Richard Reeves wrote an excellent post today on the travails of the very rich. He points out that they are travails that are unnecessary and in fact limit severly the lives of people working and working and working and driving their children to do the same.
The idea of meritocracy has long been used by the rich for self-justification. Now it is becoming fuel for their self-pity.
The raw competition for success, so the argument goes, hurts the winners as much as the losers: It is “mutually destructive.” But this is not true. By any objective measure, the rich are doing just fine. They are wealthier and healthier than ever. Economists at the Brookings Institution found that the top 10 percent of male earners born in 1940 can now expect to live to the ripe old age of 88, 12 years longer than male earners born the same year in the bottom 10 percent.
This is not to say that successful people are immune to life’s difficulties and strains. But there is no moral equivalence between the stress of a senior executive staying up late to polish a presentation for a client and the stress of a retail worker unsure if she will get the shift she needs to make rent.
The problems of the affluent are not systemic. They are self-inflicted. Well-heeled Americans have persuaded themselves that the stakes are high in every race in life. Especially when it comes to their children, the good is never good enough. Their children must have the best: the best preschools, the best high schools and the best colleges.
Reeves points out that thre are much better alternatives. if the super rich pushing themselves and their kids in the super rat race followed Reeves's suggestions, they might find it necessary to advocate for decent public schools which would benefit far more than their kids. They might have time to talk to people different from themselves, learn about lives different from their own. Learn not only about the difficulties of the poor and middle class,but also about who they are. For me, a graduate of a very fine high school and an Ivy League college, the best education I had was my two years in the Peace Corps in Uganda living in a semi-rural community teaching boys whose main shoes were flip flops. It wasn't learning that they were poor that mattered, though, it was learning that their lives mattered and that there was not a single (American) way to live your life.
I was a history major and also have a Masters in history. As an undergraduate, I majored in Medieval English history, as a graduate student,I majored in African History. Then I got a Masters in Social Work! Somehow it all makes sense to me. The article below, reproduced from AEON, addresses empathetic humanities, notably history. In our extremely adversarial age, it points out the tremendous importance of empathy which should help us avoid blackandwhite thinking and judgment making which afflicts our society, and others, like the plague. PLEASE READ IT!
Recently discovered prisoner writings on the wall of Lyon’s notorious Montluc prison from which résistant and historian Marc Bloch was taken and executed by the Nazis on the night of the 16 June 1944. A noted historian, Bloch wrote: ‘The task of the historian is understanding, not judging.’ Photo by Bony/AP/Rex.
As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard’s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called ‘a culture of “calling out”, a culture of outrage’, she asked students to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’. She could have been speaking as a historian.
History, as a discipline, turns away from two of the main ways of reading that have dominated the humanities for the past half-century. These methods have been productive, but perhaps they also bear some responsibility for today’s corrosive lack of generosity. The two approaches have different genealogies, but share a significant feature: at heart, they are adversarial.
One mode of reading, first described in 1965 by the French philosopher Paul Ricœur and known as ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’, aims to uncover the hidden meaning or agenda of a text. Whether inspired by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud, the reader interprets what happens on the surface as a symptom of something deeper and more dubious, from economic inequality to sexual anxiety. The reader’s task is to reject the face value of a work, and to plumb for a submerged truth.
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A second form of interpretation, known as ‘deconstruction’, was developed in 1967 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It aims to identify and reveal a text’s hidden contradictions – ambiguities and even aporias(unthinkable contradictions) that eluded the author. For example, Derrida detected a bias that favoured speech over writing in many influential philosophical texts of the Western tradition, from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The fact that written texts could privilege the immediacy and truth of speech was a paradox that revealed unarticulated metaphysical commitments at the heart of Western philosophy.
Both of these ways of reading pit reader against text. The reader’s goal becomes to uncover meanings or problems that the work does not explicitly express. In both cases, intelligence and moral probity are displayed at the expense of what’s been written. In the 20th century, these approaches empowered critics to detect and denounce the workings of power in all kinds of materials – not just the dreams that Freud interpreted, or the essays by Plato and Rousseau with which Derrida was most closely concerned.
They do, however, foster a prosecutorial attitude among academics and public intellectuals. As a colleague once told me: ‘I am always looking for the Freudian slip.’ He scours the writings of his peers to spot when they trip up and betray their problematic intellectual commitments. One poorly chosen phrase can sully an entire work.
Not surprisingly, these methods have fostered a rather paranoid atmosphere in modern academia. Mutual monitoring of lexical choices leads to anxiety, as an increasing number of words are placed on a ‘no fly’ list. One error is taken as the symptom of problematic thinking; it can spoil not just a whole book, but perhaps even the author’s entire oeuvre. This set of attitudes is not a world apart from the pile-ons that we witness on social media.
Does the lack of charity in public discourse – the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent – stem in part from what we might call the ‘adversarial’ humanities? These practices of interpretation are certainly on display in many classrooms, where students learn to exercise their moral and intellectual prowess by dismantling what they’ve read. For teachers, showing students how to take a text apart bestows authority; for students, learning to read like this can be electrifying.
Yet the study of history is different. History deals with the past – and the past is, as the British novelist L P Hartley wrote in 1953, ‘a foreign country’. By definition, historians deal with difference: with what is unlike the present, and with what rarely meets today’s moral standards.
The virtue of reading like a historian, then, is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.
The French medievalist Marc Bloch wrote that the task of the historian is understanding, not judging. Bloch, who fought in the French Resistance, was caught and turned over to the Gestapo. Poignantly, the manuscript of The Historian’s Craft, where he expressed this humane statement, was left unfinished: Bloch was executed by firing squad in June 1944.
As Bloch knew well, historical empathy involves reaching out across the chasm of time to understand people whose values and motivations are often utterly unlike our own. It means affording these people the gift of intellectual charity – that is, the best possible interpretation of what they said or believed. For example, a belief in magic can be rational on the basis of a period’s knowledge of nature. Yet acknowledging this demands more than just contextual, linguistic or philological skill. It requires empathy.
Aren’t a lot of psychological assumptions built into this model? The call for empathy might seem theoretically naive. Yet we judge people’s intentions all the time in our daily lives; we can’t function socially without making inferences about others’ motivations. Historians merely apply this approach to people who are dead. They invoke intentions not from a desire to attack, nor because they seek reasons to restrain a text’s range of meanings. Their questions about intentions stem, instead, from respect for the people whose actions and thoughts they’re trying to understand.
Reading like a historian, then, involves not just a theory of interpretation, but also a moral stance. It is an attempt to treat others generously, and to extend that generosity even to those who can’t be hic et nunc – here and now.
For many historians (as well as others in what we might call the ‘empathetic’ humanities, such as art history and literary history), empathy is a life practice. Living with the people of the past changes one’s relationship to the present. At our best, we begin to offer empathy not just to those who are distant, but to those who surround us, aiming in our daily life for ‘understanding, not judging’.
To be sure, it’s challenging to impart these lessons to students in their teens or early 20s, to whom the problems of the present seem especially urgent and compelling. The injunction to read more generously is pretty unfashionable. It can even be perceived as conservative: isn’t the past what’s holding us back, and shouldn’t we reject it? Isn’t it more useful to learn how to deconstruct a text, and to be on the lookout for latent, pernicious meanings?
Certainly, reading isn’t a zero-sum game. One can and should cultivate multiple modes of interpretation. Yet the nostrum that the humanities teach ‘critical thinking and reading skills’ obscures the profound differences in how adversarial and empathetic disciplines engage with written works – and how they teach us to respond to other human beings. If the empathetic humanities can make us more compassionate and more charitable – if they can encourage us to ‘always remember context, and never disregard intent’ – they afford something uniquely useful today.
On Saturday, Jim and I watched part of the inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as President of Mexico. Dare I say it was relaxing? I supported AMLO pretty strongly. No one can predict the future, but this is a man who seems determined to do good for the country. And, yes, he is a socialist.
Among his many concerns,of course, is immigration. Immigrants clustering around border cities are hard on Mexico and on the immigrants, more so than on the US which has created a mess for itself as well as a disastrous mess for many immigrants. AMLO and those around him are proposing various approaches. One of them is targeted aid to the three countries sending the most people: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Below is my translation of an article on this subject in today's La Jornada by Alma E, Muñoz, Rosa Elvira Vargas and Nestor Jimenez.
You´ll notice there is no mention of the USA or of Trump.
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Mexico City, 1 December -- The president fo Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, agreed with the governments of El Salvador, Guateala and Honduras to establish the bases of understanding for constructing a Plan of Integral Development which would propel the development and opportunities of the region, contributing to the prevention of the migration phenomenon and attacking its structural causes simultaneously. [During the meal] which López Obrador offered his international guests in the National Palace, the document was signed by the presidents of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales Cabrera and of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado as well as by the Vice President of El Salvador, Óscar Samuel Ortiz Ascencio.
"El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are grateful for the initiative of the president of the United Mexican States at developing new resources and contributing with his own experience to this joint effort," the signed agreement said.
The agreement contemplates working on the creation of a fund, with the basic objective of implementing the Plan of Integral Development which includes program, projects and specific actions to bring about jobs and to combat poverty.
With this agreement, the government of Mexico emphasizes that it is committed to the region of the Northern Triangle to strengthen social development and combat in an integrated manner the causes of the migratory phenomenon.
The presidents told their respective ministries that they would work with the support of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL in the Spanish) to coordinate in the first trimester of 2019 the identification and unification of areas of existing opportunity, in accordance with the Plan of Integral Development and its future implementation with the Objectives of Sustainable Development and the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations and the World Pact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration.
On Saturday, Jim and I watched part of the inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as President of Mexico. Dare I say it was relaxing? I supported AMLO pretty strongly. No one can predict the future, but this is a man who seems determined to do good for the country. And, yes, he is a socialist.
Among his many concerns,of course, is immigration. Immigrants clustering around border cities are hard on Mexico and on the immigrants, more so than on the US which has created a mess for itself as well as a disastrous mess for many immigrants. AMLO and those around him are proposing various approaches. One of them is targeted aid to the three countries sending the most people: Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Below is my translation of an article on this subject in today's La Jornada by Alma E, Muñoz, Rosa Elvira Vargas and Nestor Jimenez.
You´ll notice there is no mention of the USA or of Trump.
************
Mexico City, 1 December -- The president fo Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, agreed with the governments of El Salvador, Guateala and Honduras to establish the bases of understanding for constructing a Plan of Integral Development which would propel the development and opportunities of the region, contributing to the prevention of the migration phenomenon and attacking its structural causes simultaneously. [During the meal] which López Obrador offered his international guests in the National Palace, the document was signed by the presidents of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales Cabrera and of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado as well as by the Vice President of El Salvador, Óscar Samuel Ortiz Ascencio.
"El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras are grateful for the initiative of the president of the United Mexican States at developing new resources and contributing with his own experience to this joint effort," the signed agreement said.
The agreement contemplates working on the creation of a fund, with the basic objective of implementing the Plan of Integral Development which includes program, projects and specific actions to bring about jobs and to combat poverty.
With this agreement, the government of Mexico emphasizes that it is committed to the region of the Northern Triangle to strengthen social development and combat in an integrated manner the causes of the migratory phenomenon.
The presidents told their respective ministries that they would work with the support of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL in the Spanish) to coordinate in the first trimester of 2019 the identification and unification of areas of existing opportunity, in accordance with the Plan of Integral Development and its future implementation with the Objectives of Sustainable Development and the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations and the World Pact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration.
Consulta Mitovsky does many surveys of life and attitudes in Mexico. Below I´ve translated the recent survey of attudes towards gays and lesbians. Here is the link to the PDF file of the survey. . As usual, I would like to remind you that there are various places in the country more liberal than others, but that there haven´t been any of the angry demonstrations nor angry rhetoric that you find in the US, especially now, where in the US gay marriage has once again turned into a campaign issue accompanied by the usual vitriol. I´ve translated "homosexual" as "gay or lesbian" because they are the more common terms in the US.
Do you have any gay or lesbian family members (man or woman)?
Yes: 26.8%
No: 70.4%
Don´t know/No opinion 2.8%
2. Are gays and lesbians born being gays and lesbians?
Strongly agree: 55%
Agree a little or not at all: 32.2%
Don´t know/no opinion
3. A gay/lesbian couple ought to have the same rights as a heterosexual copy.
Strongly/somewhat in agreement: 51.1%
A little/not at all in agreement: 39.7%
Don't know/no opinion 9.2%
Strongly or somewhat agree by age group:
18 to 29 years old: 62.0%
30 to 45 years old: 47.7%
46 and more years old: 46.1%
4. A lesbian couple should be permitted to adopt.
Strongly/somehwat in agreement: 47.6%
A little/not at all in agreement: 43.3%
Don't know/no opinion: 9.1%
5. A gay couple should be permitted to adopt,
Strongly or somewhat agree; 41.8
A little/not at all in agreement: 48.1
Don't know/no opinion: 10.1%
6. A gay couple should be permitted to get married.
Strongly or somewhat agree: 47.6%
A little or not at all in agreement: 43.3%
Don´t know/know opinion: 9.1%
Attitude by sex: Men
Very/somewhat in agreement: 42.3%
Little/not at all in agreement: 47.7%
Don´t know/no opinion: 10.0%
Attitude by sex: women
Very/somewhat in agreement: 52.3%
Little/not at all in agreement: 39.6%
Don't know/no opinion: 8.1%
Attitude by age
Very/somewhat in agreement:
18 to 29 years: 50.8%
30 to 45 years: 47.3%
46 years and over: 45.5%
7. Would you be willing to meet the partner of a gay or lesbian son or daughter?
Very/somewhat: 40.3%
Prefer not to meet the partner: 26.7%
Do not want to meet the partner: 16.7%
Here is a link to an article in Patheos discussing opposition to Girl Scout Cookies by the St. Louis Archdiocese and Franklin Graham because of the Girl Scout positions on gays.
In at least two important areas Mexico has seemingly managed to put the kibosh on China's efforts here. The first was the cancellation of its winning bid to build high spped rail here.The second was shutting down the Dragon Mart development near Cancún because of serious environmental damage.
But China has many tentacles. Now China is overwhelming Mexico's artesanal production. With Chinese junk, of course. Today's La Jornada quotes Socorro Oropeza the director of the Unión Nacional de Productores Artesanales Coyolxauhqui which claims 15000 members as saying "We [artesans] are being extinguished" by the cheap Chinese imports. Although Mexican artesans have won international prizes, most live on the edge of poverty, without land. Rodrigo Gutiérrex from the indigenous community of El Rosario in Jalisco said that artesans had stopped making ceramics because of Chinese "junk". Instead, almost all the artesans in his area collect plastic bottles for which they get 12 pesos a kilo. (That would be empty plastic bottles.)
As far as I know, there is no official national government support for Mexican craftsmen. Here in our area, there is a government store, but I don't know about anything else. I do know we still buy lovely pots and casseroles and dishes from Puebla and our area. But tourists are the big market. Tell any you see to BUY MEXICAN.
Mexico has had a rough autumn, to put it mildly. We are accustomed here in Xico to a continuous but for the most part fairly quiet drum beat of anxiety- and sadness-producing news, but so far we live our lives more or less peacefully in the midst of our beautiful, verdant neighborhood. But this fall, the disappearance of the 43 normalistas or students training to be teachers has touched everyone. The most detailed story I’ve seen in English of the disappearance and following events is here: https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/mexico-the-disappeared-en . It is also available in Spanish. Just change the final en to sp.
A well-known contemporary Mexican author, Guadalupe Loaeza wrote a very moving piece in La Reforma about a surprising and dramatic demonstration of support at the National Theater for the fallen students. She started it in a way which will stir memories at least among some New York (and Boston) women:
As I do every year, last Sunday I took my grandchildren to see “The Nutcracker” at the National Theater. Once seated, I gave myself a task: to watch all the people filled with holiday cheer as they entered the theater to admire the last performance of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet, the music of which is so familiar to us that even the most ignorant can recall a fragment. Most of the attendees were children and adolescents, bundled up and accompanied by their families. The atmosphere inside the enormous auditorium, with space for 10,000 people, was festive and Christmassy.
She continued,
For my part, I was a deeply gratified grandmother surrounded by my six grandchildren, two of my sons, my daughter-in-law and Paloma Figueroa, the young professional dancer. With that same festive mindset, I watched young grandmothers wearing 100 percent wool coats with furs and carrying Coach or Marc Jacob purses. Many greeted and waved to each other from afar. The show was only minutes away from beginning.
Suddenly, the lights went down and at the stage’s illuminated center appeared a group of young people holding two banners, one with the hashtag #Yamecansé [Enough, I'm tired]** written on it and on the other could be read the words, “Stop impunity.” Daniel Castillo, in evening wear, spoke on behalf of his fellow members of the National Dance Company:
"Mexico is mourning the unsustainable and heartbreaking impunity that has become a daily story and that violates our citizenry."
With perfect diction, his words echoed all across the auditorium.
The tragedy has threaded its way through all classes here, all regions.
The National Theater where Señora Loaeza and her grandkids saw The Nutcracker shows the extravagant side of Mexico. Housed in the Palacio de las Bellas Artes, it is home to the Mexican national theater company and I think the Ballet Folklorico. It hosts all kinds of performances and performance groups.
Auditorium of the National Theater
The stage is hidden by the luminous curtain, the work of the Tiffany Glass Studios of Long Island, New York. Louis C. Tiffany oversaw its creation from the beginning and supervised twenty mosaic workers for fifteen months. The workers came to Mexico to steep themselves in the setting.The curtain is a mosaic weighing 27 tons with a surface of 2500 square feet. It apparently takes 7 seconds to open. I don't believe there is anything like it elsewhere in the world. I tried to insert an old black and white picture of the curtain in which you can see very clearly the scene of Popocateptl and Ixtaccihuatl, but I couldn't transfer it into a form acceptable to Typepad. These two volcanoes are, according to legend, the final resting place of two star-crossed lovers. You can read about the legend, the mosaic, and the Palacio de las Bellas Artes in a charming booklet written by someone in the Tiffany Studio about the time of the making of the curtain here.
The Palacio itself is a wedding cake of a building, art nouveau on the outside and art deco on the inside. Among the works of art you can find murals by Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and others as well as an array of sculptures by European as well as Mexican sculptors. Indigenous imagery mixes with European.
Construction started just after the birth of the twentieth century by command of Porfirio Diaz who wanted opulent buildings for the 100th anniversary of Mexican independence. He laid the first stone in 1904. The Palacio was supposed to be ready by 1910 in time for the celebration of Mexico's independence, but not just geological problems with the subsurface, its history did as well. 1910 marked the start of the Mexican Revolution. The building was not completed until 1934 when the Mexican architect Federico Mariscal took over supervising its construction.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has extensive online resources. I was amazed and really excited to find out about them. Just start with the link to the Tiffany Studio booklet and go grom there..
Well, I took a detour. Not really. It circles back to Guadalupe Loaeza and her grandchildren and the tribute to the 43 normalistas and beyond.
And as if in sympathy with the sorrows of the country, Popocatepetl has roused himself from sleep.
First off, I want to tell you that Kenan Malik is a great thinker and writer. AND he writes so easily, so fluidly, that he carries you along through tough subjects. Here I am posting a link to a post on his blog, which is called Pandaemonium, on politics and immigration in Europe, especially England. I didn't think much about the similarities between European and US attitudes until recently. They are not so different. Malik kind of comes out of left field with his ideas (or from outside the box?) Basically he feels that outsider parties gain strength because insider parties no longer speak to The People, left or right or neither, and that all parties make it hard not to be anti-immigrant. Please do take the time to read this compendium of several of his articles.
Images stolen from Google.
My grandparents (my father's parents) were immigrants in the early twentieth century. My mother's parents' families came from mostly England and Ireland (I think) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just for your information. Therefore I am a mongrel, and it's interesting to be a mongrel.
PLEASE read the Malik article!
August 18, 2014
This is not about Diego and Henry (yet) nor more about Freud and Netanyahu (yet), but it is about the continuing sin of racism in the US by Juan Cole, one of my favorite bloggers. It has some dramatic numbers about black arrests, etc. Inequality lives on.
For a long time I have wondered (as have far greater minds than mine) if it is at all possible to figure out the underlying factors that drive people to hold onto seriously destructive beliefs in the face of all reason. In our black-and-white culture, we tend to paint people who don't agree with us all one color. It's hard to be subtle. As I have watched the ripping apart of Gaza, I have seen no evidence of the policy to spare civilians Benjamin Netanyahu claims exists. Instead, it appears that the Israel Defense Forces he commands are bent on absolute destruction. I wonder how Netanyahu who I am sure sees himself doing good could appear to have twisted himself into someone so evil. Who is this man who stirs the pot of hatred in his country so successfully? And why does he do it? Why does he feel righteous (not to say self-righteous) following his policy of enormous overkill in Gaza? Is it possible to figure out how we justify horrible actions to ourselves, all of us? And why, with all our knowledge, haven't we come to terms with our own proclivity for violence in response to perceived attacks, for hatred of people we don't know. Why haven't we developed a way to soften this hatred.
I happened upon a review by Vivian Gornick of a book called "Becoming Freud" by Adam Phillips. I bought the book for my Kindle, and I will refer to it throughout this piece. I am not a "Freudian", whatever that means, but I think he opened up ways to look at people from unexpected angles. Freud's discoveries give us an opportunity to take a different approach to Netanyahu.
In her review, Gornick says:
"It was through attention to the unconscious that he [Freud] made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions — our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations — yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want — nay, intend — never to relinquish it."
Somewhere I saw an illlustration of the human psyche in which our consciousness, our supposedly sensible, aware part, was riding a giant bull or some similar animal, barely under control. The bull was our unconscious, unruly portion of ourselves, much bigger and stronger.
There is no definitive explanation of the conscious and the unconscious, nothing even close as far as I'm concerned. But we tend to recognize that we have been exposed to so much, have woven so much out of what we´ve been exposed to, that we can't possibly be conscious of it all, pull it into our decision-making or our creative efforts, even when it would be useful to do so. And if Freud is right, we don't even want to know all the unconscious stuff we harbor: it would go against who we think we are and what we want to be. We tend, all of us, to justify our own hideous actions to ourselves and others. Very few of us happily accept ourselves as evil creatures who enjoy doing evil things.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Nathan Mileikowsky (1879-1935), Benjamin Netanyahu's grandfather, shared pretty large pieces of cultural heritage (so did my dad's parents for that matter). But they responed to their heritage in very different ways. Netanyahu's father and grandfather became revisionist Zionists who were deeply committed to getting as much of the British Mandate of Palestine as they possibly could to turn into the country Israel. Their efforts were bloody. Freud's background was not so political.
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Adam Phillips says,"The Jews of central and eastern Europe in the 19th century lived mostly in small communities as minority groups in what were often tolerant but hostile cultures.They were hemmed in by restrictions and prejudices, but were not perceived as a threat to the states in which they lived....They had access only to the resources of their tightly knit communities, and they lived, like all immigrants with, and under, a great deal of suspicion. The continuity of their lives resided in their family traditions, which were religious in origin, their inherited ways of life in a diaspora that had become their culture....The consolations of locality were always provisional....
"....The stories of the poorer Jews in central Europe in the ineteenth century tend to be generic...due to the lack and limits of ...documentation. (Freud's parents and grandparents would mpt jave beem omterested om tjeor ñoves tje wau [Sigmund Freud] taught us to be. For these people, success was survival....[T]here fate was to be always potentially nomadic because they had no political or civic status, living always on sufferance in foreign states.
Orthodox judaism itself was declining in the nineteenth century "...due to the pressures of modernization. The haskalah--the Jewish Enlightenment...--was eroding the old scholarly-rabbinical tradition in favour of a more rational, skeptical humanism, radically suspicious of dogma and traditional forms of authority and encouraging more politically active forms of assimilation."
This was a period in which "European boundaries were shifting in Europe and the status of Jews was unclear. Whether or not they were a race or a people...they were resident aliens wherever they lived...As both the enemies and inventors of Christianity the Jews were doubly disadvantaged...they were by definition a dissenting group....
Although Freud ended up with an education in Enlightenment values, there had been "Generations of politically marginalized Jews in his family, people for whom political participation was unthinkable."
Freud and other Jews of his generation believed they had found a culture in which they had "a place and a voice" in Vienna.
Phillips goes on, " The allure of a taken for granted liberalism, however wishful it seems ...[in]hindsight...must have seemed irresistible to the Viennese Jews of Freud's generation...[which] wanted to free themselves from...a 'history of the Jewish people...long limited to a religious narrative of persecutions and martyrdoms. Esther Benbassa writes this 'story of suffering stood in for History in the proper sense of the term' as a way of preserving the fragile unity of the community in diaspora.'
This "story of suffering" still is dominant in the lives of Jews, secular or religious, who participate in Jewish culture. For some (many?) it merges with the notion of Jewish specialness, of Jews as "chosen people." Before the end of World War II, these beliefs offered, sometimes, means to survive and to maintain some integrity in their identities. Of course the genocide they suffered under Hitler gave it new life. Today, I think, especially in light of the great social and economic changes wrought in the second half of the twentieth century,Jewish communities themselves have changed. For some Jews, the mythology of their past has become malignant.
Netanyahu, the Zionist, is one of these Jews I think. Freud was not. Freud's father had renounced orthodox Judaism. He was apparently a failing wool merchant and because of this, the family moved first to Leipzig and then to Vienna, at the time a particularly vibrant and liberal city. The family stayed there. Many, many Jews who couldn't sustain themselves in "local shtetl communities" were migrating to eastern and central European cities.
Jews wanted their kids to gain respectability by hopefully taking up a profession, "preferably medicine or the law." Freud was consciously drawn to Enlightenment values, and himself said his father "allowed me to grow up in complete ignorance of eveything that concerned Judaism". Yet Freud's endeavors seem shadowed by his family's Jewish immigrant past.
Mexico Bob For all of you with curiosity about Mexico this is a great blog by a guy married to a Mexican in Irapuato. Really, this kind of stuff is what people up north should be reading.
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