Local vs. Global

It's an odd feeling to have after reading 2 and 3/4 long, painstaking novels that there is no global purpose---no plot, no moral. That the sum of the parts is no more than the parts, or that morals and plots are so numerous that no overarching structure emerges. (Though clearly...I've not yet regained time, so my opinion may be worthless.)

A la recherche du temps perdu seems to be an entirely local story. Its observations and anecdotes obtain their full force without much reference to other sections, books. The work can be read in minute snatches (say just before falling asleep). Maybe my thoughts on this will change as I read further.

Certainly Proust seems less concerned with this...meta-coherence than many modern authors are. For example, W. G. Sebald (who is as close to Proust's intellectual heir as I've read) in The Rings of Saturn drops so many hints in the first 10 pages about silk (sericulture's the 'topic' of the book's last section) that on readings other than the first his writing can seem almost heavy-handed. His whole book is bound up (sorry about the pun(s)) in this manner.

This is grasping: Perhaps part of the point of the books is the local nature of life, the importance of experiencing and realizing the depth of every moment, sensation, memory as it occurs? The importance of deep analysis of the seemingly insignificant? Maybe. It seems more that he was just a rushed artist.

By which I do not mean that that is not one of the primary thrusts of the book. Just that Proust might have striven for those kinds of threads from section to section, book to book---a work's self-referential instances of involuntary memory---if he had had the time to finish the final parts of the book and revise the whole. Though I'd be the first to allow that it may be that I just haven't perceived them, either because I've not finished the books, or I'm not an attentive enough reader.

Proust communicates this meaning through his exhaustive analysis of the tiny (his life is about making mountains out of molehills)---not by the fact that he doesn't link up these analyses.

GW: pp. 475-486

The Duc's mistresses; Mme de Guermantes's relation to them. Late arrival of M. de Grouchy. The Duchesse's unkindness to her footman Poullein. Her sarcasm about her cousin Mme d'Heudicourt, about the dramatist Bornier.

I'm struck by what nasty people the Duc and Duchesse are...not that I don't sympathize with the Duchesse, despite my comment last time that I was tired of her posturing (which gives no sign of ceasing).

I guess I never noticed how much all the infidelity Proust writes about must hurt those people who get cheated on...

He comes right out and says: "Despite these outward appearances...the Duchesse did not have an easy life." And that she "has no illusions left to shatter." I think the reason it's been such a blind spot for me is that Oriane is depicted as being so worldly---having no illusions: She's never fazed, even when she must take up the Duc's spent mistresses as friends...acquaintances. And since Proust is an outside observer, not her therapist, he can never know definitively her emotional pain. Perhaps this is where some of her nastiness begins. It explains at least in part why she and her husband are so cruel and disrespectful to the people they know. I find their rudeness and name-calling (at a dinner party, no less!) unimaginable. If my parents (who else throws dinner parties I attend....?) spoke of their 'friends'---though I think the Guermantes couple are islands, utterly alone, and have no real friends---in such a manner, I would spend as little time as possible with them...

And so much of this bad situation comes from two sources: The Duc's not controlling his appetites (whether he can't or won't doesn't affect the outcome), and his and his wife's vanity. He manipulates her into being witty at social functions---witty here meaning cruel. He twists the knife---and she is the knife.

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The way the aristocracy treat each other and their 'inferiors'---servants and artists and those less bright, here---is just so depressing. (Well, maybe not depressing---cautionary.) I just hate seeing smart people make bad decisions. They're all so smart and so unaware. They treat advantage---intellectual, monetary, et c.---as a zero sum game. They're so distressed they cannot attend to any needs but their own (as in the episode with Poullein).

I had a boyfriend who was simply at the mercy of his illness(es). Depression, anxiety, lack of self-control, a large libido, and certain kind of sexual disfunction are a mix that really prevent a person from being good to others. (In my own defense, he was so deceptive it took a very long time to discover these qualities.)

The Guermantes and those who orbit them are complicated people. We can't know them as thoroughly as to know their deepest psychological problems (though maybe Proust will prove me wrong), so we can't abandon all compassion when judging them---and to learn from someone requires judgment: We must judge what to accept, what to reject, and what to suspend judgment on. By judging with compassion I mean we should avoid the harshest judgments because we can never be sure our information is complete.

I think I don't hate the Guermantes. I think I don't hate my ex.

GW: pp. 469-472 (Arbitrariness in politics)

Let's look at the political use of arbitrariness in two polarizing topics (in the US), one hard, one soft.

Global warming:

There is virtually no disagreement in the scientific community (the only community with the expertise to observe and prognosticate about this kind of thing): The average temperature has gone up about 8C since 1900. Anthropogenic CO2 has increased dramatically. There is precedent in the climatic record for high atmospheric CO2 content and higher temperatures, as well as a model for the effect. Therefore most scientists believe global temperatures will continue to rise unless CO2 is mitigated. The effects of warming (if it continues in the future) will not be (as they have not historically been) trivial---almost no one tries to rebut that.

Yet there is a great deal of "debate" in the US on the matter. A March 2010 Gallup poll (see link below) shows that between 2008 and 2010, the percentage of people who think the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated has risen from 35% to 48%. The percentage who believe they'll see the effects of warming in their lifetime has fallen from 65% to 53%, and the percentage who believe they'll never see the effects has risen from 24% to 35%. The poll is a bit simplistic, of course: It allows those polled to interpret "effects" as they choose; it makes no distinction between anthropogenic warming and warming due to some other trend.

Granted---some of the debate in this country is on how to respond to a complicated issue, which really does require a fair amount of thoughtful debate. But the poll points up that, though scientific attitudes have not changed (see for instance Wikipedia's "Scientific opinion on climate change" or the BBC's recent self-censure for false balance on this topic), public attitudes have shifted much. This has not happened in the absence of demagoguery.

The reasons, I think, that people believe their doctors when they're told to eat less saturated fat and get some exercise but don't believe their climatologists when they're told to drive less are roughly twofold: 1.) Urgency and 2.) The tendency to allow emotions to rule what we believe.

I'm not so cynical as to suggest that the (more frequently) conservative position---the denial of global warming, or at least its seriousness---is merely a reaction to the progressive position, to more starkly define their allies and enemies. (Progressives do tend to pay more attention to scientists (cf. evolution as standard curriculum).) But I do think that people are willing to believe almost anything when it fits into their existing belief system tidily. And denying global warming is easier to do when you abhor taxes and believe businesses should self-regulate.

Gallup poll: http://www.gallup.com/poll/126560/americans-global-warming-concerns-continue-drop.aspx

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Abortion:

Here my own beliefs are far less formed, so perhaps this topic will be more...palatable to my readers on the other side of the aisle.

When it comes to the termination of human fetuses, scientific opinion is not (yet?) relevant. Religious ethics cannot (so baldly) be the basis of federal law. Secular ethics can reach no agreement on the matter. Most conservatives believe abortion is bad, bad enough to believe in banning it outright. Most progressives believe abortion is bad, but not bad enough to supersede the rights of the mother.

The crux of the issue: When does life (in the human, not the paramecium sense) begin? That I can't answer and won't try.

I do want to point out that, in a certain sense, the positions of the two mainstream parties seem transposed, given what one might expect from their first principles. Republicans often speak of self-reliance, of non-interference; yet in this sphere, they're willing to intercede on the behalf of a helpless...organism. Republicans don't hold life so sacred that they're unwilling to execute criminals. I assume that it is (often religiously-derived) sympathy for the innocent that causes them to reject abortion. (I think the reason this sympathy stops short of condoning many social programs is an unfair judgment that all people are responsible for their own lives: Addicts lack will. The unemployed are lazy. Et c.)

Democrats, on the other hand, are quite willing to intercede on the behalf of the needy (which I think derives from some odd notion of fairness and ecumenicalism), almost uniformly oppose state execution (and by extension, the ending of all life?); yet they're willing to allow what some certainly call murder. Interpreted in the most flattering light, this allowance is perhaps an abstention from judgment; in the most unflattering light, it's a willingness to kill what's inconvenient.

I really do have a great deal of sympathy for both sides of the abortion debate (even though I don't have equal sympathy for their reasoning). And I think that if you are careful not to be a slave to feeling, both sides can be defensible. However, it is quite easy for a religious politician to rile his---or given recent developments, shall I say her?---constituents---it's hard talk about "killing babies" without a flood of emotion. So this issue is very easy to manipulate: The religiously inclined are whipped one way, their opponents on other topics are whipped another with some weaker emotional sauce about civil liberties and a fair bit of simple polarization.

Most of us, as participants in a representative democracy, as a result of the savvy political representation of arbitrary positions and the rough duality of beliefs that has both led to and arisen from our two-party system, are little more than leaves in a rushing river.

The Guermantes Way: pp. 469-475

The Guermantes and politics: social conduct and political conduct. "Oriane's latest".

Proust looks at arbitrariness in the behavior of M. and Mme de Guermantes. Mme de Guermantes's arbitrary social behavior I'll look at below. I think the most important conclusion from the passage on Guermantes's and others' political behavior is that political savvy (which ought not be confused with great leadership) derives in large part from the ability to control the perception of arbitrary behavior---to make the unmotivated seem both natural and essential. Many...most?...political positions are frankly pretty arbitrary: They arise from feelings, grow from religious roots, or are spread by persuasive politicians who arrive at their own conclusions, perhaps with as little reason we all often do, perhaps at the counsel of scientists (who are better informed than almost all of us, but who are still speculating, often). My criticism is more of social attitudes and soft sciences (like economics...) that end up in law.

In the next post I'll look at arbitrary beliefs and their political manipulation in two cases.

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I've never before noticed how much more effective and impressive it is to appear principled than it is to state and codify principles that can then be sniped. How often do politicians hawk their "strong family values"---whatever that means. Who'd admit they don't much care for values? As soon as a politician is challenged to lay out his beliefs, he merely gives a litany of positions on sensitive issues. Not one begins with first principles and follows them to their logical ends. It's all feeling. It's all how they were raised.

Sorry this is such a political gripe this time.

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On a slightly more meta note: I'm tiring of Oriane. I think she's just an attention seeker, fundamentally. (Though in the next paragraph I'll entertain another possibility.) She is as contrary as she can get away with---to pique the interest of those (probably) more genuine and (certainly) less intelligent folk who orbit her. I say they're (probably) more genuine just because their level of consciousness is so low they really do believe in the necessity of what they do. But I'm sick of Oriane, sick of people like her I encounter in life, and sick of Proust's exhausting analysis of her and her shallow world. At least for now.

But the more I think about her the more I find myself fascinated by her complexity, just as Proust was. With the last episode in this section---in which she insists on sitting in a cheap seat near the orchestra from the beginning of the show---my judgment of her shifts, or is at least doubtful: Is she sitting with the proles to show how little she regards rank? Is she sitting there just to be scandalous and position herself at the center of gossip? Or is she more like me: oblivious and does as she pleases? Or perhaps not oblivious: Does she simply recognize the arbitrariness of convention and ignore what doesn't please her? There's an important difference between being scandalous because you want to be scandalous and happening to be scandalous because you're not a leaf in a river.

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Proust's comment that it is the combination of a psychological quirk and a lack of sensitivity that makes us always feel the need to say something smarts a bit. I smart as a blogger. And I'm reminded of something a very smart asshole once said in a different but related vein: That "[y]ou should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of [the exact value of unsolicited opinions] to your listener." But...I'm able to convince myself that blogging is not exactly sharing unsolicited opinions. I hold my tongue all the time; my blog is where I can disburden myself appropriately. Analogies to other forms are inaccurate (since a blog's a blog, and is nothing else), but writing in a blog more resembles writing in a diary, but for an exhibitionist (or for (in this case) an intellectually lonely person), than it resembles a didact cornering his victims.

And besides, Dear Reader (if you exist), you are free surf over to FoxNews or Facebook at any time.

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Another meta note: Proust is such a ruthless observer. Even though he sees with a great deal of compassion, I'm a bit terrified there may be people in my life who can see as totally as he might have through my complications, bullshit, dissimulations to whatever is most fundamental about my motivation. I'm not sure whatever's in there is flattering. Reading Proust helps me try to be honest with myself.