King Arthur as President of Simple folks of America? Marx, Engels, Snark and Boojum.

There is always the wish in the mind of the ordinary simple folks that they could be ruled by a benevolent figure like King Arthur or his equivalent, It would be better still for the world if the most powerful country in the world, say America, had such a leader.

It is easy to pose the question in the title of this blog. One looks at the presidential candidates or presidents or important public figures of USA, The answer would be very easily a simple “no” … not even if you were allowed to consider Che Guevara!

The rub comes if we can think of “yes” as an answer. Then we have to pose some more questions. Therefore this blog?

It will be somewhat out of character if this blog is not as long as it is. Unfortunately, it could have become longer simply because there are so many things I have to learn through blogging... and there may be little time left?

The last time I started on a blog was more than four months ago. I thought I would write on Labour day, trace its origins, come to Chicago, find an Obama-connection and then argue about why Obama’s strong Chicasgo influence makes him use an altruist’s concern for the poor for his own selfish ends of remaining in power and bank-rolling his life style at the expense of the American people. We in India know about the qualities of our recent day politicians too well and need not be disappointed with the behavior of any politician, least of all any recent American president. All this I will leave to a later blog.

Obama is no King Arthur nor was meant to be. Obama, as an individual or as a president has seemingly (at least to somebody like me) has made little positive contribution of any kind to an original, typically American, philosophy that could improve the quality of the life of the ordinary American, regardless of colour or wealth or religion or education.

As world citizens, however, we were really hoping that a man such as Obama with an “ordinary” upbringing could come out of his middle-class-ness and rid the world of its petite bourgeoisie mentality of undeserved and unreasonable self-enhancement. We had also hoped that a benevolent American President, would take up global concerns that affect the life of the simple folk.

The danger is that the hunt for a King Arthur may be like the hunting of a Snark when all we have is the Boojum

Who are the simple folks?

They celebrate the May festival.

I will spend some time with the origins of May Day because this day has its roots in the earliest spontaneous folk festival which did not require a sanction from authority. To be a benevolent leader one could ask, like White’s “Once And Future King” Arthur asks of his queen Guinevere in the film version of Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot (just in case you have not seen the movie several times),

What do the simple folk do?
To help them escape when they're blue?
The shepard who is ailing, the milkmaid who is glum
The cobbler who is wailing from nailing his thumb
When they're beset and besieged
The folk not noblessly obliged

To which Guinevere guesses

“… They must have a system or two
They obviously outshine us at turning tears to mirth
Have tricks a royal highness is minus from birth …”

Guinevere, so lustily enacted by the very charming Vanessa Redgrave, would look forward to the month of May

… That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.
Tra la! It's here!
That shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts
Merrily appear!

It is this general acceptance in Europe of May being a lovely month that led to the celebration of May Day. This festival, it seems, is really from a pre-christian Celtic paganistic festival pronounced something like Beltane. This festival has some similarities to our own Holi festival especially in the way they light bonfires to mark the festival. Beltane also refers to the god of fire/light. This ancient pagan (relating to an ancient religion that had many gods and praised nature.. my computer tells me) festival is also associated with the Maypole festivities of Whitsun which is thought to be related to lingam worship (see “The Sacred Fire: The Story of Sex in Religion” By Ben Zion Goldberg) and a licence for free sex, as it is (or was, perhaps, before internet and virtuality came in) supposed to be in our Holi festival.

My father was born in the first of May. As children, we five siblings within twelve years of each other, have celebrated May 1 as my father’s birthday. As a six-year old or so, I concluded --- as usual wrongly --- that the public holiday on May 1 was part of celebration of my father’s birthday by the workers of the small factory where my father was chief engineer. As my innocent world expanded with age I was impressed by the number of other factory workers celebrating our father’s birthday.

We looked forward to that May-day holiday when we would picnic in My Ladye’s Garden (did not understand at that time why “lady” became “ladye”) before or after we went to the (now shifted) Madras zoo. Labour day was indeed a day of family celebration. Even if summer was not the best time the sea breeze was most cooling in the summer evenings when the typical madrasi male would roll up his lungi to ventilate his inners.

In the context of the May festival , it has to be mentioned that My Ladye’s garden was initiated by Charles Trevelyan in 1859 when he became a Governor of Madras (now Chennai) for a brief period. Trevelyan did it as a People’s Park which ended in a place that is now called Park town. So our family’s may day was somewhat in touch with the “pagan” spirit of May Day in a “holi”-day sense.

A more people-unfriendly view of Trevelyan is that of one who was put in charge for relief during the Irish famine in the mid 1900s when nearly a million people died. Trevelyan failed to bring the famine under control, He is supposed to have written (according to Wikipedia) "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated... The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people." Maybe Trevelyan made the people’s park for the Indian people as a penance for his Irish crime, ... or was it for for his ladye who “... remained in London for the sake of the children.” (Florence Nightingale’s letter in 1859).

Simple folks and the Proletariat Caste: A Loss of Innocence.

Our communist labour-union-leading relatives traced its origin for us to the workers’ revolution in which Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky figured. The workers, they said, revolted against the richness of the rich who profited from the wealth of the workers’ labours. This was how the class-distinction between workers and rich factory owners crept into our minds at our young impressionable age.

Marx and Engels had just entered manhood when they voiced their philosophies. Engels wrote Engels would write his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England” in 1845 when he was twenty four years old! That is the age when one is not afraid As a preface to the 1891 English Edition of his book, Engels would write

The book, an English translation of which is here republished, was first issued in Germany in 1845. The author, at that time, was young, twenty-four years of age, and his production bears thestamp of his youth with its good and its faulty features, of neither of which he feels ashamed.

Youth is never a problem for original thought and action. Einstein was 26 in the year when he published his works on Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of matter and energy, S N Bose’s work that led to the concept of bosons --- as in the so-called god particle Higgs boson --- was also that age when he finished his work. Enrico Fermi was twenty two when he realized the possibility of enormous nuclear potential energy in Einstein’s E = mc2 equation. Alexander was twenty two when he invaded Persia minor.

The immaturity of youth is a problem, however, when it comes to social issues since age does temper the impetuosity of youth, with the arrival of children and grandchildren and with the simple joys of running a family.

The loss of innocence of Camelot’s “simple folks” all over the developed/developing world is one of the more important consequences of the influence of the philosophies of Marx-Engels. The simple folks became the proletariat caste (Roman term, as we ought to know, for those whose children are their wealth because they perform manual services for the Roman empire that the aristocrats cannot). Engels would write “…The first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw materials …”

Since that time, the middle of the nineteenth century, the aim to be come a so-called class-less society, has seen instead a new hierarchy of caste systems within the salaried class. As Engels noted, “… the degree of intelligence of the various workers is in direct proportion to their relation to manufacture; and that the factory-hands are most enlightened as to their own interests, the miners somewhat less so, the agricultural labourers scarcely at all … .”

In the context of this article, it was the misery of the Irish workers in Manchester that led to Engels’ Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England in 1845 that eventually led to the workers’ revolution and to the amelioration of the conditions of the factory workers. The credibility of this revolution led eventually to the monopoly-like power of labour leaders. This revolution was destroyed by the Communist party of the Soviet union and re-phrased by the (now capitalist) Communist party of China. Both of these developments left the communist parties all over the world rudderless. With it, the theme of “upliftment of the proletariat” --- so common in the mid twentieth century --- vanished from political usage.

The salvation of the so-called poor, sadly it seems, can never come from the poor simply because the poor think themselves to be poor because of conspicuous images that drive them to want to be conspicuously rich also.

Their actual salvation seems to come from people who have been healthily and wealthy for several generations. These saviours are able to be generous without being conscious (say by tax concessions) about it.

The saviour has to be something like King Arthur in his Camelot.

Marx and Engels and King Arthur --- men with beards

A king such as King Arthur had to rule based on a philosophy on which he must have been advised on. Let us say that his advisor was Merlin the magician. Merlin may have been a magician to King Arthur, because Merlin’s advice worked like magic since he would not have understood the philosophy in its full context.

Let us also say that Marx-Engels to a modern ruler would be somthing like a Merlin.

Both Marx and Engels belonged to an affluent class which pu them, like a Buddha, to be in position to feel the sufferings of the poor from their truly privileged position. Because of their privileged position they could also be heard by people of consequence. Engels would write in the preface of his book on the conditions of the working class in England,

“... I am both glad and proud of having done so. Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour in obtaining a knowledge of the realities of life -- many an hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette; proud, because thus I got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of everyone but an English money-monger...”

The images of Marx and Engels above, presumably working on the conditions of the working class, show them in quite comfortable conditions. These conditions naturally made them appreciate the misery of the working class. Marx would seem to be the more convinced. Engels was probably more steet smart. He would publish his “authorised version” of an English Translation in America, hoping as usual to make some money.

When Engels made his classification of workers based on the degree of intelligence, he was, of course, like all non-proletariat intellectuals, unaware of the amount of intelligence used by an organic farmer because of his experience. In any sensible society of simple folks, this organic farmer, who cannot be thought of as part of a petite-bourgeois salaried class, should head any labour hierarchy simply because of the essential food he provides. Instead, in the modern world, the hierarchy of labour is headed by programmes generated by computers.These programmed machines of manufacture are in the hands of environmentally de-sensitized, conspicuously consuming, clerk-people. The conditions of these workers are naturally unstable since they become redundant when more efficient labour unfriendly programmes increase worker redundancy.

Engels and Marx become relevant in modern times because of the philosophy of their ideas, even if they rephrased old philosophies in terms of what was contenporart for their times, Their analyses do not depend (I think) on the actual working condition of a salaried class, Their importance came from their unorthodox views which they could sustain because of their affluence.
The images of Marx and Engels that we are familiar with are those with long beards. Fig 1 is taken from the internet, pens and relative positions of the two have changed. Engels in a woollen coat may have been visiting Marxr. A portrait on the wall behind (;eft of Fig 1) suggests an affluence associated with Marx in his earlier days. It is their beard which gave American politicians their phobia of people with long beards (Castro, Osama, holy muslims, Sikhs).

The growing of a beard could suggest a non-necessity to spend time shaving one’s self purely for the purpose of conforming. The series of photographs in the top row of Fig 2 shows Engels growing up from a cocky young lad of the upper classes, through an uncertain angry young man who has made his first protest, then basking in the comforts of his recognition till finally becoming a wise old man, a little uncertain and perhaps forgiving himself for some of his early inaccuracies.

Not all men with beard are associated with blood-spilling bolshevikism (say, Jesus Christ or Gabby Hayes --- he was the sidekick that provided the negative space that made heroes out of cowboy legends such as Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry)., Cricketing revolutionaty W G Grace (played cricket from age 17 to 61) was famous for his bird nest beard. Tendulkar by this example could break another record by playing till 2035, sharing as he does Grace’s financial acumen. I don’t think Tendulkar is hairy enough to grow a Grace-ly beard.

Marx’s Philosophical Problem

Karl Marx did not start his non-conforming life with a beard. He had the air of a confident young man, because of which perhaps he engaged in a difficult doctoral thesis on the difference between Democritean (from Democritus’ theory of atomos or indivisible) and Epicurian philosophy in Nature. Karl Marx’s dilemma was the following:-

Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but — how inconsistent! — they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general. I say that they stand diametrically opposed, and I shall now try to prove it.

Some of Marx’s statements (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch03.htm) are quite simple

“... while Democritus turns the sensuous world into subjective semblance, Epicurus turns it into objective appearance... ;
... Democritus, dissatisfied with philosophy, throws himself into the arms of empirical knowledge, Epicurus has nothing but contempt for the positive sciences, since in his opinion they contribute nothing to true perfection. ..."

Such contests between the philosophical and the empirical comes up in all aspects of life ... The philosophical aspects are most often imbibed by the deprived while the empirical or practical aspects are best suitable for the ordinary (non-monsanto?) farmer who has the more difficult task of understanding nature and drawing from her resources without upsetting her rhythm.

When Marx and Engels started their collaboration, they were perhaps guided by the Democritean approach. They required an analytical basis, not unlike aspiring scholars of that time. Just like the laws of motion in physics, they came up with “ … dialectics, or the laws of motion of nature, human society and human thought …” (most of the comments on dielectics in what follows immediately will be based on Robert Sewell’s “What is dialectical materialism? - A study guide with questions, extracts and suggested reading” http://www.marxist.com/what-is-dialectical-materialism.htm).

Dielectics (a method of argument for resolving contradictions or disagreement) is primarily meant by Marx and Engels (I think) to provide the required philosophy for the working class (producers of wealth) to understand the conflict in their relationship with the capitalist class (hoarders of wealth). Once this is understood it can be used as their most effective weapon in their fight against their exploitation by the capitalist class,

One important aspect of such a dielectic, that is to Hegel in western philosophy, is that for every thesis one seeks an antithesis and one makes progress by a synthesis that removes the contradiction till another antithesis is found.. and so on. This is a dynamic theory which changes with change. Change it must as the environment of the universe changes with time independent of the direction it goes.

Within the limited lifetime of interest in philosophy that is available to a human mind such changes become slow to grasp after a certain time. The synthesis becomes static and reaches a steady state in which contradictions are not perceived to exist. One then writes a textbook or a treatise that is used as a guide. This may be thought to be a crystallization of ideas but is actually a petrification. Outside such a fossilization of a living mind, however, change continues relentlessly, A given synthesis or treatise becomes erroneous and therefore obsolete with time. The dialectical process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis continues but any synthesis during a finite period of time remains incomplete.

The requirement for the fulfilment of this dialectical process is infinite time which is impossible for the ordinary human. In this case one requires an authoritative statement from one who has experienced infinite time (in any direction). This becomes the dogma of a doctrine or a revelation in religion.

One may conclude, as a corollary, that since one does not have infinite time in one life, such doctrine must come from another world where time has reached infinity (godliness) and no change in time is possible. This could provide the basis for a “god-given” treatise such as the Vedas. The following of the Vedas will then necessarily have to be ritualistic since we cannot know truth in our finite life time. On the other hand, those who live in a dynamic sense and perceive change, the time-dependent dynamic dialectical method of perception and inference are the only source of knowledge, with little interest in its end. It provides the philosophy for action in life. In the context of awareness of the Vedas, this is the interpretation of the Mimamsa philosophy.

The essential feature, at this point of my understanding, is that at every point of one’s life the essence of any experience (forward in time) at any instant of time is registered only because of its negative or contradictory memories (backward in time). We learn how to walk on two legs because of our memory that we fall if we move forward without walking properly. This we do instinctively, even if we do not realize that we fall because our centre of gravity falls outside our base of support and we can prevent ourselves from falling if we move our base of support of our centre of gravity before the time it would have taken to fall. The quicker we do it, the steadier our gait is. This is so in all aspects of our walk through life. This is an irreversible process. We cannot unlearn it simply we cannot un-experience it. Just as a fallen stone will not climb up.

Dielectical materialists are those who believe that matter always existed but the consciousness of the existence of matter came only from the mind of evolved species such as that in mankind. But if life is a reaction to change, then all changes must be considered as a life process. The requirement for change is a requirement to remove differences in potential that appears due to such a change. This does not require a cognitive mind. The notion that there is change even when there is no mind to perceive the changes suggests that time is independent of its perception by the mind and that there would be no existence in the absence of time or change.

Dialectical Materialism as applied to mankind (Historical Materialism) refers to the events in History that was created by man’s consciousness and has been applied to the role of man in his economic order and the contradictions that arise within. The class of mankind that controls production of wealth is in contradiction with the other classes. Historical materialism predicts the synthesis of such contradictions.

Because of its very contradictions, Marx”s conclusions derived in the early 19th century cannot be expected to be valid in the early twenty-first century.

The dialectical method --- not necessarily that of Marx --- will still be relevant.

The Snark of a Story teller

The storyteller has many times perhaps little use for the empirical or the philosophical sciences. His successes depend on the acceptability/gullibility of his readers and their own private biases of their life-experiences.

One of the more attractive storytellers must be Lewis Carroll, which is the pen-name of Charles Dodgson (the same name as his father, his grandfather, his great grandfather). Lewis Carroll did not grow a beard, probably because he stammered. One of his poems on “The Hunting of a Snark” had a bearded Bellman captaining his ship who lands his crew on a beach hunting for a Snark. The Bellman (second from tight in the bottom row of Fig 2)who was trusted so well as the Captain “... had only one notion for crossing the ocean, And that was to tingle his bell ... .”. Henry Holiday’s sketch of the bellman has quite a resemblance to Charles Darwin.

The poem begins thus
“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care; 
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair. 
“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew. 
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”