Category Archives: Rationalism

Dubai is a city that traffics in hope and optimism, but above all, it serves as a model for the concept of rationality. Despite the push-and-pull forces that tries to move policy in opposite directions, the moral compass of the city has been that of rationality, the highest calling that one can answer.

This mode of thinking adores facts, and when the domain of facts cannot be reconciled, there is only one variable that overcomes it; patience.

Rationalism is one of the words that have developed a slippery coating. In its purest sense, the construct of rationality is about how we gain knowledge, through deductive reasoning and the power of the mind.

Conjuring numbers

Of course, a priori knowledge of facts are a prerequisite for this kind of knowledge base to be formed and harnessed. It is in this context that when we look at real estate research reports for 2021, one variable jumps out - No one can seem to agree upon the number of units that have been delivered for the year.

Estimates abound from 17,000 homes to 36,000; what is astonishing in this regard is that the Dubai Land Department has already released this data in the public domain. It Is puzzling to see the narrative of oversupply still engulfing the landscape, when the price and rental rise has clearly put to bed the notion that any such oversupply would exist.

Combine that with the Dubai Urban Plan of 2040 which calls for a near doubling of the population from current levels, and the picture that emerges is one of a need to rapidly urbanize even further. Middlemen who rely on data have been equally perplexed by this wide disparity of numbers. In some sense, their job has been made more challenging because of the erroneous figures that continue to emanate from the analyst community.

Go by the facts

The recent release of Ejari data for 2021 further buttresses the claim that industry watchers already knew; rents have risen for the most part across the board despite the headwinds of Covid, and these numbers fly in the face of the oversupply narrative.

There is an infinite number of potential interpretations and opinions about which way the market can move. This is but natural and serves the foundation of a marketplace. What clouds judgment is when the domain of facts get eroded by numbers that are empirically wrong.

Macro supply stats have been one variable that the analyst community has broadly gotten wrong time and again since 2008. The narrative of oversupply that has taken over has in the past year been irrevocably challenged by the facts on the ground, as prices and rents moved higher in response to the demand curve that has shifted upwards.

The empiricist movement in philosophy paved the way of rationality by observing the facts on the ground, and determining whether they were incongruous to observable events. In Dubai, policymakers have adopted the same approach, as have long-term investors and the middlemen that harness them.

The blueprint of the citys future, carved out in not only the Urban Plan, but in the successes of its past and the resultant wealth creation that has accrued for those who have been willing to wait is a simple one. But for the most part, remain incongruous to what most of the analyst community has stated in the past few years.

Price variables

Price and business cycles move in variable direction over time under a number of variables that act and exert pressure on it. Over the longer term, cities that are successful do not get there with a pall of oversupply hanging over it. Nor do they succeed with chronic levels of undersupply.

Rather, the only axiomatic claim to extract is that for cities that have the right ingredients in place, asset and wealth creation are the inevitable consequence of the long-term trajectory of growth. Against this backdrop, commentaries that profess otherwise are part and parcel of the conversation that society has with itself. Nowhere in this conversation can facts be distorted for a prolonged timeframe.

The good news is that this form of rationalism not only emerges triumphant ultimately, but more importantly, can be learned. An increase in rationality is not something that you choose or not choose. The implication is clear: you have to work at it.

Becoming more rational is a long process that demands patience and discipline, and over time, weeds out the speculators and false information carriers. It is something that may have a variable result in the medium-term. Over the long-term horizon, there is hardly anything more important.

Sameer Lakhani

The writer is Managing Director at Global Capital Partners.

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Dubai property market is in firm control of supply and demand - Gulf News

Meadow sees the breakdown of any genuine sense of community among evangelicals as representative of the breakdown of community life all across America, at every level. For this he blames the Lockean philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on property rights and self-sovereignty, to which he opposes an ethic of solidarity with fellow citizens. But the authors of other books in my collection have found the source of contemporary political disorder in a more recent and insidious doctrine, that of neoliberalism, with its scorn of government and worship of private markets.

In Teacher Education Policies in the United States, a chapter in the book Navigating the Common Good in Teacher Education Policy, Barbara Bales explains that over a 25-year period beginning in 1992, the federal government systematically usurped oversight of teacher training from local school districts around the country and concentrated it at the federal level. The most jarring transition commenced in 2001, with the advent of the George W. Bush administration and the punitive neoliberal policies that characterized the No Child Left Behind Act and its audit-based accounting system. Bales quotes from a paper by education professor Ken Zeichner, who asserted that teachers had become instruments to further the spread of global capitalism in its current forms and lend support to elements of the current system such as free markets and trade agreements, economic rationalism, increased surveillance of workers, and greater privatization of public services. In his book For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America, Charles Dorn, a professor of education at Bowdoin College, lambastes American universities for the corporatization of higher education, which he holds responsible for a crisis that includes soaring tuition costs, limited student learning, the decline of the humanities, increasing class stratification, and the unmaking of the public university. In From Commodification to the Common Good: Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society, philosopher of science Hans Radder notes that since the commodification (i.e., patenting) of academic research, which he vehemently opposes, is part of a widespread pattern of profound social and economic development (in particular the rise of neoliberal doctrines and politics), there is no easy answer to the question of whether it can be stopped. Still, he says, the recent, more widely acknowledged criticisms of neoliberalism may be a sign of forthcoming change.

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Fanfare for the Common Good - The New Republic

After Graces death, Tommy went with Johnny Dogs and baby Charles in a wagon to the Black Mountains. There, he sought the advice of gypsy matriarch Madame Boswell. He told her he was giving the sapphire away and asked whether or not she would take it. His wife was wearing it on the night she was shot, he told the wise woman, and he blamed himself. You want me to tell you this jewel is cursed and then her death wont be all your fault? she asked. If I believed in priests, Tommy said, I would confess and ask for forgiveness, but all I have is you, Madame Boswell. She said that the sapphire was indeed cursed, she could feel the curse burning through her hand. Tommy left the stone with her, and she shouted after him that from now on, he would be blessed with good fortune.

Its a great scene that, at the time, was marked by ambiguity. Was Madame Boswell lying to land herself a valuable jewel, or did she really feel the stones curse? Did Tommy truly believe in the curse, or did he just need an explanation for Graces murder that absolved him of guilt? In season six, that ambiguity was replaced with certainty. The sapphire was indeed cursed, Esme Shelby-Lee tells Tommy. Madame Boswell (renamed Barwell here, perhaps to avoid insult to the real-life Boswell gypsy tribe) gave it to her daughter Evadne, who put it around the neck of her seven-year-old daughter Connie, who immediately started coughing and was dead before morning.

The sapphire was thrown into the river and Evadne duly cursed Tommy Shelby, that if he should ever have a daughter, she would also die at that age. Her childs grave was marked by a cross bearing the inscription: Connie Barwell, seven years old, died of a cursed stone not forgotten, and then in red, what looks like the words Vengeance will come.

In season six, episode three Gold, vengeance did come. Tommys seven-year-old daughter Ruby died of tuberculosis, after hearing voices, seeing visions and speaking the Romani words for the devil. Ruby died from a curse laid in retaliation for Tommy having passed on an already-cursed sapphire to the Barwell family. Evadne Barwell (still listed under the familys original name of Boswell on IMDb), is credited as appearing in the next two episodes of season six, played by actor Gwynne McElveen.

If viewers chose to, they could dismiss all this talk of curses and jewels, and simply believe that Grace was shot by a foe, and that Ruby and Connie both died of TB and the sapphire had nothing to do with any of it. Tommy felt guilt over Graces death and needed something to blame that wasnt himself, so he seized on the idea of the cursed stone as an explanation. Tommys mind almost says as much when he had a vision of Grace holding the sapphire in season five and she gave voice to his greatest fear: It wasnt the blue stone, Tommy, it was you.

None of that dull rationalism though, would be very Peaky Blinders. This is a drama that believes in gypsy superstition, so why shouldnt we believe it too? The stone was cursed, and that curse killed Grace, Connie and indirectly, Ruby.

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Peaky Blinders: Ruby Shelby, Connie Barwell and the Cursed Sapphire - Den of Geek

Before the rise of the Nazis, Germany with its powerful workers movement and mass social democratic and communistparties was home to a flourishing Marxist intellectual landscape. Marxist evening schools, party magazines, and scholarly journals fed a vibrant culture of debate that, while primarily the domain of intellectuals, far surpassed any left-wing milieu since then in both quantity and quality.

After 1945, Marxism was officially canonized as Marxism-Leninism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East, while in West Germany it was banished during the 1950s and survived only on the fringes of society. Marxism held on only in the form of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and a handful of Marxist intellectuals scattered across the country. One of those intellectuals was Leo Kofler(19071995), an important but unfortunately often overlooked intellectual pioneer of the postwar German left.

While Ernst Bloch once praised his work as a direct successor to Gyrgy Lukcss pathbreaking classic, History and Class Consciousness, Leo Kofler generally had little luck with the more than thirty books and pamphlets published during his lifetime. For example, the mythical year 1968 was almost over by the time his manifesto, Perspektiven des revolutionren Humanismus (Perspectives of Revolutionary Humanism), was published by the renowned Hamburg publisher Rowohlt. Yet the West German extraparliamentary opposition (Auerparlamentarische Opposition, APO), then at its height, apparently had little use for his political and theoretical pamphlet, since practically no one referenced it or discussed it extensively after its publication.

Today, readers would be hard-pressed to find much trace of his public reception beyond a handful of rather distant and critical reviews in mainstream newspapers. This could be blamed on the flood of socially critical literature being published at the time, in which so much was overlooked and later forgotten, or on Koflers occasionally all-too-intricate writing style, which differed from his thrilling oratory style. One could also attribute it to the old-fashioned style that characterized his demeanor and that he happily affirmed in provocative fashion. Yet more than anything else, Koflers obscurity is the product of a profound alienation between the different generations of the political left.

The young protest generation of 1968, and especially its West German branch, was not free of illusions and hubris. One example was the way in which they perceived themselves as truly new, failing to grasp that they stood in a long tradition of protest against social democratic reformism on the one hand and Stalinism on the other.

Leaving aside the first isolated predecessors of the 1930s and the 1940s, the history of the New Left began in the middle of the 1950s not only but also in West Germany. Around this time, a network and milieu of groups and individuals, newspapers, and periodicals formed. Social democrats disappointed and radicalized by their partys accommodation and integration into the system; democrats dissatisfied with the postfascist restoration; communist dissidents inspired by destalinization and the rise of national liberation movements in the Third World; and left-socialists and -communists who had been politically homeless since the 1930s and 1940s all sought to break out of the Cold War superpower binary and pursue a third way or, as they put it, go back to Marx.

These social democratic dissidents represented many thousands in the years 195459. Among them were figures such as the former trade union theorist Viktor Agartz, the young left-wing Catholic Theo Pirker, the journalists Gerhard Gleissberg and Fritz Lamm, and the left-socialist jurist Wolfgang Abendroth. Leo Kofler, as a sort of wandering preacher in community colleges, trade unions, and student groups, introduced quite a few of them to the foundations and intricacies of an undogmatic Marxist theory reuniting the severed threads of freedom and socialism and anticipating many of the questions that Marxism would take up in the 1960s.

He had already founded a philosophy of praxis in the 1940s with his fundamental methodological work on Die Wissenschaft von der Gesellschaft (The Science of Society) and his writing on the relationship between history and dialectics, in Geschichte und Dialektik, published in 1955. Koflers philosophy of praxis argued for a renewal of Marxist thought in the spirit of what we now call Western Marxism beyond the vulgar materialist understanding of Marxism of the likes of Karl Kautsky or Joseph Stalin.

In his 1948 Zur Geschichte der brgerlichen Gesellschaft (On the History of Bourgeois Society) his most well-known work during his lifetime that exhibits interesting parallels to, as well as differences from, the school of British Marxist historians Kofler had traced the historical roots and paths of radical democracy and socialist conceptions of freedom. A few years later, at the beginning of the 1950s, he put forward the first systematic ideological critique of Stalinist theory and practice in the German-speaking world. For structural reasons, he wrote, Marxism-Leninism tended toward a vulgar materialist and undialectical indeed, almost anti-dialectical understanding of Marxism that was deeply anti-humanist, as it degraded the concrete humans to be emancipated into mere appendages of a new, bureaucratic ruling stratum.

As it also did elsewhere, the social and political upsurge pursued by the first generation of the New Left would ultimately fail in divided Germany. Exacerbated by the 1956 ban on the Communist Party in West Germany and the treason trials against Wolfgang Harich in East Germany and Viktor Agartz in the West in 1957, the communist and left-socialist milieu was permanently marginalized and repeatedly divided. The defeat of this socialist left also prepared the ground for the Social Democratic Party of Germanys (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD) final retreat from any form of political or programmatic anti-capitalism, completed at its Bad Godesberg party congress in 1959. Together, these events culminated in the kind of lasting alienation between the political generations that could also be observed in neighboring European countries, even if it was not nearly as severe and long-lasting as in Germany.

The heavy burden that the failure of this first New Left left behind at the beginning of the 1960s can be seen in both political as well as theoretical debates. Even if the inventive power of the 1968 generation was impressive, it often reinvented the wheel. What Wolfgang Abendroth tried to diplomatically teach his young listeners during the revolt, Leo Kofler expressed in considerably blunter and harder-to-digest terms.

Even as a spectator of the movement, for Kofler 1968 nevertheless represented a world-historical new beginning. He was also keenly aware of everything that had transpired since the mid-1960s. While applying the final corrections and revisions to the new edition of his monumental Zur Geschichte der brgerlichen Gesellschaft in early 1966, he inserted the following formulation: An opposition that pushes for democratization is becoming visible in the people and the intelligentsia. The fateful question for Germany is whether they will be able to carry it through.

Like Herbert Marcuse, Leo Kofler was, with his heart and mind, fully on the side of the young generation. Unlike Marcuse, however, he was too much of an old left-socialist to turn into a simple apologist for the antiauthoritarian awakening. With a caustically sharp tone and frequently trenchant critique, he used every available opportunity for intraleft contestation, for the struggle between two lines within what he had for a decade been calling a progressive or humanist elite.

Whether dissident Communists battling against the half-measures of destalinization or oppositional social democrats and trade unionists fighting against bureaucratization and integration into the system, radical democratic citizens or socially engaged Christians they all became, willingly or not, an independent sociological layer, under the historically novel conditions of a bureaucratically blocked workers movement. They were an amorphous elite composed of progressive elements of socialist and nonsocialist origin, a formless mass with strongly heterogeneous and fluctuating tendencies heterogeneous in its social and political composition, its social and political views, and its habitus.

This progressive humanist elite (the term elite was not intended judgmentally; today we would perhaps say multitude) led a sort of pariah existence on the margins and in the niches of social organizations (parties, associations, cultural and religious communities) between all the camps. It stood socially and ideologically at odds with the traditional front lines of socialism and nonsocialism. It was full of contradictions, volatile, socially powerless and yet it is there and not without significance. According to Kofler, a real renewal of the socialist left, a return to health of revolutionary humanism could only succeed if this progressive elite reflected on its humanist sensibility and became a mediator between the old and new milieus.

This, in turn, would only succeed if they united the powerless academic left, the world of highly developed abstraction, with the powerful trade union movement (that world of vulgar practicality (which places itself against the sting of class struggle) on a new foundation. Yet both of these worlds, critical and oppositional according to their origin, barely come into contact, they go their own ways, he wrote in 1968. The consequence is obstinate practicality over here and complacent intellectualism over there, both sides observing each other suspiciously as though through glass walls, yet not influencing each other.

That was not the only unreasonable demand for the New Left in 1968. That Kofler was guided by the theories of Gyrgy Lukcs, above all his aesthetic theories, was already bad enough for the neo-vanguardists. That he was also critical or even hostile to the psychology of Sigmund Freud and bluntly insulted the Frankfurt School of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as Marxo-nihilists made him just as suspect to the younger generation, as did his downright pushy insistence that socialist humanism provided the main target for the rampant structuralist anti-humanism at the time.

Perhaps he demanded too much of the new movement, which in fact had already begun to fall apart by 1969. Yet these were and here Koflers originality seems to have been widely underestimated the unreasonable demands of a New Left fellow traveler, not a bourgeois or Communist critic. His ambitious attempt at an alternative social philosophy to that of the Frankfurt School had no chance with the generation of young intellectuals. Yet the idea that Kofler had nothing to say about the new phenomenon of welfare state capitalism is not borne out by his work. Starting in the 1950s, he was one of the first Marxists after World War II to grapple intensively with an analysis of the contradictions and pitfalls of a capitalism that promised prosperity for all.

His analysis, carried out in his works Staat, Gesellschaft und Elite zwischen Humanismus und Nihilismus (State, Society and Elite between Nihilism and Humanism), Der proletarische Brger (The Proletarian Citizen), and Der asketische Eros (The Ascetic Eros) and taken up again in Perspektiven des revolutionren Humanismusturned its gaze to the unprecedented integration processes of late bourgeois class society. Kofler saw this neocapitalist society as having transitioned into an epoch of deliberalization and spiritual demoralization (decadence) that did not want to be reminded of its early bourgeois promises of emancipation and, indeed, had become downright nihilistic.

The world, he wrote in the late 1950s,

only remains useful for the bourgeoisie, bearable for profit, otherwise it has become empty and meaningless. The leftover freedom is no longer the freedom to realize ideals and uplift humans whoever wants to do that becomes suspect! but rather the freedom of competition, of the jungle. Essentially, everything is achieved, there was history, but in the future there wont be any more.

This social stasis, condensing into a sort of cynical, nihilistic Weltschmerz and revealing a pessimistic concept of man, drove even its leftist adversaries piece by piece into a theoretical anti-humanism that isolated them from the one thing that could carry out a real transformation of society: the broad majority of working and thinking people.

According to Kofler, neocapitalism doubtlessly had quite a bit to offer its people: political freedom, more income and free time, more security and fewer taboos (including those of a sexual type). Yet at the same time, these new freedoms and possibilities shackled the individual more than ever to a form of society that was irrational in its principles. Hunger had indeed disappeared, but not deprivation. Consumption was possible, but only through asceticism before and after the consuming: Doing without in order to be able to afford something and affording something with the consequence of doing without afterward belong to the most self-evident forms of behavior of our time. What appeared to be de-ideologization was in fact total ideologization: individual rationalism was merely the epiphenomenon of collective irrationality, the democracy of the market the obfuscation of the despotism of the factory and the office.

Kofler pioneered a critique of bourgeois freedom in late consumer capitalism that avoided the then-predominant ideological pitfalls of an allegedly administered world, of a one-dimensional society or even an integral statism, without ignoring the social phenomena at the root of these misleading units of ideology. Postwar capitalism, restrained by the welfare state, was also, first and foremost, a class society an antagonistic form of society shaped by exploitation, injustice, and domination, in which some have what others do not.

There was still lord and servant, bourgeois elite and the wage-earning class, and consent had still not abolished coercion something only a few critical thinkers acknowledged back in the 1960s and 70s. Today, however, in the age of the war on terror and weaponized globalization, this has become undeniably clear. Thus Kofler described, in a way that was both old-fashioned and forward-looking, the class society we all live in, and reflected on what it meant for perspectives of emancipation.

He challenged many left-wing currents as well as certain interpretations of the Marx renaissance at the time, a challenge that has by and large been ignored. That applies to Koflers view of the questions of social psychology, his critical and productive discussion of certain Freudian theorems, and his argument for conceiving a new, contemporary Marxism, by thinking through and combining the theoretical ideas of Lukcs and Marcuse.

His critique of the structurally bureaucratized workers movement targeted, in different ways, both of its main currents: social democracy integrating itself into the bourgeois state with its merely ethical socialism as well as the socialist bureaucracy of the Communist movement with its incapacity for destalinization. This did not contribute to Koflers popularity; neither did his early ideological criticism of the Frankfurt School, which he had already developed by the mid-1960s, a decade before Perry Andersons famous critique of Western Marxism. This was especially true of his attempt to conceptually combine Western Marxism with a radical socialist humanism and thereby lay the epistemological foundations for a Marxist philosophical anthropology.

With his theory of society, Kofler drew on the early bourgeois, radical democratic ideals of freedom, equality, and solidarity turning them against the limited bourgeois, purely political form of freedom as well as the limited actually existing socialist freedom conceived merely in socioeconomic terms. He understood the socialist project to mean a comprehensive emancipation. Oppositional demands for freedom, progress, democracy, and self-realization, for a classless society in the common interest and for self-realizing individuality, must be undergirded by a conceptual orientation to humanity and an anthropological epistemology from a Marxist perspective.

We humans are, as Terry Eagleton once put it, cultural beings by virtue of our nature, which is to say by virtue of the sorts of bodies we have and the kind of world to which they belong. And where human beings stand, as it were, between nature and culture, human nature will indeed be changed through human culture but not eliminated. Forty years before Eagleton, this was also Koflers understanding. For him, this is fundamentally justified by the fact that it is the human brain and thus human culture that distinguish humans nature. It lies in the essence of this human nature that it is structurally dependent on ones fellow human beings and the forms of work and activity mediated by them. This practical, active work and its accompanying social forms of relation are creative and inventive in nature.

Koflers often misunderstood groundwork of a Marxist philosophical anthropology understands itself literally as the science of the unchanging preconditions of human changeability. It sees itself as a form of metatheory and auxiliary science that has no desire nor ability to be a guide for action but rather only shows why there was and will be a specifically human history at all, and why change in humans and their social conditions is fundamentally possible, if not concretely predetermined in its content.

Kofler provides us with a criterion for what humanitys self-realization can be, and thereby also precisely for what emancipation cannot and must not be. What practical significance such a discussion of anthropological concepts of man has is perhaps only truly clear today, in light of a neoliberalism rooted in a structural social Darwinism and the contemporary challenges of biological and neurological sciences intervening in human nature, along with the ever more obviously dysfunctional relationship between humanity and nature.

Read more here:

Leo Kofler Was a Marxist and a Revolutionary Humanist - Jacobin magazine

However, emotions may explain why reality looks very different. There could equally be emotions of fear of Russia, a sense of pride, and political rhetoric that motivate NATO to grow and become the great military power in the Western hemisphere.

Either way, the result seems rationally predictable: the clash between rationalism, on the one hand, and emotions and rhetoric, on the other, creates tensions between Russia and NATO, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as the outcome. This situation is exactly what Russias MFA was referring to: to keep the West on its toes.

In international relations, the component of morality and ethical norms is mostly confined to the national level. This is because states have moral obligations toward their citizens, but are restricted in moralizing other states. Moral obligations are also embedded into ontological security and self-identity which need to be protected against what becomes a threat.

The notion of morality creates room for diplomatic maneuverings, justifying the moral interference into the domestic affairs of other states.

Russia acknowledges the increasing need for public legitimization of foreign policy decisions. Using public diplomacy mechanisms, Russias foreign ministry implies communication with other states and with foreign and domestic publics. Referring to Ukraine in recent years and through public diplomacy mechanisms, Russia has repeatedly condemned Ukraines anti-Russian sentiments.

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Russian Foreign Policy and the War with Ukraine - Politics Today

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose birthday was on March 6, the theme of all his works is solitude, of power, relationships and everyday life

For Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose birthday was on March 6, the theme of all his works is solitude, of power, relationships and everyday life

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez sat down to write his breakthrough novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), he wanted to find a way of expressing in literature all the experiences which had influenced him as a child. In his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, and also in his conversations with his friend and contemporary Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza ( The Fragrance of Guava), Marquez says Solitude draws word images of his childhood which, was spent in a large, very sad house with a sister who ate earth, a grandmother who prophesied the future, and countless relatives of the same name who never made much distinction between happiness and insanity.

Born on March 6, 1927 in Aracataca, Colombia, Marquez worked as a journalist for years before turning to writing. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he passed away in 2014 after suffering from dementia. Earlier this year, it was reported that Marquez had a secret daughter with a Mexican journalist. As new readers discover Marquez, his origins, craft, work, views on women and politics, through his books (he wrote over 15 works, including novels, short stories, and non-fiction) and interviews, its pertinent to ask how has the story of the Buendias he traces in Solitude endured so long? What pulls us to a narrative filled with men of folly, who are into alchemy and audacious wars, and women who have better sense? His biographer Gerald Martin contends that the book may have been set in Aracataca, in mythical Macondo, but Macondo becomes a metaphor for the whole of Latin America a macrocosm contained within a microcosm the local becomes universal.

For Marquez, though Solitude brought him immense fame and glory, it was not his favourite book. Before I wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold, my best novel was Nobody Writes to the Colonel, but in Chronicle I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. In my other books the story took over, the characters took on a life of their own and did whatever they fancied, he told Mendoza. First published in English in 1982, Chronicle is based on the murder of Marquezs friend decades earlier, but like in Solitude, he juxtaposes the personal with the wider social, cultural and political milieu of a particularly violent period in Latin America. Its consciously built as a literary tour-de-force, says his biographer, for implicitly mocking the concept of suspense, the writer announces the death of his character in the first line of the first chapter: On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.

To Marquez, his most important book was The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), the one which might save me from oblivion. It took him 17 years to write about the solitude of power. Set in an unspecified country, its the portrait of a tyrant who dies after being in power for 200 years. The vultures get to him first, stirring up the stagnant time inside the presidential palace, and the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur. Post-Nobel Prize, one of his most-read books was Love in the Time of Cholera, about love and loss and the essential loneliness of human beings. Asked by Mendoza why the reality in his novels has been called magical realism, Marquez retorted: This is simply because rationalism prevents people from seeing that reality isnt limited to the price of tomatoes and eggs. Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things.

The magical reality followed Marquez right till the end. He passed away on a Thursday, the day a bird hit a glass wall and died inside Marquezs home. In A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, a tearful tribute to his parents by Rodrigo Garcia, he writes that Marquezs secretary received an email by a reader wanting to know if the family is aware that Ursula Iguaran, the matriarch in Solitude, also died on a Thursday, on a day which was so hot that birds in their confusion were flying into walls and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms.

The rest is here:

Books of solitude - The Hindu

Then the crowd of protesters marched through the CBD and along Broadway before arriving at Camperdown in front of the barbed wire fortress of the Chinese Consulate General in Sydney. By displaying the portrait of Tsewang Norbu throughout the event, the demonstrators remembered and paid tribute to the famous young singer who recently immolated himself in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, for the just cause of Tibet.

The rally was jointly organised by the Sydney Tibetan Voluntary Group (STVG) and the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress Sydney (RTYCS). Several activists from Hong Kong, East Turkestan, Vietnam, Chinese pro-democracy groups along with Tibet supporters joined the rally. The crowd chanted prayers and shouted slogans that included "Save Tibet, free Tibet, we want freedom, China out of Tibet, wake up UNO, Australia supports us, world supports us, Tibet is burning and the world is watching, stop genocide in Tibet, free China, and No Chinese Communist Party".

While enjoying and praising today's good weather, Rev Bill Crews, a good friend of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, from Exodus Fundation pointed to the water that had pooled in front of the assembled crowd, reflecting everyone and chanted "Long live the Dalai Lama" and "Long live the people of Tibet". He said, "I suppose when Putin invades Ukraine, he learned lessons from China when they invaded Tibet, when they took away your freedom and identity, but all they took away was the reflection in the water. That is all they took from you, because they didn't take away your culture and identity. They couldn't take any of it away from you, no matter how hard they tried. They can't, and they won't, but these will spread all over the world.

New South Wales MP and Greens member Jenny Leong criticised China's autocratic actions against the Tibetan people, drawing comparisons between the current situation in Tibet and that of aborigines long time ago. "If there is one thing the Tibetan people understand, it is the huge injustice that occurs when you are displaced from your own homeland. When other people invade you and take away your right to self-determination," Leong said.

She has clearly pointed out her party's strong historical stance on issues of Tibet. "You will hear later from my colleague Jannie Parker, who always also is a great representative and strong tradition of standing very closely with the people of Tibet, with Tibetans inside Tibet and the Tibetan community across this country and around the world," Leong said.

"I know that our best and our leader of the party, Bob Brown was a good friend of the Dalai Lama. I know that the Greens have stood in our federal and our state parliaments, calling for respect and autonomy for the people of Tibet. I also know that we support a Free Tibet where Tibetans have the rights to self determination. However, today is a special day because it marks the anniversary of an uprising. What we need is the recognition of basic human rights, justice and self-determination for the people inside Tibet," she added.

In his speech, New South Wales MP Jamie Parker, also from the Greens, expressed strong support for Tibet and the spiritual leader of Tibet. "I acknowledge His Holiness the Dalai Lama and pay my respects to his spiritual leadership for many decades to come and supporting a Free Tibet. Most importantly, I want to thank every single one of you" he stood in solidarity with the crowd.

"You are so important. Your presence here today sends a powerful message to the Australian government, to politicians, to policymakers in Australia that Australia is not doing enough and Australia can and must do more," Parker stressed his dissatisfaction with Australia's efforts to raise the issue of Tibet.

"Today, on 10 March, we acknowledge this particularly important day. This is the day that the Tibetan people rose up to struggle against the occupation of their land, and for 63 years the Tibetan people have not been silenced," he further added.

"Because we know that activities like this are basic human rights, like the right to assemble freely, which is a basic human right to buy and trade inside China. Freedom of expression and the opportunity for you to stand up here and express your political or religious views is almost impossible in China and, of course, in occupied Tibet," he said.

The Greens MP said that "the challenge for us as a nation, as Australia and for the international community, is to recognise that human rights must come first, not trade, not diplomacy, not money and power, but human rights, because our country picks and chooses which human rights it will stand up for and in which country. In some countries, such as occupied Tibet, we see the denial of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the violation of land illegally. Australia should take a strong stand on Tibet, as it did on Afghanistan."

To show his support and solidarity with the people of Tibet, Prof Feng Chongyi of the UTS issued his personal statement, read by Ms Li Sun, strongly criticising the CCP for its ongoing atrocities against the people of Tibet with decades of failed policies while maintaining its 'wolf warrior diplomacy'. She called out "Free Tibet, Free Taiwan, Free Hong Kong and Free China" on behalf of Professor Feng.

Speaking at the rally, Australian human rights activist Bob Vinnicombe condemned the CCP for putting the Tibetan people in dire straits and stressed that the world should raise the value of human rights and pay more attention to the vulnerable groups, led by Tibet. "Tibet is one of the oppressed people under the one-party dictatorship of the CCP, which has usurped it by force since 1949, and Tibetans have suffered immeasurable human rights persecution to this day, and I look forward to international attention being turned to Tibet so that Tibetans can be free soon."

Pointing to the similar fate of Tibet and Ukraine, Bob said that 'what is happening in Ukraine today, the atrocities of Putin we seeing on TV every day, happened in Tibet 63 years ago, hidden from the world for decades. Tibetans and Ukrainians suffered invasion, destruction and murder. Tibet was a wonderful and huge country, bigger than Australia, in term of land size.'

'Australian policies have tried globalisation and economic rationalism, allowed the CCP to pile up Australian poverty, farmland, racehorses, dairies and even airports and flight schools. Look at how many Liberal and Labor MPs are present today at this important event, there are none,' he expressed his disappointment.

After a brief introduction to the Uprising Day, Jigme Dorjee, the President of the STVG said that the recent self-immolation of a famous Tibetan youth shows that the current situation is deteriorating and is very grim. "After 63 years of occupation and genocide committed by China, Tibetans inside Tibet still face a hellish situation in their own country. Therefore, it is the responsibility of all of us who live in free countries to bring and raise the real appeal and demand of all Tibetans in Tibet to the international community on their behalf."

"The rally here in Sydney is a public display of unity, to draw attention to the current plight of Tibetans who are trapped, voiceless, inside military-occupied Tibet, and to stand against the ongoing violations of basic human rights in our homeland and in East Turkestan, where the CCP has persecuted, and which continue unchallenged to this day," the joint statement said.

While expressing his gratitude to those present at the event and to those involved in the welfare and security, including members of the local police, Tsundu Oser, the RTYCS President gave a short speech. He called on the international community to wake up and urged world leaders to raise the issue of Tibet with China and support their struggle for the freedom of their people and their homeland.

"Today, 10 March, is the 63rd anniversary of Tibetan National Uprising Day, one of the most important days in the Tibetan calendar. On that day in 1959, thousands of Tibetans from all walks of life rose up against China's invasion and occupation of their country. The protests were followed by brutal crackdowns, which resulted in tens of thousands of lives," Oser said.

"Tibet's recent history has seen it illegally ruled and brutally oppressed by the CCP, but this has not brought the Tibetan people to their knees, on the contrary, they have become more and more courageous, never feared or retreated, and to this day there are Tibetans who are continuing to sacrifice their blood and lives to fight for the freedom cause of Tibet," he told the TPI.

Addressing the rally at Chinese Consulate General, Dr Jin Chin, President of the Federatopm for a Democracy China (FDC), said that "the CCP will not fall in the face of the resistance of the democracy movement and Tibet's freedom struggle, but will collapse with a bang amidst the changing international landscape.

'After that, China will have a political opportunity for the Tibetan people to achieve a high degree of autonomy, even independence. By the post-communist period, China will also be dismembered into pieces, and this will be the historical reality in the future," he added.

In the course of the last 70 decades, 'political repression, social discrimination, economic marginalisation, environmental destruction and cultural assimilation' have continued, particularly as a result of Chinese immigration into Tibet, fuelling intense resentment among the population of occupied Tibet.

To check out the image gallery related to the event on our social media page, click here "Tibetan National Uprising Day in Sydney".

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National Uprising Day of Tibet in Sydney draws strong support and solidarity - Tibet Post International

When I was 17 I heard the name Dostovesky, and was enthralled. Just the name felt so glamorously intellectual, so deep. I began to read some of his novels, and my hunch was vindicated. A bit later I delved into his ideas, and my admiration became more nuanced. I partly admired his defiance of the rational humanist arrogance of the West, but I was also wary of his reactionary mystical nationalism, his faith in the anti-liberal Russian soul.

It seems that a lot of religiously minded intellectuals struggle to get past stage one. They are so taken with the flinty glamour of this writer that their critical faculties atrophy. They allow their aesthetic admiration to influence their religious politics.

Rowan Williams is a theologian I admire for the most part, but he has been overly romantic about Russian Orthodoxy, as if its vision of religion and politics in perfect harmony is more authentic than modern western Christianity. And his love of Dostoevsky has been a major factor in this.

Last year he wrote an article for the New Statesman in which he argued for the novelists abiding relevance, 200 years after his birth. He acknowledged that his opinions jar against every liberal orthodoxy you can think of. He was an authoritarian monarchist who loathed Western democratic ideals and thought socialism a diabolical perversion. But we should not dismiss his thinking too quickly, he argues:

He may have defended tsarist absolutism, but he provides the most eloquent argument of the 19th century against religious tyranny. He wrote toxic nonsense about Jews, but objected to any attempt to limit their political and religious freedom. He believed that Christian (more specifically, Russian Orthodox) faith was the only hope for cultural renewal and global reconciliation, but wrote a scarifying catalogue of the unavenged horrors of human suffering (including child abuse) for which the Creator had to be held to account. He imagined Jesus Christ being tried and condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. He claimed, with a typical mordant irony, to have made a better case for atheism than most atheists would dare.

Williams implies that it is simplistic to criticise Dostoevsky for his anti-liberalism: there is actually nuanced vision here. I dont buy it. His anti-liberal vision must be squarely addressed, in normal sober terms, without reference to the poetic passages in his novels. If a reactionary, theocratic version of Christianity is a bad thing, then his version of it is also a bad thing. If only Rowan Williams spent more time explaining that a more enlightened, pro-liberal version of Christianity is possible, rather than semi-glorifying reactionary versions.

A.N. Wilson also displayed his deep love for the Russian sage a few months ago. In the TLS he reviewed various books about Dostoevsky, and concluded by suggesting that he foresaw some of the ruptures of our time. These include 'the pathetic unravelling of liberal Western Christianity, and its attempt to marry Reason and the Gospel'. This is a deeply clumsy little bit of theologising, and again it gives succour to an illiberal vision. Wilson is wrong to suggest that liberal western Christianity is defined by its attempt to marry Reason and the Gospel. This was one aspect of it, but another aspect is its belief in political liberalism. By shoving these two aspects together, Wilson implies that the liberal Christianity of the West was a huge mistake, a failure of authenticity. Does he believe this that we should have stayed with a medieval theocratic version? His desire to sound as deep as Dostoevsky has clouded his judgement.

So what, you might say these erudite Dostoevsky-fans are not likely to approve of religious nationalism in real life. Surely I do not accuse them of being Putins useful idiots? Well, there is an article in this months Catholic Herald by Mark Jenkins that gives one pause. It too begins by explaining that Dostoevsky was a prophet of Russias religious renewal, and an antagonist of western individualism and rationalism. Then it explains that this vision was revived after the fall of the Soviet Union: an intellectual called Aleksandr Dugin heralded the rise of a new Russian empire, rooted in Orthodoxy. In writings that directly influenced Putin, Dugin announced that Russias holy calling is to destabilise the decadent liberal West and make the world safe for traditional Christian civilisation. Jenkins maintains a neutral tone as he describes such ideas, but presumably he disapproves of a grand plan to divide and weaken the West. But the conclusion suggests otherwise.

Jenkins makes a surprising prediction: In ten years time, Russian tanks in Ukraine might well be greeted with flowers, rather than bullets. Really? Fundamentally, Jenkins explains, the current crisis in world affairs is rooted in the materialism and dualism of the European Enlightenment. It is a defective paradigm, remarkably similar to the one that brought ancient Rome to its knees. He then quotes Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyres belief that the liberal order is a new barbarism. And he finishes with another quote: As Friedrich Holderlin once said: Where there is danger, deliverance lies also. The implication is that Putins chaos might be providential, a righteous blow against the false ideology of the West.

This is the sort of thing that was written a century ago, about another bold foreign leader who dared to stand up to the decadence of liberal democracy: Mussolini. Soon Hitler was also praised on the same grounds. Yes, he might be crude and simplistic in his rhetoric, but who else is defying the Communists, and the secular liberals? Yes, there might be tragic conflict in the short term, but maybe this is necessary, to shake the world from its captivity to liberalism. Plenty of right-wingers said this sort of thing, right up to the outbreak of war, and religious conservatism was a major factor in their worldview.

I think it is time to question the theological disparagement of liberalism, the not-quite-harmless theocratic posturing of our leading religious thinkers.

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Dostovesky and Putin's useful idiots - The Spectator

(Brownie Harris / Corbis via Getty Images)

Norman Mailer was proud of his essay The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster. Published in Dissent in 1957, it was reprinted in Advertisements for Myself (1959), Mailers anthology of selections from his fiction and nonfiction. Its easy today to forget the immediate context: Mailers protest against the threat of mass destruction during the early part of the Cold War. It was absurd, the argument went, to behave as though life were normal or society rational when human beings faced daily the possibility of total extinction. Americans had to cultivate values that went beyond the concerns of middle-class comfort. What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people cannot be contained.

Powerful provocation: Mailer challenged sanitized postwar American life in his controversial 1957 essay.

In The White Negro, Mailer argues that the postwar bleakness of the 1950s saw the appearance of a phenomenon, the American existentialist, the hipster. The hipster had the life-giving answer to the threats of both instant death by atomic war and slow death by conformity. By embracing death as an immediate danger, divorcing himself from society, the hipsterwho was understood to be a white malecould exist without roots. This uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self meant encouraging the psychopath in oneself and the freedom to explore the domain of experience. Most Americans, Mailer held, were conventional, ordinary psychopaths, but a select few represented the development of the antithetical psychopath, who derived from his condition a radical vision of the universe.

Much of The White Negro is devoted to analysis of why the overcivilized man cannot be existentialist. The hip ethic is immoderation, adoration of the present. The image of the rebel without a cause, the embodiment of societys contradictions, involved for Mailer the romanticization of the psychopath. The drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Hip is the liberation of the self from the Super-Ego of society. There are the good orgasm[s] of the sexual outlaw and the bad orgasm[s] of the cowardly square. The hipster belongs to an eliterebels who have their own language that only insiders can convincingly speak, a language of found and lost energy: man, go, put down, make, beat, cool, swing, with it, crazy, dig, flip, creep, hip, square. As Mailer writes:

The organic growth of Hip depends on whether the Negro emerges as a dominating force in American life. Since the Negro knows more about the ugliness and danger of life than the White, it is probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential superiority, a superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground drama of domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of the unforeseeable consequences, for the Negros equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every White alive. MORE FROM Darryl Pinckney

At the time, some white writers, Mailer among them, allied themselves with Black people who were urgently calling for American society to re-create itself. Like the juvenile delinquents, these white bohemians were drawn to the culture of the urban Black. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger. Unconventional action takes disproportionate courage, therefore it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. The Negro, in Mailers view, had been forced to find a morality of the bottom. Hated from outside and therefore hating himself, the Negro was forced into the position of exploring all those moral wildernesses of civilized life which the Square automatically condemns.

The White Negro had its specific origins in a quarrel with no less than William Faulkner. A mutual friend had sent Mailers sketch on school integration to Faulkner. In it, Mailer had said that white men in the South feared the sexual potency of the Negro and his hatred for having been cuckolded, historically, for two centuries: The Negro had his sexual supremacy and the white had his white supremacy. Faulkner replied that he had heard that idea expressed by ladies, but never by a man. Mailer observed that the sheltered Faulkners most intense conversations had no doubt been with sensitive ladies. Yet to be so dismissed by Faulkner annoyed him, and he decided to expand on his interpretation of a sexualized racial politics.

Whatever Mailers reasons, James Baldwin later said that he could not make any sense of The White Negrothat he could scarcely believe it had been written by the same man who recognized the complexity of human relationships in his novels The Naked and the Dead (1948), Barbary Shore (1951), and The Deer Park (1955). Mailers characters do not live on the road, Baldwin observed, yet he had fallen for the mystique of the Beats. Baldwin charged Mailer with maligning the sexuality of Negroesand failing to see the limits in his point of view as a white man. Current Issue

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In his essay, Mailer reiterated the contention that offended Faulkner: that the white man feared the Black mans sexual revenge. He himself was not opposed to miscegenation. Baldwin knew American masculinity because hed been menaced by it enough, writing that the American Negro male was a walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in ones own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. He tried to convey in his work what life for the Negro was like, but he had become weary, he said, which was why he hadnt anything to say about Mailers essay when it was first published.

Yet two years later, Baldwin did respond. The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy was published in Esquire in May 1961 and reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1961), Baldwins second collection of essays. In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer had called Baldwin too charming a writer to be major, quipped that his prose was sprayed with perfume, and suggested that Baldwin lacked hisMailersstreet credibility. Baldwin admits in the essay that Mailers condescension hurt, but he doesnt believe Mailers opinions will affect his reputation. Rather, he recalls with some eloquence the personal circumstances, differences, and similarities that prevented real friendship between the two writers. Then he takes aim: The Negro jazz musicians, among whom we sometimes found ourselves, who really liked Norman, did not for an instant consider him as being even remotely hip and Norman did not know this and I could not tell him. They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.

Mailer makes a distinction between hipster (of the proletariat) and beatnik (middle class). Baldwin didntand he expressed contempt for the character in Jack Kerouacs On the Road (1952) who, when alone in Denver, seeks the Black part of town because that is where real life is. In The Subterraneans (1958), Kerouacs white hoodlum succumbs to his paranoia that his soft brown bop-generation girlfriend will steal his white soul. Baldwin considered Kerouac and the Beats inferior to Mailer as writers, and he would be as impatient with the hippies in the 60s as he had been with the Beats. He said his problem with white people was that he couldnt take them seriously. They acted like crybabiesbut their innocence was a danger to people like him.

Two approaches: Jack Kerouac (left) toyed with white characters adopting Black cool, while Richard Wright dramatized the existential conditions of Black Americans. (Mondadori via Getty Images, left; Robert Kradin / AP)

Mailers argument that the Black man in America was born to be existentialist in outlook, because, unless he was an Uncle Tom, he had no other alternative philosophy that honestly addressed his circumstances, had antecedents. In his novel Native Son (1940), Richard Wright had anticipated the existential drama that follows when the feeling of what it is to be human has been lost through racial oppression. The urban loneliness Wright portrayed descended from Dostoyevsky, one of existentialisms precursors. Partisan Review published parts of Jean Paul Sartres Anti-Semite and Jew in 1946, after which Wright read widely in existentialist literature. In The Outsider (1953), he attempted to formulate a more cogent philosophy about murder and irrational behavior. Wright eventually decided that his alienation was not due to his color but was mans fate, and wrote another murder story, Savage Holiday (1954)a so-called raceless novel, a psychoanalytical study about the singularity of existence. Some critics missed Wrights insights into the racial context and were disappointed by the abstract application of existentialist ideas in his fiction, especially his notion of how the violent act defines human essence.

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Baldwin didnt see a quest for an authentic self in the sex and violence of Wrights novels either. Bigger Thomas, the black murderer of both a white girl and a Black girl in Native Son, was based on a stereotype, Baldwin said. Wright himself was so sensitive to racial stereotypes he wouldnt dance or play cards.Related Articles

Michele Wallace agreed with Baldwin. In Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978), she said that the white mans love affair with Black Macho began with Native Son. Wallace claimed that its message was that a Black man could come to life only as a white mans nightmare. She credited Mailer with having been accurate in The White Negro about the intersection of the black mans and the white mans fantasies. But this was diagnosis, not praise. Though Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice (1968) had been outraged by Baldwins criticisms of Mailer, in Wallaces judgment Baldwin had suppressed his own ambiguities and ambivalences about gender and sexuality, because Black militancy, the political face of Black Macho in the 60s, required it of him to do so.

Racial fixation: Mailer reported on the 1974 fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. (Ed Kolenovsky / AP)

An obsession with the Black male also drove The Fight (1975), Mailers report on the heavyweight championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mailer took the art of boxing seriously, and it was a subject he had some real knowledge of. However, reading him on the underworld of Black emotion, Black psychology, Black lovewith Ali as exuberant as a white fraternity president and the darker Foreman the true Africanwe cant help but recall Mailer saying of himself in The White Negro, I am just one cat in a world of cool cats and everything interesting is crazy.

Writing of himself in the third personhis signature movein The Fight, Mailer admitted:

His love affair with the Black soul, a sentimental orgy at its worst, had been given a drubbing through the seasons of Black Power. He no longer knew whether he loved Blacks or secretly disliked them, which had to be the dirtiest secret in his American life.

In contrast to Mailers fame in New York, the indifference to his presence on the streets of Kinshasa had succeeded, Mailer wrote, in niggering him; he knew what it was to be looked upon as invisible. But the Zarois had an incorruptible loneliness, some African dignity, and when Mailer read Bantu Philosophy, by the Belgian missionary Placide Tempels, he was excited that the instinctive beliefs of African tribesmen were close to his own. People are forces, not beings. He rediscovered his old love for Blacksas if the deepest ideas that ever entered his mind were there because Black existed, and he delighted in the mysterious genius of these rude, disruptive, anddown to it!altogether indigestible Blacks. He also confessed once again to the old fearthe resentment of black style, black rhetoric, black pimps, superfly, and all that virtuoso handling of the hoand envy that they had the good fortune to be born Black. He felt he understood what a loss the loss of Africa had been for Black people.

Macho display: Mailer arm-wrestles with heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali in 1965. (AP)

Anti-slavery literature was older than pro-slavery literature, but fear of interracial mixing was older than whatever the opposite of that was. Melanin infatuation doesnt always imply wanting to interact with or to be intimate with Black people. It can mean a person wanting to be Black, to be like Black people, to import Black, have the Black style, or, especially for white men, to copy Black men. The Black hustlers Detroit Red learned from in The Autobiography of Malcolm X all came to a bad end. Yes to the glamour, no to the risk.

As the War on Drugs destroyed Black militant politics, hip-hop became the keeper of the real, the authentically Black. Hip-hop, an aggressive sound created by Black American youth on the East and West coasts of the United States, is the dominant form of youth culture on earth, Jelani Cobb proclaims in To the Break of Dawn (2007), his study of the hip-hop aesthetic. But the love of things Black, like existentialism, is a tradition, not a movement. That is why Baldwin kept saying, This is your problem, not mine.

After the slaughter of World War I, many white writers and artists lost faith in the supposed rationalism of Western society. This questioning marked a return yet again to the pastoral as an idealand Black people were thought to be close to the ways of the earth. Every negative in the depiction of Black people in American cultureshiftless, emotional, childlike, animal-likebecame positive qualities. As the conventional paths to success that newly middle-class Americans chased in the 1920s were revealed to lead to the deformation of character, the exclusion of Black people turned into their supposed detachment from stress. Oppression gave Black people the freedom to want the right things from life.

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The social Darwinism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries let white people put themselves at the top of the cultural pyramid, given the (to them) advanced development of their societies when compared with the decayed societies of Asia and South America and the barbaric ones of Africa. But then Picasso paid a visit to Matisses studio in 1905, and in 1907 he had his fateful encounter with African art in the Musee dEthnographie. After World War Icivilizations catastrophe, as it was calledand after the 1919 exhibition of Paul Guilluames African art collection in Paris and the arrival of jazz there, the primitive, or primitivism, spread through the arts as a virtue, a reaction to the old social order. Our age is the age of the Negro in art, the Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay declared. The slogan of the aesthetic art world is Return to the Primitive.

McKay himself was more interested in primitivism in literature than he was in its expression in the visual arts. Batouala (1921), by the Martinican poet Ren Maran, made a considerable impression on McKay, as it did on Hemingway, as a novel that presents the consciousness of an African. Maran enjoys a sexual frankness in his tale of love and jealousy beyond anything D.H. Lawrence could have published about white people at that time in English. The anticolonialism of the novel is part of the natural life of the characters in their equatorial village. Batouala was one of the first literary works to present primitivism from a Black perspective as a positive political and social value.

In his study The Negroes in America (1923), McKay proposed that the root of the racial problem in the US was the old fear of social equality. To conceal the crimes of labor exploitation and lynch law, McKay said, the American bourgeoisie maintained a war between the races over sex. The sexual taboo that served the interests of the master class was a form of black magic. Sexual fear had acquired the force of instinct in the US, he contended.

The black writer Jean Toomer belongs more to the Imagists than he does to the Harlem Renaissance, but Cane, published in 1923a collection of sketches, poems, and Expressionist-like drama that Toomer called a novelwas much emulated for its nostalgia for an instinctive way of life and its eroticized Southern landscape. Waldo Frank, a novelist born into an upper-class Jewish family who became known for his radical ideas, wrote the preface for Cane and published his own novel, Holiday (1923), on similar themes. However, in Franks romance of primitivism a white womans desire for the kinds of experience she imagines is available to Blacks delivers the Black man she attempts to seduce to a lynch mob.

Sherwood Andersons Dark Laughter (1925) shows Toomers influence in its telegraphic prose style, mixed with lyric poetry, and its determination to contrast the fecundity of the South with the sterility of the industrialized North. A Midwestern white maneveryone must be labeled these daysAndersons protagonist escapes the highly organized Chicago existence that has weakened his instinct for life, finding cures for the body and soul in the ease of New Orleans, among overly enthusiastic images of sexually anti-neurotic blacks. Anderson expresses much of what he has to say about the cultural and spiritual afflictions of white people in sexual terms.

Melanin infatuation circulated through American culture after the Jazz Age, mostly unexamined, unacknowledged. Mailer developed his hypothesis of hip during yet another postwar mood of repudiation. For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man, Mailer said in The White Negro. Mailer was 16 years old when he entered Harvard in 1939. Drafted upon graduation, he saw action in the Pacific in 1945. Veterans like Mailer had also seen something of the world, and the experience of meeting people unlike yourself is part of his ambitious, hugely successful first novel, The Naked and the Dead, published when he was only 25a book Richard Wright read in Paris but doesnt mention in his letters. Mailers was an American career, though he and Baldwin first met in Paris. If Henry James was Baldwins early model, then Hemingway was Mailersespecially when it came to projecting an image of masculine prowess.

The Brooklyn-raised Mailer was a New York City character, a founder of The Village Voice, a onetime mayoral candidate, his moods of dread or discontent always on public display. Making a spectacle of himself gave Mailer bragging rights, always bogarting onto center stage. Pugnacious in his intellectual style, he was not a good Jewish boy like Lionel Trilling, anglicized by the Ivy League.

In an essay published in Commentary in 1963, My Negro Problemand Ours, Norman Podhoretz, another working-class Jew from Brooklyn, remembers as bad boys the sort of Black guys Mailer casts as natural dissenters. They persecuted Podhoretz when he was growing up in Brownsville in the 1930s. Italians and Jews feared the Negro youths who embodied the values of the streetfree, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic. The qualities he envied and feared in the Negro, Podhoretz said, made the Negro faceless to him, just as Baldwin claimed Blacks were to whites in general. And as a white boy, Podhoretz said, he in turn was faceless to them. Mailer wanted not to have this problem of intimidation, facelessness, shared or otherwisenot after the Holocaust. Summon instead the Maccabee who can hang tough with anyone, anywhere.

Mutual fascination: James Baldwin (left) never befriended Norman Mailer, but both investigated problems of race and American masculinity. (Bettmann)

We all have changing relationships to writers, and how they seem to us down through the years is not fixed and cant be when it comes to such complicated artists. I was not a reader of Mailers fiction. My college friends and I struggled through The Naked and the Dead and then read James Jones, a peer of Mailers as a novelist of their war, but because of the Vietnam War we preferred Joseph Hellers blackly comic tone to their grit. I can recall the sensations that The Executioners Song (1979) and Ancient Evenings (1983) were as publishing events. I have a memory of Christopher Hitchens extolling the virtues of Harlots Ghost (1991) as a CIA novel. But my heart is with Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), Mailers reportage on the Republican and Democratic political conventions in 1968, and The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), about the march on the Pentagon in 1967. The mere memory of those two titles makes me mourn again my older sister, an anti-war hippie who brought Mailer home in paperback. It took a while for serious citizens to like him as much as the young did, Baldwin said.

Many of Mailers readers grew up with him. Or not. Margo Jefferson remembers that she found The Prisoner of Sex (1971) insufferable. Oddly enough, it is this book, about his views on what he accepted as the natural inequality of men and women, that reminds us of the days when race relations were spoken of as a conflict between Black men and white men, for which white women were the prize and Black women were not in the frame. Town Bloody Hall (1979), the documentary about the panel discussion at Town Hall in 1971 between Norman Mailer and Jacqueline Ceballos, Germaine Greer, and Diana Trilling, captures the atmosphere of his public presence: combative, provocative, fired up. The women in the audience, plenty of whom knew Mailer, take his pronouncements on women as what theyd expect: condescending, out-of-date about equality and biology, and therefore irrelevant, just more of his shtick, which was to be outrageous. This, for the man notorious for having stabbed his second wife.

Mailer brought out nearly four dozen books in his lifetime, right up to his death in 2007. Do the biographies already out there have anything to say about Jason Epstein, Mailers longtime editor, who once said he really disliked The White Negro? Epstein, who has just died, remembered in his eulogy for Mailer in The New York Review of Books his limitless ambition and his sense of the writers vocation as being a commitment to explore the deepest mysteries. Baldwin said he wanted to die in the middle of writing a sentence. Time has obscured what he and Mailer once had in common, their love of purely literary qualities. Baldwin was certain that Mailers work would outlast the newspapers, the gossip columns, the cocktail parties. And Mailers own garrulity, he might have added.

Recently, news accounts have appeared claiming that a posthumous collection of Mailers political writings had been turned down by his publisher, Random House. The rejection was due, at least in part, according to the initial account, to the reaction of a member of the publishers junior staff to the word Negro in the title of the essay The White Negro, which was to be included in the volume. There were also rumors about declining sales, and speculation over how much Random House had paid Mailer over the years for his quest for the Great American Novel. Mailers family has stressed continued good relations between his literary estate and his backlist publisher. The estates literary agent also denies that any cancellation had occurred. In any case, the collection is to be brought out by Skyhorse Publishing, haven of the canceled.

What does this episode mean for Advertisements for Myself, which seems to be very much in print? Perhaps Mailer himself has become too controversial, given his misogyny, the violence in his personal history. But some people are asking, What is the difference between being canceled because you offend and your book getting turned down because your offensiveness represents a financial risk?

Picture of virility? Norman Mailer as a young man, an era that apparently haunted his later writing. (Bettmann)

I dont want to read Mailer again, but I dont want to read any more Baldwin either, not until we get his letters. But while it may be too late for me to want to read Mailers books againor even, most of them, for the first timeI wouldnt want them not to be available in someone elses future. As a historical document, The White Negro does not need to be defended, and as for Mailers ideas on Black primitivism, as an update on an American fetish they seem more in debt to Freud than to Sartre. Mailer said he was trying to kick benzedrine when he was writing The White Negro, which brings to mind Sartre going off speed in order to prove he didnt need it. Sartre wrote his best book, The Words, without the aid of drugs.

Still, there is something cold turkey about The White Negro in its maniabut then Mailer was always on, out there. Sobriety was not one of his muses. In his time, critics talked a lot about Mailers saturation in the language, in the invention of his idiom, and how in his nonfiction each of his participant/observer narrators was a persona embarked on an adventure of mind and will. Writers must be free to take risks, to make their own mistakes. Mailer should be defended not for reasons of nostalgia but on principle.

There has always been a problem that what is being said about Black people and white people depends on who is saying it and where. There had always been the question of whether the superiority seen in Black vernacular culture was adequate compensation for political powerlessness and economic suppression. Intellectual heritage is now capital, and the belief that the fight for control of culture is political has become obsolete. Zora Neale Hurston resented white writers making money from Black material when she never got the chance to. Poachers. What separates the chaff from the wheat these days, and who decides and by what criteria? In print culture, the change in who gets to say what is grounds for expulsion from cultural memory signals a shift in power, a creation of new powers. The offended are not merely heard, they are enthroned.

I dont believe in the non-AA use of the word trigger. You are not brought down by the encounter with a written work or an object of art to the extent that you would harm yourself or others unless you were already predisposed to do so and thrived on suppositions confirmed by your paranoia.

New powers need new standards: Is the aim the chastisement of the white gaze, control over sublimated and unsublimated aggressionor the placement of an additional apparatus of surveillance and accountability over culture? The market loves what are deemed icons, while the culture has come to suspect individualism. Even David Blights monumental Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom has moments when he regrets that Douglass thought of himself as exceptional. Never mind that Douglass could not have accomplished what he did had he not had this extraordinary sense of self. The age of auteurism is over. We all can be stakeholders in the fantasy that culture should be a safe place and that talent must be democratic, not a mystery.

I do not know how we got from wanting civilized workplace practices to imposing censorshipand doing so in the name of progressive intentions. John McWhorter was inspiring in his defense of the word Negro in a recent New York Times opinion piece. I was always told that my great-grandparents, listed either as colored or Negro in every official US Census, related to the word Negro in print as manifesting the respect they and W.E.B. Du Bois had won for themselves.

Writers works often disappear after their deathsand then come back. Or not. Mailer has range in his subjects, but are his ideas just flawed, or are they so wrong theyre harmful? Eldridge Cleaver, rapist of Black women and white women, was excused back then because of white supremacys crimes. Did the murderer Gary Gilmore, the subject of Mailers Executioners Song, find dignity when he insisted on being executed for his crimes? Was the murderer Jack Abbott, whom Mailer helped get out of prison, worthy of what Mailer read into his miserable upbringing in the criminal justice system?

The history of ideas is unpredictable. Critic Sterling A. Brown was adamant that readers made the canon; academics seem to think theyre in charge these days. Perhaps time and other writers shape these matters, which are so fluidwhat to call them? Along with the objections to what Mailer represents comes an exasperation with the 60s, later generations fed up with hearing what to them sounds like the plea of impotence: that the wide cultural dimension is a crucial gauge to a free society. Artistic independence is fragile as social practice. What is being canceled is the status of art as sacrosanct, and that of the artist as belonging to an elect. Writing used to be considered a form of magic. Now its a profession. Behave.

See the rest here:

My Norman Mailer Problemand Ours - The Nation

At first glance, it seems like a cannibalistic gesture, even if it is addressed to God and not to a human being. Yet it is the quintessence of Roman Catholicism. We are talking about eating God, an act that is at the heart of the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist.

Can Roman Catholicism really be thought of as the religion of eating God? Matteo Al-Kalak, professor of modern history at the University of Modena-Reggio, exploresthis questionis in his latest book, Mangiare Dio. Una storia delleucarestia (Turin: Einaudi, 2021; Eating God. A History of the Eucharist).

The book is a history of the Eucharist from the Council of Trent (1545-1563) onwards in the Italian context and focuses on how the Eucharist has been elevated to a primary identity-marker: practiced, taught, protected, abused, and used for various purposes, including extra-religious ones.

Using a mosaic technique (p.xiv), he analyzes some pieces of the history of the Eucharist.

It is not surprising that facing the challenges posed by the Protestant Reformation (in all its Eucharistic variants, from the German Lutheran version to the Calvinian-Zwinglian Swiss version), the Council of Trent emphasized the sacrificial character of the Mass and made the Eucharist the symbolic pivot of the Counter-Reformation.

Al-Kalaks book is a collection of micro-stories aimed at forming a mosaic that reflects the crucial importance of the Eucharist in the construction of the post-Tridentine Roman Catholic imagination and strongly Eucharistic emphasis.

After reviewing the biblical data, the book summarizes the medieval debates starting from the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) which intertwined three pillars: who was to dedicate (in Roman Catholic language: consacrate) the bread and the wine (i.e. only the clergy), the confession to be preceded, and the true and proper Eucharist.

One of the outcomes of the Council was the institution of the feast of Corpus Domini (The Body of the Lord, 1247). This Lateran synthesis was contested both before and after the Reformation.

The pages on the heretical movements of the 16th century give voice to the doctrinal fluidity of Italian heterodoxy on the Lords Supper (p.19). In this regard, the opinion of Natale Andriotti from Modena is reported. Talking to a friend he said, Do you think that Christ is in that host? Its just a little dough (p.149).

As pieces of the mosaic, other chapters tell stories of Eucharistic miracles, associated with various prodigies, and the development of a kind of preaching centered around Eucharistic themes (from the model offered by Carlo Borromeo in the 17th century to the impetus given by Alfonso Maria de Liguori in the 18th century).

Al-Kalak touches on the meticulous regulation given to the administration of the Eucharist (from the spaces, to the gestures, to the treatment of abuses) outside and inside the Mass (for example, at the bedside of the sick).

Further chapters follow on the Eucharist represented in poetic, pictorial and architectural forms and on the desecrated Eucharist in witchcraft, magic and superstitious practices.

The discussion of the Eucharist in the face of the cultural disruption of the French Revolution is also of great interest. The Eucharist was seen as a polemical tool against the rationalism of modernity and for the re-Christianization of society (Pope Leo XIII).

In recent years, though, Pope Francis is pushing to loosen the criteria for access to the Eucharist to allow the inclusion of those who are in irregular life situations. The book witnesses to the fact that the Eucharistic theologies and practices are not static and given once and for all, but always on the move.

The volume ends with an interesting postscriptum in which Al-Kalak dwells on the scandal of the Eucharist: only the host is subject to the physiological mechanisms of the human being in such a radical way (191), yet it is believed as a supernatural act filled with mystery.

It combines rational language with sensory ones, opening up to the irrational (p.193). If it is true to say that the Eucharist in the regular mass, in Eucharistic adoration, in Eucharistic processions and fidelity to the pope and to the hierarchy are the two most distinguished features of Roman Catholicism from the Council of Trent onwards (p.195), then a history of the Roman Catholic practice of eating God allows us to enter into the depths of the Roman Catholic religion.

Beyond the fascinating stories told by the book, what is of some interest is its title, Eating God, and its appropriateness to describe the soul of Roman Catholicism.

Already in the early centuries of the church, Christians were sometimes accused of cannibalism precisely in relation to the Lords Supper. What did Jesus mean when he said, Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life (John 6:54)?

The meal of bread and wine associated with the memory of the body and blood of Jesus Christ could give rise to misunderstandings. Was it a truly human body? Was it the blood of a corpse? Was it then a cannibal meal?

Christian apologetics of the early centuries tried to unravel the misunderstandings as much as possible, indignantly rejecting the accusation of cannibalism and, if anything, indicating the biblical parameters of the ordinance instituted by Jesus himself.

Yet, already starting from the Fourth Lateran Council, and even more so from the Council of Trent, the church of Rome embraced transubstantiation, i.e an understanding of the sacrament according to which, after the consecration of the bread and wine and the transformation of their nature into the body and blood of Christ, there is a sense in which the Roman Catholic Eucharist is a real eating of God.

If the bread really becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus (the God-man), taking it in some way means eating God,

Can it really go that far? Evidently yes, according to Rome. While the Reformation insisted on recovering the distinction between Creator and creature, the radical nature of sin and the sufficient mediation of the God-man Jesus Christ for the salvation of those who believe, the Roman Catholic Church instead veered on the analogy between Creator and creature and on the prolongation of Christs mediation in the hierarchical and sacramental church, to the point of considering the creatures eating God as possible, even necessary.

For Roman Catholicism, man is capable of God (capax dei) to the point of having to really eat him.

Is this the meaning of the meal that the Lord Jesus instituted the night he was betrayed and that he gave to the church as a memorial of him in view of his second coming?

The debate on this question in history has been very lively and is still crucial.

In the eating God of the Eucharist, Roman Catholicism puts all its worldview at work: its view of reality as touched but not marred by sin, the extension of the incarnation in the church, the divinization of man, and the already of salvation enjoyed in the fruition of the sacraments without waiting for the not yet of the final banquet.

If you think about it, as absurd as it appears, eating God is a synthesis of Roman Catholicism.

Leonardo De Chirico is an evangelical pastor in Rome (Italy). He is a theologian and an expert in Roman Catholicism. He blogs at VaticanFiles.com.

Published in: Evangelical Focus - Vatican Files - Eating God? A history of the Eucharist and a glimpse of Roman Catholicism

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Eating God? A history of the Eucharist and a glimpse of Roman Catholicism - Evangelical Focus