Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Cry in the Orchard

At the far end of the orchard one night, Claire was plucking apples from a tree and dropping them into a burlap bag when, suddenly, a cry from the other side of the brick wall startled her. She waited silently to hear the cry again. She couldn’t tell if it was a human cry, or the cry of an animal. The night wind trailed briskly through the long grass and the dried fallen leaves, and touched Claire’s fingertips. The cry was indistinct. It could have been a cry of pain or a laugh. But Claire would never know. Silence crept back into the corner of the orchard, and the cry was heard no more.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Jacob Bronowski's Science

Jacob Bronowski identified a modern myth whose origins, he claimed, could be traced to the Industrial Revolution: the fear that man was becoming, ever more swiftly, a machine at the hands of modern science. When Bronowski entered the culture wars of the mid-twentieth century, sparked by C.P. Snow’s 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures—addressing the breakdown in communication between scientists and literary intellectuals — he wanted to expose this myth, dispel false and antiquated notions of science, and illuminate the human being’s unique position in the natural world. His series of essays, The Identity of Man, is a valiant attempt to humanize science, and simultaneously, to popularize it. Only by discerning, as Bronowski believed, the inextricable relationship between science and the arts — by recovering the integrity of science — could one begin to appreciate man’s extraordinary, albeit material, nature. Unlike Snow’s treatise, whose political agenda bears the marks of Cold War anxieties and personal antipathies, Bronowski’s essays constitute a total philosophy of modern life, whereby a sound education in humanistic science is the basis for self-affirmation and the preservation of citizenship and democracy.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Reflections on 1968

In 1968, the world abounded with young idealists: student radicals, third world guerillas, disaffected intellectuals, Dany Cohn-Bendits, Rudi-Dutschkes, and Adam Michniks. They came out en masse in 1968 – symptomatic of the “eros effect,” as theorized by George Katsiaficas – initially to challenge local authority structures, and ultimately to attack oppression and injustice everywhere, especially in imperialist, hyper-capitalist, Communist, and underdeveloped societies. In the global revolution that ensued, the New Left – as this emergent vanguard of the socialist movement came to be known – recognized that its own interests lay in the equality and freedom of self-determination of all people: instinctual needs that, when realized, might culminate in utopia.

And yet, while the events of 1968 were wider in scope – politically, culturally, and geographically – than the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848, they ended nonetheless in disappointment, disillusionment, and shock. In popular memory, the failure of 1968 is attributed to any of several factors, like the overwhelming resistance of the state, the degeneration of revolutionary fervor into counterrevolutionary hedonism, and the lack of mass support from the working classes for the student movement. This last factor needs to be considered in detail, not least because it has provoked unwarranted criticism of the working class as an apathetic collective force resistant to revolutionary change. In reality, no single explanation can account for the breakdown of the student-worker alliances that manifested, to varying degrees of success, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The socio-political context in which each movement originated was significantly different from every other, so that each must be assessed and respected on its own terms. What these movements all had in common, however, was the student movement’s ability to identify existentially with oppressed peoples around the word, and in particular, with the working class. An alliance between these two parties, as national governments feared, could pose an irresistible threat to their dominance.