O! The Things I Don't Know! (Thomas Paine and Spinoza)

[A report on watching my memory systems work within the context of books/reading and all that reading we've done and have seemingly forgotten. What remains? All of this within the further context of historical ideas about economic redistribution and welfare, of mounting concern for me, in Unistat 2013. - OG]

I'd just finished a re-reading of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Agrarian Justice (c.1797), when a few lines jumped out at me: didn't someone else say almost the exact same thing at an earlier date? If so, who? One of the unconscious subroutines in my brain spat out an answer 20 minutes later, after I'd forgotten I'd asked the question: it wasn't another of the American fore-fathers. It wasn't Jefferson. (But what does my brain know? Maybe it was Jefferson. Parts of my brain have been known to delude and mislead me in the past. Hell: every day. But let me go find the passage from Paine...)

Ahh...Here 'tis:

When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the additional aids of cultivation, art, and science, there is a necessity of preserving things in that state; because, without it there cannot be sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that which is called the civilized state. 

Agrarian Justice is Paine writing a proto-Henry George geolibertarianism argument after reading a sermon by one of God's men that He was Infinitely Wise in creating Rich and Poor. This pissed off Paine, who thought humans created advanced societies starting with agriculture, and this in turn created incredible wealth, but also: a squalor unseen in "native" populations, such as the North American native  peoples. "God" has nothing to do with the few rich and the many poor. Paine was outraged by this income inequality and proposed that everyone has an equal inheritance of land as a birthright, but only some have had the fortune to inherit (or sometimes, buy) enough land in which to make a decent living. And so: everyone - even the richest - should receive an annual payment, because we're all in this together. Most of us have been divested of our rightful inheritance of land. Paine says he's got nothing against the landed wealthy, but he is "shocked by extremes of wretchedness," and that "The most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." (Recall that Paine wrote this seven or eight years into the French Rev.)

I linked to the actual (very short) text in my first line. See what you make of it.

So, the lines quoted above seem like they could've been written by anyone. They seem like they were in the air among many of the Enlightenment revolutionaries and intellectuals. Was it Voltaire? I went looking through my Voltaire and nothing jumped out at me. He seems to agree, but whatever neurons fired in excitement when I read the Paine passage didn't evince a shock of recognition in Voltaire. I tried Rousseau and found a few pages that read as very proto-Marx, with a tinge of what Paine was getting at, but a bevy of neurological subsystems checked in: "That ain't it, chief." Having nothing better to do, I whiled away more of the better part of an early evening pulling books off shelves, collapsing on the couch, searching, getting diverted, going back on the trail, feeling foolish, cheering myself with Ezra Pound's line, something about true education having taken place "when one has forgotten which book..." But still: I mean, what's really the use of this search?

                                                     Thomas Paine

I guess I wanted to know if Paine had discernibly cribbed those lines from an earlier genius. At times I may be overly obsessed with the idea of origins. I happen to love Paine, seeing him as working class intellectual before the historical notion was formed. And he seized the time and rose to heroic levels.

I also get this similar feeling - "who did he steal this from? - when reading other authors, but rarely has it sent me on this Fool's Errand. Gawd, there was so much You Tube to watch. Films noir DVRed off of Turner Classic Movies. Internet porn. Bills to pay. Calls to return. Articles to write. "Real" reading to be done.

Some serious daydreaming was called for. I've been in similar spots before: have a vague feeling that there was some sort of connection to be documented, but the endeavor was like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar. But those subroutines had come through for me, countless times. And it always felt uncanny. What one must do - it seemed - was to "forget it" and go do something else. I took a long break and listened to Mussorgsky. Nothing.

Okay, okay, not a problem. There have been times when this took two weeks. Or so another set of subroutines seemed to say.

Then, just before I hit the hay, very late, after spending an evening reading unrelated books and topics (Born Losers by Sandage; Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented The Supernatural by Steinmeyer;  and Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons, which is so funny I need only pull it off the shelf before I start laffing, if you must know)...a steering committee drawn up from more modest subroutines suddenly said, "Yo! About that Paine-similar passage problem? We're thinking Spinoza." This was probably 4AM.

Bleary-eyed and slightly buzzed from a monstrously "big" double IPA, I meandered with building excitement back to my shelves. When had I last read Spinoza? I had a copy of his Ethics in my Great Books collection I'd bought from a guy I was renting a room from when I was in my early 20s. I'd grappled and floundered in Spinoza off and on, but mostly I'd read articles on his necessary subterfuges in publishing and eluding authorities in Amsterdam, the "freest" part of Europe, where the local Jews turned on him...jeez I was tired. Some nutjob in the local Dutch jewish community tried to stab Spinoza for being a heretic, or something. Spinoza died from inhaling industrial waste...something like that. OSHA was way in the offing. He'd been up to Huge doings in 'Dam, but had to stay on the QT for persecution's purposes. His family had been chased out of...was it Portugal? by antisemites. They'd been hounded everywhere by goddamned Jew-haters, and the Dutch were the most tolerant around and still Spinoza got shit there. Why couldn't I just scribble "check Spinoza" in my notebook and go to sleep?

I'm embarrassed to answer that question. Let me elude it now, by lamely employing the mountain-climber's gambit: 'Cuz it's there! It's in my personal library. Maybe.

So I start paging through the volume Descartes/Spinoza, vol 31. I feel like an idiot. Did I really ever understand any of this? And what time is it? 4:15 AM? Jeez look: here's a Euclidean diagram and he's trying to prove God's existence or something. Spinoza probably actually "believed" all this, but with hindsight may have been compartmentalizing his ideas in an effort at self-preservation.

Einstein said at one time (to the public) that he believed in Spinoza's God, who revealed Himself in the "harmony of all Being" or some stuff like that. Pantheism. A way to be a mystical Atheist-radical at that time and not be killed by The State. Or to dodge very-real fellow Jews who feel the need to overcompensate to the Dutch, by showing they can take care of their own...

Then other subroutines kicked in, chiming, "Spinoza summarized his entire book at the end for the idiots like you." Oh...right! I quickly flipped to Appendix, which visually reminded me of some of Nietzsche's books. I started skimming like mad. And there, at number XVII, I got the much-sought recognition shock:

Men also are conquered by liberality, especially those who have not the means wherewith to procure what is necessary for the support of life. But to assist every one who is needy far surpasses the strength or profit of a private person, for the wealth of a private person is altogether insufficient to supply such wants. Besides, the power of any one man is too limited for him to be able to unite every one with himself in friendship. The care, therefore, of the poor is incumbent on the whole of society and concerns only the general profit.

That's it! But how could it be? Was Spinoza even read by the Anglo or American Enlightenment thinkers? Was he translated into English then? It turns out he was, and if you Google "Thomas Paine and Spinoza" you see some interesting stuff. Interesting to me, anyway. 'Cuz damn if I don't feel ignorant sometimes. Most of the time.

                                                  Baruch Spinoza

Now here's what's most interesting to me, and you may have noted it yourself: the two passages, when read back-to-back, may seem dissimilar enough that I may seem to be making connections when they're really quite loose, even superficial. Paine addresses cultivation, art, science. Spinoza talks about how a private person who has the dough can't be expected to bring up the poor. But both Paine and Spinoza thought the poor should be cared for by some power of "wholeness" which I think stuck in my brain. Or at least that's my best interpretation, as of today, of the Situation in my nervous system and my ideas about economic justice.

What I think happened was what I'll call my emotional brain had filed the two passages together, somewhere "deep" in there, in my grey-goo. Neural clusters that "knew" about ideas of economic justice as encountered in Paine and Spinoza were close enough that, when my reading of Paine fired one circuit, a message was sent: you have another circuit that is quite related but you consider the two authors as being separate (I think I see Spinoza as a Continental rationalist Jew-genius, much persecuted, but far removed from the American and French Revs. Which I find out, was erroneous), so...you might want to obtain some of that intellectual "integrity" you say you value so much, dude.

Well, I was satisfied. If you've read this far, thanks for the indulgence.

My Weird Jewish Pangs: A Divulgence

I don't know when it started, but it definitely recurs. Something will trigger it. I'll read something particularly brilliant, and quite often: yep. There it is: a Jewish name attached. I think it all first started for me when I was around 13. My last name? Johnson.

I was one of those introverted, bookish kids. Deep in WASPy Los Angeles suburbia. I don't recall ever knowing a Jewish person; that is, I somehow didn't know what "jewish" meant. I'd heard the word, but it was a cipher. I always had one best friend as a kid, and we spent all our time together. When I was 13, my best friend was a kid that got the best grades in math, and he also broke the school record for the  mile run. I think his background was British, by way of North Carolina. We were both bookish in our own ways. We had other friends, too.

                                                           Woody Allen 

My mom thought we'd like a new movie - new to us, because at the time our little burgh filled with white flighters didn't have its own movie theater - and my mom had to drive my pal and I to an adjacent town to see the second run of a film called Take The Money and Run. I remember we laughed through the whole thing, then stayed and watched it again. As I remember it, we were the only people under 30 in the theater. It felt that way. Back then, if you paid once and you wanted to see the film again, you just remained in your seat and waited for another showing. They didn't chase you out. Anyway, at 13, all I knew was this Woody Allen guy was a genius.

Later, I developed quite a taste for Allen's books and films. As I slowly pieced together for myself ideas of "Jews" - reading the OT on my own, trying to figure out Israel and Palestine, tracing that history, I kept running into writings and ideas that I found endlessly interesting, and almost always some Jew was at the center of it all.

Now: my people are from Norway, Scotland, England, Sweden. But on the West Coast of Unistat, in the last third of the 20th century, in the suburbs of LA, I had no religion. I grew up with no tradition. My mother had been active in the League of Women Voters and was a JFK Democrat. I don't remember my father talking about intellectual ideas at all. He wasn't religious but he was good at sales and had very many friends because he was a master joke-teller and genuinely loved people. He was the life of the party.

How did I become so bookish? Around age 20 or so, I remember I sort of thought I was sort of...jewish. But how incredibly not Jewish I was! My ancestors were not hounded all over he globe and  subject to pogroms.

                                          Franz Kafka, prophet of absurd State power

Well, growing up an introverted asthmatic kid, in suburbia, with long hair and guitar, not Protestant, not wealthy, with an anxious mother who passed that on to me...I escaped into books and other worlds, other ideas. This was a world inordinately influenced by Jews, an influence far above their numbers relative to the larger population.

So: being alienated and persecuted for looking like a dirtbag pothead rock and roller in a small, smoggy white town overwhelmingly clean-cut, Republican and WASPy was one aspect. My bookishness ("Why do you...read books?," I distinctly remember a fellow band-member ask me) was another. The asthma and anxiety was probably another ingredient. Anyway, I most definitely felt (and still to this day feel) as The Other...without any of the Holocaust-y stuff bagged in there.

And by my late teens I had become steeped in Jewish humorists and had become interested in ideas by people like Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and later, Chomsky. I had practically memorized Groucho's lines from Duck Soup. 

[It occurs to me my blog entries on "Favored Hungarians" can double as "More Jews That I've Found Fascinating."]

Chaim
I recently became acquainted with a writer friend's friend, a San Francisco writer named Chaim Bertman, roughly my age. He was housesitting for my friend and I went over to check on him and we talked rapid-fire about odd ideas for a solid hour as I stood in the doorway. I asked him if he'd published and he told me of his 10 year old first novel. Later that night I found a library that had it in its catalog so I obtained it a couple days later and read it. He'd previously said he'd like to read my (this) blog. As I read his first chapter, it was so fine, so writerly, that I felt like calling him up to request that he not read my blog. His book - which he seemed quasi-embarrased about, or maybe it was such ancient history to him? - is called The Stand-Up Tragedian and it came out in 2001. If you want to write a novel about not being able to write a novel while having picaresque adventures through Israel, Florence, and all over Unistat, you will have a tough time topping this guy. He writes beautifully. I loved one little moment, when the protagonist (who seemed very like Chaim; it was difficult to not read the book as poetic autobiography) is talking on the phone to his university professor-father, who wants him to finally settle down and "do" something with his life."Eric" dodges the question and tells his father a Hasidic story:

"I asked him if he knew the story of Rabbi Isaac, son of Yekel, in Cracow. I'd found it in an English translation of a book of Hasidic tales. It explained better than I could what had set me into motion - why I wanted to be a writer.

"After many years of poverty, which had never shaken his faith in God, Rabbi Isaac dreamed that someone had bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge that leads to the King's palace. Rabbi Isaac didn't have a curvy bone in his body: He always told the truth. When he arrived at Prague, Rabbi Isaac ingeniously told a native his dream. 'Treasure, king, bridge, palace,' the man laughed. 'I have dreams too - who doesn't? Me, for instance, I keep having this dream that I find a big treasure under the stove of some poor Jew by the name of Isaac, son of Yekel, in Cracow. But you think I'm going to wear out my shoes, walking to Cracow, where one half of the Jews are named Isaac, and the other Yekel?' And he laughed again. Rabbi Isaac bowed, traveled home, and found his shovel." (p.16)

This tale acts as a fractal for the entire book. His next book will be science fiction, Bertman told me.

                                                             Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer
One of my favorite political writers. My beloved English professor - the best teacher I'd ever had and who was incidentally not a Jew -  told me about Scheer, who I'd never heard of. Scheer had written a book on how dangerous and crazy Reagan and the people he was surrounded with were; Reagan was into his second term and my Professor pointed me toward Scheer's With Enough Shovels. Some Reaganite had told Scheer that nuclear war was winnable, it's not that bad: we can dig holes in the ground and dirt is a wonderful thing. And he was serious.

I followed Scheer closely after that, then realized he had been writing in "my" newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. Later I found out he'd been involved in SDS, had written for Ramparts and maybe even, if memory serves, The Berkeley Barb, all sorts of romantic things.

Anyway, he'd published, in the Times, a very long, three-part piece that ran January 29-31, 1978: "The Jews of Los Angeles." It was filled with history, influential figures, and all sorts of arcane (to me) minutiae about various schisms and causes and immigration routes to LA, and statistics. (You can find it collected in Scheer's Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death.) It clarified some things for me about Jewish identity that I've never ceased to think about since: the idea of Jews as a race (and how this must be preserved, and various other dissenting takes by Jews); the idea that Israel is the most important thing to a Jew: to keep Israel safe and thriving. And third: the culture of improvement of the human race, which was based in a universalist idea. It is this face of Judaism - the universal brother and sisterhood of the human race - that appealed to me greatly. (And, in my current state of ignorance, I trace the historical epicenter over this idea, its coalescence, to Holland and Spinoza, but I will leave that for some future blauge/blah-g/blog.)

Scheer wrote of a retired female Jewish garment worker in LA. She didn't care about the ideas in the synagogue; she'd left oppressive Russia 50 years before. She did miss Yiddish speakers, socialist rousers coming to give furtive talks despite right-wing LA's WASP-rulers and their thriving Red Squads. "She missed the young Jewish girls in leather jackets, organizers in the fledgling garment district, transplants from the East Side of New York, trying to have their fiery idealistic commitment, and sunshine and oranges, too. [...] They passed this secular religion of the Jews - this special moral concern that would not quit - on to their young, who then flooded the ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements."

Now, below is a passage that gave me an envious Jewish pang way back when, when I first read it. Recall that not for one moment was any "idea" ever discussed around my family's dinner table, while my mom and dad were still together, nor even after they split:

(Despite the sunshine and beaches of Santa Monica and the crime rate, rudeness on the buses, etc:) "But their minds were still occupied with social ideas, with what, for generations of Jews, had been the substance of life itself - with issues, with ideas, with what the contemporary Jewish writer Vivian Gornick captures best in her recent book [presumably The Romance of American Communism? published in 1978? - the OG]:

"It was characteristic of that world that during those hours at the kitchen table with my father and his socialist friends I didn't know we were poor. I didn't know that in those places beyond the streets of my neighborhood we were without power, position, material or social existence. I only knew that the tea and black bread were the most delicious food and drink in the world, that political talk filled the room with a terrible excitement and richness of expectation, that here in the kitchen I felt the same electric thrill I felt when Rouben, my Yiddish teacher, pressed my upper arm between two bony fingers, and his eyes shining behind thick glasses, said to me, 'Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.'" (Thinking Tuna Fish, pp.47-48)

                                              Meghan Daum, hilarious shiksa

Meghan Daum
Not long ago I finally got around to reading Daum's 2001 book of essays, My Misspent Youth. I first encountered Daum in the LA Times. I still read her online. She's wickedly funny, often self-deprecating, sometimes bitchy, always very intelligent. I had never given any conscious thought about whether Daum was Jewish or not. I just knew I had a crush on her because she was such a tremendous essayist.

So I'm reading through, admiring each piece, when I get to "American Shiksa" near the end. That tears it: Meghan is not Jewish. She's a WASP from the East-ish part of Unistat, now living on the Left Coast.

And she's got a variation of my Jewish pang.

When adolescence hit her, she skipped becoming a woman and instead became a shiksa:

"I just didn't have much taste for those praying quarterbacks, those hunks in blue satin choir robes, the hulking social drinkers, the swaggering lifeguards and stockbrokers, the good old boys from the verdant athletic fields of my youth. I discovered Jewish men like I discovered books in the library, tucked away in the dark corners of suburbia, reticent and wise and spouting out words I had to look up in the dictionary. Unlike Christian men with their innate sense of entitlement, with their height and freckles and stamp collections and summer Dairy Queen jobs, all those homages to the genetics and accoutrements of Western Civilization, Jewish men were rife with ambiguity, buzzing with edge. Their sports were cognitive, their affection seemingly cerebral. They were so smart that they managed to convince girls like me that they liked me for my brain, that even though I was a shiksa, even though I had been deprived of Hebrew school and intense dinner debates about the Palestinian Question, I was a smart girl."(pp.129-130)

She goes on in hilarious detail. Daum eventually married a Jew. You could see it coming. Oh my gawd Daum is funny. And she's not even Jewish! (Well, maybe she got some of it via osmosis?) Anyway, I ain't the only one, although I myself have never had a Jewish girlfriend...until my wife found her birth parents and it turns out her biological father is Jewish. I'd rather not get into the particulars as to whether that actually "counts," because it's not my point. My point is: I missed out on Vivian Gornick's tea and black bread and ideas being "everything."

                                            Steve Almond. I identified a lot with the 
                                            main character in his short story, "My Life
                                            In Heavy Metal," which, 'nuff said.

Steve Almond
I recently read, with mounting envy, his collection of essays, (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions, from 2007. His obsession with Kurt Vonnegut, his run-in with Fox News after he quit his Adjunct Professor job at Boston University after they invited Condoleeza Rice to talk. An essay on the Boston Red Sox that is probably the finest piece of sports fandom-sickness I've ever read, and I've read a lot. I'm a connoisseur. Almond writes about sex in the most frank and funny manner. Read his books if only for the sex. He's not an erotic writer, although at times he writes about sex in such a starkly truthful and poignant and poetic way, he seems erotic nevertheless. And then, near the end of the book, an essay on his Jewish identity, "Ham For Chanukah":

"It will be difficult to explain why, as full-blooded Jews, the spawn of actual rabbis, we took part in this deeply fucked-up ritual. But I am going to try to explain. Because that is what Jews do: we try to explain." (p.273)

Almond tells why his upbringing near Stanford was so non-religious: his parents were professionals. They were busy. His grandparents had a lot to do with it, too, and Almond is hilarious about it: "My paternal grandfather Gabriel endured a thorough Jewish education, then went off and became a famous political scientist. His basic attitude was that God had done some interesting work early on, but hadn't published much lately."

Well into his adulthood, Almond didn't seem to consciously identify with any of those three aspects of Jewish identity: Race. Israel. Universalism. Gabriel's wife was Jewish but seemed to so desire assimilation in the US that she seemed almost "tacitly anti-semitic," identifying with German culture and becoming involved with the Unitarian Church.

Eventually, as Almond grows and begins thinking for himself about his background, he gravitates to the universalist aspect of identity:

"My appreciation of Judaism has more to do with pride. I viewed my people as pound-for-pound champions of consciousness - Christ, Marx, Freud, Einstein - stars of the longest-running ethnic drama on earth..." (p.285)

Here's a passage that activated my pang big-time. Almond's mother spoke Yiddish, and passed a large Yiddish vocabulary on to Steve. Almond writes:

"I cannot begin to express my adoration for Yiddish, the official language of the shtetl Jews and the most emotionally precise vernacular ever devised. More than any holiday ritual, Yiddish is the legacy my mother passed on to me. I once actually wrote an entire cycle of poems (awful, all of them) devoted to the Yiddish word schmaltz." (p.285)

He writes that his "recovering Catholic" wife wanted to convert to Judaism, which moved him greatly, and they will bring their daughter up in Judaism. "She will know where and who she came from. She will be loved unreasonably. The rest is hers to determine."

Almond impressed the hell out of me a few months back when he dared to publish a critical essay on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert - and their slavish fans, of which I guess I'm one - for congratulating themselves for being so cool and hip and smart, when, Almond thought, Stewart and Colbert were more enabling and giving air time to fascists. I admired the essay even though I thought Almond misunderstood the function of satire and comedy - and Almond does both very very well himself - but he really made me think. (I'm always grateful for this.) When the piece was picked up by Huffington Post, I was embarrassed for the 3000 (it seemed like it) liberals in the comments section who lashed out at this "Steve Almond" for offending their immaculate tastes, making fun of his name, no one evincing the slightest hint they knew who he was, accusing him of being a sour grapester who probably got turned down for a writing gig with Stewart or Colbert. Thereby sorta proving - or at least strongly bolstering - Almond's points.

It's this kinda schtuff that get me all lathered up in admiration. A brilliant Jew taking on another brilliant Jew (and Colbert is a Catholic): all ideas are worth fighting over. Words. Ideas. Creativity. Intelligent Talk. Books. Science. Human Universalism.

Hoo-kay! Now: it's out there. My weirdo Jewish pangs of some sort of envy. But in my heart, I'm sort of Jew myself. Indulge me? Do a mitzvah and grant a goy some delusion?