Forever Young

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Psychotherapist Carl Jung called him the puer aeternus.

The eternal youth.

The adolescent who never grows up.

Peter Pan.

Bro.

Jung warned against the puer aeternus.

Living the couch surfer's life, and without an inner senex (old man) to tell him to check his childish impulses, the puer aeternus soon becomes the slacker, the hooligan, the terrorist, and, eventually, the fascist destroyer of societies.

Jung had two pieces of advice for these neurotics: get a job and deal with your mommy issues.

Meantime—as the neurosis reaches epidemic proportions—what will we grownups do?

Pardon My French

When I see certain social science theories imported from the US, I say we must re-invest in the field of social science.

— Emmanuel Macron

Merde alors!

Something stinks. 

The French, believe it or not, are complaining about the "American" export they call wokisme.

 

President Macron complained last year that wokisme is undermining the whole nation. 

And now French grammarians are complaining that wokisme is corrupting the French language.

Putain!

The French rather conveniently forget that wokisme originated in—of all places—France!

French philosopher Michel Foucault concocted it. 

In the late 1970s, Foucault's radical beliefs vent viral, spreading in less than a decade from the cafes of Paris to the classrooms of America—doubtless making Foucault the single-most influential French export since Coco Chanel.

A disciple of the German Nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche and the French Marxist Louis Althusser, Foucault saw the world in the starkest of terms: as a endless warfare between the powerful and the powerless; between oppressors and the oppressed. 

Foucault interpreted culture—in the broadest sense of the word—to be the club the powerful wield to assure their power. 

And culture surrounds us. Turn over any rock, you'll find the same thing: the people in power subjugating everyone else.

Foucault's idea informs almost every aspect of the "American" woke movement.

And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Or, as we used to say in grammar school, he who smelt it, dealt it.

Combating Stupidity

I don’t like shaking hands with these disgusting people.

— Donald Trump

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by the Nazis for his participation in Operation Valkyrie, understood stupidity and the danger it poses to freedom.

In his essay "On Stupidity" (unpublished in his lifetime), Bonhoeffer offered his conclusions after a decade of witnessing the sorts of Germans who rallied behind der Führer.

They were all adamant.

Stupidity is dangerous because it is adamant, he said; unassailably so.

"Against stupidity we are defenseless: neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything," Bonhoeffer said. 

"Reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed; and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as incidental. 

"In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous."

Stupidity isn't related to brains, education or economic class, according to Bonhoeffer. Stupidity is a voluntary defect. People "allow this to happen to them," he wrote.

And stupidity isn't a solitary pursuit. It flourishes within parties. Stupidity is a disease of the psyche wrought by historical forces that propel people, willingly, to surrender their autonomy to a leader and his wims. 

"Every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere infects a large part of humankind with stupidity," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell."

Therein lies the danger in stupidity. 

"Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil," Bonhoeffer wrote. 

"This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings."

Diabolical leaders manipulate the mindless for their own ends, "expecting more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom."

Wise and responsible people can only respond to such manipulation through political acts, Bonhoeffer believed; god-fearing "acts of liberation" designed to unchain the stupid by undermining their leaders. 

We should forget trying to convince a stupid person he's being stupid: combating stupidity head on is "senseless." 

"Internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it," Bonhoeffer wrote.

That's why he joined the plot to remove Adolph Hitler—and why he was hanged.

Quite a Week for Wokeism

Virginians decided this month that wokeism is so offensive they want a governor who will eradicate it from schools.

Of course, these are citizens of the same state that hanged the rebel Nat Turner, then cut off his head, disemboweled him, flayed him, and sold souvenir purses made of his skin.

They don't cotton to upstarts.

Wokeism is certainly all about being an upstart.

Upstart is a 16th-century word denoting "one newly risen from a humble position to one of power, importance, or rank; a parvenu." It was borrowed from the Old Norse upp—meaning "to a higher place"—and the German stürzen—meaning "to hurl."

Wokeism is about being hurled to a higher place.

This has been quite a week for wokeism.

On Tuesday, during a guided tour of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, I was informed by the docent that the home was "built on the backs of five slaves," an absurd claim given the owner was an extraordinarily enterprising merchant seaman. It was the seaman's wealth that built the lavish house—and that allowed him to own five slaves. The slaves were the seaman's house servants. He didn't involve slaves in his business.

On Wednesday, The Women’s March formally apologized for a fundraising email it sent donors. "We apologize deeply for the email that was sent today," the organizers said. "$14.92 was our average donation amount this week. It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving." The apology comes so close to mockery, it defies explanation.

And today, the Tate Britain had to defend itself against critics who accused it of "cancelling Hogarth" and promoting "wokeish drivel." The museum's new exhibition, Hogarth and Europe, features wall labels which insist that Hogarth's art was only made possible by the slave trade. Hogarth in fact earned most of his keep selling political cartoons. He disdained slavery.

I'm all for hurling POC to higher places; but wokeism sometimes sounds just silly.

It's silly to attribute everything to slave labor, just as it would be silly to attribute everything to the discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the domestication of horses, or the heroism of St. Paddy.

Shit's more complex than that.

Consider, for example, the steps our Founding Fathers took to end the slave trade:

• Northern states abolished slavery in the 18th century. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777; Pennsylvania, in 1780; New Hampshire and Massachusetts, in 1783; Connecticut and Rhode Island, in 1784. By 1860, free states outnumbered slave states.

• Washington enacted the world's first national anti-slavery law. The Slave Trade Act of 1794 prohibited the outfitting of ships for slave transit in any US port.

• Adams strengthened the law. By signing the Slave Trade Act of 1800, Adams prohibited the transit of slaves by US flagships and US citizens aboard foreign flag ships.

• Jefferson stopped the importation of slaves. By signing the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1808, Jefferson ended the trade altogether.

• Monroe criminalized the slave trade. By declaring the trans-Atlantic slave trade an act of piracy, Monroe sought to punish illegal slave-trafficking.

• Tyler pledged to use the Navy to stop slave traders. By signing the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842, Tyler agreed to use US Navy ships to interdict slave traffickers.

These are only a few of the "inconvenient truths" wokeism can't abide.

There are a whole lot more.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to historian Glen Williams for citing, via email, the Founding Fathers' anti-slavery legislation.

Mary Had a Little Turkey

If I may talk turkey, let's give credit where credit is due. 

The author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was also the author of Thanksgiving.

Sarah Hale was an early feminist and the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the most widely circulated magazine in America before the Civil War.

The war, when it came, incensed Hale, who took it upon herself to write President Lincoln a letter in September 1862 stating that only he had the power to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday and “permanently an American custom and institution.”

Heeding Mrs. Hale, five days later Lincoln ordered that, henceforth, the fourth Thursday of November would be marked by the national observation of Thanksgiving.

Turkey Day had long obsessed Hale, who grew up observing it in New Hampshire. 

For more than a decade, she had written yearly editorials in Godey's about the holiday, imploring government officials to fix it forever on the country's calendar.

She believed the national holiday would smooth the bitter rift between the North and South.

It took a bloody war to make Hale's dream come true.

Thanksgiving has fallen ever since on the fourth Thursday of November, except in the years 1939 and '40, when, as a means of combating the Depression, FDR moved it up a week, to extend the Christmas-shopping period.

He caved to criticism two years later, and moved the holiday back to the fourth Thursday of November.

POSTSCRIPT: Did you know "Mary Had a Little Lamb" was based on actual events? As a young woman, Sarah Hale taught elementary school near her home in New Hampshire. A student named Mary brought her pet lamb to school one day, inspiring Hale to write and publish the poem. Forty-six years later, a Mary Elizabeth Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, emerged to claim she was the Mary of the poem, and that a local boy had written it. Sawyer was quickly proven a fraud, but not until Sterling had erected a statue of a lamb in the town center.