'Change your thoughts': On the law of attraction

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Relatedly:

For a college class c. 2000, we were assigned to read:

From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the therapeutic roots of the consumer culture, 1880-1930 by T. J. Jackson Lears. Printed in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Ed. by Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. (New York: Pantheon, 1983.

For some reason — whether for a class assignment or for personal reasons — I wrote this summary and just came across it.

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Also, this book criticized the self-help industry in part for "push[ing] people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will."

Also, Jared Yates Sexton has this book about how certain American myths/illusions/inspirational metaphors have become cultish.

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Before the 20th century, USAmericans believed that spiritual salvation came through self-denial, hard work, and temperance. But as the industrial and communications revolutions changed their world, they increasingly felt that the fragmented, impersonal capitalist society was "unreal," and they sought salvation through "reality" and "real life." This value shift rang truer to their experience. It manifested itself through religion — but advertisements also reflected it.

Lears calls the new value structure the "therapeutic ethos." People felt dissolved in masses of humanity. They felt stifled, shriveled, as if they had no self at all. Hence the popularity of an ethos that made the healing of the self its top priority. The cultivation of a healthy personality was every person's highest goal. If one lacked vitality, one wasn't enjoying "real life." The self could be healed by following an exercise regimen, eating proper foods, permitting oneself hedonistic self-expression, and buying the right products.

Advertisers seized upon the belief that fulfillment of deep yearnings was just around the corner. The public accepted the explanation that they bore the responsibility for their own depression, exhaustion, and demoralization because they had failed to buy the correct combination of elixirs. They were willing to take more consumer advice and to act on it.

Advertisers didn't merely respond to customer demands but also shaped those demands. They attributed the customer's vague unhappiness to specific consumer complaints which they could remedy. Consumers adopted those claims and used them to shape their own wishes.

Before the 20th century, the dominant Western worldview instructed each person to consider themselves a creature of pure reason and unfettered freewill. Of course, every person has a sense of emptiness, but according to this worldview, it was an obstacle in one's ability to redefine oneself — so if you admit to feeling any emptiness, you admit to a character flaw. Freud's late-19th-century theory of the subconscious allowed each man to relinquish some of that responsibility for his psychological and physical weaknesses. Advertisers happily took on the responsibility for the solution.

The Industrial Revolution was a stressful time in human history, and USAmericans expressed their sense of spiritual emptiness by buying products advertised to them. Dissatisfaction and depression appear in every age, but this explanation and proposed solution was unique to this period, as was the economic ability of the United States to produce and consume enough so that people could live out this "therapeutic ethos." The maxim was economic as well as spiritual.

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Photo by Quick PS on Unsplash

"There is a form of social and political control implemented by medicine, a way to sever an unpopular minority [trans people] from their own bodies and then sell back limited access to their bodies if they will submit to a set of trials to prove they can be good people, or at least made better. The people opposed to that kind of medicalization simply think that trans people enjoy no right to their bodies at all, under any circumstances."

— Detransition is a Mythology, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 6, 2024

Believing everything is fine should be based in reality; it's the reality-base that elevates belief to thought. B. Lorraine Smith discusses it.

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I have moral expectations of myself and others. It's fair to have them, and we need to set mutual expectations so that we can co-create a livable society. Moral expectations are not quite the same thing as "law of attraction."

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JD Vance

Alissa Quart writes:

"Welcome to the Art of the Deal of the Hillbilly.

Trump for much of his career was alternately mocked, admired and amplified by New York’s liberal media. Like Vance, he also peddled what I think of as crappy prosperity populism. (Here we might ask whether all prosperity populism is crappy!) Crappy prosperity populism is the claim that all success is the result of an individual’s gifts and efforts, and anyone who tries hard can make it. It’s also the faith that this achievement is best measured by dollars and the ability to enter the highest reaches of society.

Finally, it's a contempt for the poor — in Vance's case, his own family members, who he blames for their condition. As Vance wrote in Hillbilly Elegy, of those he had left behind in Ohio, they were simply spending their 'way into the poorhouse.' 'People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown,' he sniped. 'You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.'"

— Alissa Quart, "JD Vance is the Toxic Byproduct of America’s Obsession with Bootstrap Narratives," LitHub, July 18, 2024

Here's another idea

Diane Aoki discusses the idea of "ontological design," meaning a focus on designing the real, shared space you inhabit, not only your inner world. Some people believe "that unless you change your self, and deal with the issues that are thwarting your emotional health, you will take your problems with you wherever you go. That is what ontological design argues against. It argues that your outside does affect your inside, so be intentional about the world in which you reside. Curate it."

The illusory truth effect

See this article: "Why do we believe misinformation more easily when it’s repeated many times?: The Illusory Truth Effect, explained." Decision Lab.

Agreed. Really starting to feel like rats hitting the cocaine button. It was productive for a while because it was helping cement the perception of him as a weird sex pest (100% true). But we’ve wrung the last bit of the illusory truth effect out of it at this point.

[image or embed]

— Aunt Sylvia’s Home for Wayward Women and Lurid Tulips (@socialistboghag.bsky.social) Jul 28, 2024 at 9:22 AM

Never admit error

Roy Cohn taught that to Donald Trump.

More

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

When conflicting perspectives are opportunities to learn about oneself and others

Multiple worldviews can be a source of conflict, but they can also be a path to peace.

One approach is to reconcile some of the gaps within oneself. Gish Jen wrote in Tiger Writing:

It is clearer from the book [Philip Kasinitz's Inheriting the City] than from this quote that life in a structural hole [a term coined by sociologist Ron Burt for the location between two cultures] is not an advantage in the way that, say, private school education is an advantage. Still, the larger picture this term describes, including both the ‘structural hole’ in which children of immigrants like myself grow up and the ‘creative selective assimilation’ that results, seems to me on the mark.

People who grow up in multicultural families or neighborhoods may be especially attuned to certain areas of discrepancy in worldviews or mores, but they are not the only ones who experience this potential source of anxiety and this opportunity for growth and insight. Everyone is exposed to uncertainties and "structural gaps" where they are taught contradictory or incompletely explained ideas.

After acknowledging the gaps within oneself, another approach is to reconcile with others. Richard Kearney wrote in Anatheism:

I like to think that the eventual formulation of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in March 1998 — permitting Irish citizens to be “British or Irish or both” — was greatly facilitated by the interconfessional and intercultural hospitality practiced by some of Ireland’s finest artists.

Here, a grassroots culture of acceptance and successful intercultural exchange is identified as being developed prior to a formalized political breakthrough. This is inspiration for self-empowerment; change can begin from the bottom-up.

Apparent contradictions can disguise significant opportunities for growth.

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I'll share something from Roy Speckhardt, "How to Be a Good Blasphemer: A Humanist Guide to Courageous Critique" (TheHumanist.com, 26 September 2025)

"People can stand up to those who would suppress dissent and endanger humanist ideals by being a good blasphemer. To be most effective, before they blaspheme, they ask:

• Is this critique aimed at harmful behavior or doctrine, not at vulnerable individuals?
• Is it a genuine exercise in humor, satire, or free speech—not a veiled act of bigotry?
• Does it challenge power structures that use religion to justify oppression?

Blasphemy has the most positive impact when it isn’t targeting people’s faith, but instead, interrogates the ideas underlying many faiths that shield injustice or demand unquestioned obedience."

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Sources:
Gish Jen. Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. p. 111.
Richard Kearney. Anatheism: Returning to God After God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. (Kindle edition.)

Part of what makes a history video educational, says historian Shae O. Omonijo, is that you can "check a citation or follow a thread on your own. Real learning needs that architecture, the quiet ability to trace a claim back to where it came from." Otherwise you experience "epistemic alienation."

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Unreadable and mysterious written language: A look at ancient languages that still haven't been deciphered

Some scripts have not been deciphered. Some are so mysterious, it isn't even known what language they were used to transcribe. Originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 27, 2010.

Among the greatest puzzles in the world are the undeciphered scripts - ancient systems of writing that no one has yet been able to learn to read. In many cases, it is not even known what language is represented by such strange symbols. They are like secret codes that no human or computer has yet been able to crack. We can only wonder what mysteries of ancient life are locked behind them.
Here is a brief overview of a few randomly selected undeciphered scripts, organized from oldest to newest.

Vinca

This was a pictogram system used in southeastern Europe from 6000-4500 B.C.E. Short inscriptions have been found on burial sites.

Indus

Used in the region of present-day Pakistan between 2600-1900 B.C.E. Although there are thousands of examples of this script, no one has cracked it. It may have represented a Dravidian or Indo-Iranian language. About 500 distinct symbols are known, yet the longest surviving example strings only seventeen of them together.

Linear A

Used in Greece around 1800 B.C.E., it is related to hieroglyphics and uses relatively few symbols. (Linear B was once also a mystery but it proved to be a Cretan form of Greek.)

Tujia

Today the Tujia are a Chinese ethnic minority who trace their heritage back to the Ba kingdom (600-316 BCE). Their spoken language is in the Tibeto-Burman family. They were long believed never to have had a written language, but several ancient books discovered in Youyang County in 2008 use a script that resembles Chinese characters and may be Tujia.

Etruscan

The Etruscans lived in Italy around 600 BCE. Scholars are able to pronounce Etruscan words, and the "bi-texts" combining Etruscan with Latin or Greek have enabled guesses about its meaning. According to one writer, "Etruscan, as scholars know it, cannot simply be classified as belonging to the Caucasian, the Anatolian, or Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, from which it seems to differ markedly in structure." It has no surviving descendant languages. While Etruscan texts can be read for general meaning, the precise connotations of their words and grammar remains a mystery.

Zapotec

This system was used in southern Mexico from 500 B.C.E.-1000 C.E. Most inscriptions are less than 10 symbols and, although modern forms of Zapotec are still spoken today, the ancient language has been lost.

Meroitic

Dating to 300 BCE in the Sudan, Meroitic is the second-oldest writing system in Africa. One Meroitic script is an adaptation of Egypt's hieroglyphics (which is the oldest African writing system), while another is a 23-symbol alphabet including vowel sounds and a sign to divide words. The existence of this script was unknown in Europe until the 19th century. Today, these inscriptions can be decoded, but it is unknown what language they represent.

Runes

The Runic alphabet, often called "futhark," was used throughout Europe for magical inscriptions as early as the 1st century CE and especially during medieval times. Some people believe that it was created artificially rather than having evolved on its own. It may have been modeled on the Roman or Etruscan alphabet. The word "rune" means something akin to "text" in Old Norse and "mystery" in Old Germanic.

Isthmian

Also known as Mojarra or Epi-Olmec, it was used in Central America from about 500 BCE-500 CE. The glyphs are elaborate boxes and crosses. The language is unknown.

Pictish

The Picts lived in present-day Scotland in the 4th-9th centuries C.E. They inscribed symbols on stones, and no one knows whether this may have been a form of writing rather than art.

Khazar

This extinct language was used in Khazaria - the present-day region of Caucas, Armenia, northeastern Turkey and part of Russia - whose kingdom that lasted from 652-1016 C.E. It was related to other Caucas languages and used a slightly different alphabet.

Nahuatl

Modern Nahuatl dialects are spoken by two million indigenous Mexicans, but Classical Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs when the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century C.E., is now extinct and its glyphs have not been decoded.

"Voynich"

There is only one existing example from Central Europe, c. 1600 C.E. The hauntingly illustrated Voynich manuscript, named after the collector who acquired it in 1912, has never been deciphered. Many people believe the manuscript was created as a hoax.

Image of the Voynich manuscript by: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University ([1]). © public domain Wikimedia Commons

Rongorongo

Used on Easter Island, c. 1800 C.E. This script probably represented the Polynesian language Rapa Nui, but no one remembers how to read it.

These are just a few of the mysteries of ancient writing. Some of them may be solved one day. Others may rest in permanent darkness.

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Computers may be able to crack the codes. A 2019 update: Jiaming Luo and Regina Barzilay from MIT and Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab in Mountain View, Calif. developed a computer system that correctly translated two-thirds of Linear B cognates into Greek. Linear B was a test case because humans had already deciphered it. Given that the computer can correctly decipher Linear B, it may be able to crack the code of other scripts.

Alphabet Politics (paywalled). What prompted the development of systems of writing? Josephine Quinn. New York Review of Books. January 19, 2023 issue.

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"When she died, Rachel Pollack had just finished her memoir.

However, we will never get to read it.

You see, she wrote it in notebooks in a special shorthand of her own devising that only she could understand. She had just begun the process of dictating it out to others to print when she passed away.

So, the woman who decoded the gender mysteries of the Tarot has left her life’s story behind in a code that no one will ever be able to decipher."

— Fay Wylde, "Remembering Rachel Pollack…“I Didn’t Know She Was Transgender!”" Prism & Pen, October 15, 2024

Read also: Symbols found carved into 40,000-year-old German artifacts may be precursor to writing, CNN, Feb 25, 2026

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

Learning to let go of the past in Eudora Welty's novel 'The Optimist's Daughter'

A plot summary of 'The Optimist's Daughter' by Eudora Welty. In this novel, an American Southern woman releases herself from the grip of her memories of her family.

Originally published to Helium Network on Dec. 6, 2013.

"The Optimist's Daughter" is a short novel by Eudora Welty (1909-2001) that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973. It follows a middle-aged woman in the American South as her father dies and as she copes with the aftermath of his death, finding herself left alone except for a heartless, foolish stepmother. The story is written in four parts. The first part is the father's long stay in the hospital, and the second part is his funeral. The third and fourth parts are devoted to the woman's memories of her family and to her redemptive realization that she can let go of her past.

Part One

Clint McKelva is a 71-year-old retired judge in Mount Salus, Miss. He has traveled to New Orleans, La. to see a particular eye doctor, Nate Courtland, a longtime friend. Judge McKelva reports having seen a fig tree while staring at a courthouse, and he says, "I was forced into the conclusion I'd started seeing behind me." Dr. Courtland diagnoses him with a slipped retina. Courtland prefers to delegate the necessary surgery to another doctor, but McKelva insists that he do it himself. He declares himself an "optimist" although he's warned the surgery is risky.

Two women have traveled to support McKelva: his forty-something daughter Laurel, described as "a professional designer of fabrics in Chicago," and his new wife Fay, a part-time typist who is perhaps even younger than Laurel and whom he married only a year and a half previously. Laurel's mother, Becky, is dead. The second wife, Fay, presents herself as a disagreeable, egocentric character from the moment of the diagnosis of her husband's slipped retina, as she cries: "I don't see why this had to happen to me." It seems that Judge McKelva still cares deeply for the memory of his first wife, as he asks for Becky, not Fay, as he wakes from surgery.

While waiting in New Orleans for Judge McKelva to recover, Laurel and Fay stay in separate rooms at a "decayed mansion" called the Hibiscus, a streetcar ride away from the hospital. One night, Laurel knocks on Fay's door hoping to acquaint herself better with Fay. Fay tells her that she had left Texas and come to Mississippi because all her family members were dead, and she implies that she looks down on Laurel for having left her father behind in favor of pursuing a career in Chicago. "Oh, I wouldn't have run off and left anybody that needed me," Fay said pointedly. "Just to call myself an artist and make a lot of money."

The judge – immobilized and bandaged across both eyes – shares a recovery room with another man who is blind and mostly deaf. A nurse, Mrs. Martello, watches over both patients. For weeks, Laurel reads Nicholas Nickleby aloud to her father in the recovery room. He weakens. One day, she arrives at the hospital to find a commotion between Fay and Mrs. Martello. The nurse is physically restraining Fay and bars her from Judge McKelva's room, claiming that Fay is "abusing" and stressing her husband during his recovery. Dr. Courtland immediately closes himself in with the patient and asks both women to stay away from the hospital.

At the Hibiscus again, Laurel tells Fay, "I believe he's dying." He does die, suddenly, without explanation. Fay screams, "You picked my birthday to do it on!" when Dr. Courtland delivers the news. Dr. Courtland's comments are regretful but not precisely apologetic; he seems to be frustrated by the medical case and sad more for himself than for his patient. Laurel and Fay travel back to Mississippi on a train that also carries Judge McKelva's body home.

Part Two

Laurel is greeted at the train station by six women who were bridesmaids at her wedding to Philip Hand. (Laurel is a widow now, her husband having disappeared in combat only a year after their marriage. She still wears her wedding ring.) These bridesmaids include the eye doctor's sister, Miss Adele Courtland, and Tish Bullock. Laurel and Fay are driven to the home that Judge McKelva shared with Fay. It is filled with Judge McKelva's friends who make affectionate comments about the departed man, such as "He was never sick a day in his life!" and "Can't believe Clint's gone for good." Fay cries, "What are all these people doing in my house?" That night, Laurel sleeps in the same bed she had slept in as a child, while Fay sleeps in her predecessor Becky's bed.

The next day, the funeral is held at the house. Mr. Pitts, the undertaker, reveals his cosmetic work on the dead man's face. Laurel prefers the casket closed, but Fay exercises her authority as widow to demand that it be kept open.

A broad cast of characters turn out to mourn the judge, who was a public figure in the small town. The mayor says of Laurel: "This girl here's surrounded by her oldest friends! And listen further: bank's closed, most of the Square's agreed to close for the hour of services, county offices closed. Courthouse has lowered its flag out front, school's letting out early." The mourners turn out platitudes and generally make buffoons of themselves, retelling funny tales of Judge McKelva's alleged antics as a younger man, which Laurel suspects are not entirely true. "I don't think that was Father," she tells Tish, in reference to an especially unlikely tale of bravado, and she thinks to herself: "The mystery in how little we know of other people is no greater than the mystery of how much." Laurel has a more serious attitude during the funeral, but few of her thoughts are made explicit. She does say aloud: "He loved my mother." The judge is buried in the local cemetery, although Fay refuses to bury him near his "old wife."

Among the visitors are Fay's mother, who is referred to as Mrs. Chisom, and several of Fay's siblings. Mrs. Chisom elaborates that they are all still living in Texas. "Yes, me and my brood believes in clustering just as close as we can get," she says. This contradicts Fay's previous story to Laurel that her entire family was dead. One of Fay's sisters compliments the family on the "large crowd" that was drawn to the funeral, "without even having to count those Negroes." After the funeral, Mrs. Chisom asks Fay if she'll consider allowing the entire family to move into the large house she is inheriting.

Laurel calls Fay on her previous claim that her family was dead. Fay is nonplussed: "It's better than some lies I've heard around here...at least my family's not hypocrites. If they didn't want me, they'd tell me to my face."

Part Three

After all is said and done at her childhood home in Mount Salus, Laurel is consumed by memories of her parents that are triggered by the furniture, garden and books whose spines are colored with lamp-black and whose words she can remember hearing her parents read aloud to each other in bed. Someone has already cleaned out her father's desk. She insists on returning to Chicago, although some friends suggest that she stay.

Alone at last, Laurel discovers a chimney swift in the house. Anxiously pursuing the bird in the dark, she is flooded with thoughts: about Fay, about her longing for her dead mother. She finds her mother's sewing machine engraved with the year 1817, and then she is surprised to find her mother's personal papers intact. She recalls many details about her parents, especially that Dr. Courtland had removed a cataract from her mother's eye, and that her mother had subsequently suffered a stroke and spent five years in bed, disoriented, "in exile and humiliation," before dying.

Part Four

Laurel recalls parts of her brief marriage to Phil: their honeymoon in Cairo, Phil's work designing houses, his death by the kamikaze in the Pacific. When morning comes, Laurel enlists the help of a man named Mr. Cheek in catching the chimney swift, but he does not succeed. A woman named Missouri arrives and opines that the "vermin" bird doesn't fly out the open door because "they just ain't got no sense like we have." Laurel catches the bird and brings it outside.

Then, standing in the driveway, Laurel burns the family papers and books she has found. When Fay returns, Laurel accuses her of dirtying and damaging the breadboard that her husband had made for her mother. Fay replies that "it's just an old board" and "it's my house now." Laurel tells Fay, enigmatically, that her mother had predicted that Fay would come into her house someday. Laurel says she is taking the breadboard back to Chicago, and she lifts it out of Fay's reach; Fay accuses her of threatening to strike her with it, and Laurel admits to herself that "she had been ready to hurt Fay." At the last moment, she chooses to leave the breadboard behind as she departs the house, saying, "I think I can get along without that too."

"The Optimist's Daughter" is an unusual novel. It doesn't have an action-driven plot, and neither does it feel primarily like a character study given that the main character is so silent and challenging to understand. It is about a woman who, in loneliness and under unrelenting pressure, finally cracks and has a psychological breakthrough.

Illustration by Chester A. Reed, published in "The Bird Book," 1915 © Public domain in the United States.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

What makes print books special, compared to e-books?

Print books have certain qualities that give them an advantage over e-books. Chiefly, their permanence has great value, whereas digital content is more easily altered.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 12, 2012.

Books have long been considered objects of art. After the writing and editing is complete, serious publishers pay attention to typesetting, illustrations and even paper quality and bookbinding. An expert can recognize a printed book as a product of a certain era. Book lovers have long recognized that their tomes can be inscribed and given as gifts, and that the pages can be marked up with comments. Books can be passed down to the next generation or sold as valuable antiques. They can carry sentimental value. Many insist that the tactile "feel" of holding printed material in one's hand and the visual pleasure of scanning a page that has been painstakingly laid out cannot be mimicked by electronic media.

The rise of e-books has begun to change how people think of books. It is now easier to consider a "book" as its content alone, independent of the paper it may (or may not) be printed on. Ancient peoples, for whom books were rare and expensive, could not have dreamed of the kind of catalogues available today for instant download anywhere in the world. Consider the New Testament reference to the eunuch official of an African queen who traveled all the way to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, a journey that must have taken months, and who was in possession of the Book of Isaiah, presumably on a fragile, hand-lettered piece of parchment. (Acts 8:26-40) What would he have thought if he had been told that, two thousand years in the future, an ordinary person would have the ability to carry over a thousand books on a single device in her pocket? There is no doubt that he would have been impressed, but wouldn't it also be reasonable for him to suspect that, as books become economically cheaper and easier to carry and store, people will no longer have the same sense that books are precious and holy objects?

With all that can be said in favor of e-books, they are simply not precise substitutes for print books.

First, purchasing a license to read content is not the same as purchasing a material object of art that is one's rightful property forever and can be given as a lasting gift. While some e-book programs allow the legitimate temporary loaning of content – assuming, of course, that the recipient has a compatible device or app – other programs do not allow the file to be transferred at all. When the devices finally become obsolete or the companies go out of business, there is a risk that the content will no longer be retrievable by the consumer.

Second, the digital economy is fueled partly by the money involved in storing data about what has been read and who has loaned books to whom. While the "book recommendations" made by computerized algorithms can be helpful, there can also be great value in the sense of lifelong privacy when a print book is bought with cash and then finally – secretly – passed on to a used bookstore or to a friend. Whose business is your choice of reading material? With print, it is easier to keep it your own business and not allow it to become some company's data point about you.

Third, print books are currently perceived as the friendlier format in social situations, given the current relative ease of lending them and given their visible covers. When someone on the train is reading a print book, others around them can see the title. They can form an idea about what is trendy or intriguing, and they can even strike up a conversation.

Fourth, when one has a copy of a print book, one has more certainty that it's substantively the same copy that other people saw when they read the same edition. The publisher's imprint serves as a trustworthy historical record that the book is "real"; this is why people cite sources. If necessary, a particular book could even be carbon-dated to prove how old it is. With e-books, readers have reason to be a little more skeptical: how can one know that someone has not changed the text in the file? Does a recently digitized text contain exactly the same words that one's parents and grandparents read? What may have been misinterpreted, mistyped or deliberately purged?

There is no one right answer to the question of whether print books or e-books are "better." Each format uses different material resources and may be priced differently, taxed differently, reach different audiences and be read for separate reasons. Even with the rise of personal computers and e-reader devices, there is still much to be said in favor of print books.

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A character analysis of Clytemnestra in 'Electra' by Sophocles

Electra is a tragedy written by Sophocles that chronicles a chapter of the ongoing difficulties of the House of Agamemnon.

Years earlier, Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter to the gods when it seemed that some supernatural force was preventing the Greek fleet from advancing. The girl's grieving mother, Clytemnestra, eventually killed her husband in revenge. (Her motive was complicated by the fact that she was involved with another man, Aegisthus, who helped her commit the murder and whom she subsequently married.) Three surviving children feature in the play Electra: the boy Orestes, the girl Chrysothemis, and another girl, Electra herself.


When the play opens, Electra is grieving the death of her father Agamemnon. Electra defends the sacrifice of her sister as having been necessary and she finds fault with her mother Clytemnestra for having killed her father.

Clytemnestra first appears onstage a third of the way into the play, at which point she delivers two monologues. She has only short lines for the rest of the play.

In her first monologue, Clytemnestra criticizes Electra for having started the fight between them. She defends the righteousness of her choice to slay Agamemnon on the grounds of a mother's love. She makes the somewhat strange argument that a different man could have sacrificed her daughter or else another girl could have been chosen; she finds it particularly repellent that Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter by his own hand.

Electra asks to be permitted to share her opinion, which Clytemnestra makes a pretense of being willing to listen, saying "didst thou always address me in such a tone, thou wouldst be heard without pain." After listening to Electra's complaint, she angrily vows "thou shalt not fail to pay for this boldness, so soon as Aegisthus returns."

Clytemnestra's second monologue is a prayer to Apollo foreshadowing her own death, asking that no evil come to her. She asks to enjoy prosperity in the company of her friends and specifically with only those of her children "from whom no enmity or bitterness pursues me."

A messenger then comes to announce the accidental death of Clytemnestra's son Orestes, who had allied with Electra in opposing their mother. Clytemnestra rejoices in a muted and conflicted fashion as it seems that her prayer has already been answered. "'Tis a bitter lot," she admits, "when mine own calamities make the safety of my life." She had feared that Orestes might kill her. "A mother may be wronged," she adds contemplatively, "but she never learns to hate her child."

As it turns out, the announcement of Orestes' death is a lie. Orestes soon appears and, with his sister Electra's approval, kills his mother Clytemnestra and his stepfather Aegisthus in revenge for their murder of his father Agamemnon. The victims are not given an opportunity to speak before they are killed. Clytemnestra only manages to shriek a few words of alarm offstage before her end comes. Her conflicted character does not achieve any sort of resolution or final apology in this play.

Article originally posted to Helium Network on Aug. 29, 2011.

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Greek god punishes skeptics in Euripides' 'Bacchae'

The premise of the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek tragedy "Bacchae" is the god Dionysus's punishment of the inhabitants of Thebes for denying his divinity. He causes all Theban women to go into a mad frenzy and to run into the cold mountains, drinking wine, dancing to flutes and drums, ripping apart cows with their bare hands, and making the contextually odd declaration that Dionysus is a beneficent god of pleasure who helps people forget their sorrows. Pentheus, the new king of Thebes and a nephew of Dionysus's mortal mother, is annoyed by the strange cult and refuses to acknowledge the god. Dionysus appears as a mortal man to specifically punish Pentheus, and here the play begins.

The action is interspersed with quasi-philosophical arguments in which Dionysus' apologists and deniers alike are made to look slightly ridiculous. The chorus members are true believers and insist that worshippers, despite their bizarre and immoderate behavior, are pious and pure. They also make somewhat contradictory comments about wine's effect on sexual desire. The blind prophet Tiresias exaggerates that drink is the only way that humans can mollify their sorrows and he makes the dubious claim that alcohol doesn't spark sexual desire in chaste women. The cult's nemesis Pentheus pontificates from a different angle but he is not a credible moral teacher either. He alleges that Dionysian worshippers are sexually licentious and therefore deserving of imprisonment. Having heard a rumor of a male stranger who has come to town heralding the god (this stranger would be the god Dionysus himself in human form), and without even having seen him or knowing his name, Pentheus wants him executed.

When the servants of Pentheus arrive to capture Dionysus, he surrenders laughing, warning them not to try to subdue him any further. They ignore him. Dionysus releases himself from the chains, shatters Pentheus' palace in a storm-like event, and mocks the king by causing him to stab at a phantom image of an opponent. He also magically releases his worshippers from their chains.

The second punishment for Pentheus is humiliation. Dionysus prods the king to admit that he'd like to watch the Theban women in their drunken and possibly erotic dances. Officially Pentheus only wishes to put a stop to their suspected misbehavior, but there are overtones that his curiosity is not entirely for strategic purposes. Dionysus warns him that the frenzied women will kill him on sight, so - first reducing the king's mental clarity - he coaches Pentheus in disguising himself in women's clothes. He then speaks to the chorus and admits that his real goal is simply to have Pentheus embarrass himself in front of Thebes by parading in a dress. This may be in revenge for Pentheus' previous mockery of Dionysus as an effeminate man.

Dionysus's third and most severe attack is to place Pentheus at the top of a pine tree where he is totally vulnerable and attacked by the mad worshippers. His own mother, not recognizing him despite his protests, participates in his dismemberment and sticks his head on a pike. When she returns to the city, her father Cadmus gently wakens her from her fantasy and helps her to see that the head belongs to her son and that she has murdered him. The tragic death of the king affects the entire family.


The tale contains several important moral lessons. To the contemporary Greek mind, the surface interpretation may have been that of a cautionary tale about piety displaying the utter dependence of humans on the angry whims of the gods. There is, however, a deeper lesson in the extended example of how evil begets evil. Zeus impregnated Semele and killed her; her misfortune was compounded by her family's disbelief in her story; her divine son Dionysus goads the disbelieving king into deeper heresy, then congratulates him for fighting evil (drunken revelry) with evil (deceit), when the compliment properly belongs to the god himself for his cruelty and duplicity in leading the king to a hideous death. There is also a subtle warning at the end of the play about the risks of being overly concerned with honor. It comes to light that Pentheus had been trusted by his grandfather Cadmus as a protector of the old man's honor to the extent that he would initiate violence against anyone who had offended him. It cannot be foreign to the royal family, then, that the gods also have a sense of honor and will destroy mortals who ignore, deny, or malign them.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Jan. 4, 2011.

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Knowledge of the First Indemonstrable Principle

Originally posted to Helium Network on June 24, 2012.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Second Article to his thirteenth-century Summa Theologica that "the first indemonstrable principle is that one cannot at the same time affirm and deny the same thing." Appealing to Aristotle's Metaphysics, he says that "this principle is based on the nature of being and nonbeing, and all other principles are based on it." He quickly concludes that "the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil."

Appealing to a law of non-contradiction is a standard trope in Western philosophy that forms the cornerstone of many logical arguments. But is this principle really inflexible? How do you know what you think you know about it?

Qualities such as heat and cold, wetness and dryness, etc., are opposites, but you never see them at their "pure" extremes. Instead, whenever they describe something in nature, they appear somewhere along a spectrum. To say that something is partly wet is also to say that it is partly dry. This looks like a potential case of affirming and denying the same thing. Indeed, it seems that there is some inevitable contradiction in any assessment you might make about the qualities of a thing, since your words are only rough approximations of the world they describe and nothing is ever a pure example of the categories you attach to it. You try to be mostly right, but you are always a little bit wrong. You could speak for hours or write hundreds of pages and never get at the full, exact meaning of what you are trying to convey.

Furthermore, when such observations are made, they typically involve an observer whose subjective appraisal taints the "fact of the matter." For you to say that something is hot is to imply that it is warmer than you might normally expect and also to suggest that you attach a value judgment to it: a pleasingly hot dinner, perhaps, or a scaldingly hot one. Otherwise, if there were nothing interesting to report, why would you be speaking about its temperature? So when you affirm or deny something about your dinner, you're also affirming or denying something about yourself and what you find noteworthy.

This sort of psychological reading of even the simplest factual assertions introduces a new level of complexity. The hard material world may not seem to admit contradictions, but the soft abstractions of humanity certainly do. Happiness and sadness are opposites, yet you can be happy and sad at the same time. You may affirm and deny your happiness simultaneously because you do not know yourself well, because you know yourself too well, or because you wish to influence what others believe about your mental status regardless of whether you are convinced it is true.

As another example, if you ask someone whether they like chocolate, they might reasonably assume you are offering them a small dessert following a meal. In that case, they probably do like chocolate. But they would not like to be forced to eat three pounds of chocolate in the middle of the night. So there are different senses in which they do and do not like chocolate. It's that crucial interpretation that makes your sentence appear (mostly) true or (mostly) false.

Thomas Aquinas wants to apply the "first indemonstrable principle" to the ethical realm. To get started here, you would have to agree that good and evil are opposites; that to be one is not to be the other. This is not as straightforward as one might suppose, since it is not obvious whether evil is merely the absence of good or whether evil is some positive trait in itself that somehow opposes or frustrates good. Good and evil might be on a spectrum just as wet and dry are. After all, anyone giving an honest assessment of themself would have to admit they are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.

This brings you to the psychological angle which cannot be removed from questions of good and evil. If you meet two beggars and only have one coin, how do you choose which one to feed, or whether to feed yourself instead? To choose one person leaves another in the lurch. There is no option uncontaminated by complexity and the possibility of competing ethical valuations. You cannot choose good in one area without choosing the absence of good in another area. And whether you've chosen good at all is arguably a matter of opinion. The beggar who receives the coin will affirm that you've chosen good, while the one who goes hungry will deny that you've done so. How should you evaluate yourself? Why should it be impossible that both beggars' assessments of you are true? Why must you affirm one and deny the other?

There is another problem with Western philosophy's fixation on the supposed law of non-contradiction.  It is that arguments tend to reduce to only two sides. In the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, reflecting on Protestant-Catholic disputes about the proper reverence of the Virgin Mary, wrote in her essay "The Blessed Woman": "Truth has always had the fate of the shuttlecock between the conflicting battledoors of controversy." By this she implied that neither the typical Protestant nor Catholic argument captured what she saw as the real truth about Mary. In other words, the problem is that, when you frame your idea of what the argument is or should be, you tend to close off your imagination to solutions that lie outside the bounds of the argument you've just constructed.

Of course, there may be multiple religious opinions about all sorts of subjects, and many of these beliefs are compatible with each other. If one reduces these opinions to a simplistic debate about whether it is, or is not, proper to make a statue of the Virgin Mary, then one has framed the debate in a way that seems to force everyone to take sides - even those who are not Christian and should have no recommendation about the worship of Mary at all!

One would seem foolish, hypocritical, and untrustworthy if one went around publicly affirming and denying the very same statement. In this way, what Thomas Aquinas calls the "first indemonstrable principle" is somewhat of a social norm governing clear, reliable communication. Non-contradiction helps to manage useful pieces of information and creates boundaries in which people can respect each other. But it is not necessarily descriptive of the way things "actually are."

Fortunately, for many questions you are not called upon to affirm or deny anything at all. Most subjects to most people are irrelevant or beyond their ken. When you are asked to make a choice about some obscure or abstract question, you should be suspicious not just about which of two options is more correct, but about what motivates someone to ask someone to "pick sides" in the first place.

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Race, desire and reason in 'Ourika' by Claire de Duras

"Ourika" was based on the true story of a Senegalese girl raised by nobility in France before the Revolution. In the novel, Ourika believes herself in love with her brother by adoption.

Originally posted to Helium Network circa 2012.

The story "Ourika," based on the true story of a Senegalese girl raised by the Princess of Beauvau before the French Revolution, was extremely popular in France in the early nineteenth century. Initially, a few dozen copies were privately printed in 1823. The next year, thousands of copies were printed. The story inspired four plays, two poems and a work of art by the king’s court painter, and it was lauded by Goethe. It was embraced by a growing abolitionist movement. The French colonies outlawed slavery 25 years after its publication.

The author was Claire de Duras. Born in 1777, she spent her early life in several countries after her aristocratic father was executed in the French Revolution. She married the future Duke of Duras, and eventually they returned to France, where she hosted an intellectual salon in their palace. Duras was so well known as a storyteller that she did not have to put her name on the first copies of "Ourika"; everyone knew who had written it.

Race

An introduction by Joan DeJean says that, until "Ourika," French literature employed African characters “to provoke reflection on the plight of slaves: they are not seen as individuals with psychological depth.” The character of Ourika is different.

The story opens with a doctor who is called to the convent bedside of a melancholy young nun and has a “strange shock” (in John Fowles’ translation) upon seeing that she is a “negress.” The bulk of the story is then told by Ourika in the first person voice from her current perspective as she looks back upon her childhood. When the story closes, it is bookended by the doctor’s voice again, saying that Ourika has died.

Growing up in a wealthy household, raised by a white woman called Mme. de B., Ourika judges that “everything prolonged my mistaken view of existence and made my blindness natural.” At the age of fifteen, she overhears Mme. de B. discuss her nonexistent marriage prospects. The only educated, wealthy, high-class men in their 18th-century France are white, and none are likely to marry a black woman. Thus Mme. de B. says: “I see her alone, always alone in the world.” Ourika suddenly realizes the import of her black skin. The overheard conversation is the moment that “ended my childhood.”

She is plunged into self-pity and despair. She believes she will never be able to find an appropriate match anywhere: not in France because of her Senegalese skin color, and not in Senegal because of her French education and culture. Therefore, she says, “I exaggerated my ugliness to myself,” and she declares “I was cut off from the entire human race.” She hides her skin as much as possible by wearing gloves. She withdraws from company. This inner wrestling is an example of the psychological depth mentioned by DeJean.

Desire

On a matter less tangible than her skin color, Ourika also comes to be tormented by the question of whether she is in love with Charles, her adoptive white brother. When he returns from school, Ourika feels that he is perfectly open and intimate with her, and she reveres him – yet she cannot share her “secrets” with him. Her secret, of course, is “the extent to which the irremediable stain of my color had made me miserable.”

At the outset of the story, she says, “I believe I felt for Charles exactly as a sister,” contrasting it with a feeling for Mme. de B. that is “more religious than emotional.” Yet her comment about the sisterly feeling may be also be contrasted with the possibility that she feels romantically toward Charles. This foreshadows what is to come.

Charles becomes betrothed to another girl, and Ourika withers further. Mme. de B., in a moment of annoyance, informs Ourika that she suffers from “an insane and doomed passion for Charles.” Ourika has never considered this before, and wonders if Mme. de B. is right. “Had what had canceled my heart really been no more than a forbidden love?” She believes she loves Charles “innocently,” yet a “mysterious voice cried deep in my heart” that Mme. de B. was right. She resolves to become a nun, telling Charles that the convent is “the one place where I may still think of you day and night.”

The author never firmly resolves the question of whether Ourika is in love with Charles. Ourika seems puzzled over it herself, and even as she muses in retrospect, her words are ambiguous. Ourika’s depression may stem from considerations of race, unrequited love, or other aspects of her personality – or all of these things. She acknowledges: “Unspoken desires have a kind of modesty – if they are not guessed, they can’t be satisfied. It’s as if they need two people to exist.”

Reason

A third concern in the story, and the least tangible of all, is the role of reason. Ourika observes that people become less dogmatic as they get older. As she puts it: “Youth cannot qualify. For it, everything is either good or bad, whereas the rock upon which old age founders is usually the discovery that nothing is altogether one thing or the other.” This attitude naturally varies between individuals, too. In one of her discussions with Charles, Ourika finds herself less dogmatic than he: “For him all suffering had to have some rational foundation. But who can say what is or isn’t rational? Is reason the same for everyone?” Indeed, even as dogmatism may decline with age, reason may increase, as reflected in her comment: “There is something striking about great suffering in the old, since it has the authority of reason.”

Lastly, Mme. de B.’s friend, a marquise, comments that reason is anyway “powerless against evils that arise from deliberately upsetting the natural order of things.” In other words, individuals cannot escape the trap of social hierarchies using mere wishes and plans. Some social institutions wield more powerful than the reasoning powers of individuals who would abolish those institutions.

A work that had great impact

These three themes – race, forbidden love and philosophical generalizations – make the story a good candidate for literary analysis, all the more so because they are expressed by a character who may be a so-called “unreliable narrator” due to her own depression. "Ourika" had a large impact on the French abolitionist movement and on French literature, and this places it among those rare works that succeed at their political and artistic goals alike.

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Hobbes: Learn the "Rules of Civil Life" and Stop Civil War

"The end of knowledge is power," Hobbes wrote. The point of thinking is to get things done. One of the most important tasks to achieve, he believed, having lived through the seventeenth-century English Civil War, is the cessation of wars.

Hobbes blamed civil wars on the citizens' ignorance of their moral duties: "The cause...of civil war is, that men know not the causes neither of war nor peace," he wrote. "Now, the knowledge of these rules [of civil life] is moral philosophy." More philosophy, more peace.

But this does not seem right. Many of the people who initiate civil wars surely have an over-developed sense of their moral duties as citizens, and they are outraged by people and institutions with fundamentally different beliefs. Such thinkers resort to violence, not for lack of philosophy, but for lack of dialogue with other philosophers.

If one of the warring sides is defending a political belief that is popularly considered to be more obviously right--perhaps democracy against totalitarianism, freedom against fear--then one could also argue it demeans the people and degrades their ideals to imply that both sides are ignorant, when one appears to be correct. It may also be unproductive to blame either side for a lack of education or moral literacy if each perceives itself to be defending itself against imminent physical aggression.

Source:
Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 1: Of Philosophy. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.)

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See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled. If you buy a paid membership, you don't have to worry about the paywall.