Book Reviews and Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

The tagline for the 1962 movie version of the play said it all: “He used love like most men used money”.

The Great Alternatives of Social Thought: Aristocrat, Saint, Capitalist, Socialist. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.

In the J. C. A. Gaskin translation, “World's Classics” Series. Oxford: Oxford UP, (1996):83–84.

Philosopher Alan Watts has defined ‘myths’ as, “a complex of stories—some no doubt fact, and some fantasy—which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life” (Myth and Ritual in Christianity. Boston: Beacon, 1968: 7). This definition of ‘myth’ is a Kantian one, in which, according to Philip Wheelwright, “all knowledge involves, at the instant of its reception [or inception] a synthesizing activity of the mind”. (The Semantic Approach to Myth. Myth: A Symposium. Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1965, pp. 154–68). Joseph Campbell, a lifelong student of myth and man, similarly claims that:

Like dreams, myths are productions of the human imagination. Their images, consequently, though derived from the material world and its supposed history, are, like dreams, revelations of the deepest hopes, desires and fears, potentialities and conflicts, of the human will … Every myth, that is to say, whether or not by intention, is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors [emphasis in original]. (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York: Alfred van de Marck, 1985, p. 55).

In an echo of politics and possibilities pre‐9/11, when anti‐globalization demonstrations had some effect on powerful policy‐makers of the political‐economic elite. Professor Robbins references John Berger, to point out the pre‐9/11 “saintly” political view that has become harder and harder to say in the face of that audacious, “in‐your‐face” terrorism:

In his Foreword to this volume, John Berger cites a 1997 letter by Subcomandante Marcos in which Marcos describes the world as a battlefield. In Berger's paraphrase, “The arsenals are financial; there are nevertheless millions of people being maimed or killed every moment.”

Why is Berger obliged to say “nevertheless”? The idea does not seem to need any ifs, ands, or buts. Joseph Stiglitz, until recently chief economist at the World Bank, has himself said of his former employer, “It has condemned people to death.” And yet, although we should know better, we still have trouble getting our heads around the idea of a battlefield where the weapons are financial instruments. Battlefields are about animosity. Finance is about profit. The imagination tends to balk at equating bloodless financial policies, laid out in rates, schedules, percentages, and decimal points, with the organized, intentional killing and maiming of real bodies.

Since September 11 (how many pieces of writing have been unable to begin with‐out these words!), this resistance to the equation of finance with killing has become a datum of some importance in the struggle over how to interpret the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath. Many of us, horrified at this appalling and utterly unjustifiable assault on civilian lives, have nonetheless felt compelled to speak about chickens coming home to roost, about years of bipartisan U.S. support for corrupt and undemocratic Arab regimes and Zionist outrages against Palestinians, about global economic networks seemingly designed to ensure that Egyptian or Pakistani or Indonesian farmers will never approach the income or life expectancy of American sales clerks and waitresses, not to speak of more privileged Americans. By and large, the point has not been taken [reviewer's emphasis] (297–298).

Hence, Robbins states, “it is often easier to preach to the converted” left‐political activists, who tend to look for the hidden, sometimes fanciful, explanations of first‐world evils, than to convince average non‐political folk of the “systems warfare” caused by first‐world institutions.

In World Hypotheses: A Study of Evidence (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), philosopher Stephen Pepper provides the reviewer a set of inadequate “world hypotheses” to go along with the “relatively adequate” world hypotheses he provides in the bulk of his study. These lesser four world hypotheses (utter skepticism, dogmatism, animism and mysticism) provide a goodly framework with which to analyze intellectual shortcomings committed by social thinkers, “aristocrats”, “saints”, “capitalists”, “socialists” all. (Indeed, in a sense, he provides a firm meta‐philosophy with which to ground that other essential philosopher of man, Hobbes.) The lesser world hypotheses are rejected by Pepper because they deny the possibility of obtaining certified knowledge (utter skepticism), or they assert the validity of only one form of knowledge (dogmatism), or they presume that man's private thoughts are the only measure of their own worth (animism), or finally, they give central stage to the emotive power of an indescribable experience (mysticism). Of the later two world hypotheses (animism and mysticism), the first, claims Pepper, suffers from a lack of precision (indeterminate categories) and the second from a lack of scope (too much phenomenon in the world is rejected as unreal because the hypothesis cannot explain them). The reviewer will trust the reader to see the parallels in these higher education books reviewed (and many others yet to come).

The literary critic Calvin Trillin (the reviewer thinks) said it best years ago, when he called the Aspen seminars — hosted by Montimer Alder of Great Books collection fame — a truly “vulgar” enterprise, given the (false) air of academic dialogue created in an ahistorical re‐rendering of Plato's and Aristotle's Academy (in a twentieth‐century American ski resort) for business executives who wish for a ‘taste’ of intellectual life, with their own “just call me Aristotle!” professor Alder to guide them to the (largely pre‐determined) conclusions.

As Todd Gitlin observes in his critical appraisal of the political ‘left’ versus the political ‘right’ in America (in The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1995), the problem was that, “while [President] Reagan took the White House” in the 1980s, the left was “marching on the English Department” rather than with coming up with an politically effective counter‐strategy to his success.

Following the thinking of René Girard, the problem mentioned is, at root, one of “mimetic desire”, that is, institutions and individuals want to possess what they see others as having. As Girard's theory defines and explicates it (in the words of James G. Williams), “mimetic desire is a kind of nonconscious imitation of others, but it is important to stress that the word “imitation” has to be joined with the adjective “appropriative” or “acquisitive.” Mimesis seeks to obtain the object that the model desires. The function of culture is to control and channel this potential conflict over the object” (290). This imitative desire can take three forms, Williams continues:

A. Internal and External Mediation: … Girard distinguished between internal mediation, the situation when the subject's and the model's objects of desire overlap and become a matter of rivalry; and external mediation, where the model or mediator is removed from the individual [or group] (whether historically, ontologically, or however) and so there is no competition for an object of desire.

B. Model‐Rival. Strictly speaking, if a model is a person [or institution] in our immediate life setting (parent, authority figure, peer), then he or she is always potentially a rival. Likewise, a rival in this same immediate setting is always basically a model, although this may not be apparent to the subject. The model‐rival is associated with an object of desire which the subject wants to obtain, but the important thing is not as much the object as the defeat of the model‐rival. Continually putting oneself in situations of rivalry may be exhilarating if one is winning, but losing may lead to extreme depression. The situation becomes a crisis if the person [or institution] is entrapped in a model‐obstacle relationship.

C. Model‐Obstacle. The model‐obstacle is someone or something over whom the subject cannot win, or in some cases it would be accurate to say that the subject will not allow himself to defeat the model‐obstacle, for to achieve that would be to lose the model. All sorts of self‐defeating behavior, including addictions … stem from this predicament. From the standpoint of the mimetic theory, it can only be understood in terms of the mimetic, interdividual character of human existence. The person [or social unit] in this predicament could be described as stumbling over or being blocked by the skandalon [or “stumbling block”] [emphasis in original]. (The Girard Reader [New York: Crossroad/Herder, 2003], pp. 290–91).

To the reviewer's mind a rich body of truly innovative research on the behavior of higher educational institutions facing the global marketplace could be drawn from such deeply humanistic insights. In other words, the pessimism of a Hobbes can be overcome, but not by bromides.