Quotes for the day: Paul Kennedy; Eric Hobsbawm

Today being the ninety-first anniversary of the end of World War One (Nov. 11 being marked as Veterans Day in the U.S., Remembrance Day in Canada, and Armistice Day in Europe), two quotations for the occasion:

1.

"...what that struggle meant and did changed the course of history more than any other in modern times.... It brought the end of the Romanovs, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and the emergence of a Communist system that blighted so much of humanity for the rest of the century. The war also made possible the growth of Fascism.... [The war] shattered a Eurocentric world order, shifted the financial center of gravity to New York, nurtured Japanese expansion in East Asia, and, at the same time, stimulated anticolonial movements from West Africa to Indonesia.

The aerial bomber, the U-boat, and poison gas brought mechanization to...killing.... Industrialized labor, trade unions, and socialist parties gained in power, while the landed interest declined. The social and political position of women was transformed in various aspects.... The war produced a cultural crisis, in the arts, ideas, religion, literature, and life styles. It also exacerbated ethnic and religious hatreds, in Ireland, the Balkans, and Armenia, that scar the European landscape today. The Great War is therefore not some distant problem about dead white males on and off the battlefield. Its origins, course, and consequences are central to an understanding of the twentieth century. Any high school, college, or university that does not accord importance to teaching its meanings is shortchanging the present generation of students and discrediting itself."

-- Paul Kennedy, "In the Shadow of the Great War," New York Review of Books, August 12, 1999

2.

"On the 28 June 1992 President Mitterand of France made a sudden, unannounced and unexpected appearance in Sarajevo, already the centre of a Balkan war that was to cost many thousands of lives during the remainder of the year. His object was to remind world opinion of the seriousness of the Bosnian crisis. Indeed, the presence of a distinguished, elderly and visibly frail statesman under artillery and small-arms fire was much remarked on and admired. However, one aspect of M. Mitterand's visit passed virtually without comment, even though it was plainly central to it: the date. Why had the President of France chosen to go to Sarajevo on that particular day? Because the 28 June was the anniversary of the assassination, in Sarajevo, in 1914, of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which led, within a matter of weeks, to the outbreak of the First World War. For any educated European of Mitterand's age, the connection between date, place, and the reminder of a historic catastrophe...leaped to the eye. How better to dramatize the potential implications of the Bosnian crisis than by choosing so symbolic a date? But hardly anyone caught the allusion except a few professional historians and very senior citizens. The historical memory was no longer alive."

-- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994), pp.2-3

Looking behind an endnote

I'm reading Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism (2009). On p. 45, Wolfe refers in passing to "some scholars [who] have relied on sociobiological arguments to develop theories of international relations supportive of neoconservative understandings of how the world works." Curious about which scholar(s) Wolfe had in mind (I guessed Bradley Thayer, author of a book on Darwinism and IR), I turned to his endnotes. My guess was wrong. The single work Wolfe cites in this connection is Stephen P. Rosen's War and Human Nature (2005).

It happens that I'd read Rosen's book, but it was a while ago and I didn't remember it especially well, so I took it down from the shelf. "Relie[s] on sociobiological arguments to develop theories of international relations supportive of neoconservative understandings of how the world works" is not, I think, a particularly good description of much of what Rosen is trying to do. In his chapter 2, for example, "Emotions, Memory, and Decision Making," Rosen draws on animal and human research to argue for the importance of "emotion-based pattern recognition" in decision-making. Pattern recognition happens when the brain processes information "in blocks or chunks" (p.34), and "pattern recognition of events associated with past emotional arousal radically reduce[s] decision-making time" (p.35). With respect to foreign policy decision-making, Rosen hypothesizes, among other things, that "if decisions are made on the basis of emotion-driven pattern recognition, the decision will be made quickly and early in the process, despite the complexity of the situation and the availability of contradictory analysis and data" (p.55). He then examines several historical cases where this kind of decision making (arguably) occurred.

The argument may or may not be persuasive, but at least this chapter of War and Human Nature would appear to have little to do with "neoconservative understandings of how the world works." Indeed one might well be able to apply 'emotion-based pattern recognition' to the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. I doubt that the results would be pleasing to neoconservatives.

Stand-up comedy and our reptile brains

Note: HC wrote this guest post; LFC furnished the title. The post contains some language that certain readers may find offensive.
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Bro (that’s me) and LFC went to a comedy club (actually a cinema-'n-draft-house doubling as a comedy club) on Saturday night. We originally set out to see a movie but got lost in Arlington (Va.) because I had jotted down the Google directions without looking at the Google map (always a mistake); so, in a decision that would have made André Breton proud, we gave up hope of making the movie (Doubt) and pulled up at a random movie house whose marquis advertised something starting at exactly the time it then was (9:45).

Turned out the thing advertised, Doug Benson, was not a movie at all but a stand-up comic best known for his jokes about pot and his movie about smoking too much of it (Super High Me). We had traded Doubt for Doug, exchanged a highbrow film with some capital-a acting for jokes about jacking off and gays. Whee! Plus everyone was smoking (cigarettes), there was no noticeable ventilation, and it was one of those bars where they had the contract with Heineken not Becks, which is almost as bad as Pepsi not Coke.

Doug himself was highbrow compared to the warm-up acts, which I don’t really remember, but I’ll try. Each guy had his schtick. The black guy talked about sex. Funniest bit was about getting old, which was not affecting his sex drive but was affecting his drive to do the stuff it took to get sex. First white guy talked about sex too, starting off with a joke designed to trigger/allay the anxieties of the guys in the audience. (Does size matter? Of course it does. You gals need to stay small and tight. I don’t want to be f---ing an open car door.) He also made jokes about his weight even though he was not really fat, just as the black guy was not really old. Second white guy did physical comedy about how he was a yellow belt in karate and how those karate moves (like the palm strike) were so gay.

Then came third white guy and main act of the evening, Doug, who seemed smart enough to know the audience, for the most part, probably wasn’t. He acted high, shuffling around the stage and reading jokes from napkins, then putting them either in the right (“yes”) pocket or the left (“no”) pocket of his vinyl windbreaker depending on crowd reaction. He had a patrician manner and occasionally used some big words and even made one joke about politics: McDonald's is a democracy because you get a choice of bacon or sausage on your McGriddles, unlike Florida and Michigan, where you don’t have a vote.

Doug was a method actor inhabiting a role. He probably rubbed his eyes a lot just to make them look bloodshot. Probably not that far from Philip Seymour Hoffmann in Doubt after all. The role allowed Doug to get away with some sophisticated stuff, because among your average kids today (by “kids” I mean anyone under 40 taking a date to a comedy club) being stoned seems to excuse all kinds of things, like word play and caring about politics, that would otherwise just be gay.

All in all it was pretty depressing but I admire any kind of public performance and I also admired the way the comics stood in the lobby afterward next to their CDs and t-shirts (their “merch” as Doug said) while the crowd avoided eye contact and filed by into the drizzly night.

Postscript. Did you see the piece in the NY Times the other day about how it’s hard to remember puns because the act of getting them resolves them so thoroughly that they are wiped out of our memory banks? I wonder if that’s true for jokes in general. Which would mean that comedians are bards, keeping alive an oral tradition that we can’t lodge in our heads. (Have you heard the one about x? Maybe, but tell us again, we can’t remember.) To put it another way, comedians are the collective memory of our reptile brains. Another Heineken please. I like the red star on the label.

-- HC

Collective forgetting

In a comment on this earlier post, 'bro' suggested adding a sentence to McCain's line that Americans make history: "And then we run screaming out of the room, get trashed, go to sleep, and wake up with no memory of what happened."

This was meant humorously, of course, but it points to a non-humorous issue, namely the function of collective forgetting, which is perhaps best understood not as literally blotting out certain painful parts of a national past but as agreeing to "bracket" them. More than a century ago, the historian Ernest Renan, in his lecture "What Is a Nation?," observed that "the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things...." More recently, Anthony Marx has put it this way: "Nations drink at the fountain of Lethe, clearing their memories, before their rebirth in the Hades of modernity." (Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism [2003], pp.29-30)

American Memory and World War I

University of Virginia historian Edward Lengel has an interesting column in the Wash. Post of May 25 about why Americans today are relatively uninterested in the experiences of U.S. soldiers in World War I, as opposed to say the Civil War, World War II or Vietnam. Comment on this column has appeared elsewhere in the blogosphere (notably by John Quiggin at Crooked Timber, see link at the sidebar). You can read the Lengel column by clicking here.

May '68 (and all that)

This afternoon I saw Romain Goupil's 1982 film Mourir à 30 ans (To Die at Thirty), the last in a series of movies dealing with May '68 shown at the Nat'l Gallery (Wash. D.C.). The movie won prizes for its director, who was a high-school militant/activist at the time and later an apprentice to Godard and a moviemaker in his own right.

The movie, told retrospectively, is basically a group biography of Goupil and some of his friends, especially one Michel R (I'm not going to try to spell the last name), who was a leading activist, though still a high-school student in '68, then became a professional revolutionary, was imprisoned for several months after the Communist League was banned in summer '73, and committed suicide in March '78. He seems to have been charismatic and a skilled organizer; the movie touches on what might have contributed to his death, though it proceeds by indirection. Indeed, the whole movie is somewhat cryptic in effect, at least for someone (i.e. me) who in May '68 was about to turn eleven, did not live in France and thus did not directly experience the events in question, and knows something -- but not a huge amount -- about the history of the French left in this period.

In particular, it would have been nice to learn more about the backgrounds of the protagonists. Goupil seems to have been from a left-wing and working-class family and he is shown selling the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanité door-to-door as a young kid (before deciding the CP is too do-nothing and "establishment"), but although Vietnam is mentioned there's no real explanation of exactly where his politics came from, or of the specifics of his class/social background (father's occupation, e.g.). Then there are the mundane questions: if all the flashback scenes in which Goupil and his friends appear actually show them (which seems to be the case) as opposed to actors playing them, then who is holding the camera (they were the budding filmmakers, after all)? And why, when everyone in the movie obviously is speaking French, is Goupil's voice-over narration in English?

Finally, this movie, made in '82, underscores the psychic and political gulf that separates 1968 from 2008 by refracting '68 through a lens that itself now seems distant. In 1982, after all, the French socialists were in power, Mitterand had not yet made his U-turn away from his original program, and there was no firm indication that Reaganism/Thatcherism/corporate neoliberalism was going to triumph so definitively. The "second Cold War" had just begun, the nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. and Europe was about to go into high gear, and one could still perhaps see some of the flames of '68 flickering if one looked hard enough. There are people who think "the world revolution of 1968" (as I. Wallerstein calls it) had long-lasting effects in several crucial ways, and they are probably right. And of course mass demonstrations still occasionally occur (Seattle '99, Genoa '01, Feb '03 vs. the Iraq invasion, etc.). Still, 1968 does seem now like a very long time ago: in some ways it could be almost as far away as 1848; and the 1971 Paris celebration of the centennial of the Commune (as shown in the movie), with the banners of Lenin and the choruses of the Internationale, seems almost as distant as the Commune itself. To watch To Die at Thirty in 2008, in other words, is like reading a kind of double elegy, or walking through two sets of mirrors into a dim, even if not altogether vanished, past.