29 posts tagged “ethics”

Change, repeated the social worker.  The way of ice becomes water, the way water becomes clouds.  You will live, Risa.  Only in a different form.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Tonight I offer but a brief comment on the book of the day recommended by my son. Neal Shusterman’s Unwind  is a dystopian look at the future of the pro-choice/pro-life conflict in which a war ensues (as the Civil War once erupted over differing moral positions) and was ended by a compromise of half rights. In Unwind, fetuses come to term. Mothers of unwanted children are allowed by law to “stork” them – that is, to leave their unwanted children  on doorsteps and those recipients are required by law to keep them.

Even more thought provoking are new laws that allow teenagers between the ages of 13 andf 18 to be “unwound” – that is, dismembered into organs and tissue and donated to others in need of them. The law agrees to regard such people as still living as they go on to live their lives in the context of other bodies.

The book begins by introducing us to three of the main characters who have just discovered that they are to be unwound. They each find themselves in the same predicament by different means. One is simply unwanted by his parents. One is from an orphanage that is experiencing government cutbacks, and one is being tithed by his very religious family. The plot of the book includes periodic conversations between members of “normal” society and those who are scheduled to be “unwound” (they are never regarded as being killed) that reflect in many ways contemporary debates over abortion. Indeed, the whole novel is a parable intended to give teenagers the opportunity to reconsider their views on abortion in a context where it is camouflaged into something else, just different enough to be plausibly different and just just similar enough to be understood.

Some of those being sent to be unwound find themselves wondering what exactly the implications for a soul are when its body is “unwound”. They wonder what an appropriate response is to a society that regards their demise as a perfectly legal procedure.

Naturally, the great difference that one could draw between a thirteen year old slated to be “unwound” and a fetus has to do with consciousness and sensibility. These characters sense their plight. They seek to escape. They chose lives as fugitives. They resent not being consulted in the matter of their own existence. They feel anger. They feel betrayal. They question the morality of what is being done. They take philosophical positions on the nature of the soul and its relationship to the body. They love one another. They exhibit all the traits of what we have come to regard as “humanity”.

In a sense the author has asked us to ask ourselves “What if the unborn could think?” Some will object to the question. Others will find this a book worth reading as a means of stimulating a discussion about the relationship between law and morality.

I can only assure you, it will make you think. The scene where one of the characters goes through the process of being unwound is something not easily to be forgotten.

Every once in a while you meet someone who has had a unique life experience. This man has served as a chaplain in the Huntsville, Texas prison where, over the course of his career, he served as confidant and spiritual adviser to 95 death row inmates. After each execution, he went home and recorded his thoughts on tape as a means of processing the feelings that such involvement entailed for him psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. At the Death House Door documents the ethical dilemmas and struggles that someone with a compassionate intention goes through in "helping" someone to go "process" their own execution. As far as the warden is concerned, his job is to see to it that the prisoner arrives at his own execution willing to cooperate. As far as God is concerned, his job is to see to it that this human being is as prepared as he or she can be to meet his or her maker. As far as the inmate is concerned, his job is to address the fears and sorrows of the impending moment. And to do that, it almost seems as though a certain ability to form attachment that will not last through the night is needed. That has to be a difficult line to walk.

The documentary eventually leads to a lean in opposition to the death penalty but it does not assault the viewer from the beginning with that perspective. The director has done a good job presenting the issue in a morally complex fashion. One comes to the anti-death penalty conclusion slowly and only as the documentary's main subject does. The documentary does not pretend that many of the people executed under this man's watchful care were "nice" people. But it neither assumes that none were innocent. Sadly, humans are fallible and the mechanisms they use to protect themselves are no less so. Lethal injection, like a machine gun or a cruise missile serves as a tool in the hands of people who are as capable of errors of judgment as the rest of us. Should tool that can injure the innocent be banned from use on the guilty because we are imperfect discerners of the two? 

Definitely a movie to put on my list of discussion starters for Ethics class.

HERE are the last words and testaments of 444 Texas prisoners executed for murder since 1982 in case you are interested.

For the last nine weeks, I have been teaching my Ethics students the tools of Ethical thinking. We have looked at the ethics of divine commands (Jewish, Christian, Islamic), the ethics of selfishness (Ayn Rand/Frederich Nietzsche); the ethics of consequences (Bentham, John Stuart Mill); the ethics of duty (Immanuel Kant); the ethics of rights (Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, etc.); the ethics of justice (Socrates/Plato/Rawls); and the ethics of character (Aristotle, etc.). We still have a few more weeks of tool learning to go but I wanted to see if I could undo, in my own mind, much of the foundational work that I have accomplished. I think reading Hans-GeorgMoeller’s book, The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality has served me quite nicely in that regard.

Moeller begins his book with a concern that I have been hinting at throughout the course – that the philosophy of ethics can be as dangerous to us as a human community as it can be helpful, and maybe more so. “Hardly any political purge, religious war, or ethnic cleansing was not justified, embellished, or inspired by great moral values:” Moeller writes,”

“ justice, righteousness, freedom, liberty, equality, human rights -- you name it.  Robespierre, Hitler, and Pol Pot all acted in the name of virtue.  When people kill each other, especially on a massive scale and inman organized fashion, ethics are usually held in high esteem.  It is much easier to murder a man if you believe that he is evil -- and that you are good.  Of course, the defenders of ethics will say well “So what, no moral value is immune to abuse.”  But what is abuse?  An  axe can be used for cutting down an oak tree  that will keep your house warm in the winter.  It can be used to split the skull of a criminal who attacks your family; it can be used to cut off the head of a man sentenced to death.  It can be used to assassinate a tyrant.  It can be used to kill your enemies in war.  It can be used to break into a rich man's home.  It  can be used to torture a terrorist.  It can be used to take deadly revenge.  Where does its use end and its abuse begin?  What are the rules for the use and the abuse of the tool?  Who defines these rules, and when do they apply?  Morality is a tool.  It is not, unlike an axe, used for splitting things into halves, but for dividing people into two categories: the good and the bad.  It is a rhetorical, psychological, and social tool.  To say it can be used and abused is the same as to say: he's not guns that kill, but people.  I do not believe in this logic.”

Moeller wants to make the case, as I have often made, that there are profound problems with any system of thought that leads to people being defined as good and bad and to some sort of knowledge as being “certain.” The specific problem with ethics,” he writes,

“ is -- and this is my first hypothesis -- that it can lead to pathological states.  It potentially leads to dangerous one- sidedness, or to put it in Western terms, self-righteousness.  If one starts to conceive of oneself and others in ethical terms, then one is easily driven to look at the world in terms of black and white, of friends and enemies.”

Moeller then goes on to deconstruct each of the various theories that students are taught in an introduction to Ethics class, citing examples of how each of them uses the alchemy of their ethical certainty against what seems to be the end of good ethical decision making. He is particularly vociferous in his opposition to Kantian ethics and ridicules the notion that Kant could claim ethical certainty for his process while coming out with ethical conclusions that seem to us absurd. For example, he mentions that Kant insisted that servants could and should be regarded as property. And he notes that Kant argued that children born out of wedlock could be killed without repercussion. “Interestingly,” Moeller writes,

“Kant mentions a particular exemption, a case where killing does not constitute a murder, and in which, therefore the death penalty is not called for.  This case is the mothers killing of a child born out of wedlock.  Kant once more instructs us about the scientific moral evaluation of such a case: “A child who comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law -- for the law is marriage -- and therefore outside the protection of law.  It has, as it were, stolen into the Commonwealth -- like contraband merchandise -- so that the Commonwealth can ignore its existence (since it rightly should not have come to exist in this way) and can therefore also ignore its annihilation.  Illegitimate children have according to pure and universal moral principles, the status of contraband merchandise, and therefore their mothers can ‘annihilate’ them without having to fear they will be accused of murder.”

One of the more interesting ethical theories we talked about in class last week is John Rawls idea of the veil of ignorance. Rawls argues that we can only establish fair rules – just rules- in society when we construct them as though we did not know who we would be in the society where those rules will be in effect. It is an ethical theory that has had profound influence on the way that we have structured rules in American society, for good or bad.

But Moeller questions Rawls’ assertion by means of the following analogy.

“Most people would agree that the rules of basketball are reasonably fair.  In fact, everyone who competes in the sport to a certain extent implicitly accepts the fairness of the rules.  Obviously, if a player did not think the rules are fair and refused, for instance, to accept the penalty for a foul or some other violation of the rules, she would not play the game for long.  However, it would be absurd to state that the rules of basketball are fair in Rawls’  sense.  Obviously, given the veil of ignorance, people would probably have a major problem with the height of the basket, since it gives an unfair advantage to the very tall.  Most are not fairly treated by the standardized height.  It would be much fairer, in a Rawlsian sense, to calculate the height of the baskets on the basis of the average height of the players on all the teams.”

Rawls does not offer an alternative to these great theories of the Western Tradition in his book, and I suspect for that reason, it will not become one of Western History’s “immortal” ideas. But he does offer his own position. He would do away with morality and leave us all at the mercy of two forces: Law and Love. He believes in the creation of Civil laws that we all should abide by and he believes that if people will but love each other within those boundaries, morality will not be needed, and indeed, will be seen as an obstacle to the good life.

In some respects, I am reminded of Robert Jastrow’s words about the Big Bang:

“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Question for Comment: What if we regarded various ethical theories as various "senses" - none of which are always totally reliable - but all of which, if used in conjunction with one another, will in crease our odds of not walking off a cliff. Does that answer Moeller's argument well enough?

The Page Turner

I am presently engaged in a discussion with my Ethics class and a Literature class in Jordan about the theme of revenge and retaliation. My colleague in Jordan brought up a great passage in Wuthering Heights. It records a conversation between Nelly and Heathcliffe.

He [Heathcliff] went down: I [Nelly] set him a stool by the fire, and offered him a quantity of good things: but he was sick and could eat little, and my attempts to entertain him were thrown away. He leant his two elbows on his knees, and his chin on his hands and remained rapt in dumb meditation.

On my inquiring the subject of his thoughts, he answered gravely - 'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!'

'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.'

'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall,' he returned. 'I only wish I knew the best way! Let me alone, and I'll plan it out: while I'm thinking of that I don't feel pain.'

(Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: chapter 7)

Tonight I watched a movie about a Heathcliffe like character placed in the soul of a ten year old girl.

This girl goes to a piano recital that will decide whether or not she gets into a prestigious music school. She has worked incredibly hard to get the piece she is to play down perfectly. She enters the room, sits down to play and starts without error. About a minute into it, someone comes in the door, walks over to one of the judges (a famous piano player) and asks for her autograph. The interruption breaks the little girl's concentration and she messes up and is unable to finish well.

As she leaves, she has tears streaming down her face because she knows that her life was changed in that moment. She goes home, puts away her statue of Beethoven, closes her piano, and walks out of the room, never to play piano again.

The next scene is some ten years later. She takes a secretarial job with the law firm of the husband of the woman whose brief lack of consideration cost her her dream. Slowly but surely, she gains his trust and then the family's trust and becomes their nanny (No one remembers who she is in the slightest). She is quiet but ever so calculating as piece by piece, she goes about dismantling this woman's life, slowly, quietly, obsessively.

Then the last scene of the movie just shows her walking away with the slightest of smiles on her face.

But in the course of getting her revenge, many other totally innocent people are deeply hurt.

I guess the movie was a reminder to me that sometimes, the smallest things we do can wind up hurting someone's feelings. We might never know that something we did deeply impacted them. Just as we ourselves may sometimes be deeply impacted by a small thing that was not small to us.

Question for comment: If someone does something that deeply and negatively impacts our lives, but had no intention of doing so, or had no understanding of what they did, how are we to find restitution with them? What does justice mean when there is a wide gulf between what we have actually done and what we think we have done?

[I have NO idea why VOX is creating these red fonted underlines! Drives me crazy. I can't get rid of them]

I wish I could figure out a way to combine the benefits of watching a movie based on a novel and reading the novel itself. I confess, I enjoyed the dramatized version of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: A Man of Property, and I found a good deal of the novel tedious when I read it. But there are some passages in the novel that don’t make it through into the film that are really well written. Galsworthy is one of the first writers of the Edwardian Era to begin to seriously challenge the “suffocating” morality of the Victorian Age (and I realize that one could also parse that sentence differently and say that John Galsworthy is one of the first writers to undermine the sanctity of the Victorian family.) Passion and social order are two trains and authors like Galsworthy insist that if you can only get on one, you should choose passion. He himself had an affair and later married his cousin’s wife.

In many respects, he can be placed in the same category as Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster. He’s a Rousseau who will follow through with his principles, society be damned.

In many ways, the The Man of Property could be an effective tool for teaching Victorian moral sensibilities and values. The basic story involves a wealthy family (the Forsytes) that represent what, to Galsworthy, is the problem with the Victorian family and society. They have honed their capitalist skills and neglected to invest the time it takes to be emotionally and relationally wealthy. Two cousins, Jolyon and Soames Forsyte take opposing approaches to the way they value people, things, reputation, and happiness. Soames marries to possess a beautiful woman whose principle function in his life revolves around status. Jolyon leaves his wife and is excommunicated from the family in pursuit of a natural affection he has for a domestic servant. The novel traces the arc of wisdom and/or foolishness in these two men’s lives by focusing on the life and hearts of Soames’ wife Irene and Jolyon’s daughter, June.  Through these two characters, we are given to understand how painful the life of passion can be, and yet Galsworthy would seem to indicate that there can be no other alternative if one is to live.

Throughout the novel, Galsworthy keeps returning to the Victorian perception of marriage as a matter of contract and ownership and critiquing it. Soames instinct for “possessing” his wife exceeds his momentary and ephemeral feelings of love for her. Jolyon wishes to own and be owned by no one. His soul is in his feelings and passions and he will sell them for no amount. Irene must decide if she will or will not do the same.  June has her father, Jolyon’s predisposition to throw herself entirely into her love for her beau but she suffers the excruciating agony of having done so for a man who has his heart attached elsewhere.

“But this long tale is no scientific study of a period,” we read in the preface,

“it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men. . . . The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”

One sees this even in Soames’ proposal to Irene: “Will you do me the honor of becoming mine.” He asks. Her financial situation leaves her desperate to say no but inclined to say yeas.

“I will marry you Mr. Forsyte” she replies. HE is not her lover. He is an insurance policy.  

But unlike a piece of property, a human being is not something you own just because you buy it. “Why do you never look at me like you look at him?” Soames asks his wife years later.  “Readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames,” the preface explains,

“and to think that in doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. . . . taking sides, they [the reader] loses perception of the simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact it never does.”

As one of the characters explains, “But it’s the spark. It’s the spark you need.”

Galsworthy characterizes the marriage between Irene and Soames in the following way:

“He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.

He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behavior under this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women--not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him. Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she marry me?' was his continual thought. He had, forgotten his courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labors with success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her face- -strange, passive, appealing--when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

The imagery is instructive. Irene is a castle besieged and taken. How dare she not then belong to he who breached her defenses to possess? Soames’ solution to his wife’s indifference to him is to isolate her. Essentially, to take away any other option to his company. To drive her to him by deprivation of all other sources of affection.

“To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going about and seeing people, away from her friends and those who put ideas into her head! That was the thing!”

In short, his goal is possession not love and for that reason, his chances of possession are doomed.

“Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.”

Galsworhty keeps returning to the theme, illustrating, by means of his ability to let us see into the mind of Soames and Irene why this marriage is not working.

“Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.”

“In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body--if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If any one had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the writing said he never would.”

“She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though terrified lest by word, motion, or sign she might lead him to believe that she was fond of him; and he asked himself: Must I always go on like this?”

“Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames was a great novel reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had imbibed the belief that it was only a question of time.”

“In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife. Even in those cases--a class of book he was not very fond of-- which ended in tragedy, the wife always died with poignant regrets on her lips, or if it were the husband who died-- unpleasant thought--threw herself on his body in an agony of remorse.”

“In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room, stood invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the letters brought by the last post. She turned back into the drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which was purring against her neck. Why couldn't she look at him like that?”

Over and over again, he says to his wife “I love you” but acts in such a way as to convey to her in no uncertain terms that she is his possession and that he loves himself.

“The Buccaneer [the architect who is in love with Irene] asked after you more than once,” he [Soames] said suddenly. And moved by some inexplicable desire to assert his proprietorship, he rose from his chair and planted a kiss on his wife’s shoulder.”

Does he think that she cannot feel what he is saying? Why can’t she look at him with affection? He keeps asking the question but can never seem to answer it. The answer of course is that Soames has banished passion from his conscious life. And without it, he does not really exist. And without existing, he really can not hope to be noticed, much less loved or adored.

“Forsytes, as is generally admitted, have shells, like that extremely useful little animal which is made into Turkish delight, in other words, they are never seen, or if seen would not be recognized, without habitats, composed of circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives, which seem to move along with them in their passage through a world composed of thousands of other Forsytes with their habitats. Without a habitat a Forsyte is inconceivable--he would be like a novel without a plot, which is well-known to be an anomaly.”

The long and the short of it was that Irene married Soames for all sort of excellent Victorian reasons. He was wealthy. She was destitute. Her beauty for his protection. The marriage was more a business deal than an affectation from the very beginning. I often wonder, when the Bible says “What God has joined together, let no man separate” is it also implying that what God has not joined together should not be joined in marriage? When God places an attachment between people, does it happen at the ceremony or long before?  In the case of Irene and Soames, Irene knows it is a mistake. But Victorian society gave her no skills, no means of independent sustenance. All she can do is enter the arrangement with a promise from him that he will let her out if she cannot make it work.  “Will you let me go?” she later pleads with Soames, “You promised you would let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?”

“Behave yourself and it would be.” He replies.

To which she can only say “Of course I won’t.”

One of my favorite passages in the novel expresses Galsworthy’s conviction that love has a will of its own. It cannot be bought or purchased in the market. It is not for sale and it is not the servant of anyone’s whim, whether they have money or not.

“The situation which at this stage might seem, and especially to Forsyte eyes, strange--not to say 'impossible'--was, in view of certain facts, not so strange after all. Some things had been lost sight of. And first, in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and color are always, wild! And further--the facts and figures of their own lives being against the perception of this truth--it was not generally recognized by Forsytes that, where, this wild plant springs, men and women are but moths around the pale, flame-like blossom.”

“There is a line in the world,” one of my mentors once told me. “Above the line are people. Below the line are things. People are to be loved. Things are to be used. One should never confuse the two.” There are few people who can live on a diet of being used as though it were a diet of being loved and Irene is not one of them.

Jolyon had paid dearly for his decision to “give all for love” but years later, the family members that cast him out for his refusal to follow out his duty in his loveless marriage slowly come to question the rightness of their decision. James Forsyte is a case in point.

“James had passed through the fire, but he had passed also through the river of years which washes out the fire; he had experienced the saddest experience of all--forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love. Forgotten! Forgotten so long, that he had forgotten even that he had forgotten.”

Again, Galsworthy lets us in on the Victorian mind of Soames Forsyte as he contemplates the possibility of divorce.

“A scandal! A possible scandal!

To repeat this word to himself thus was the only way in which he could focus or make it thinkable. He had forgotten the sensations necessary for understanding the progress, fate, or meaning of any such business; he simply could no longer grasp the possibilities of people running any risk for the sake of passion.

Amongst all those persons of his acquaintance, who went into the City day after day and did their business there, whatever it was, and in their leisure moments bought shares, and houses, and ate dinners, and played games, as he was told, it would have seemed to him ridiculous to suppose that there were any who would run risks for the sake of anything so recondite, so figurative, as passion.

Passion! He seemed, indeed, to have heard of it, and rules such as 'A young man and a young woman ought never to be trusted together' were fixed in his mind as the parallels of latitude are fixed on a map (for all Forsytes, when it comes to 'bed-rock' matters of fact, have quite a fine taste in realism); but as to anything else--well, he could only appreciate it at all through the catch-word 'scandal.'”

What is fascinating is that even as the pursuit of passion seems to destroy the lives of the people in the novel who pursue it, the author celebrates the pursuit even more. The musical score of the film is always celebratory when people live out their “real” [read, emotional] intentions. “There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods” writes Galsworthy,

“--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.”

But Soames cannot see this. There is no place for this sort of chaos in his ordered universe.

“God forbid that he should know anything about the forces of Nature! God forbid that he should admit for a moment that there are such things! Once admit that, and where was he?”

Forsytes are deceived by their economic and class advantages into believing that they are a superior species to the “commoners” that live on the lower plane of human instinct and passion. They have “risen above all that”. They shrink from the notion that they are every bit the equal of the lower classes as a bat would shrink from noonday sun.  

“The look which June had seen [in the affection between Irene and the architect, Bossiney], which other Forsytes had seen, was like the sudden flashing of a candle through a hole in some imaginary canvas, behind which it was being moved--the sudden flaming-out of a vague, erratic glow, shadowy and enticing. It brought home to onlookers the consciousness that dangerous forces were at work. For a moment they noticed it with pleasure, with interest, then felt they must not notice it at all.”

To Jolyon, the order loving Forsytes are crucial to the functioning of society. Their virtues are precisely what leads to the money that funds the people who want to live their lives in more passionate pursuits. “At a low estimate, three-fourths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes,” Jolyon tells Bosinney,

“seven- eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the press. Of science I can't speak; they are magnificently represented in religion; in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I'm not laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority and what a majority!" He fixed his eyes on Bosinney: "It's dangerous to let anything carry you away--a house, a picture, a--woman!"

Dangerous. But perhaps not prohibitively so. As Jolyon knows, it is also dangerous NOT to go against the majority and the Forsyte ethic or self-protection and emotional restraint.

"My people," replied young Jolyon, "are not very extreme, and they have their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte--the power of never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body, and the 'sense of property'."

Once again, Galsworthy returns to the subject of marriage as ownership. Jolyon gets into a Tevya-like Fidder-on-the-Roof style “on-the-other-hand” argument with himself about what to advise Bosinney.

“Then, too, he distrusted his judgment. He had been through the experience himself, had tasted too the dregs the bitterness of an unhappy marriage, and how could he take the wide and dispassionate view of those who had never been within sound of the battle? His evidence was too first-hand--like the evidence on military matters of a soldier who has been through much active service, against that of civilians who have not suffered the disadvantage of seeing things too close. Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed--the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the statu quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.

This was the case for the defense, and young Jolyon sighed.

'The core of it all,' he thought, 'is property, but there are many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is "the sanctity of the marriage tie"; but the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!

And again young Jolyon sighed.”

Property. Ownership. Can real relationships really thrive in the formaldehyde of this kind of social bondage? The relationship between Soames and Irene is Galsworthy’s answer.

“Soames was silent for some minutes; at last he said: "I don't know what your idea of a wife's duty is. I never have known!"

He had not expected her to reply, but she did.

"I have tried to do what you want; it's not my fault that I haven't been able to put my heart into it."

"Whose fault is it, then?" He watched her askance.

"Before we were married you promised to let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?"

Soames frowned.

"Success," he stammered--"it would be a success if you behaved yourself properly!"

"I have tried," said Irene. "Will you let me go?"

Soames turned away. Secretly alarmed, he took refuge in bluster.

"Let you go? You don't know what you're talking about. Let you go? How can I let you go? We're married, aren't we? Then, what are you talking about? For God's sake, don't let's have any of this sort of nonsense! Get your hat on, and come and sit in the Park."

"Then, you won't let me go?"

He felt her eyes resting on him with a strange, touching look.

"Let you go!" he said; "and what on earth would you do with yourself if I did? You've got no money!"

"I could manage somehow."

He took a swift turn up and down the room; then came and stood before her.

"Understand," he said, "once and for all, I won't have you say this sort of thing. Go and get your hat on!"

She did not move.

"I suppose," said Soames, "you don't want to miss Bosinney if he comes!"

Irene got up slowly and left the room. She came down with her hat on.

They went out.

Property. Contracts. Reason. Order. Duty. Listen to this description of Mrs. Baynes, Bosinney’s aunt:

“She believed, as she often said, in putting things on a commercial basis; the proper function of the Church, of charity, indeed, of everything, was to strengthen the fabric of 'Society.' Individual action, therefore, she considered immoral. Organization was the only thing, for by organization alone could you feel sure that you were getting a return for your money. Organization--and again, organization!

“The enterprises to which she lent her name were organized so admirably that by the time the takings were handed over, they were indeed skim milk divested of all cream of human kindness. But as she often justly remarked, sentiment was to be deprecated. She was, in fact, a little academic.

This great and good woman, so highly thought of in ecclesiastical circles, was one of the principal priestesses in the temple of Forsyteism, keeping alive day and night a sacred flame to the God of Property, whose altar is inscribed with those inspiring words: 'Nothing for nothing, and really remarkably little for sixpence.' . . . People who knew her felt her to be sound--a sound woman, who never gave herself away, nor anything else, if she could possibly help it.”

Property. Contracts. Expectations. Duty. Forsytes and their friends expect to pay something and get something. They do not enter into relationships on some tidal wave of passion that they cannot predict.

“Nothing in this world is more sure to upset a Forsyte than the discovery that something on which he has stipulated to spend a certain sum has cost more. And this is reasonable, for upon the accuracy of his estimates the whole policy of his life is ordered. If he cannot rely on definite values of property, his compass is amiss; he is adrift upon bitter waters without a helm.”

And for this reason, they cannot understand those whose hearts must have all of life and all of their lover’s love or nothing. James, a friend of the Forsytes, takes Irene out for a drive to see if he can talk some Victorian sense into her. The following conversation ensues.

“It was not before he had got her more than half way that [James] began: "Soames is very fond of you--he won't have anything said against you; why don't you show him more affection?"

Irene flushed, and said in a low voice: "I can't show what I haven't got."

James looked at her sharply; he felt that now he had her in his own carriage, with his own horses and servants, he was really in command of the situation. She could not put him off; nor would she make a scene in public.

"I can't think what you're about," he said. "He's a very good husband!"

Irene's answer was so low as to be almost inaudible among the sounds of traffic. He caught the words: "You are not married to him!"

"What's that got to do with it? He's given you everything you want. He's always ready to take you anywhere, and now he's built you this house in the country. It's not as if you had anything of your own."

"No."

Again James looked at her; he could not make out the expression on her face. She looked almost as if she were going to cry, and yet....

"I'm sure," he muttered hastily, "we've all tried to be kind to you."

Irene's lips quivered; to his dismay James saw a tear steal down her cheek. He felt a choke rise in his own throat.

"We're all fond of you," he said, "if you'd only"--he was going to say, "behave yourself," but changed it to--"if you'd only be more of a wife to him."

Irene did not answer, and James, too, ceased speaking. There was something in her silence which disconcerted him; it was not the silence of obstinacy, rather that of acquiescence in all that he could find to say. And yet he felt as if he had not had the last word. He could not understand this.”

It is only a matter of time before Soames begins to reveal the actual nature of his relationship with his wife -What Irene has known almost from the beginning. What the Forsyte family has been able to avoid seeing, in time, comes to the surface.

“Soames gripped her arm. "A good beating," he said, "is the only thing that would bring you to your senses," but turning on his heel, he left the room.”

When he thinks of the possibility of divorcing or being divorced, he again cannot seem to think of it in any other terms but that of a “loss of property.” To him, she is a painting that he should hate to have stolen from him. He likes to look at it. To have it.  

“A divorce! Thus close, the word was paralyzing, so utterly at variance with all the principles that had hitherto guided his life. Its lack of compromise appalled him; he felt--like the captain of a ship, going to the side of his vessel, and, with his own hands throwing over the most precious of his bales. This jettisoning of his property with his own hand seemed uncanny to Soames. It would injure him in his profession: He would have to get rid of the house at Robin Hill, on which he had spent so much money, so much anticipation--and at a sacrifice. And she! She would no longer belong to him, not even in name! She would pass out of his life, and he--he should never see her again!”

Soames Forsyte’s next step is critical. He opts to exert his “ownership rights.” She elects to respond by leaving. And in an act of unmistakable symbolic expression, she asserts her refusal to be owned by taking none of his resources with her.

“He stooped over the drawer where she kept her jewels; it was not locked, and came open as he pulled; the jewel box had the key in it. This surprised him until he remembered that it was sure to be empty. He opened it.

It was far from empty. Divided, in little green velvet compartments, were all the things he had given her, even her watch, and stuck into the recess that contained--the watch was a three-cornered note addressed 'Soames Forsyte,' in Irene's handwriting:

'I think I have taken nothing that you or your people have given me.' And that was all.

He looked at the clasps and bracelets of diamonds and pearls, at the little flat gold watch with a great diamond set in sapphires, at the chains and rings, each in its nest, and the tears rushed up in his eyes and dropped upon them.

Nothing that she could have done, nothing that she had done, brought home to him like this the inner significance of her act. For the moment, perhaps, he understood nearly all there was to understand--understood that she loathed him, that she had loathed him for years, that for all intents and purposes they were like people living in different worlds, that there was no hope for him, never had been; even, that she had suffered--that she was to be pitied.

In that moment of emotion he betrayed the Forsyte in him--forgot himself, his interests, his property--was capable of almost anything; was lifted into the pure ether of the selfless and unpractical.

Such moments pass quickly.”

A Man of Property ends with Soames trying to understand the relationship between his view of Irene and his pain.

“And Soames thought: 'Why is all this? Why should I suffer so? What have I done? It is not my fault!'

Soames thought: 'Suffering! when will it cease, my suffering?'

If only he could surrender to the thought: 'Let her go--she has suffered enough!'

If only he could surrender to the desire: 'Make a slave of her-- she is in your power!'

If only even he could surrender to the sudden vision: 'What does it all matter?' Forget himself for a minute, forget that it mattered what he did, forget that whatever he did he must sacrifice something.

If only he could act on an impulse!

He could forget nothing; surrender to no thought, vision, or desire; it was all too serious; too close around him, an unbreakable cage.”

And that, I suspect, is how John Galsworthy viewed Victorian society.

“He is the Moses of race hatred in the United States.”
Gedalia Bublick, of Madison Grant

Defending the Master Race by Jonathan Spiro is probably the most important work of History that I have or will read this year. Much like David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed last year, this book is one that will take some time to get through but will help a person to understand why a whole period of American history (and in some cases, world history) happened the way it did. Defending the Master Race is a biography of Madison Grant that serves as a primer in the origins, influence, application, and legacy of “scientific racism” in the United States and, in the last chapter, Germany. In one of the final chapters, Spiro makes the connection between Madison Grant's writings (particularly his highly influential book, The Passing of the Great Race) and National Socialism explicit.

“German Eugenicists eagerly established close ties with the Grantians in the 1920s. They were full of admiration for the success of their American counterparts in restricting immigration, passing anti-miscegenation laws, and implementing coercive sterilization ask. German journals provided timely updates on developments in US eugenics and regularly translated the articles of the Americans.” P. 356

“Adolf Hitler's closest scientific advisers were avid fans of Madison Grant and accepted all the major tenets of his scientific racism. Hitler himself, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘the highest aim of human existence is... the conservation of the race,’ sent Grant a letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race and telling him that ‘the book is my Bible.’ Mein Kampf is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The Passing of the Great Race, in particular the chapters entitled ‘Race and People’ and ‘the State’, which encapsulate all the aspects of Grantian thought.” P. 357

“In 1936, when the Nazi party published its official recommendation for essential reading in the fields of human heredity, it mentioned only two books by non-German authors: Gobineau’s Inequality of Human Races and Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race.” P. 357

“Madison Grant warned Harry H. Laughlin in 1934 that while ‘most people of our type are in sympathy with the German eugenical measures,’ political considerations meant that ‘we will have to proceed cautiously and endorsing them.’” P. 365

I often tell my students that “ideas have consequences” and this is a classic case of that truth. Spiro makes it clear that the objective of Madison Grant's life was a mission of conservation. He wanted to protect animals, trees, landscapes, and gene pools. Growing up in New York City in the later 1800's, Madison Grant could see “his city” being “taken over” by immigration and insisted that his “people” were being buried in an avalanche of mediocre to poor genetic material. As someone once put it, “a snob is someone who acts like he begat his ancestors.”

“In 1892, Madison and his brother Deforest, who had just graduated from Yale, helped to found a slightly different type of club: The Society of Colonial Wars, a fraternal organization with membership restricted to ‘men of good moral character and reputation' whose ancestors had attained distinction in the wars of the colonial period.’”

One should note that Madison Grant was not alone. Indeed, U.S. President, Theodore Roosevelt was a huge fan of Madison Grant and his writing.

“As a frustrated [Theodore] Roosevelt told his friend Owen Wister: “they [the public] seem unable to see that it is simply a question of the multiplication table. If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no child at all, while the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaum's and Rabinsky's have eight, or nine, or ten -- it is simply a question of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from it?’”

It is somewhat amazing to think that Theodore Roosevelt, a man who we have up on Mt. Rushmore as being one of our greatest Presidents, had this to say about Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race, a book that Adolf Hitler referred to as “his Bible”

“This book is a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts our people most need to realize. It shows an extraordinary range of reading and a wide scholarship. It shows a habit of singular serious thoughts on the subjects of most commanding importance. It shows a fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous sentimentality and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men dare assail. It is the work of an American scholar and gentlemen; and all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you for writing it.” P. 158

It is not difficult to see why Theodore Roosevelt found such a kindred spirit in Madison Grant. Some 20 years before Grant wrote his treatise on scientific racism, Theodore Roosevelt had written in his book, The Winning of the West of the necessity of racial wars.

Necessity of the Conquest.

Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the western miners and cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end
shape their own destinies.

Righteousness of the War.

The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and
Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,--in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.

Both men were deeply impacted by the theory of Darwinisn and by the men who so soon after Darwin carried his theories out to what they regarded as their logical conclusions. Darwin himself had not engaged in a great deal of policy speculation but he did see that his theory would soon be finding logical expression in human societies. “We civilized men build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick;” he wrote,

“we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment... thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.” p. 122

Grant would later name a his association of anthropologists who believed in scientific racism after Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of the Eugenics movement. According to Spiro,

“Positive eugenics would encourage the fittest members of society to have more children, while negative eugenics would discourage the propagation of the unfit. Eugenicists of lesser refinement than Sir Francis [Galton] would later refer to the positive and negative aspects of their program as ‘breeding and weeding.’” P.120

“Grant never felt that his background in zoology disqualified him from taking up the study of man. To the contrary, he declared that man is an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe, not in kind but only in degree of development, and therefore an intelligent study of the human species must be preceded by an extended knowledge of other mammals.” p. 100

“The Aryanists who had the most influence on Grant where three of the most intriguing figures in the Western canon: Arthur Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Georges Vacher De Lapouge.” p. 103

The race wars that Theodore Roosevelt was praising and predicting in 1894 when he wrote volume three of the Winning of the West were being “scheduled” at least by 1899, the year that Ripley's Races of Europe, Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century, Lapouges L’Aryen and Haeckel's Riddles of the Universe were all being published. (Interestingly, 1899 was the year that Jack London began publishing novels as a means of popularizing the Darwinian ethos.)

Perhaps one of the most interesting and troubling themes that one sees throughout the discussion of Madison Grant and the eugenics movement is the merging of religious and scientific impulses. Many, if not most, of the scientific racists came from religious backgrounds and many from Puritan ancestries. One senses that same predilection to eradicate evil and bring about a millennial world, albeit with very different methods. Similarly, one finds in the key evolutionists and eugenicists a tendency to see their movement as a religious one. A few quotes suffice.

“Haeckel claimed that in the wake of the Origin of Species, evolution had replaced religious dogma to become ‘the sure foundation of our whole world system.’ “Allis ist Natur. Natur ist allis.” P. 123

“Since the inferior races are, he said, nearer to the mammals -- apes and dogs -- than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.” P.124

“Reformers who are serious about improving the human race, and not just about acquiring reputations as do-gooders, would do better to devote their efforts to eugenic programs that strove to eliminate defective germ plasm from the population.” P. 125

“Eugenics offered the post-millennial hope that, through good breeding, the victory of the righteous would be assured in the perfect kingdom could be established on earth. We sense this in the American Eugenics Society's proclamation that the discovery that man is able to guide his own evolution by means of eugenics 'is the most momentous of human achievements, ranking ahead of the discoveries of fire, speech, tools, and writing.'” P.135

“Eugenical truth, declared Grant's disciple Robert E. Wiggam, ‘is the highest truth men will ever know.’ He explicitly referred to the genetics laboratory as ‘the new Mount Sinai’ and announced that the findings of eugenics were ‘the 10 Commandments of science.’” P. 135

“The hero of this secular faith was Sir Francis Gaulton.”

Over and over, this idea that scientific racism was simply another expression of Puritanism and that what was going on was not so much a replacing of religion with science as much as a transformation from one religious world view to another. Consider the place that “preaching” and sacrificial atonement play in the following sentence:

“Grant preached that the fate of the race outweighed that of ‘only few particular humans who were of no value to the community’” p. 136

Indeed, the leaders of the Eugenics movement saw it as a cause worthy of tithing to and a means for wealthy people to bring about a “kingdom of God”.

“Eugenics was the supreme preventative medicine; it was the preeminent philanthropy. As Davenport insisted, ‘vastly more effective than $10 million to charity would be $10 million to eugenics. He who, by such a gift, should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility and suffering would be the world's wisest philanthropist.’” P. 137 (The leaders that Spiro mentions as being most influential are Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Benedict Davenport (Eugenics Center at Cold Springs, NY), and Henry Fairfield Osborn (American Museum of Natural History)

Jonathan Spiro argues that The Passing of the Great Race is an extraordinary overview of Western history as seen through the eyes of a scientific racist.” P. 145. Anyone who has ever read the speeches of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels or even excerpts from the biology textbooks that were being served up to children in Nazi schools will see the effects of Madison Grant's logic. “We can now see that the social workers and their ilk have done ‘more injury to the race than Black Death or smallpox.” says Grant,

“ . . . Scientists have long understood that nature cares not for the individual.... she is concerned only with the perpetuation of the species or type.”

“In clear, sober language that is indistinguishable from the official dogma of National Socialism,” writes Spiro, “the charming Park Avenue conservationist instructs us that the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.’” p. 151. “Anticipating the rise of fascism, he predicts that the spread of scientific literacy will enable us to see that ‘the basis of the government of man is now and always has been, and always will be, force and not sentiment.’” P. 156

Throughout the writing of Madison Grant and his contemporaries, one finds this celebration of the banishment of sentiment (and compassion). Even the patron saint of birth control, Margaret Sanger, participated in the frenzy of “objectivism” asserting that “sentimentalism was dysgenic”

“Sanger agreed with Madison Grant that sentimentalism was dysgenic, and denounced society’s misguided policy of ‘indiscriminate charity’ towards ‘the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock.’” P. 192

Wars of the 20^th Century, here are your architects.

On page 185, Jonathan Spiro mentions the “Fitter Families competitions” that the Eugenicists inspired. Ironically, just last week, my dad was showing me a newspaper article from 1922 when my Uncle Paul was born that indicated that he was a winner of this contest in Vermont that particular year.

When the book returns to the subject of scientific racism and immigration policy, we are again returned to the days of early Puritan New England where the Puritan clergy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were banishing people to Rhode Island for not being theologically “pure” and attempting in any way possible to exclude the Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular.

“From the Society of Colonial Wars to the American Eugenics Society, Grant had sternly controlled admission to all his clubs, and now he was intent on doing the same with his nation. His unflinching and determined effort to preserve the Nordic character of the United States involved three legislative steps that progressively and severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: the literacy test of 1917, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. It was an undertaking that one scholar has referred to as America's most ambitious program of biological engineering.’” P. 197

“Grant authoritatively explained to the president that ‘the old theological views in regard to the unity of the human race and its relatively recent origin some 6000 years ago is giving way to the knowledge that man as such dates back two or 300,000 years, and that consequently the line of cleavage between the so-called races of mankind is fundamental and cannot be modified by any change of environment in a life time of a nation.’ Therefore, speaking as a ‘scientist,’ Grant asked him [President Taft] to stand up to the steamship companies, the industrial interests, and the immigrant organizations and ‘preserve the Native American stock’ by taking a brave stand in favor of immigration restriction.” P. 200

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the way that Spiro analyzes why the idea of scientific racism gained such traction so quickly and why it lost it so quickly as well. He spends some time examining the “group think” tendencies of the Eugenics movement and notes how a small group of elitest individuals set up numerous different organizations that made them look like they were on the cutting edge of many different scientific movements when in fact it was realy the same set of Oz-like propagandists behind the scenes of each and every one. “Grant cited Laughlin who had based his analysis on Bringham’s statistics,” writes Spiro,

“which were in turn based on Grant's calculations of the racial composition of the European population. What seemed, in other words, to unaware observers, to be a plethora of independent studies by reputable scientists was actually a series of self-referential claims... that constantly fed upon itself.” P. 227

I was reminded of the conclusions of the Senate Investigation on Pre-Iraq War Intelligence as I was reading this.

Conclusion 3. (U) The Intelligence Community (IC) has long struggled with the need for analysts to overcome analytic biases, that is, to resist the tendency to see what they would expect to see in the intelligence reporting. In the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capabilities, the Committee found that intelligence analysts, in many cases, based their analysis more on their expectations than on an objective evaluation of the infomation in the intelligence reporting. Analysts expected to see evidence that Iraq had retained prohibited weapons and that Iraq would resume prohibited WMD activities once United Nations’ (W)inspections ended. This bias that pervaded both the IC’s analytic and collection communities represents “group think,” a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970’sto describe a process in which a group can make bad or irrational decisions as each member of the group attempts to conform their opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. IC personnel involved in the Iraq WMD issue demonstrated several aspects of group think: examining few alternatives, selective gathering of information, pressure to conform within the group or withhold criticism, and collective rationalization.

The Committee found that the IC had a tendency to accept information which supported the presumption that Iraq had active and expanded WMD programs more readily than information which contradicted it.”

For example, the IQ tests that were taken during the enlistment of soldiers during WWI. “Karel C. Bringham’s Study of American Intelligence was a major achievement in the history of scientific racism.” says Spiro, explaining the way that eguenicists, anti-immigrationists, and scientific racists “cooked the books” to get the results they wanted.

‘Few works in the history of American psychology,’ writes Leon Kamin, ‘have had so significant an impact.’ Henry H. Goddard declared that the analysis of the Army mental tests was ‘probably the most valuable piece of information which mankind has ever required about itself.’” P. 219

But if you look at the questions that these tests were asking, you discover that they are really tests of the takers interest in white American “Nordic” culture.

And yet these tests became the evidence that was driving the epistemological conviction of Senators Congressmen, Presidents, doctors, and white racist everywhere. Even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken in by the propaganda. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his Buck v. Bell decision, a case that determined the legality and morality of involuntary sterilization of “unfit” potential parents.

Eugenicists like Grant were ecstatic that they were winning the “commanding heights” of the culture to their views. “Continuous decimal elimination, should become a part of eugenics creative civilized people,” Henry Laughlin argued. His plan involved taking the bottom ten percent of the population (by some definition that I am sure made it unlikely that he would be in it) on a regular basis and sterilizing them. To the scientific racists, decisions like Buck v. Bell meant that they were on course to become the high priests of a new religious world view.

“Justice Holmes, in fact, explicitly viewed his decision as a blow against religious fundamentalism in the United States, and he proudly wrote to Harold Laski that ‘the religious are in a stir over Buck v. Bell. Replying a few days later, Laski encouraged Holmes to stay the course: ‘sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all the fundamentalists.’” P. 23

Perhaps he was joking but it is not unusual for jokes to become, in time, policies, and even doctrines. Spiro writes:

“It is difficult not to notice that the leaders of the American Eugenics Society, like high priests demanding ever bloodier sacrifices for their cults, were, as Mark Heller says, ‘possessed by a compelling urge to castrate the unfit.’ It is wondrous to witness the vehemence with which such childless figures as [these] set about attacking the genitals of the lower breeds.” P. 240

“The readers of The Passing of the Great Race were informed that ‘in the modern scientific study of race we have long since discarded the Adamic theory that man is descended from a single pair, created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden.’ According to Grant, whites and blacks evolved independently of each other, and only ‘old-fashioned’ thinkers still maintained that all human beings belong to the species Homo sapiens.”

Chapter 13, “The Decline of Scientific Racism” is an analysis of why the scientific racism of Madison Grant had such a short lifespan in the American consciousness. To summarize, it failed because it was so successful. After the 1924 immigration Act, Americans figured they had solved the problem and forgot about the theory that had defined it as one. Secondly, the war in Europe took so many white men overseas that millions of African Americans migrated north to work in the war industries and the improvements in their educational and occupational lives quickly led to test scores that made the white racist propaganda look ridiculous. Thirdly, Spiro also mentions that there were hundreds of Jewish (and other ethnic groups?) students graduating from American Colleges and demonstrating the lunacy of Grant's assertions to intellectual superiority and dominance. Fourthly, the field of Sociology began to publish numerous studies to show the ignorance of those who had argued that cultures were the result of genetics, not human initiative. Fifthly, the field of psychology began to critique the ridiculous notion that a test of American pop culture was an adequate means to test intelligence. Next, the science of genetics made tremendous advances detrimental to the racists cause, taking the science out of “scientific racism”. Seventh, the Great Depression of the 1930's served as a great equalizer. It hit the pocketbooks of old stock and new immigrant alike. And an ideology that said that suffering populations should be eliminated seemed a bit stupid in a society where everyone was suffering. Eighth, Spiro notes that the restrictive immigration policies of the 1920's cut American immigrants off from the populations and cultures they left, making it abundantly easy for their kids to assimilate into American culture with far more ease than the racists had thought possible. Additionally, the rise of Naziism and the reports of brutality and discrimination in Germany made the the whole idea of scientific racism stink foul in the nostrils of a people who still retained enough of their basic decency to know that something was “fishy in Denmark”. Lastly, scientific racism failed because so many of its leaders had never chosen to marry and have children. The list of those leaders of the movement who felt themselves too pure for mere mortals to marry and conceive children with is so long as to be bizarre. The cause of this self-imposed celibacy among so many of the movement's key leaders is worthy of investigation.

“Eugenics, concluded the New York Times at the end of the [last Eugenic Congress], ‘seems to have become a disguise for race prejudice, ancestor worship, and cast snobbery” P. 341 and “when copies of Madison Grant's new book, the Conquest of the Continent were stacked on the shelves at bookstores at the end of 1933, they remained there.” P.344

William Langer, of Foreign Affairs referred to the book as “Science submerged by opinion.”

Sadly, the movement that Americans were interested in casting off, was being heartily accepted in Germany, a place where Madison Grant and company were hailed as prophets of a new age. “A commonly heard slogan during the Third Reich was ‘National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.’” 378. I suspect that this was an accurate description of every idea Madison Grant ever had.

Spiro notes that there were Nazis who used portions of Madison Grant’s work in their trials at Nuremburg.

Question for Comment: Who do you think bears more responsibility for the damage done as a consequence of the adoption of a “dangerous idea”? The people who create them, popularize them, or implement them?

Earlier today, I set up a global classroom curriculum that engages students of 19^th century American literature and students in my college Ethics class in a conversation about a number of pieces of literature and the topic of the ethics of retribution. In the first week, we will be reading and discussuin Melville's character Captain Ahab and his obsession with revenge.

Melville refers to Captain Ahab's desire for revenge on the whale Moby Dick, as “the cankerous thing in his soul.” Starbuck fears that Ahab's desire for revenge will doom them all.

“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck; "never, never wilt thou capture him, old man - In Jesus' name no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone - all good angels mobbing thee with warnings: - what more wouldst thou have? - Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh, - Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"

To which Ahab responds, “I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders.”

I couldn't help but think of Captain Ahab as I was watching the movie, Flash of Genius this afternoon. The movie is about a rather obsessive engineer by the name of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper blade. The American Heritage article about Robert Kearns written by Curt Wohleber has this to say about his story:

“Nonstop ones made drivers crazy. Inventing a solution did the same to Robert Kearns. . . .

In 1963 he built an intermittent wiper system using off-the-shelf electronic components and offered it to Ford. The interval between wipes was determined by the rate of current flow into a capacitor. When the charge in the capacitor reached a certain voltage, the capacitor discharged, activating the wiper motor for one cycle. After extensive testing, Ford executives decided to offer Kearns’s intermittent wipers as an option on the company’s Mercury line beginning with the 1969 models. Kearns assigned his patent rights to the Tann Corporation, a Detroit tool-and-die company, which planned to sell the wipers to Ford and other carmakers. Tann paid Kearns $1,000 a month to continue improving his design.

Kearns had refused to tell Ford how his system worked; the prototype was sealed in a red box labeled do not open. Then one executive told him that since windshield wipers are a safety feature, he was legally required to explain their functioning. Kearns did so. A few months later he was told that Ford had changed its mind and chosen a different electronic intermittent-wiper system that it had developed in-house. Kearns wanted Tann to sue, but the company depended on Ford for a big chunk of its business, so it was not about to make waves.

Kearns moved on, taking a job with the National Bureau of Standards and moving his family to Maryland. Then, in 1976, he took apart a wiper control that one of his sons had bought. He found that it was basically the same system he had invented. Kearns promptly had a nervous breakdown, fled his home, and spent several weeks in a psychiatric ward. When he emerged, his hair had turned white.

He sued Ford for patent infringement in 1978, later suing Chrysler as well and making plans to sue General Motors and foreign manufacturers. It took 12 years for the Ford suit to reach trial, as Kearns spurned repeated offers to settle. His wife left him in 1980, and a bitter divorce suit ensued; he spent five weeks in jail in 1990 for nonpayment of alimony. . . .

In the end, Kearns achieved the vindication he craved—and wrecked his life. He won $10.2 million from Ford in 1990 and $18.7 million from Chrysler in 1995, though both juries determined that the companies had not intentionally infringed on his patents. Along the way he had run up huge legal bills, so he needed lots more money to continue his fight against GM, Mercedes, and more than two dozen other companies. Near the end of the Chrysler litigation, he fired his fifth law firm and decided to represent himself. The work overwhelmed him, and when he began missing deadlines, the remaining suits were dismissed. He retired, but his patent rights remained an obsession until Alzheimer’s disease overtook him. In 2005 Robert Kearns died in a Maryland nursing home.”

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2007/1/2007_1_6.shtml

According to John Seabrook, the author of the story upon which the movie was based, “the most frightening thing about Kearns, from the automobile companies' point of view, is that he is not particularly interested in money.” “He wants justice.” Seabrook continues,

"They think they can pay me thirty million dollars and put me on a park bench," he says. "Well, Bob Kearns is not somebody's lackey."

"I just felt very diminished," Kearns says later in Seabrook's article.

"It's like you're a nothing, you're a gnat. You don't count. You just don't count."

What I found particularly interesting about Kearns is that the trauma he felt when he first saw that the Ford motor company had simply made use of his idea without compensating him, sent him into a psychiatric break. As Seabrook records it,

“On July 8, 1976, Dennis Kearns stopped in at a Mercedes service center, bought a wiper control, and brought it home to his father. Kearns went down to the basement and took it apart. "And I saw capacitor, resistor, transistor--it was all there," he recalls. "Even the great Mercedes had infringed my patents." He wandered distractedly out of his home, hitchhiked to Washington, and got on a Greyhound headed South. Somehow, he had become convinced that Richard Nixon wanted him to go to Australia, to build an electric car. "Then I realized I'd never spent any time with my kids. I'd been so consumed with my work on the wiper that I'd never even shown them how to fly a kite. So I went and bought these two kites. When the police picked me up a few days later, I was in Tennessee, in a park, holding these two kites."

http://www.booknoise.net/johnseabrook/stories/technology/flash/index.html

The movie and article make it clear that the ford Motor Company attempted numerous times to settle with Mr. Kearns out of court, even offering him as much as 30 millions dollars apparently. But he would only accept money on the condition that Ford take out an advertisement in the Detroit free Press and apologize to him. As Seabrook puts it, “the lawsuit against Ford became Kearns' life. He put every penny he had into it. He was driven by an uncynical, almost spiritual belief in justice and an equally pure hatred of the automobile industry.”

In 1980, Robert's wife left him, claiming that he “expected me to have the same focus he did, and I just didn't have it."

In short, like Ahab, his was an obsession for justice that pretty much dragged him down with the whale. Was it worth it? I suspect not. But when has that ever stopped a wronged person from obsessing to the point of illness. Injustice poisoning I call it. I try not to be a victim.

Question for Comment: Have you ever been wronged and wanted retribution to the point of ruining your life somehow? What is the solution?

Gerald Bull. Not many Vermonters know that this uber-genius was using Northern Vermont as a firing range for the testing of long range weapons (superguns) intended to be used by Saddam Hussein. Though his death is shrouded in a bit of mystery (A lot of people wanted to kill him for different reasons), the reasons WHY so many wanted to kill him are not. He was too smart about something that was too dangerous. Namely, superguns.

A good movie for discussing the ethics of high-end arms dealing and the free market application of dangerous science. A classic case of technology smarts disconnected from moral smarts in my opinion.  

Another movie to consider for the Ethics class. Another story to make you shake your head and wonder. Robert Hanssen. Here is a guy who has been paid with taxpayer funds for 27 years. Paid to learn how to be a spy and how to manage spies. Trained to look like one thing and act like another. Trained to get other people to betray their promises and commitments for money. What does he do with the training? He sells secrets to the Russians, and avoids detection by his own agency, basically undoing the work of hundreds of people who are paid with tax payer money to keep secrets, guard secrets, tell lies, detect lies, and turn enemy agents. How do they catch him? The only way they catch him is by paying off some guy in the Russian Intelligence service (one of the people we have been paying to counter) 7 million dollars. That is right. 7 million dollars. And a new identity and life. So, we have to imagine that the only way that the informant GOT access to the information was to prove himself a good liar and then, he steals the file in an act that must have violated some oath he swore and WE pay him to do it to the tune of 7 millions dollars! So, what is Robert Hanssen's punishment? Well, for one thing, he gets to spend the rest of his life in a high security prison in solitary confinement. How much that costs the taxpayer is yet to be determined. Ironies abound. Hanssen is apparently forbidden to ever write or say anything about his story to anyone (outside of to the FBI) so at least he doesn't get to make any money off it. One can almost imagine him getting a 7 million dollar book deal to put the icing on the cake. As part of the plea bargain that Hanssen agreed to to avoid being executed, his family has been allowed to receive the survivor's part of his FBI pension ($38,000 a year). In Saddam's Iraq no doubt, the whole family would have been taken out and shot no doubt. 

Other ethical issues enter the case when we discover that Hanssen's wife had known that he had received money for spying and she had insisted that he confess to a Catholic priest what he had done. the priest suggested that he simply agree not to do it again and to pay the money he had received back by means of a Catholic charity and for years, Hanssen's wife says, he did. It raises questions about the ethics of a priestly confession of a crime. Would WE be forgiven by the State for not turning Hanssen in? Should his wife? How should she and/or her children be required to suffer consequences other than the obvious damage that this has done to their reputation. According to Mrs. Hanssen as recorded in a New York Times interview, her greatest ambition now is just to have a normal life, "I would just like to dissapear" she adds.  

The interview that Eric O'Neill, the FBI plant that was put into Robert Hanssen's office to help develop the case against Hanssen, one discovers that their were a number of poetic licenses that the director took in retelling the story. Indeed, though Eric is confident that the story is accurately told in spirit, he is clear that it makes no claim to being entirely "true". I always wonder why directors do this sort of thing when the story they are telling is plenty exciting already.

To add even more sauce to the Ethical interest in this story, we have the whole question of the ethics of the CIA in general to deal with. If you look at the order for Hanssen's arrest, you will note that one of his great crimes involves the surrender of information to the Russians that led to the executions of two Russian spies who were working for the CIA. In other words, we as tax payers were paying money to Russian "Robert Hanssens" to get them to do precisely what we have put Robert Hanssen in jail for the rest of his life for doing. Is there some sort of ethical inconsistency there?

"How" I ask myself, "does a guy like Hanssen pass all the polygraph tests that these people in these positions are supposedly taking all the time? I went and did a little research and came across a letter by "superspy" Aldrich Ames, who asserts that polygraph tests are basically formalities that such institutions use to cover their buts. when someone hires a person for an intelligence sensitive job, they want to be able to point to something on a piece of a paper that says that they made a good decision in doing so. It is not altogether unlike the education system that requires that an applicant for a teaching job have "certification". If they can't teach, it can become the responsibility of the certify-er.  Sigh. 

It all has me thinking about Henry David Thoreau's essay on Civil Disobedience in opposition to the Mexican War.

"Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all?"

Maybe it is just best not to think about some of these questions? 

Question for Comment: What use of government money would cause you to regard it "unethical" to pay taxes?    

In 1873, Vermonter, P.T. James claimed that he was dedicating himself to serving as the medium through which Charles Dickens intended to communicate the ending of his last unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Flushed with success over the notoriety he gained from this venture, James came up with an idea for publishing a periodical that would continue to provide readers access to more writing by the dead author (as well as insights into the whole new field of spiritualism in general). Vermont seems to have been fertile soil for such spiritualists it seems. Just up the road from where I live is the famous Eddy farm where the infamous Eddy brothers grandfathered the Theosophy movement a year after P.T. James demonstrated the financial advantages to be gained by connecting people with the afterlife.

Today, I finished a fascinating book by Ben Macintyre entitled Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elizabeth Nietzsche. I know it probably seems impossible, but it was a book I simply could not put down.

"Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else" Nietzsche had written in his autobiography, Ece Homo. The irony is that Nietzsche, who thought most anti-Semites to be morons and who often thought of himself as more Polish than German, would be adopted as the patron-saint philosopher of Naziism. “Even by virtue of my descent, I am granted an eye beyond all merely local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives,” he had written,

“it is not difficult for me to be a "good European." On the other hand, I am perhaps more German than present-day Germans, mere citizens of the German Reich, could possibly be—I, the last anti-political German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: I have many racial instincts in my body from that source—who knows? [...] When I consider how often I am addressed as a Pole when I travel, even by Poles themselves, and how rarely I am taken for a German, it might seem that I have been merely externally sprinkled with what is German.”

And this is what is fascinating about Forgotten Fatherland and what connects it to the story of P.T. James. The book tells the tale of how Frederich Nietzsche's original mind and gift for expression and creativity was abducted by his rabidly racist and eventually pro-Nazi sister, Elizabeth, who essentially packaged and sold Nietzsche as a perfect philosophical prophet for National Socialism. Much to Frederich's dismay, Elizabeth had married one of Germany's pre-eminent anti-Semites and sailed off to Paraguay in 1886 to found a “pure” Aryan colony there. The story about Elizabeth Nietzsche's ability to “sell” the snake oil of her colony to unsuspecting German peasants and wealthy financiers is matched only by her ability to similarly package her brother's writings after her husband killed himself in Paraguay, her colony failed miserably, and her brother went insane.

I confess, not being a professional student of philosophy, I had not known myself how conflated the ideas of Nietzsche (ideas which are disturbing, controversial, and dangerous in and of themselves) and the pseudo-ideas of Elizabeth became over the decades that she controlled his legacy. Imagine, if you will that in P.T. James' ending to Charles Dickens' novel, one reads a well articulated defense for the use of sweat-shop labor and the maintenance of a caste system with rigid laws about protecting bloodlines. “Is this the same Charles Dickens we knew?” one might ask.

Fundamentally, I found myself wondering about all intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual movements of a similar nature. Frederich Nietzsche was neither a saint nor a seer. He was simply original. He spoke with compelling images and was himself an iconic story. One can be profoundly interesting without being profoundly right, as many of humanity's best prophets and visionaries have been. What I gathered from the reading of this book is how easily a person like P.T. James or Elizabeth Nietzsche can pirate the agendas of those they claim to be qualified to channel. One certainly can see this in various religious traditions where a second or third generation from the original “seed mind” absconds with the “name” and “trademark” of the founder to work their own code into the original program. I think of the Church Father, Tertullian, who, made ample use of the growing popularity of Christianity to influence his community to practice the strictest rules of misogynistic legalism in dress codes with respect to women. See ON THE APAREL of WOMEN. I cite three or four chapter titles of this lengthy tome for evidence.

“Chapter V.—Some Refinements in Dress and Personal Appearance Lawful, Some Unlawful.  Pigments [makeup] Come Under the Latter Head.”

Chapter VIII. The Same Rule Holds with Regard to Colours. God's Creatures Generally Not to Be Used, Except for the Purposes to Which He Has Appointed Them.

Chapter VI. Of Dyeing the Hair.

Chapter VII.Of Elaborate Dressing of the Hair in Other Ways, and Its Bearing Upon Salvation.

Anyone who has ever read the gospels themselves might come to wonder just what Jesus had said about the damning illegality and immorality of wearing of ear-rings or colored clothes. Tertullian was writing some 175 years after the founder of his faith died. The amazing thing about Elizabeth Nietzsche is that she was helping herself to her brother's talent while he was still alive (albeit too mentally incapacitated to object to what she was doing). I am not sure why I find this all ironic but I can't help but see a powerful karmic story being played out. While Frederich Nietzsche was still alive, his original inspiration was already being harnessed up to the agendas of people like Goebbels, Hitler, Frick, and Frank even as people like Tertullian and Pope Urban had harnessed the teachings of Jesus to their misogyny and crusaderism. “How do you like it?” I can imagine God saying to the drooling ex-philosopher in his forlorn wheelchair. “How do you like having someone take your Sermons on the Mount as justification for committing genocide on brilliant people?” Nietzsche had once wished that all of Germany's anti-Semites would jump on a boat and go into the jungles of Paraguay with his sister and her husband. “Deutchland, Deutchland ubber alles was the end of German philosophy,” Frederich wrote of German nationalism. Under the massaging influence of his sister's marketing talents, he became Adolf Hitler's “court philosopher”.

In the last chapter of Macintyre's book, the author details his impressions of the lost colony of Aryans that still eek out a meager existence in the jungles of Paraguay. Elizabeth liked to think of her husband as a fallen Teutonic hero taken by the Valkyries to Valhalla when he died (deeply in debt depressed, Bernhard Forster had committed suicide). In actuality, he was an Archie Bunker with a bad case of Jim Jones-itis. Elizabeth Nietzsche's “mansion” in the jungles of Paraguay is fallen into ruins and pigs use it to breed. Meanwhile the descendents of this pathetic dream interbreed with themselves to maintain a link to their founder's crazy vision of Aryan supremacy.

Like Nietzsche himself, I should not wish to be mistaken here. I find much that is reprehensible in Nietzsche's ideas as I find much that is inspiring. Nietzsche referred to Christian faith as “poison” and likened the teaching of Christian morality to children to “poisoning”. He thought the notion of serving others a “slave morality” contrary to nature. He is a prophet of arrogance and in many cases an opponent of compassion in the world. I now know that he was also cursed with an evil sister who insisted that he had appointed her as his official interpreter upon his death, thus doubling any damnation he might have earned himself. (See Chapter VII: Will to Power in particular).

“Hear me. I am such and such a person,” Nietzsche had insisted in his autobiography. “Do not mistake me for someone else.” “If my brother had ever met Hitler, his greatest wish would have been fulfilled,” wrote Elizabeth Nietzsche to counter those who insisted that she was selling her brother's soul to the Nazis. Clearly, neither Charles Dickens nor Frederich Nietzsche had the power to come back from the dead to stop the selling of their reputations. Whether this is the case for the founders of other great world views is an interesting question.

Question for Comment: Who do you think will control the way you are remembered after you leave your present job, community, or life altogether?