Gotham Diary:
The Ladies
April 2018 (II)
Wednesday 11th
The other day, a copy of Thinking Without a Banister arrived. This collection of essays, speeches, letters, and journalism by Hannah Arendt, edited by Jerome Kohn, takes its title from Arendt’s description of thinking in modern times.
I have a metaphor … which I have never published but kept for myself. I call it thinking without a banister — in German, Denken ohne Geländer. That is, as you go up and down the stairs you can always hold on to the banister so that you don’t fall down, but we have lost this banister. That is the way I tell it to myself. And this is indeed what I try to do.
I’ve read only the first essay in the book, but I expect that the second, “The Great Tradition,” will describe that banister and what happened to it. I’ll let you know. For the moment, I want to say something about reading the first essay, a two-part block of seriousness in which it is sometimes difficult to tell whether Arendt is speaking for herself or crystallizing the thought of her subject, Karl Marx. Sometimes my sense of perspective, of point of view, becomes unsteady, and I can’t really follow the train of thought. Sometimes I suspect that my problem comes down to not having had a German education.
It’s more likely that my problem comes down to not having read Marx and other modern political thinkers until rather late in life. I may be accused of having cultivated patches of ignorance, a slightly paradoxical endeavor in which I simply refused to learn more about something that puts me off. In the case of modern political thought (and action), what puts me off is collectivization, bundling individual people up into indissoluble lumps and dealing with them en masse. My humanism, I now realize, has always been liberal humanism. Not Roman Catholic or Christian humanism; not atheist humanism; not even the anthropocentric humanism that underlies the whizbang triumphs of material progress. Liberal humanism can be simply described but never simply lived. As a liberal humanist, I treat each and every person with whom I come into contact as an unaffiliated individual, a person with unique resources. I like some people more than others, of course, but I don’t like or dislike anybody on account of a tribal or ethnic allegiance. Even “Trump voters”! I cannot think in terms of “classes.”
Now that I am robustly resistant to ideology of any kind — I maintain that liberal humanism is not an ideology like any other but rather a set of rules for, among other things, withstanding ideologies — it is safe for me to read about the formation of modern political ideas, forms of government, and social organizations. And I think that I have done wisely in appointing Hannah Arendt as my tutor. She can be as ponderous and obscure as any mystical German, but she can also be homely, homely in a very sophisticated manner. (This comes out strongly in her correspondence with Mary McCarthy.) Denken ohne Geländer is a fine example of her everyday style.
The lesson that I have most strenuously postponed is Arendt’s insistence that Karl Marx is the central figure. That so much of what he wrote was wrong is not the point. The point is that he alone is our link to the Western intellectual tradition that came crashing to the ground in the multiple revolutions that clustered around the year 1800. Marx was one of the last thinkers to be formed by the old tradition, and one of the first to understand that it had been wrecked beyond repair. Being Marx, he celebrated the wreckage, and went all in for the new dispensation, the previously unthinkable enfranchisement of what Arendt calls “the laboring classes.” I was brought up to find laborers uncouth, and Marx an incendiary lunatic. Now I understand that laborers often have the wisdom as well as reason to hope that their children will not be laborers, and I agree with Arendt about the centrality of Marx, despite as much as because of his confused legacy of inhumane totalitarianism.
But what am I to make of this:
The social revolution of our time is contained in the simple fact that until not much more than one hundred years ago [Arendt was writing in the Fifties], mere laborers had been denied political rights, whereas today we accept as a matter of course the opinion that a nonlaborer may not even have the right to stay alive. (37)
We do? Where? Outside the nightmare of totalitarian régimes, where have “parasites” been put to death, or denied medical attention? This is the sort of perplexity that sometimes makes it difficult to digest Arendt.
***
Karl Marx gave us the concept of “capitalism,” and it has taken me several years to understand just how profoundly the term is, or ought to be, defined by the historical developments that inspired him. Unfortunately — most unfortunately — it has become synonymous with “business” and “private ownership.”
Last summer, I read a book that I wrote about in August, before I’d quite finished reading it, William Janeway’s Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (Cambridge, 2012). What I took away from Janeway’s memoir of successful investing was an understanding of capitalism as a vital preliminary phase that, if prolonged, could easily become toxic. Mature businesses don’t need to issue equity shares; if they require cash, they can issue debt, and do so all the time. (It is a commonplace to observe that the public trading in Silicon Valley’s Big Five stocks was simply a reward to early investors, a liquidation, if anything, of capital commitment.) Capitalism is a necessary instance of gambling; when and if the gamble pays off, capitalism’s contribution to the enterprise comes to an end. At this point, shareholders ought to be replaced by stakeholders. The work of legally determining what we mean by “stakeholders” remains to be done — probably in step with environmental restoration. But it seems to me that there is plenty of room for options between state ownership and public (ie rentier) ownership.
Another book that highlights the transitory nature of capitalist enterprise is Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua Freeman (Norton, 2018). Freeman’s subject isn’t so much the factory as the really big factory, the vogue for which has come and gone within the space of two centuries. What explains the trajectory is the workforce. In case after case, the workers at impressively huge new factories consolidated the power of their numbers, and by the postwar era it was a rule of thumb for industrial giants like General Motors and General Electric to avoid enlarging existing plants and to develop new works in smaller, geographically diffuse locations. Polish and other Communist authorities learned the same lesson the hard way.
I have known, ever since I began reading about medieval trading operations years ago, that capitalists hate one thing more than all others combined: the payroll. The ideal capitalist payroll does not exist, because it is unnecessary: there are no employees. If Freeman’s behemoths had been erected in order to nourish the prosperity of their workers, many of them might still be operating, and those that weren’t might have been neatly dismantled or repurposed. Imagine: a corporation in the business of employing people and paying them well! Rocket science?
***
Thursday 12th
A great deal of the current issue of the London Review of Books (40/7) is given over to James Meek’s report on breakdowns in health care, particularly the care of frail, elderly people, in Leicestershire, an English county beset by a familiar strain between uncongenial urban and rural populations. Well on the way to being frail and elderly myself, I read it with harrowed interest. But nothing in Meek’s piece was as shocking to me as an innocuous sentence in another article, Rosemary Hill’s essay on “frock consciousness” — the phrase is Virginia Woolf’s, and she found it difficult to define — entitled “What does she think she looks like?“
Clothes, for those who could afford to choose them freely, had always been to some extent an expression of the wearer – of their status, character and taste – but it was in the popular Modernism of the interwar years, when so many men had died and women consequently found themselves with more room to manoeuvre in society, that the particular compound of woman + clothes, Woolf’s ‘frock consciousness’, became a significant aspect of female experience, a colour on the writer’s palette, a possible agent in a narrative.
Forget parsing “woman + clothes.” The electrifying phrase is this: when so many men had died and women consequently found themselves with more room to manoeuvre in society. Haven’t we all — but perhaps it’s just we men — haven’t we long looked back on the Twenties and the Thirties as the time of a Lost — dead — Generation? Hasn’t it been customary to feel sorry for all the women who couldn’t find mates? An intellectual cliché, certainly; but we couldn’t get through the day without thousands just like it. Hill’s sentence takes a scalpel to the received view and scrapes a bloody gash. Many men dead -> more room to maneuver for women.
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.” No, indeed I hadn’t. And I’m not sure that the point would register so sharply if we weren’t in the #MeToo moment, when every intelligent man feels estopped from generalizing about women. I felt no such constraint forty years ago, when men were pigs, period. Those were crude times. What did women want? They seemed to know only what they didn’t want. We learn to want things from what we see, and many women saw nothing desirable except career opportunities formerly available only to men. So this was changed, but that was about it. Men certainly didn’t change. Most women decided that they couldn’t do without pigs after all; they settled down.
Now a new generation has stood up to complain about men. The complaint is vastly more focused, and yet there is a blur at the center. What does the narrator of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” want? We know what she doesn’t want. But is there a way to describe her beau idéal that would serve as a template for young men to emulate? Something that isn’t simply negative (“don’t get any ideas from porn”)?
(Interestingly, most men accused of sexual improprieties have not put up a fight, but quickly folded. So that has changed.)
It seems to me that Rosemary Hill has hit upon something positive. Room to maneuver. It is a bit vague, but it is not at all negative, except to the extent that all freedom implies the elimination of limits.
Hill devotes several paragraphs to the wardrobe of Emily Tinne. Mrs Tinne was a doctor’s wife in Liverpool; the Tinnes belonged to “the solid Liverpudlian bourgeoisie.” When Emily Tinne died, in 1966, she left behind a rather grand collection of evening dresses, some with matching “coatees.” What she did not leave behind were matching shoes or handbags. Many of the outfits still carried price tags. Hill concludes that they were never worn, if they were ever worn at all, outside of Mrs Tinne’s chamber. Perhaps she merely went through them lovingly, with her hands, like Mrs Danvers with Rebecca’s underthings. It is too late for us to scold Mrs Tinne for wasting her husband’s money on a private wardrobe; she enjoyed it while she had it. Indeed, one lesson to be drawn from the exhibition of her gowns at the National Museums, Liverpool would be that pleasure, like taste, is non disputandum.
Bon week-end à tous!