Protective Arts

I have not been able to train Aikido since March 2020. It has been over six months since my last contact on the mat and I confess, I do not miss it nearly as much as I expected to. As summer 2020 draws to an end, I suspect fall will not provide an end to our forced isolation.

Covid restrictions keep me cloistered, so I retreat to the hermitage of my basement office to read, write, and watch too much television. But my days are more meaningfully filled with time reclaimed with my family. Selfishly, I am happier to have the proximity. I know this uncertainty is harder for them than me. I have the refuge of history and a general aloofness as armor, but for them the lack of routine and social interaction is a harsh break that amplifies their anxiety: plague, civil insurrection, political polemics, wild fires, it is all too many horsemen at once. At least the rain has cleansed the air so it is no longer dangerous to breathe.

My wife, I suspect, is not alone. She spends too much time in the present, focused on the inane spectacle that is our current political environment. Her anxiety is sharp because we have a megalomaniac buffoon in office and a dotard offered as an alternative. The fascist right and the socialist left – the “U” shaped landscape where the opposing forces are closer to one another than either side will acknowledge. Compounding her anxiety, a bastion of reason has left us: Ruth Bader Ginsberg died September 18, 2020.[1]

Her death was not surprising, she had battled cancer multiple times, and her obituaries had been written in advance – they were published immediately after the announcement of her passing:

The New Yorker remembrance

NPR obituary

The timing of her death could not be worse. She leaves a vacant seat on the Supreme Court and Trump can now nominate and fill it with a conservative-minded justice. In this era when “conservative” means intrusive rather than classically attentive to individual liberty, I fear the possibilities. My only buoying hope is that once appointed, most judges exhibit tempered-reasoning and are less willing to legislate from the bench. But only time will tell.

I wonder how these events will be recorded in my boys’ memory. In a perverse way, the coronavirus has been a blessing for me: forced me to spend more time at home and with my family; no rushing off to the office, no mad rush to close deals, the amount of work has slowed just a little, but the pacing of it is now in my control. Despite the greater economic uncertainty, I am happier for the dramatic events that have wracked the nation and the world. It reminds me that earth abides and that we have been here before.[2] Intellectuals scour history for the mirrored-crystal ball, looking for the past performance that will predict the future performance. Should we take lessons from the Spanish Flu of 1918, or is it the Black Death of the 1300s?[3] Neither is the correct answer when you compare the gross fatality rates, but the psychological trauma of all the shit going down is real.

The rich are fleeing cities for the countryside, just like they ran from the Black Death – Boccaccio’s Decameron collects the stories narrated by the sheltering elite, like a moralizing Shahrazád telling stories to keep death away for just one more night.

The Black Death gave birth to the Danse Macabre – art reminding us all of the universality of the death we cannot escape. The Black Lives Matter gives prominence to graffiti reminding us of economic inequities and unequal access to justice.

The Black Death was a social leveler, bringing down high and low indiscriminately. Because of underlying morbidity, Covid statistically is disproportionately impacting the poor and the old, but the narrative locks in on a racial bias, missing the point by highlighting differences rather than remembering our universal battle with Death (qv. Easter 2020).

Because the impacts of the virus are disproportionate, it has been politicized. The elite can hide in gated communities or walled enclaves; they are fed by modern serfs, UPS door-drops their purchases and Uber Eats door-dashes their food. And it is true that the social divide is greater now – the Medieval aristocracy was closer to their sustaining workers than are the tech/media oligarchy of today. These elites are simply out-of-touch, literally and figuratively, with the working class. They moralize and are proudly “woke” to racial injustice, but are ignorant of the plight of the flyover counties that make up the geographic majority of these United States.

These secular clergy hold sanctimonious conversations debating whether gender is a social construct [5] and laud the legitimacy of self-identification betraying an inordinate focus on the importance of the individual and their opinions. The validity of argumentation now is not how it reflects upon or explains facts, but rather how offended the other party is.

When opinion trumps facts and logic it’s game over. I fear that the obsession with the modern sins of racism and sexism and the witch-hunt for reparations and justice has squandered the lessons the seven-deadly sins teach. It is a pathetic indictment of the current discourse that there is a narrow range of permissible opinion. Stray from the dogma of either faith and excommunication and termination of employment shall be the doom on your head! (At work I had to sit through D.E.I. training and I flash to Chinese re-education: doublethink good that!)

The trauma-inflicting news cycle eats at us all. The irony of a massively interconnected world with news delivered by algorithm and sanitized by self-selection creates a reflexively affirming and stultifying worldview that is as limited as an isolated medieval hamlet where itinerant merchants and gossip were the only sources of information. This is the root destruction of collective truth claims. The law-and-order right believes that Portland is ruled by antifa gangs at night and inundated by BLM protesters during the day. On the left, the same protesters who demand inclusion and equal outcomes are the very ones who created the world where a greater portion of the gold goes to a small minority (smaller than the medieval aristocracy) which leaves more people lost in the wilderness and turn beggar on the streets. Compare and contrast the knightly virtues that guided the imperfect holders of that title with the current oath for police and civil servants:

I, (name), do solemnly (affirm or swear) that I will support the Constitutions of the United States and of the State of Oregon and the Charter of the City of Portland and its laws; and I will faithfully, honestly and ethically perform my duties as (office). 3.74.030

A weak and fading whisper (support, not defend?) compared to the chivalric code:

1. Thou shall believe all that the Church teaches and thou shalt observe all its directions.
2. Thou shall defend the Church.
3. Thou shall respect all weaknesses, and shalt constitute thyself the defender of them.
4. Thou shall love the country in which thou wast born.
5. Thou shall not recoil before thine enemy.
6. Thou shall make war against the infidel without cessation and without mercy.
7. Thou shall perform scrupulously thy feudal duties, if they be not contrary to the laws of God.
8. Thou shall never lie, and shalt remain faithful to thy pledged word.
9. Thou shall be generous, and give largesse to everyone.
10. Thou shall be everywhere and always the champion of the Right and the Good against Injustice and Evil

Neither knights nor police were or are perfect guardians as the stories are clear to point out. The Knights of the Round Table, the romance and escapist idealism sustained and informed the literary class during the Black Death. The tales were in common circulation before Malory anthologized them in Le Morte d’Arthur (1485). The medieval elite were realists; even in their stories human frailty and weakness are common, they know the fallibiliy of mankind. But, there was always the ideal, aspirational characters who showed the path to Progress.[6] Where is Galahad now? What ideals do we now hold that bind us all?

I skip centuries: Walter Rathenau [7] provides some guidance:

Even the most troubled epoch is worthy of respect, because it is the work not just of a few people but of humanity; and thus it is the work of creative nature—which is often cruel but never absurd. If this epoch in which we are living is a cruel one it is more than ever. Our duty to love it, to penetrate it with our love till we have removed the heavy weight of matter screening the light that shines on the farther side

Walter Rathenau’s Ou Va la Monde? (Where is the World Going?) III, 11

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On the lighter side, David F. Walker captures the spirit with 70s throwback style

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[1] Justice Ginsberg outlived her friend and philosophical rival Antonin Scalia who died February 13, 2016. His numerous talks online demonstrate his intelligence, wit and strong textualist stance on the Constitution. Their combined wisdom is missed.

[2] Earth Abides (1949) by George Stewart – I read it as a teenager, perhaps it is time for a re-read.

[3] The Economic Impact of the Black Death (2020).

[4] Personally, I find the semantic ambiguity funny – reminded me of W.V.O Quine on the inscrutability of reference (1964):

You owe Steve Jobs = Steve Jobs owes a portion of his wealth because of his atmospheric success?

You owe Steve Jobs = Consumers owe Steve Jobs thanks for creating technology that has expanded their lives and increased their happiness?

I wonder if the vandal knows Steve Jobs died November 5, 2011?

Public property and monuments – control ceded by the City to the movement. Relatively innocuous by day, but the rhetoric of the mob is predictably vacuous of integrity. I was accosted by a virulent white woman when walking by, told that I had to listen to the rhetoric of the black man on a megaphone, because he “had an important message” and when I declined to stop, she demanded that I “get out of their park.” I so viscerally wanted to punch her sanctimonious throat and shove my tax burden down her Marxist idealism. I pay for you to use that fucking park!

Protest activity in Portland has garnered national attention because of the nightly face off between Federal officers and an entrenched encampment in Lownsdale Square, which has been destroyed as a result of the “civil” protests.

Once the Federal officers announced they would leave, the protesters decamped and the nightly media circus dissipated.

[5] On gender politics, I really don’t give a rip as to how any individual identifies. But it is a sad state of affairs to think that the idiosyncratics of any given individual’s psychological makeup should be important. If the inner world of the individual isn’t harmful to themselves or others, then I don’t care what they identify as or believe in. But don’t make it my problem by forcing me to use neologisms or shame me for using traditional pronouns based on biological markers to normalize what is statistically deviant behavior. And as to biological sex (vs gender which can be a ‘social construct’) the answer is simple: if you produce eggs, your are female, and if you produce sperm you are a male. If you can do neither or choose to surgically eliminate your options before reproducing, then you are biologically of no significance.

[6] Both Malory and Bunyan wrote their works while in prison. Redemptive literature born from boredom while in carceration?

[7] Walter Rathenau (1866-1922) – I need to study his works in greater detail, but he is an intriguing man whose biography bridges the end of Romanticism and the intimations of the Age of the Atom. Science and idealistic perfectionism collided so that one “knew” that the evolutionary process is not to be confused with natural selection, which is a purely superficial process. In Rathenau, Nietzsche (1888) and Einstein (1909) can converse: The modern disciples of Einstein recognize nothing but an eternal present, which was also what the ancient mystics believed. If the future exists already, then precognition is a fact. The whole trend of advanced knowledge is to place the laws of physics, and biology and psychology as well, in a four-dimensional continuum—that is to say, in the eternal present. Past, present, and future are. Therefore, perhaps it is only our consciousness that moves.

One must not count too much on God, but perhaps God counts on us…