``BLOW THE MAN DOWN, BOYS”

Jerry Harkins

You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

                                                                                                                  ––Exodus 20:4

In every nation through every age there have been some of God’s children who have taken the First Commandment very seriously.  The Bible is strong against the making and worshiping of graven images which it considers to be idolatry.  It makes a single exception in the Book of Numbers (21:8-9) where  God instructs Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a poll so that people who are bitten by real snakes can gaze at it and be cured.  The commandment is otherwise crystal clear that realistic statues are forbidden.  The Catholic Church interprets this as meaning that believers must not worship statues but can use them to focus their thoughts and prayers.  The difference between adoration and contemplation of the divine seems superficial and statues are an important part of Catholic life.  Pope John Paul II was convinced that the Blessed Virgin had intervened to save his life in 1981 when an assassin shot him four times so he had one of the recovered bullets mounted in her statue at Fatima.  Eastern Orthodox Catholics are a bit more ambiguous.  Their icons are two dimensional images and they generally permit relief sculpture but statues in the round are extremely rare.  Muslims and Jews do not allow images of any kind and Protestants occupy every niche in between.  Southern Baptists are generally opposed to what they consider idolatry but each congregation is largely self-governing and exceptions can be readily found.  Quakers are also opposed to images of any kind, including crosses and even stained glass. Exceptions are rare.  History is replete with iconoclasts destroying images of every description but the main target has always been the three dimensional art of sculpture.

It is not only religious sculpture that is controversial.  For reasons that would probably delight practitioners of psychoanalysis, secular works, especially those placed in public spaces, have their own way of igniting battles royal.  The wide range of controversy and ferocity is suggested by some historical examples:

·  “The Greek Slave” of 1849 by the American sculptor Hiram Powers is a nude and chained maiden captured and sold into slavery by Turks.  Widely accepted by the American public because of its similarity to classical Greek and Roman sculpture, it nonetheless occasioned fierce opposition from proto-Comstockians.  This was met be a brilliant proto-PR campaign led by liberal clergymen which resulted in the adoption of the maidens as a symbol by both abolitionists and early feminists.  The debate continues to the present day.

·  “Liberty Enlightening the World” of 1886 by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, better known as the Statue of Liberty, was also well received by most but attacked on aesthetic, economic and, most vehemently, racial grounds.  A month after its dedication, an editorial in the Cleveland Gazette for November 27 insisted, “Shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an industrious and inoffensive colored man in the South to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”

·  “Civic Virtue” by Frederick MacMonnies has been denounced by feminists almost since it was installed in City Hall Park, New York in 1922.  It shows a naked male hero holding a sword while standing triumphantly over two beautiful naked women symbolizing vice and corruption.   His genitals are covered by the leaves of a vine and the women’s’ bodies below the waste are actually serpents’ tails.  Mayor LaGuardia had it exiled to Queens Borough Hall in the 1930’s where it resided until 2012 when, at the age of 90, and under renewed attack in the era of #MeToo, it was removed to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn at a cost in excess of $100,000.  A committee of Queens civic leaders wants it back so Green-Wood may not be its final resting place.

·  “Bird in Space” of 1926 is an abstract work by the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi said to represent not the bird but its flight.  It was purchased in Paris by the American photographer Edward Steichen.  However, when it arrived in New York, the Customs Bureau refused to believe it was a tax exempt work of art and imposed a $230 tax on it as a “manufactured metal object.”  This decision was appealed and the trial was followed avidly by the press.  One expert testified  “If that's art, hereafter I'm a bricklayer.”  The court decided it was art but that would not have impressed the American poet and critic John Ciardi who opposed distortion and abstraction of any kind.  He famously wrote, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” 

·  “Chicago Picasso” of 1967 by Pablo Picasso is a monumental cubist work dominating the plaza of the Daley Civic Center in Chicago.  From the beginning, the critics loved it but most Chicagoans made their dislike loud and clear. In part, this was because they also disapproved of the artist’s alleged Communism and his sexual appetites.  The populist columnist Mike Royko opined, “… the fact is, it has a long stupid face and looks like some giant insect that is about to eat a smaller, weaker insect.  Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak.” Over time, however, most citizens accepted the work as an icon of the city and became proud of it.

·  “Three Servicemen” was commissioned to create a representational tribute to the soldiers who fought in Vietnam specifically to assuage the outraged response of veterans and politicians to the austere minimalism of Maya Lin’s “Vietnam Wall.”  Dedicated in 1984, two years after the Wall itself, Ms. Lin objected strenuously and Mr. Hart responded in a similar vein.  The controversy raged for several years but quickly evaporated as the power of the wall became obvious. The Hart work and another by Glenna Goodacre depicting the women who served have also become highly admired by all but the most superannuated critics.

Of course, all the arts engender vehement criticism but sculpture, especially public sculpture, seems to bring out the worst in critics, artists and the citizenry.  There are certain sculptors who are particularly vulnerable.  Among contemporary artists these would include the aforementioned Frederick Hart who is thought to be too representational, S. Seward Johnson, Jr. too lowbrow, Richard Serra, too intrusive, Jeff Koons, too trivial, and Damien Hirst, too commercial.  At present, there is a new category of disdained work:  statues of historical figures whose lives did not, in some respects, accord with contemporary standards of morality.  Again, the range is wide, including:

·      Christopher Columbus for genocide against Caribbean natives;

·      Saint Junipero Serra for torture and enslavement of California Indians;

·      Robert E. Lee, for being a slaveholder and a traitor to the United States;

·      William Tecumseh Sherman for war crimes in his march through Georgia;

·      Theodore Roosevelt for being a warmonger and racist;

·      Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony also for racism;

·      Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears and the Long March;

·      Kit Carson for implementing the Long March;

·      Charles Lindberg for his Nazi sympathies and his promotion of eugenics;  

·      J. Marion Sims, the Father of Gynecology for experimentation on slave women;  and,

·      Joe Paterno, Penn State football coach, for a subordinate’s pedophilia.

All these people have been honored with one or more statues in one or more prominent locations.  Even today, all have their vociferous detractors and their staunch defenders.  Every single statue on the list has recently been defaced, destroyed or taken down and hidden except for that of the Mss. Stanton and Anthony whose larger-than-life monument (portrayed ahistorically with Sojourner Truth) was installed in New York’s Central Park only recently on August 26, 2020.  It is the first statue of real women gracing the park but is liable to attract attention because Stanton and Anthony did not welcome African-American women to their movement.  We shall see.

I make no claim on the merits or lack thereof of the persons on my list.  It is not that I am without opinions about them.  In the interest of full disclosure, I confess that I have often explained why I have never read the poetry of Ezra Pound by claiming that there are enough great poets to occupy me for life without wasting time reading the work of a crazy Nazi.  I would hate to see New York erect a statue to Mr. Pound in Bryant Park but there is little to fear on that account.  I do wonder, however, if I would join a mob tearing it down if it should come about.  I hope not.

Iconoclasm, like book burning, is always a brutal act even if the work celebrates, accepts or even merely ignores brutality.  It is true, as Shakespeare taught us, “The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.”  But both good and bad are part of our history and our culture.  I am certain that the Taliban blew up the Bamyan Buddhas and ISIS threatened to blow up the Taj Mahal in the belief they were carrying out Islamic decrees.  I and, probably, most Muslim scholars disagree with any such rationale and I strenuously object to people blowing up other people’s history.  In the real world, of course, there are always exceptions.  I would be outraged if Germany erected a memorial to Hitler and I can hear myself saying that the monster was not just part of German history.  I watched with approval as the Iraqi Shiites toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein and the Russians tore down those of Lenin and Stalin.  But not so much Marx.  I wince every time Stalin seems to be making a comeback but, ultimately, it’s none of my business that he appeals to many Russians.

I’m not the only one who draws very fine lines.  America has a long and unattractive history of moralizing, of people trying to force other people to think and act as they do or purport to do.  The key word there is force.  You are welcome to try to persuade me that the earth is flat but not to outlaw condoms or the teaching of evolution.  I believe we all share the right to freedom of speech but Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has no moral right to preach nonsense about vaccinations.  

Human society is complex and often surprising.  When I think of all the art that has been attacked as somehow unacceptable or discomforting, I cannot help but think about the exceptions, the contrary examples.  Anthony Comstock did not live long enough to mount one of his trademark crusades against the last work of Daniel Chester French, the remarkable sculpture “Andromeda,” which is arguably one of the most erotic images

ever carved in marble.  Yet it has been widely praised by critics and the public ever since it was finished in 1929, in part because French was a beloved public figure and in part because the work has seldom been exhibited outside his studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  However, thousands of people visit, photograph and post it on the internet every year without incident.  One wonders what would happen were it installed on the Boston Common or in the Smithsonian Institution.  Would it be thought to objectify a woman’s body?  Or, worse, be pornographic?  Would there be demands  to remove it?  The answers for Boston are maybe not.  For Washington, D.C., it would seem inevitable that congresspersons of various persuasions could not resist storming the ramparts.  You will have to forgive me for saying so, but it would be even more shocking if any of the solons could tell you who Daniel Chester French was, what the Greek myth of Andromeda and Perseus was about or how the sculpture was made.  Admittedly none of that is important to the success of the communication between the artist and the viewer, just as it is not important that Bird in Space has no feathers.  Indeed many contemporary artists do not give their works titles or give them titles unrelated to their creative intent.  French was an upright American of the Victorian era.  His intent was never salacious.  Rather, Andromeda is a hymn to beauty, a validation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s axion that, “…if eyes were made for seeing, / Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”

Sculpture may be the most powerful medium for capturing and communicating ideas that are nebulous, elusive or incompletely formed, as though seen through St. Paul’s glass darkly.  This is true whether the work is directly representational or highly abstract.  In either case, it can convey its message without the intermediation of words.  Robert Burns brilliantly defines love as like a red, red rose but the reader has to think about it.  Not so if you come upon a glass rose created by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, the father and son team of Czech artists who made the Ware Collection at Harvard. The dimensionality is more emotionally revealing and more immediate than the poem.  A David Smith geometric piece of industrial steel or a Henry Moore “Reclining Figure” in bronze may be a low definition or cool medium in Marshall McLuhan’s terms while Andromeda would be higher definition or hotter.  Each communicates with an immediacy that no other medium can match.  It merely takes the first two a little more time to sink in.  What exactly “sinks in” is non-verbal by its nature.

When protesters complain that the statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the American Museum of Natural History makes them “uncomfortable” because of the supposed racism of the two other figures depicted, they are confirming its immediacy.  It is not necessary for them to know anything much about Roosevelt or his era, about the iconography of the other figures or about the intent of the sculptor, James Earle Fraser.  When the Mayor of New York says, “The statute clearly presents a white man as superior to people of color and that’s just not acceptable in this day and age and it never should have been acceptable,” he is trying to define the protesters’ discomfort in the words of a twenty-first century politician/art historian/critic.  That discomfort may not be inappropriate but is also not precise or even concrete.  By today’s lights, Roosevelt was a complicated man.  Among other things, he shared a degree of the racism most of us find immoral today.  Was his racism as evil as Hitler’s anti-Semitism?  Is his progressive leadership obliterated by his faults?  Are these even legitimate questions?  Discuss.  Of course, if you tear down his many statues, you obliterate the questions for yourself and everyone else.

As a general rule, people who do violence to public sculptures that discomfort them are the intellectual and moral heirs of Anthony Comstock and Jimmy Swaggart.  But, like all general rules, there are always going to be exceptions.  People of good will can disagree about whether Theodore Roosevelt was a bombastic racist or an admirable pilgrim who contributed greatly to making America a more perfect union.  Was he a patriot or jingoist, a peacemaker or warmonger, a conservationist or trophy hunter?  Of course, he was all of these things to one degree or another.  He was also the most popular man in America.  In the 1904 Presidential election, he defeated his principal opponent by a margin of twenty percent, one of the largest landslides ever.  In other words, his sins were the characteristic morality of a majority of Americans of his times.  Can we afford to expunge a man who did so much to shape and be shaped by those times from our history because they make us uncomfortable?

It is a legitimate question and one without a definitive answer.  On the one hand, as the philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  His words are engraved on a plaque at Auschwitz which was considered too evil to be leveled after World War II.  It was preserved to make people feel uncomfortable.  On the other, though, the historian Edward Gibbon concluded that history serves no purpose, follows no course, makes no promises, promotes no values.  It is, he said, “…little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”  

The iconoclasts of old at least had empirical objectives.  Oliver Cromwell made no secret of his desire to erase Irish history.  The Taliban openly published their objective of erasing any history that did not comport with their understanding of Islamic law.  But the lives of individuals and nations are always to be understood as journeys, not destinations.  Those who would shape the future of our history would do well to understand where we have been.

THE IMPORTANCE OF POETRY AND IRRELEVANCE OF CRITICISM

Jerry Harkins

My mother, an elementary schoolteacher born in 1908, her mother, a nurse born in 1882, and her sister, another school teacher born in 1905, all grew up memorizing and reciting poetry in school and at home.  I spent a lot of time alone with them especially with my mother when she was on sabbatical before and after giving birth to my sisters.  I would be with her when she was in the cellar doing the wash, in the kitchen preparing dinner and in the bedrooms when she was changing the linens.  She knew an amazing amount of poetry by heart and she loved to recite it whenever the task at hand didn’t demand her full attention.  She could recite all 1,399 lines of Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline.”  Her repertoire included the complete texts of “The Merchant of Venice" and “Julius Caesar” and every soliloquy Shakespeare ever wrote.  She knew both of Walt Whitman’s Lincoln elegies, “O Captain! My Captain!” and the much longer and more difficult “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.”  She knew hundreds of poems for children as well as dozens of works by Shelley and Keats, William Blake, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Ernest Henley and Walter Savage Landor.

I inherited some of this skill.  I can recite more poetry than anyone else I know but nowhere near as much as mother knew.  I grew up at the tail end of the era in which memorization was thought to be important.  I think I know the lyrics to some two thousand songs and at one time I could recite several hundred lines of the Odyssey in Greek, maybe a hundred lines of Cicero’s first oration against Cataline in Latin and a dozen or so lines of Caesar’s Gallic War also in Latin.  But the closest I ever came to my mother was when I was required by Father Lemkhul to memorize the 626 lines of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”  Overnight.  For something I had done that displeased the Prefect of Discipline. (Full disclosure:  all those heroic couplets make it easier than it sounds.)

I enjoy memorizing.  The truth is I enjoy everything about the faculty of memory such as  remembering something out of the blue that happened a long time ago that I haven’t thought of in decades.  Even when I know the memory isn’t perfect.  Or when I remember something I may have dreamed or something that I wish had happened or something that had not happened at all.  I love the games I play when I’m trying to dredge up some elusive memory.  Let me see.  It begins with an m.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.  Why did I come here?  What is the capital of Nevada?  Obviously not Las Vegas.  Not Reno.

In the age of Google, memory is not as essential as it used to be.  I no longer need to remember what the Docetist heresy was about.  Google knows and will give me 101,000 answers in less than half a second.  It will also criticize my spelling and my use of the uppercase D.  They want me to ask for docetism and not to label it a heresy.  I can however refer to it as “heterodox” which means different from orthodox but is less judgmental.  Which brings me to the point of this essay.  I’m a pretty heterodox person myself, especially when it comes to the poetry I like.  At one brief point in my checkered academic career, I had a fantasy of becoming a critic and took a course entitled “The Literature of Literary Criticism.”[1]  We covered the period of two millennia between Aristotle and Edmund Wilson, all of it boring and irrelevant to what interested me.  And that was in the era before deconstructionism with its central premise that every text contradicts itself.  In any event, I wrote a term paper entitled “The Three Worst Poems Ever Written in English.”  The idea came to me from reading an article about the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest conducted by the scholars of Columbia University.

Of course I’ve always liked the work of Joyce Kilmer, including “Trees” which is scorned by the supercilious scholars of his Alma Mater.  “Roar, Lion, Roar / For Alma Mater on the Hudson Shore!”  So my paper was a satire relying heavily on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism” and Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective.  The latter offers persuasive evidence that music critics are almost always wrong by the simple expedient of quoting them at length.  My nominees for the “worst” poems were the “Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” as translated by Edward Fitzgerald, "Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer and “A Visit from St. Nicholas” by Clement Clark Moore.  All of them once beloved by millions of the unwashed.  The latter two won their places on the list over “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service because it amused me that, like Kilmer, both poets were graduates of Columbia.[2]  Also, my mother apparently did not know about Sam McGee from Tennessee while she was on familiar terms with Casey, Omar and Santa.  And, of course, with Joyce Kilmer.

“Trees” is a remarkable piece of work:  a simple but appealing theme, an almost perfect metric pattern (iambic tetrameter) and, of course, the very strong rhyme scheme that makes it one of the most memorable poems in English.  It utilizes a variety of poetic techniques including anaphora, alliteration, enjambment, personification and repetition.  It was set to music in 1922 by Oscar Rasbach and became one of the biggest hits in the Great American Songbook, covered by the likes of Paul Robeson, Patti Page, Mario Lanza, Nelson Eddy, David Whitfield and Robert Merrill.

Now no one would mistake Joyce Kilmer for Shakespeare or any other member of the approved canon but that fact has almost nothing to do with the quality of his work.  Rather, it is entirely a matter of the personal preferences and enthusiasms of the canonists of the moment.  There is nothing wrong with this; it is just not the only way to read and enjoy a poem.  Consider, for example, one scholar’s insight on the first line of John Keats’ masterpiece, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

The urn as unravished bride proleptically contains its ravishment as a natural outcome in the ritual of weddings that parallels the consummation of questions asked. And even if stated in a kind of elegiac or tragic negative, other elements are structured around narratives of completion: lover meeting and kissing, trees leafing, ritual sacrifice being performed, citizens leaving and then returning to their town.[3]

This was written nearly twenty years ago.  Had it been written during the #MeToo era, one would expect a very different analysis of Keats’ “yet unravished bride of quietness” and one might note the omission of the words “yet” and “quietness” in the earlier explication.  As interesting as this might be to an academic, it has little relevance to my enjoyment of the poem.  More importantly, it does not make “Trees” any less (or more) of a poem.

I suppose it would be churlish of me to think that any work of art that appealed to a broad public would be, ipso facto, anathema to those who earn their daily bread by telling the rest of us what to think.  And it would not be entirely accurate.  There were one or two contemporary critics who recognized Beethoven’s genius and many who overcame the immense popularity of Joyce Kilmer and celebrated his work.  Even during the two hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare’s death when his work was totally denigrated, he had a handful aficionados acclaiming him in the wilderness.  Criticism in general, however, has always been part of the fashion industry.

Why are critics so often wrong?  The dark answer is that they know criticism is a useless exercise but it lets them imagine otherwise.  A more generous answer is that criticism, like art itself, is a reflection of its time even when it is deploring its time.  O tempora, o mores!

It is at least arguable that poetry originated in the need of pre-literate societies to record and pass on their history, mythology and culture.  In Europe and probably everywhere, bards were taught from an early age to memorize and elaborate on the stories that carried those values.  Their task was made more manageable through the use of rhythm and rhyme.  Of the two, rhyme is more powerful but it developed much later and is still much rarer.  There are forty different kinds of rhyme available in English, each with complex rules.[4]  Kilmer was a master of several.  It is likely that the immortal lines:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree

are the most memorable lines ever written in English and certainly lines that the Columbia scholars would never be able to write in a million years.

Another master of rhyme was the British-Canadian poet Robert W. Service whose best known work is “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”  After the famous scene-setting opening, he introduces Sam thusly:

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he'd often say in his homely way that “he'd sooner live in hell.”

Whenever in the future readers encounter Sam, they will learn viscerally what the Klondike was like during the gold rush of the late 1890’s.  This epic experience of North American history is thereby preserved in the collective memory of the generations.  The Greeks understood the importance of this in binding a community’s sense of itself. Mnemosyne, their personification of memory, was one of the twelve Titans, a primordial deity, a daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth).  In her youth, she knew almost nothing but as she matured she accumulated memories.  It is sometimes said that this made her wise but it was not wisdom so much as common sense.  Memory is not history and not unadorned truth.  It is experience shaded by imagination, intuition and sometimes wishful thinking, closer perhaps to mythology than science.  It influences and is influenced by the emotional intelligence.  It is both a principal tool and a product of poetry.  It is good if it is successful in eliciting pleasure, comfort, understanding;  it is not good only if it fails to do so for those who encounter it.

Whenever my mother reached the end of “Evangeline,” both of us would experience a flash of sympathy or fellow-feeling :

All was ended now, the hope, and the fear, and the sorrow,
All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain, and constant anguish of patience!
And, as she pressed once more the lifeless head to her bosom,
Meekly she bowed her own, and murmured, "Father, I thank thee!"

And then the epilogue and, somehow, the catharsis:

Still stands the forest primeval

… 

Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun,
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story,
While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

---

Notes

[1] The text for this course was Criticism:  The Major Texts, Harcourt, Brace, 1952 edited by the distinguished critic and Harvard Professor Walter Jackson Bate who won the Pulitzer Prize twice for biographies of Samuel Johnson and John Keats.  I found the texts disappointing but Bate’s introductions to them are brilliant.

[2] Columbia University is not on the Hudson River Shore.  Its Baker Field, where the Columbia Lions roar only rarely, is on the Harlem River.  Still it has turned out a surprising number of popular artists including Richard Rodgers and the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein.  The scholars’ opinions about these worthies are not known.

[3] Jeffrey C. Robinson, "Deforming Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in James O’Rourke (Ed.), “Ode On a Grecian Urn:  Hypercanonicity and Pedagogy,” Romantic Circles, October, 2003( romantic-circles.org/praxis/grecianurn/index.html).

[4] See An Introduction to Rhyme by Peter Dale (Agenda/Bellew, 1998).

THE INTRACTABLE COMPLEXITY OF POVERTY

Jerry Harkins

Complexity characterizes the behavior of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions.  The term is generally used to characterize something with many parts where those parts interact with each other in multiple ways, [creating a situation where a system has properties not present in its parts].

                                                  ––Wikipedia

My friends, you will never encounter three more different entities than Donald Trump, the Pope and the New York Times.  But they do share several important traits including ignorance and not excluding deception and delinquency when felt convenient. They also promote themselves as experts on an infinite variety of the world’s most complex problems.  One claims to be a super genius, another says he is infallible.  The Times, quite accurately, scoffs at both these upstarts because it knows that its editorial opinions and journalistic insights are essential to the working and very survival of the universe.

The Times used to issue upwards of eleven hundred editorial diktats every year.  Recently it has cut this outpouring of sacred wisdom by more than half, filling the space with differently named opinion pieces like “editorial observer.”  Even with the reduction, however, no one casts as wide a net as the Times.  Is there an election or a revolution anywhere in the world?  The Times knows how voters should exercise their franchise, how rioters should choose their targets and how a new junta must proceed.  Are American universities trying to cope with their role in the slave trade?  Easy, just ask the editors of The Times who will also instruct them as to their admissions policies, grading criteria and course content.  Should museums be allowed to de-accession any of their holdings?  Should Great Britain leave the European Union?  Should statues of such as Robert E. Lee, Joe Paterno, and Christopher Columbus be removed from public sight?  Must Central Park share the money it raises from private donors with parks in less favored neighborhoods?  Did the fame of Elvis Presley have “…something to do with his music?”  Was Mother Teresa a criminal psychopath?  The Times has held forth on each of these questions and has issued definitive answers.  The problem is not so much the substance of what is written which is always predictably left of center but the arrogance with which it is set forth to an undeserving world.  Its favorite verb is "must."  The President must do this, the Pope must do that.  Its favorite conjunction is "but."  Pandemic deaths are down, but...  The President signed some bill, but...  Although it issues hundreds of “corrections” every year, it has never, so far as I know, felt a need to retract an editorial opinion.  

So it was not surprising that, on May 15, 2020, the newspaper of record revisited the eternal problem of homelessness with special reference to New York City.  As is often the case, its solutions were long on ideology and short on history, economics and technology.  It began with an analysis of the roots of the problem:

“Collectively, we are choosing to avert our eyes from the people who sleep where we walk. We have decided to live with the fact that some of our fellow Americans will die on the streets.  'There’s a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen,' Leilani Farha, then the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, was quoted as saying after a 2018 visit to Northern California.”

When they say “we are choosing,” they do not include themselves.  They are pointing their fingers at their readers but they have enough residual sense not to make it obvious.  The victims of our malevolence are invariably righteous, virtuous and deserving.  They include:

“…graduates of foster care or the prison system, victims of domestic abuse or discrimination, veterans, and people with mental and physical disabilities. Some end up on the street because of addictions; some develop addictions because they are on the street.”

Note that all the factual statements are true even if the association of foster care and prisons is unfortunate, perhaps careless.  Everything else is pure invention.  We choose to avert our eyes.  We have decided to live with the fact of death on the streets.  Our behavior constitutes a cruelty never equaled in the experience of a UN rapporteur who appears to have led a charmed life.  Note also that the authors are referring only to the 10% of the homeless who sleep on the streets and in subways and parks. Finally, note that the editorial pays little attention to solutions.  It rails briefly against the government providing, “…more than $70 billion in tax breaks to homeowners, including a deduction for mortgage interest payments and a free pass on some capital gains from home sales. Let’s end homelessness instead of subsidizing mansions.” 

Brilliant!  The solution is to throw money at the problem, money we can take from undeserving homeowners.  A little class antagonism is a small price to pay for…well, what exactly?  Cities and states have tried a number of strategies without a great deal of success.  I suspect the Times envisions building charming tree-shaded villages that provide their residents with a wide variety of support and services.  Maybe they are based on B. F. Skinner’s vision of Walden Two.  Which, I suppose, would be better than George Orwell’s Oceania.

In fact, the Times has no way of knowing my choices or decisions.  It simply makes the worst possible assumptions about me (and you) and reports them as part of “all the news that’s fit to print.”  I know this probably sounds like that man in the oval office bitching about fake news.  But, no, the Times’ actual news reports are reliable if increasingly rare, simplistic, pompous and impractical.  But it's their editorializing that is that is often more simplistic, pompous, impractical and also embarrassingly stupid.

The problem of homelessness is approximately ten times as large as and closely related to the number of people sleeping outdoors, at least in terms of how it can be addressed.  It is  always a result of other problems the roots of which vary by the distinct cohorts within the homeless population.  First, consider the 60,000 people sleeping in shelters of various kinds.  The precipitating cause for the African-Americans among them is probably racism.  It may be post-traumatic stress syndrome for military veterans, domestic violence for many women and children and substance abuse for a diverse group of other people.  Often enough, several of these causes are at work and it is hard to distinguish between cause and effect.  But underneath the immediate causes, there is almost always the underlying condition of generational poverty and its concomitants.

Like homelessness, poverty is enmeshed in a dazzling array of social phenomena:  discrimination, educational failure, poor housing, poor medical care, crime, violence, addiction, political corruption and so on and on.  These are related to each other in ways we do not fully understand.  We used to call it the “cycle of poverty” implying that they were links in a chain of causality.  President Johnson’s War on Poverty was an attempt to figure out where that cycle was most vulnerable.  It addressed some eighteen “links” and instituted experimental programs to discover the most promising ways to attack each and break the chain.  Sargent Shriver was put in charge of a new Office of Economic Opportunity.  It  did a truly excellent job which was sadly truncated by the economic demands of the Vietnam War.  But we learned a lot.  

Unfortunately, much of what we learned was politically unpalatable.  For example, the most important link in the chain turned out to be education.  For one thing, the children of the poor were not prepared for the school experience and fell behind from the first day of kindergarten.  The obvious solution seemed to be preschool education for children as young as two years.  But that meant assuring children were well fed because you can’t learn on an empty stomach.  On the same theory, it meant making sure kids who needed glasses got them and those who needed medication for asthma got and took it.  Preschool would be an expensive long-term investment with no short-term payback for politicians.  Americans are not good at either complexity or long-term anything.  Like the Times, they prefer magic wands to incremental progress.

If you take the end of the Vietnam War as 1975, it took New York, arguably the nation’s most liberal city, more than 40 years to institute a preschool program for every child.  The delay was due to political inertia and to opponents demanding a share of the educational budget for their own use.  But it eventually came about and anecdotal evidence gives every indication that it is working wonders in New York.  But there is still a long way to go.  We need to focus more resources on education at all levels, particularly on vocational high schools, community colleges and lifetime learning.  We need to assure college graduates that they won’t be burdened with crippling debt for the decades in which they will start families and purchase homes.  These are urgent problems but they are also awesomely complex.  Complexity itself is a complex subject.

In 1969, Beryl L. Crowe of Oregon State University published an article in which she claimed, “There has developed in the contemporary natural sciences a recognition that there is subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, environmental corruption, and the recovery of a livable urban environment, for which there are no technical solutions.” [1]  She continued that a similar recognition was emerging among social scientists about certain “current political problems” and she gave the identical examples.  The article was and remains controversial but might have been less so had she focused on different examples such as poverty, racism and income equity which are more complex and difficult to quantify than those she chose.  Thus, global warming can be measured but measuring racism is much more difficult.  Even poverty cannot be easily measured because it has many subjective indicators.  Lyndon Johnson, who grew up in Stonewall, Texas on the banks of the Pedernales River, once said, “We were poor but we didn’t know we were.”

Every program a government considers, whether simple or convoluted, competes with every other program and all programs have their constituencies.  Thus, the budgetary process requires the balancing of incommensurables:  guns versus butter in the metaphor of economists.  The scales used to weigh programs are often devoid of substantive programmatic goals, relying instead on political considerations.  Homeless people weigh very little in such a calculus and those who do advocate for them generally do so from a moral perspective rather than an economic one.  Which is exactly what the Times is doing when it castigates us for supposedly choosing to ignore the moral imperative that seems so obvious to its editors.

Complexity theory was first developed in the middle of the nineteenth century to deal with problems in the natural sciences that dealt in variables that were inherently imprecise or vague.  For example, the slightly erratic behavior of steam engines made them useless in precision operations.  Traditional or Aristotelian logic requires that variables be fully true or fully false and cannot cope with inconstancy.  Mathematicians and philosophers began to develop alternative logics including what is now known as fuzzy logic which many see as intellectually unsatisfying but which “works” in a wide variety of scientific and engineering contexts.  It is not clear that any current alternative logic could be applied to major social problems but it appears to have been used with some success in a variety of social media and related applications.  In the meantime, we have to re-think the role of ideology in informing policy.

Every community needs a widely shared social contract which is a polite way of referring to a common ideology.  In America, that need has been met by the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and perhaps a small number of other statements. [2]  The ideas –– or self-evident truths –– encapsulated in them have not been fulfilled but it would be hard to argue that progress has not been made.  Throughout our history, conflicts have arisen over whether and how different ideas fit into our ideology but in recent decades we have witnessed the so-called “culture wars” which question whether the ideas themselves are valid.  Perhaps the most threatening of these battles have been fought over civil rights and our commitment to it.  When the Supreme Court ruled that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal, [3] it set off decades of turmoil including copious bloodshed and a third party presidential campaign that captured five states and 13.5% of the vote for a racist candidate.  It also led to the creation of the Republican Party’s “southern strategy” in 1970 which has permeated the party’s philosophy ever since.

Ideology is not sacred scripture.  It evolves over time, often in fundamental ways. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  Does this mean all males but not females?  Or is it the generic mankind, human beings?  Does it include people held in slavery and, if so, do slaves enjoy the unalienable right to the liberty endowed to them by their creator?   On July 4, 1776, almost no one thought women had or should have rights equal to those of men.  When the Constitution was adopted in 1789, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a white person.  No one thought they had a right to vote because they were thought to be inferior and they were not citizens.  The Supreme Court explicitly ruled that they were not and could not be citizens in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. [4]  The Fourteenth Amendment changed that ideology in 1868 but change at the polling place came at a snail’s pace and is still incomplete.  Ideology has limits especially in the arena of political decision making.

In today’s world, the consensus of American opinion rejects slavery and patriarchy at least in theory and in public discourse, both of which have histories dating to the dawn of civilization.  As do poverty and homelessness which received little attention simply because they were part of the way the world had always been.  There were occasional revolts against the conditions and treatment of the poor.  The Peasants’ Revolt in fourteenth century brought about the end of serfdom in England.  Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 was a military failure but achieved several of its economic aims including debt relief and tax reforms demanded by the impoverished veterans who led it.  (It also gave rise to one of Thomas Jefferson’s less enlightened remarks, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Poverty as a social concern began to attract support from a generation of urban reformers in the late nineteenth century, people like Jacob Riis, Henry George, Walter Rauschenbusch, Ed McGlynn, Jane Addams and Dorothy Day.  Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives,  influenced many Americans including Theodore Roosevelt and laid the foundations of public policy that persisted until the 1960’s.  Success, however, was elusive.  For one thing, the housing provided by densely clustered high rise apartment houses was an improvement over the tenements but the “projects” were an enormous gamble that created more problems than they solved.

At present, New York is not a well-managed city.  Even a great manager like Michael Bloomberg was not able to cut through the ideological battles that occur every time a new policy initiative is proposed.  Among recent mayors, Bloomberg was an exception;  most have been little more than ideologues.  It may be that politics American style is not an effective way to address complex problems.  The challenge to find ways to bring empiricism into our decision making is as complex as our problems.

Subsequently

Twenty-four days after calling on the city to spend a vast but unspecified amount of money on the homelessness problem, the Times ran an editorial insisting it cut its projected post-covid budgetary deficit of more than $7 billion by a huge but unspecified amount.  It did claim the police budget could be cut by $1 billion or 16%.  The education budget could be slashed by more than $966 million.  The information technology budget could be cut by $29 million.  The total cuts come to one billion nine hundred sixty-six dollars or 28% of the deficit.  Does anybody at the Times read this stuff before sending it to the printer?

---

Notes

[1] Beryl L. Crowe, “The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited,” Science, 166:3909, pp. 1103-1107, 28 November, 1969.

[2] Of particular relevance to this essay is the freedom from want asserted by President Franklin Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address in 1941.  It was later adopted by the United Nations as Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

[3] Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

[4] Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).