Ian on Sunday
Experience comes to us not just through our lives but as much, perhaps more as we grow old, through reading. The greatest books are those which introduce us most intimately and vividly to events, places, people, emotions, thoughts and immortal revelations which we would not otherwise have encountered. You can be in your Berbice chair at home and travel far in all the realms of this wondrous world and meet its people in all their tumultuous variety and learn about the marvellous and terrible events which light up and scar our days. The well-read brain teems with luminous memories that come from books.
Age has slowed me down but no day goes by without reading bringing me the fascinating and penetrating insights of other minds.
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If the writings of Karl Marx were now appearing for the first time, unsullied by the perversions of his thinking which tyrants like Stalin inflicted on the world, they would certainly be attracting great interest.
Tony Judt, a distinguished European historian, has described why the insights which Marx brilliantly expressed more than a century and a half ago have a new relevance.
“If generations of intelligent men and women of good faith were willing to throw in their lot with the communist project, it was not just because they were lulled into an ideological stupor by a seductive tale of revolution and redemption. It was because they were irresistibly drawn to the underlying ethical message: to the power of an idea and a movement uncompromisingly attached to representing and defending the interests of the wretched of the earth. From first to last, Marxism’s strongest suit was what one of Marx’s biographers calls “the moral seriousness of Marx’s conviction that the destiny of our world as a whole is tied up with the condition of its poorest and most disadvantaged members…
“If Marxism fell from favor in the last third of the twentieth century it was in large measure because the worst shortcomings of capitalism appeared at last to have been overcome. The liberal tradition – thanks to its unexpected success in adapting to the challenge of depression and war and bestowing upon Western democracies the stabilizing institutions of the New Deal and the welfare state – had palpably triumphed over its antidemocratic critics of left and right alike. A political doctrine that had been perfectly positioned to explain and exploit the crises and injustices of another age now appeared beside the point.
“Today, however, things are changing once again. What Marx’s nineteenth-century contemporaries called the ‘Social Question’ – how to address and overcome huge disparities of wealth and poverty, and shameful inequalities of health, education, and opportunity – may have been answered in the West (though the gulf between poor and rich, which seemed once to be steadily closing, has for some years been opening again, in Britain and above all in the US). But the Social Question is back on the international agenda with a vengeance. What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of a handful of corporations and holders of capital…
“In short, the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation – at home but especially broad. And thus, as we lose sight of communism (already in Eastern Europe you have to be thirty-five years old to have any adult memory of a Communist regime), the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.”
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In a good biography of the great physicist Isaac Newton by James Gleick I came across a passage which is appropriate to explanations given by current cricket commentators in match after match about the swing and swerve imparted to a cricket ball. When at Cambridge University Newton occupied a room upstairs between the Great Gate at Trinity College and the Chapel. To the west stood a four-walled court used for the game of royal tennis. Sometimes Newton watched fellows play and he noticed that the ball would curve about and not just downward. He understood instinctively why this should be so: the ball was struck obliquely and acquired spin. In a letter to his mathematician friend Oldenburg of October 6, 1672, Newton wrote: “Its parts on that side, where the motions conspire, must press and beat the contiguous Air more violently than on the other and there excite a reluctancy and reaction of the Air proportionately greater.” This is a correct account of the Magnus effect named after Gustav Magnus who ‘discovered’ the effect in 1852, 180 years after Newton wrote about it. The best bowlers exploit the Magnus effect best.
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Browsing downtown in a second-hand bookstore, as it is lovely to do in the great city of Toronto, I came across a book entitled 1688: A Global History by John Wills. It is full of fascinating information of what went on in that year in a world very remote from ours. There are, of course, descriptions of great events like England’s ‘Glorious Revolution.’ But just as interesting to me are the numerous nuggets which I was glad to discover. Did you know, for instance, that 1688 was the year in which the Japanese poet Ihara Saikaku in a single day wrote 23,500 Haikai poems – that is still a record.
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Here is a good poem by that shrewd and luminous poet Wislawa Szymborska about ruined expectations on a massive scale. In a few lines we experience the 20th century’s terrible failure.
The Century’s Decline
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others:
A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn’t funny,
wisdom isn’t happy.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong
but good and strong
are still two different men.
