Here is an anecdote I was not allowed to post on Twitter.
On a recent trip to Costco, the kids were fighting in the back of the car and I asked my husband, “Why do we have such bad children? Is it because we’re bad parents?” He said, “Yes, but it’s not our fault, we must’ve had bad parents.” I said, “But that’s not their fault — ” and my 6-year-old son interrupted, enraged, yelling from the back of the car, “IT’S ALL GOD’S FAULT!”
Your own reaction to this story can tell you why my son wouldn’t let me tweet it: He doesn’t want you to think he’s cute. (He has consented to have it appear here. No children’s rights were violated in the writing of this essay.) When he was saying those words, he was not trying to entertain. He was angry — at me, at my husband, at God and, after I asked him whether I could tweet it, at you for the way he knew you would react.
My oldest son is 15, and he finds my Twitter behavior undignified. (“Why does the world need to know that we are at Costco?”) He feels that a teacher, mentor and role model should cultivate a distance, even a mystique, so as to elicit the kind of respect she needs from her students, advisees and admirers. If people do not think they know you, then you do not need to worry, as my 6-year-old did, that you have left yourself in their interpretive hands. You can restrict their thoughts about you.
To allow others to think about us in whatever way they feel like — perhaps to laugh at us, perhaps to dismiss us — is a huge loss of control. So why do we allow it? What is the attraction of it? I think that it’s the increase in control we get in return. Social media has enabled the Great Control Swap. And it is happening right now, beneath our notice.
The first baby step toward the Great Swap was the shift from phone calls to texts. A phone interaction requires participants to be “on the same time,” which entails negotiations over entrance into and exit from the conversation. Consider all the time we spend first on, “Is this a bad time to call? Can you talk?” And then later on, “O.K., gotta go, talk to you soon, see you later, good talking to you … ” (It’s only in the movies that you can just hang up on someone.) Everyone has been in a phone conversation that ended much later than they wanted it to; the form subjects us to the will of another.
A text or email interaction, by contrast, liberates the parties so that each may operate on their own time. But the cost comes in another form of control: data. Homer’s “winged words” fly from the mouth of one directly to the ear of another, but text-based communication requires stationary words: One person puts them down, so the other can come along and read them at her leisure. And that means they leave a trail.
Imagine a man conducting a romantic affair exclusively by email. He needn’t lie to his wife about fake “business trips,” since he can pursue his shenanigans right under her nose. Likewise, he avoids undesirable entanglements with his mistress: He doesn’t even need to buy her dinner! Email allows him the control to steer the two women out of the way of one another — but the price he pays is a very robust data trail. His affair has a text archive. If his mistress decides to write a book about it, she can be scientific. She needn’t rely on memory or vague impressions. She can systematically analyze their interactions and quote his exact words.
Our anger at social media companies resembles this man’s anger over his mistress’s theft of his “private data.” We wanted one kind of control, and didn’t reckon with the fact that we’d have to pay for it with another kind. We wanted to be able to interact with other people entirely in our own time, with people who make no demands on us. We wanted entry and exit to be painless. We understood from the start that this form of socializing — like an affair without physical contact — was shallower than the other, more demanding kind. We were prepared to accept that trade-off, but failed to grasp that we were trading away more than depth. We were also trading away a kind of control.
As my children appreciate, the control issue goes well beyond whether Facebookmonetizes our data. It is also a matter of making oneself into a thing that others can own. When I’ve told you what my son said, it’s not “his data” anymore. He can’t control whether you laugh at it, or what tone you use when you do.
We don’t like to acknowledge just how much we are willing to pay for distance from other people. For example, people warn prospective parents that having a baby is expensive, but that isn’t exactly true. What’s expensive is getting away from your baby. If you don’t want to feed them with your body, you buy formula and bottles. If you don’t want them looking at you all the time, you buy contraptions to entertain them. A stroller so you don’t have to carry them, a crib so you don’t have to sleep with them, a house with extra rooms so you don’t even have to sleep near them, child care so that you can get farther away yet: These are the costs that add up. You don’t pay much for babies, but you pay a lot to escape them.
All of us have a desire to connect, to be seen. But we live in a world that is starting to allow us to satisfy that desire without feeling the common-sense moral strictures that have traditionally governed human relationships. We can engage without obligation, without boredom and, most importantly, without subjecting our attention to the command of another. On Twitter, I’m never obligated to listen through to the end of someone’s story.
The immense appeal of this free-form socializing lies in the way it makes one a master of one’s own time — but it cannot happen without a place. All that data has to sit somewhere so that people can freely access it whenever they wish. Data storage is the loss of control by which we secure social control: Facebook is our faithless mistress’s leaky inbox.
When we alienate our identities as text data, and put that data “out there” to be read by anyone who wanders by, we are putting ourselves into the interpretive hands of those who have no bonds or obligations or agreements with us, people with whom we are, quite literally, prevented from seeing “eye to eye.” People we cannot trust.
The Great Control Swap buys us control over the logistics of our interactions at the cost of interpretive control over the content of those interactions. Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data.
Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.” She writes a monthly column on public philosophy at The Point magazine.
This was how Senator Elizabeth Warren, in September’s Democratic presidential debate, described the appeal she has made “every time one of the generals come through” as she sought to understand by what measure our military intervention in Afghanistan could be considered a success. In place of an abstraction — “success” — she wanted something concrete. Ms. Warren’s plea, startling in its simplicity, highlights the perilous nature of abstraction and invites us to study the various ways in which it may be deployed to control, cancel or kill people.
In the social and political realms, an abstraction is an idea — love, liberty, Leninism — that has no palpable form. When we speak about something in the abstract, we take concrete instances and average them into generalized — and necessarily reductive — concepts. Through this process, things, events and people lose their visibility and density. The world becomes a series of signs and numbers standing in for things themselves.
Among the thinkers of the past century, the French philosopher Simone Weil stands out as a powerful analyst of the many ways in which abstraction could damage our politics and our soul.
In a 1936 essay, originally titled “Let Us Not Start Another Trojan War” but better known by the title of its English translation, “The Power of Words,” Weil drew a relationship between the increasing abstraction of words and the pretexts used for war. “In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends,” she wrote. “Our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities.”
Weil saw in her historical moment a loss of a sense of scale, a creeping ineptitude in judgment and communication and, ultimately, a forfeiture of rational thought. She observed how political platforms being built upon words like “roots” or “homeland” could use more abstractions — like “the foreigner,” “the immigrant,” “the minority” and “the refugee” — to turn flesh-and-blood individuals into targets. Finally, she understood how central abstractions were in legitimizing unwarranted authority, in pitting people against one another, and in justifying indefensible wars, discrimination and other forms of brutality.
While Weil was describing Europe on the verge of catastrophic war, this insight can also help us understand the demoralizing reality of contemporary American politics.
There is no doubt that driven by the explosion of new and more accessible technologies, our world has become more and more abstract: from the advent and expansion of cyberwarfare, through demographic research and online banking and trading, to algorithmic commerce and the move toward cashless societies. The tendency toward abstraction, though, is not merely restricted to the realm of technology. It extends to our social, intellectual and political lives — including the various isms (feminism, racism, colonialism, nationalism and so on) that we use to sum up human systems and behaviors.
Abstractions often arise when there is too much to know and too little time in which to know it. Submerged in a superabundance of information, abstractions — in the guise of statistics or stereotypes — seem to act as valuable timesavers. But what we save in time, we lose in nuance and exactitude. And there is a greater danger: When the world grows more complex, as it has in our age of global technocracy, specialists begin to monopolize information and use it as a tool of control.
Weil described this dynamic well in a 1934 essay, “Analysis of Oppression,” in a passage about the origins of religious thought. She argued that when the religious rites meant to help humans gain favor from the gods grow “too numerous and complicated to be known by all,” these rites become “the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests.” And, she concluded, “Nothing essential is changed when the monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests.”
When politicians like Elizabeth Warren speak of “the generals” you can be sure they refer only partly to real people and much more to archetypes — the Generals — that have accumulated lifetimes of semantic and cultural baggage. This can also be true of other groups like the Women, the Students, the African-Americans, the Russians and so on. We know other such powerful words: Government, Corporation, Faith, Civilization, Culture, Nation. “When empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name without effectively grasping anything to which they refer,” Weil wrote, “for the simple reason that they mean nothing.”
This is why she was against all political parties. She believed they require fealty to vague ideas without an understanding of the facts, material contingencies and concrete realities necessary for effective governance. Political parties are generators of abstractions, churned out endlessly for one purpose only — so that the Party can survive and grow. In one economical sentence, Weil summed up why political cooperation requires us all to get out of our heads and dispense with abstractions, if only for a little while: “The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.”
It would serve each of us well to make a collective effort to inventory our beliefs, assess how much they rely on abstractions, and consider how a move away from the abstract and toward the concrete might bring us all closer to understanding what winning looks like.
Christy Wampole is an associate professor of French literature and thought at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of “Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor.”
ولما رأى الجموع صعد إلى الجبل.فلما جلس تقدم اليه تلاميذه. ففتح فاه وعلمهم قائلاً: طوبى للمساكين بالروح. لأن لهم ملكوت السموات. طوبى للحزانى. لأنهم يتعزون. طوبى للودعاء. لأنهم يرثون الأرض. طوبى للجياع والعطاش إلى البر. لأنهم يشبعون. طوبى للرحماء. لأنهم يرحمون. طوبى لأنقياء القلب. لأنهم يعاينون الله. طوبى لصانعي السلام. لأنهم أبناء الله يدعون. طوبى للمطرودين من أجل البر. لأن لهم ملكوت السموات. طوبى لكم إذا عيّروكم وطردوكم وقالوا عليكم كل كلمة شريرة من أجلي كاذبين. افرحوا وتهللوا. لأن أجركم عظيم في السموات. فإنهم هكذا طردوا الأنبياء الذين قبلكم أنتم ملح الأرض. ولكن إن فسد الملح فبماذا يملح. لا يصلح بعد لشيء إلا لأن يطرح خارجًا ويداس من الناس. أنتم نور العالم. لا يمكن أن تخفى مدينة موضوعة على جبل. ولا يوقدون سراجًا ويضعونه تحت المكيال بل على المنارة فيضيء لجميع الذين في البيت. فليضئ نوركم هكذا قدام الناس لكي يروا أعمالكم الحسنة ويمجدوا أباكم الذي في السموات لا تظنوا أني جئت لأنقض الناموس أو الأنبياء.
قد سمعتم أنه قيل للقدماء لا تقتل. ومن قتل يكون مستوجب الحكم. وأما أنا فأقول لكم إن كل من يغضب على أخيه باطلًا يكون مستوجب الحكم. ومن قال لأخيه رقا يكون مستوجب المجمع. ومن قال يا أحمق يكون مستوجب نار جهنم. فإن قدمت قربانك إلى المذبح وهناك تذكرت أن لاخيك شيئا عليك فاترك هناك قربانك قدام المذبح واذهب أولا اصطلح مع أخيك. وحينئذ تعال وقدم قربانك. كن مراضيًا لخصمك سريعًا ما دمت معه في الطريق. لئلا يسلمك الخصم إلى القاضي ويسلمك القاضي إلى الشرطي فتلقى في السجن. الحق أقول لك لا تخرج من هناك حتى توفي الفلس الاخير.
ليكن كلامكم نعم نعم لا لا. وما زاد على ذلك فهو من الشرير.
سمعتم أنه قيل عين بعين وسن بسن. وأما أنا فأقول لكم لا تقاوموا الشر. بل من لطمك على خدك الأيمن فحوّل له الآخر أيضاً. ومن أراد أن يخاصمك ويأخذ ثوبك فاترك له الرداء أيضا. ومن سخرك ميلاً واحداً فاذهب معه اثنين. من سألك فأعطه. ومن أراد أن يقترض منك فلا ترده.
سمعتم أنه قيل تحب قريبك وتبغض عدوك. وأما أنا فأقول لكم أحبوا أعداءكم. باركوا لاعنيكم. أحسنوا إلى مبغضيكم. وصلّوا لأجل الذين يسيئون إليكم ويطردونكم. لكي تكونوا أبناء أبيكم الذي في السموات. فإنه يشرق شمسه على الأشرار والصالحين ويمطر على الأبرار والظالمين. لأنه إن أحببتم الذين يحبونكم فأي أجر لكم.أليس العشارون أيضا يفعلون ذلك. وإن سلمتم على إخوتكم فقط فأي فضل تصنعون. أليس العشارون أيضًا يفعلون هكذا. فكونوا أنتم كاملين كما أن أباكم الذي في السموات هو كامل.
"When he was a child, books were gifts. For his daughters, he made sure they were a given."
Kathryn SchulzMarch 25, 2019
My father loved books ravenously, and his always had a devoured look to them.
Illustration by Rose Wong When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a remarkable harmony—one that anyone who has ever tried to organize a home library would envy—among thematic, alphabetic, and aesthetic demands. The other, which governed the upstairs books, was instituted by my father, and was based on the conviction that it is very nice to have everything you’ve recently read near at hand, in case you get the urge to consult any of it again; and also that it is a pain in the neck to put those books away, especially when the shelves on which they belong are so exquisitely organized that returning one to its appropriate slot requires not only a card catalogue but a crowbar.
It was this pair of convictions that led to the development of the Stack. I can’t remember it in its early days, because in its early days it wasn’t memorable. I suppose back then it was just a modest little pile of stray books, the kind that many readers have lying around in the living room or next to the bed. But by the time I was in my early teens it was the case—and seemed by then to have always been the case—that my parents’ bedroom was home to the Mt. Kilimanjaro of books. Or perhaps more aptly the Mt. St. Helens of books, since it seemed possible that at any moment some subterranean shift in it might cause a cataclysm.
The Stack had started in a recessed space near my father’s half of the bed, bounded on one side by a wall and on the other by my parents’ dresser, a vertical behemoth taller than I would ever be. At some point in the Stack’s development, it had overtopped that piece of furniture, whereupon it met a second tower of books, which, at some slightly later point, had begun growing up along the dresser’s other side. For some reason, though, the Stack always looked to me as if it had defied gravity (or perhaps obeyed some other, more mysterious force) and grown down the far side of the dresser instead. At all events, the result was a kind of homemade Arc de Triomphe, extremely haphazard-looking but basically stable, made of some three or four hundred books.
I have no idea why we called this entity the Stack, considering the word’s orderly connotations of squared-off edges and the shelving areas of libraries. It’s true that the younger side of the Stack mounted toward the ceiling in relatively tidy fashion, like the floors of a high-rise—a concession to its greater proximity to the doorway, and thus to the more trafficked area of the bedroom, where a sudden collapse could have been catastrophic. But the original side was another story. Few generally vertical structures have ever been less stacklike, and no method of storing books has ever looked less like a shelf.
Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s. (I have inherited his pragmatic attitude toward books and deliberately break the spine of every paperback I start, because I like to fold them in half while reading them.) In addition to the Stack, my father typically had on his bedside table the five or six books he was currently reading—a novel or two, a few works of nonfiction, a volume of poetry, “Comprehensive Russian Grammar” or some other textbooky thing—and when he finished one of these he would toss it into the space between the dresser and the wall. Compression and accumulation—especially accumulation—did the rest.
To my regret, I have only a single photograph of the result. I have spent a great deal of time studying it, yet find many of the books in it impossible to identify. Some tumbled into the Stack spine in, rendering them wholly unknowable, while others fell victim to low resolution, including a few that are maddeningly familiar: an Oxford Anthology whose navy binding and gold stamp I recognize but whose spine is too blurry to read; a book that is unmistakably a Penguin Classic, but that hardly narrows it down; an Idiot’s Guide to I don’t know what. In some cases, I can make out the title but had to look up the author: “Pirate Latitudes” (Michael Crichton), “Mayflower” (Nathaniel Philbrick), “Small World” (David Lodge), “The Way Things Were” (Aatish Taseer). In others, conversely, I can see the author but not the title: something by Carl Hiaasen, something by Wally Lamb, something by Nadine Gordimer, something by Gore Vidal.
Plenty of other books in the Stack, however, are perfectly visible, and perfectly familiar. There’s the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe; there’s “Pale Fire” and “White Teeth”; there’s “Infinite Jest” and “Amerika.” There’s Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose,” a book my father mailed to me in my early twenties, together with “Our Mutual Friend,” when I was travelling and lonely and had run out of things to read. In the Stack, Stegner’s novel has achieved its own angle of repose, alongside Richard Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?” and Antonio Damasio’s “The Feeling of What Happens.” Above that is Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage,” about Lewis and Clark’s westward journey, and Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home,” about the civil-rights movement in Birmingham. There’s Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” and Beryl Markham’s “West with the Night.” There are books I can remember discussing with my father—Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live”—together with books I had no idea he’d read and, despite his insatiable curiosity, no idea he would have cared to read: the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds, Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation,” Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.”
I’m not sure exactly when this photograph of the Stack was taken. It must have been after the fall of 2012, since one of the books visible is Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” which came out in September of that year, and before 2016, when my parents moved out of their home of thirty years and into a condo, the kind with no stairs for them to fall down and less space to manage as they aged. There were plenty of books in the new place, though, and a nice wide clearing by the side of the bed, so I suspect that, given enough time, it would have housed some kind of Stack 2.0. But it did not, because seven months after my parents moved in my father died. On his bedside table at the time was a new edition of “Middlemarch,” together with a copy of “SPQR,” Mary Beard’s history of ancient Rome, and Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong.” “Middlemarch” my father regarded as the greatest novel in the English language and had been rereading for at least the sixth time. I don’t know if he had completed either of the other two books, or even begun them. But it doesn’t make any difference, I suppose. No matter when my father died, he would have been—as, one way or another, we all are when we die—in the middle of something.
I don’t know where my father got his love of books. His own father, a plumber by trade, was an epic raconteur but not, to my knowledge, much of a reader. His mother, the youngest of thirteen children, was sent for her protection from a Polish shtetl to Palestine at the start of the Second World War, only to learn afterward that her parents and eleven of her twelve siblings had perished in Auschwitz. Whoever she might otherwise have been died then, too; the woman she became was volatile, unhappy, and inscrutable. My father was never even entirely sure how literate she was—in any language, and least of all in English, which he himself began learning at the age of eleven, when the family arrived in the United States on refugee visas and settled in Detroit.
It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure. I do know that when he was nineteen he left Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America. Instead, he found penury on the Bowery. To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library. Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.
But if books were a gift for my father—transportive, salvific—he made sure that, for his children, they were a given. In one of my earliest memories, he has suddenly materialized in the doorway of the room where my sister and I were playing, holding a Norton Anthology of Poetry in one hand and waving the other aloft like Moses or Merlin while reciting “Kubla Khan.” Throughout my childhood, it was his job to read aloud to us at bedtime; to our delight, he could not be counted on to stick to the text on the page, and on the best nights he ditched the books altogether and regaled us with the homegrown adventures of Yana and Egbert, two danger-prone siblings from, of all places, Rotterdam. (My father had a keen ear for the kind of word that would make young children laugh, and that was one of them.) Those stories struck me as terrific not only at the time but again much later, when I was old enough to realize how difficult it is to construct a decent plot. When I asked my father how he had done it, he confessed that he had routinely whiled away his evening commute constructing those bedtime tales. I regret to this day that none of us ever thought to write them down.
In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister, or a writer, like me. As it was, he derived endless vicarious pleasure from his daughters’ work. Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way. Still, given his particular bent, having a daughter who got paid to read books was perhaps the consummate example of seeing to it that your kids had a better life than your own.
In the weeks and months after my father’s death, my family and I went through his belongings, donating whatever was useful, getting rid of what no one would want, and divvying up the things we loved, the things that reminded us of him. As a result, some of my father’s books are my books now: my Dickens and Dostoyevsky, my biology and natural history, my literary fiction and light verse and tragedy. They came with me the summer after he died, when my partner and I moved in together and merged our worldly possessions. Along with the rest of the books, they were the first things we unpacked and put away.
Although I often identify as my father’s daughter, there’s no mistaking which half of my genome and rearing was involved in organizing our household books. Not only does Philip Roth come after Joseph Roth on our shelves; “The Anatomy Lesson” comes after “American Pastoral,” and the nonfiction is subdivided into Linnaeus-like distinctions. And yet, as my father knew, a perfect shelving system is also inherently an imperfect one. The difficulty isn’t all the taxonomic gray areas—whether to keep T. S. Eliot’s criticism with his poetry, for instance, or whether Robert McNamara’s “In Retrospect” belongs with memoirs or with books about the Vietnam War. The difficulty is that anything that is perfectly ordered is always threatening to become imperfect and disorderly—especially books in a household of readers. You are forever acquiring new ones and going back to revisit the old, spotting some novel you’ve always intended to read and pulling it from its designated location, discovering never-categorized books in the office or the back seat or under the bed. You can put some of these strays away, of course, but, collectively, they will always spill out beyond your bookshelves, permanently unresolved, like the remainder in a long-division problem. This is a difficulty that goes well beyond libraries. No matter how beautifully your life is arranged, no matter how lovingly you tend to it, it will not stay that way forever.
I keep two pictures of my father on my desk now. One is a photograph, taken a year or so before his death, of the two of us walking down the street where I grew up. My dad has his hand on my shoulder, and although in reality I am steadying him—he was already beginning to have trouble walking—it looks as if he is guiding me. It is the posture of a father with his daughter, as close to timeless as any photograph could be. The other is the picture of the Stack. Strictly speaking, of course, that one isn’t a photograph of my father at all, and yet I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally defy a camera. My father’s exuberant, expansive mind; the comic, necessary, generous-hearted compromises of my parents’ marriage; the origins of my own vocation—they are all there in the Stack, aslant among the books, those other bindings. ♦
Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest.
لأني أنا عارف بآثامي، لك وحدك خطئت والشر قدامك صنعت يا الله
ارحمني يا الله
لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني.
نجني من الدماء
ولك يليق المجد يا الله ارحمني يا الله.
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ارحمني يا الله، كعظيم رحمتك، وكمثل رأفتك، أمح مآثمي يا الله ارحمني يا الله اغسلني كثيرا من اثمي، ومن خطيئتي طهرني، لأني أنا عارف بآثامي، لك وحدك خطئت والشر قدامك صنعت يا الله ارحمني يا الله لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني. نجني من الدماء ولك يليق المجد يا الله ارحمني يا الله.
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ارحمني يا الله .. ارحمني يا الله
كعظيم رحمتك .. وكمثل رأفتك
أمحو مأثمي يا الله .. ارحمني يا الله
اغسلني كثيرا من اثمي .. ومن خطيئتي طهرني
لأني أنا عارف بأثامي .. لك وحدك خطأت
والشر قدامك صنعت .. ارحمني يا الله
لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك .. وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني
You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus:
One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives -- I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves."
Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.
And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."
Thus I became a madman.
And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.
But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.
Kierkegaard on Nonconformity, the Individual vs. the Crowd, and the Power of the Minority
“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”
By Maria Popova
“When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her spectacular meditation on happiness and conformity, “you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” And yet conformity is not only a survival strategy for us but also something institutionally indoctrinated in our culture.
A century earlier, the great Danish writer and thinker Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855), celebrated as the first true existentialist philosopher and an active proponent of the benefits of keeping a diary, contemplated this eternal tension between the individual and the crowd. Writing in The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard (public library) — the same fantastic window into his inner world that gave us Kierkegaard’s prescient insight on the psychology of online trolling and bullying — he considers how our incapacity for quiet contemplation cuts us off from our true self and instead causes us to adopt by passive absorption the ideals of others.
Lamenting the tendency to take our values from the “very loud talk” of the crowd rather than by “each individual going alone into his secret closet to commune quietly with himself” — something he had come to consider the root of our unhappiness — he writes:
One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.
A year later, in 1847, Kierkegaard revisits the question of the individual and the crowd:
The evolution of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the individual apart from the crowd… But as yet we have not come very far concretely, though it is recognized in abstracto. That explains why it still impresses people as prideful and overweening arrogance to speak of the separate individual, whereas this precisely is truly human: each and every one is an individual.
And yet, Kierkegaard argues, most of us find it too daunting to live as individuals and instead opt for the consolations of the crowd:
Most people become quite afraid when each is expected to be a separate individual. Thus the matter turns and revolves upon itself. One moment a man is supposed to be arrogant, setting forth this view of the individual, and the next, when the individual is about to carry it out in practice, the idea is found to be much too big, too overwhelming for him.
Illustration from How to Be a Nonconformist, a 1968 satire of conformity-culture written and illustrated by a high school girl
Conformity becomes our hedge against this overwhelming idea:
Of course it is more secure to have a solid position in life, some official appointment which does not demand nearly as much of one… Most people lead far too sheltered lives, and for that reason they get to know [the divine] so little. They have permanent positions, they never put in their utmost effort…
Another year later, he returns to the subject and argues that the real arrogance is not in living up to our individuality but in denying it, and in effect denying the individuality of others:
Each human being has infinite reality, and it is pride and arrogance in a person not to honor his fellow-man…. It is a paralogism that one thousand human beings are worth more than one… The central point about being human is that the unit “1” is the highest; “1000” counts for less.
Two years later, in 1850, Kierkegaard makes a poignant case for the vital role of the minority as an antidote to the chronic groupthink of the majority:
Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion — and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion, which then becomes that of the majority, i.e., becomes nonsense by having the whole [mass] on its side, while Truth again reverts to a new minority.
In regard to Truth, this troublesome monster, the majority, the public, etc., fares in the same way as we say of someone who is traveling to regain his health: he is always one station behind.
Two centuries before Zadie Smith wrote about the privilege of self-actualization, Kierkegaard is keenly aware of the class element in this interplay between minority and majority, between the individual and the crowd:
I want people to sit up and take notice, to prevent them from idling away and wasting their lives. Aristocrats take it for granted that a lot of people will always go to waste. But they keep silent about it; they live sheltered lives pretending that all these many, many people simply do not exist. That is what is ungodly about the superior status of the aristocrats; in order to be comfortable themselves they do not even call attention to anything.
Vowing not to be like the aristocrats himself, he — a self-described “complete composite of dialectics” — offers his own solution:
I will call the attention of the crowd to their own ruination. And if they don’t want to see it willingly, I shall make them see it by fair means or foul. Please understand me — or, at least, do not misunderstand me. I do not intend to beat them… I will force them to beat me. Thus I actually compel them. For if they begin to beat me, they will probably pay attention; and if they kill me, they most definitely will pay attention, and I shall have won an absolute victory.
Kierkegaard’s rationale behind this strategy is rather humanistic in considering what it takes to awaken the individual human spirit from the trance of the crowd:
[Individuals] are not so corrupt that they actually wish to do evil, but they are blinded, and don’t really know what they are doing. It is all a matter of baiting them for decisive action… A crowd triumphs if one cedes the way, steps aside, so that it never comes to realize what it is doing. A crowd has no essential viewpoint; therefore if it happens to kill a man it is eo ipso halted; it pays heed and comes to its senses.
He later adds:
Nobody wants to be this strenuous thing: an individual; it demands an effort. But everywhere services are readily offered through the phony substitute: a few! Let us get together and be a gathering, then we can probably manage. Therein lies mankind’s deepest demoralization.
Photographs from ‘Exactitudes,’ a global project highlighting the implicit conformity of subcultures. Click image for more.
But Kierkegaard’s most poignant point arrives shortly before his death, in 1854, when he addresses with prescient precision our modern anxiety about being alone, stressing its absolute vitality in living up to our individual potential:
The yardstick for a human being is: how long and to what degree he can bear to be alone, devoid of understanding with others.
A man who can bear being alone during a whole life-time, and alone in decisions of eternal significance, is farthest removed from the infant and the society-person who represent the animal-definition of being human.
In a remark to which Anne Lamott might have the perfect response, he adds:
Testifying to the fact that man is spirit … with the passing centuries, as polished brutishness mounts, becomes increasingly necessary, but also requires increasingly greater effort.
"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves..." V.W.
The Flies in the Market-Place
Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.
Forest and rock know how to be silent with you. Be like the tree which you love, the broad-branched one -- silently and attentively it overhangs the sea.
Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.
In the world even the best things are worthless without those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the people call great men.
Little do the people understand what is great -- that is to say, the creator. But they have a taste for all showmen and actors of great things.
Around the creators of new values revolves the world: -- invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.
The actor has spirit, but little conscience of the spirit. He always believes in that with which he most strongly inspires belief -- in himself!
Tomorrow he has a new belief, and the day after, one still newer. Like the people, he has quick perceptions and fickle moods.
To defeat -- that means for him: to prove. To drive to frenzy -- that means for him: to convince. And blood is to him the best of all arguments.
A truth which glides only into refined ears, he calls falsehood and nothing. He believes only in gods that make a big noise in the world!
Full of clattering fools is the market-place, -- and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.
But the hour presses them; so they press you. And also from you they want Yes or No. Alas! would you set your chair between Pro and Con?
Do not be jealous of those unyielding and impatient men, you lover of truth! Never yet did truth cling to the arm of the unyielding.
On account of those abrupt ones, return into your security: only in the market-place is one assailed by Yes? or No?
Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.
Far away from the market-place and from fame happens all that is great: far away from the market-place and from fame have always dwelt the creators of new values.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee to where a rough, strong breeze blows!
Flee into your solitude! you have lived too closely to the small and the pitiful. Flee from their invisible vengeance! For you they have nothing but vengeance.
No longer raise your arm against them! They are innumerable, and it is not your job to be a flyswatter.
Innumerable are the small and pitiful ones; and rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin of many a proud structure.
You are not stone; but already have you become hollow from many drops. You will yet break and burst from the many drops.
I see you exhausted by poisonous flies; I see you bleeding and torn at a hundred spots; and your pride refuses even to be angry.
They would have blood from you in all innocence; blood is what bloodless souls crave -- and therefore they sting in all innocence.
But you, profound one, you suffer too profoundly even from small wounds; and before you have healed, the same poison-worm crawls over your hand.
You are too proud to kill these gluttons. But take care lest it be your fate to suffer all their poisonous injustice!
They buzz around you also with their praise: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want to be close to your skin and your blood.
They flatter you, as one flatters a God or devil; they whimper before you, as before a God or devil; What does it come to! They are flatterers and whimperers, and nothing more.
Often, also, do they show themselves to you as friendly ones. But that has always been the prudence of cowards. Yes! cowards are wise!
They think much about you with their petty souls -- you are always suspect to them! Whatever is much thought about is at last thought suspicious.
They punish you for all your virtues. They pardon you entirely -- for your errors.
Because you are gentle and of honest character, you say: "Guiltless are they for their small existence." But their petty souls think: "Guilty is every great existence."
Even when you are gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by you; and they repay your beneficence with secret maleficence.
Your silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once you are humble enough to be vain.
What we recognize in a man, we also irritate in him. Therefore be on your guard against the small ones!
In your presence they feel themselves small, and their baseness gleams and glows against you in invisible vengeance.
You did not see how often they became silent when you approached them, and how their energy left them like the smoke of a waning fire?
Yes, my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors, for they are unworthy of you. Therefore they hate you, and would rather suck your blood.
Your neighbors will always be poisonous flies; what is great in you -- that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like.
Flee, my friend, into your solitude -- and there, where a rough strong breeze blows. It is not your job to be a flyswatter.
The Lesson History Teaches Is Tragic By Robert ZaretskyOct. 16, 2019
Since the election of Donald Trump, commentators have rummaged through the past to make sense of the present and predictions about the future. They are preoccupied, in a word, by precedent. At the heart of any precedent is the belief that once acknowledged, it is actionable. A historical precedent offers not only a pattern but also a promise. We are assured by a rule — given what has preceded, here is how we must proceed — and reassured by a pledge: If we act rightly, we will be around to act again.
The Athenian writer Thucydides is often considered the father of scientific or objective history — the sort of history, in other words, pregnant with precedent. Modern scholars have described Thucydides’ account of the decades-long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E. — a struggle that ultimately spelled the decline and fall of both city-states — as a model of realism. Not only did Thucydides tell it like it was, but his telling also served as a blueprint for our own time.
The relevance of Thucydides seemed particularly great at the arrival of the Cold War. What better reflection of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union than that between Athens and Sparta? In one corner, a maritime and open society; in the other corner, a landlocked and closed society. In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall claimed that Thucydides’ history offered the means to think “with full wisdom and deep convictions” about current affairs. A half a century later, the political theorist Graham Allison argued in an article that we still live in a world according to Thucydides, but with China now taking the role of Communist Russia.
Two decades later, in his 2017 book “Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?,” Allison asserts that the Greek historian provides a timeless rule — that war is more likely than not when a rising power challenges an established power. Allison thus seems to suggest the existence of apparently unchanging laws, first revealed by Thucydides, that — like Newton’s laws for physical matter — govern relations between great powers regardless of place and time.
Is it possible that the real trap, though, is the still widely unquestioned assumption that Thucydides was a political realist? That if he does offer lessons, they are not found in the study of international relations but in the study of human nature? That his brand of realism has little to do with the work of modern political theorists and much to do with the work of ancient tragedians?
Consider the story Thucydides writes about the Peloponnesian War, one he insists was even more momentous than the Persian Wars. Thucydides does not explain this outwardly outrageous claim because he does not need to: As his readers understood, this new war did not pit Greece against a foreign foe but Greeks against Greeks. With his swift tracing of Athens’s rise from a backwater polis to burgeoning power, the historian not only underscores the near-sudden fear that overtakes Sparta but also lays bare the tragic implications of the brewing collision.
In his explanation of the work’s celebrated speeches, Thucydides tells us that when he could not say with certainty what the speakers said, he had them say what they should have said. They do so not as stock figures offering insights into game theory but as flesh-and-blood individuals mostly blind to the consequences of their actions. Behind the intense debates and decisions, we hear not the muffled moves of a chess game but the grinding wheels of necessity and nemesis. The former, as the hero of Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound” declares, is unconquerable. The latter, as was understood by any Greek tragedian or historian worth his salt, was ineluctable.
Time and again, rational calculations prove as faulty as irrational forces prove overwhelming. Pericles, the Athenian leader praised for his ability to plan for all eventualities, dies in the unanticipated plague that strikes the city. The Athenian leader of the Melian expedition, who justifies the destruction of Melos by claiming that might makes right, portends the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily.
Similarly, Alcibiades, the privileged and proud politician who promoted the Sicilian adventure, did so by appealing not to the reason of his working-class base but to its discontent and desires. Likewise, the businessman turned demagogue Cleon, blasted by Thucydides as the “most violent man in Athens,” repeatedly debases language in his quest for power. As for the reasonable and moderate Nicias, the general who failed to dissuade his fellow Athenians from invading Sicily, he dies there while commanding his doomed forces. While Alcibiades eventually goes over to the Spartans, revealing that self-interest comes before national interest, Nicias suffers what Thucydides describes as an “undeserved” death.
While parallels between now and then abound, lessons are less plentiful. In the end, Thucydides’ history does not instruct us on how to exploit or avoid certain situations, instead instilling the simple truth that given our nature, there will always be situations that we cannot avoid and, if we try to exploit, will have unintended consequences.
Why bother studying the past, then, if it cannot help us navigating the present? One might as well ask why bother reading Aeschylus or Sophocles if they have no useful advice on how to live our lives. Thucydides’ claim that he wrote his history not to win “the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time” is based on his tragic conception of life. Far from our being able to master events or even our own desires, events and desires will sooner or later master us. While this is not a rousing call for action, it is a call for modesty and lucidity. Especially in our own age, these virtues might still have earned the applause of Thucydides.
Robert Zaretsky is a professor at the University of Houston and the author of a forthcoming book on the French thinker Simone Weil.
