Trotter - Instincts Of The Herd In Peace And War - extracts

 Many attempts have been made to explain the behaviour of man as dictated by instinct. He is, in fact, moved by the promptings of such obvious instincts as self-preservation, nutrition, and sex enough to render the enterprise hopeful and its early spoils enticing. So much can so easily be generalized under these three impulses that the temptation to declare that all human behaviour could be resumed under them was irresistible. These early triumphs of materialism soon, however, began to be troubled by doubt. Man, in spite of his obvious duty to the contrary, would continue so often not to preserve himself, not to nourish himself and to prove resistant to the blandishments of sex, that the attempt to squeeze his behaviour into these three categories began to involve an increasingly obvious and finally intolerable amount of pushing and pulling, as well as so much pretence that he was altogether “in,” {17} when, quite plainly, so large a part of him remained “out,” that the enterprise had to be given up, and it was once more discovered that man escaped and must always escape any complete generalization by science.

A more obvious inference would have been that there was some other instinct which had not been taken into account, some impulse, perhaps, which would have no very evident object as regarded the individual, but would chiefly appear as modifying the other instincts and leading to new combinations in which the primitive instinctive impulse was unrecognizable as such. A mechanism such as this very evidently would produce a series of actions in which uniformity might be very difficult to recognize by direct observation, but in which it would be very obvious if the characters of this unknown “x” were available.

Now, it is a striking fact that amongst animals there are some whose conduct can be generalized very readily in the categories of self-preservation, nutrition, and sex, while there are others whose conduct cannot be thus summarized. The behaviour of the tiger and the cat is simple, and easily comprehensible, presenting no unassimilable anomalies, whereas that of the dog, with his conscience, his humour, his terror of loneliness, his capacity for devotion to a brutal master, or that of the bee, with her selfless devotion to the hive, furnishes phenomena which no sophistry can assimilate without the aid of a fourth instinct. But little examination will show that the animals whose conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive instinctive categories are gregarious. If then it can be shown that gregariousness is of a biological significance approaching in importance that of the other instincts, we may expect to find in it the source of these anomalies of conduct, and if we can also show {18} that man is gregarious, we may look to it for the definition of the unknown “x” which might account for the complexity of human behaviour.

*

Slightly more complex manifestations of the same tendency to homogeneity are seen in the desire for identification with the herd in matters of opinion. {32} Here we find the biological explanation of the ineradicable impulse mankind has always displayed towards segregation into classes. Each one of us in his opinions and his conduct, in matters of dress, amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain the support of a class, of a herd within the herd. The most eccentric in opinion or conduct is, we may be sure, supported by the agreement of a class, the smallness of which accounts for his apparent eccentricity, and the preciousness of which accounts for his fortitude in defying general opinion. Again, anything which tends to emphasize difference from the herd is unpleasant. In the individual mind there will be an unanalysable dislike of the novel in action or thought. It will be “wrong,” “wicked,” “foolish,” “undesirable,” or as we say “bad form,” according to varying circumstances which we can already to some extent define.

Manifestations relatively more simple are shown in the dislike of being conspicuous, in shyness and in stage fright. It is, however, sensitiveness to the behaviour of the herd which has the most important effects upon the structure of the mind of the gregarious animal. This sensitiveness is closely associated with the suggestibility of the gregarious animal, and therefore with that of man. The effect of it will clearly be to make acceptable those suggestions which come from the herd, and those only. It is of especial importance to note that this suggestibility is not general, and that it is only herd suggestions which are rendered acceptable by the action of instinct. Man is, for example, notoriously insensitive to the suggestions of experience. The history of what is rather grandiosely called human progress everywhere illustrates this. If we look back upon the development of some such thing as the steam-engine, we cannot fail to be struck by the extreme obviousness of each advance, and how {33} obstinately it was refused assimilation until the machine almost invented itself.

*

Now the desire for certitude is one of profound depth in the human mind, and possibly a necessary property of any mind, and it is very plausible to suppose that it led in these early days to the whole field of life being covered by pronouncements backed by the instinctive sanction of the herd. The life of the individual would be completely surrounded by sanctions of the most tremendous kind. He would know what he might and might not do, and what would happen if he disobeyed. It would be immaterial if experience confirmed these beliefs or not, because it would have incomparably less weight than the voice of the herd. Such a period is the only trace perceptible by the biologist of the Golden Age fabled by the poet, when things happened as they ought, and hard facts had not begun to vex the soul of man. In some such condition we still find the Central Australian native. His whole life, to its minutest detail, is ordained for him by the voice of the herd, and he must not, under the most dreadful {35} sanctions, step outside its elaborate order. It does not matter to him that an infringement of the code under his very eyes is not followed by judgment, for with tribal suggestion so compactly organized, such cases are in fact no difficulty, and do not trouble his belief, just as in more civilized countries apparent instances of malignity in the reigning deity are not found to be inconsistent with his benevolence.

Such must everywhere have been primitive human conditions, and upon them reason intrudes as an alien and hostile power, disturbing the perfection of life, and causing an unending series of conflicts.

Experience, as is shown by the whole history of man, is met by resistance because it invariably encounters decisions based upon instinctive belief, and nowhere is this fact more clearly to be seen than in the way in which the progress of science has been made.

*

Direct observation of man reveals at once the fact that a very considerable proportion of his beliefs are non-rational to a degree which is immediately obvious without any special examination, and with {36} no special resources other than common knowledge. If we examine the mental furniture of the average man, we shall find it made up of a vast number of judgments of a very precise kind upon subjects of very great variety, complexity, and difficulty. He will have fairly settled views upon the origin and nature of the universe, and upon what he will probably call its meaning; he will have conclusions as to what is to happen to him at death and after, as to what is and what should be the basis of conduct. He will know how the country should be governed, and why it is going to the dogs, why this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He will have strong views upon military and naval strategy, the principles of taxation, the use of alcohol and vaccination, the treatment of influenza, the prevention of hydrophobia, upon municipal trading, the teaching of Greek, upon what is permissible in art, satisfactory in literature, and hopeful in science.

The bulk of such opinions must necessarily be without rational basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by the expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have any opinion upon them at all. The rational method adequately used would have told him that on the great majority of these questions there could be for him but one attitude—that of suspended judgment.

In view of the considerations that have been discussed above, this wholesale acceptance of non-rational belief must be looked upon as normal. The mechanism by which it is effected demands some examination, since it cannot be denied that the facts conflict noticeably with popularly current views as to the part taken by reason in the formation of opinion.

It is clear at the outset that these beliefs are invariably regarded by the holder as rational, and {37} defended as such, while the position of one who holds contrary views is held to be obviously unreasonable. The religious man accuses the atheist of being shallow and irrational, and is met by a similar reply; to the Conservative, the amazing thing about the Liberal is his incapacity to see reason and accept the only possible solution of public problems. Examination reveals the fact that the differences are not due to the commission of the mere mechanical fallacies of logic, since these are easily avoided, even by the politician, and since there is no reason to suppose that one party in such controversies is less logical than the other. The difference is due rather to the fundamental assumptions of the antagonists being hostile, and these assumptions are derived from herd suggestion; to the Liberal, certain basal conceptions have acquired the quality of instinctive truth, have become “a priori syntheses,” because of the accumulated suggestions to which he has been exposed, and a similar explanation applies to the atheist, the Christian, and the Conservative. Each, it is important to remember, finds in consequence the rationality of his position flawless, and is quite incapable of detecting in it the fallacies which are obvious to his opponent, to whom that particular series of assumptions has not been rendered acceptable by herd suggestion.

To continue further the analysis of non-rational opinion, it should be observed that the mind rarely leaves uncriticized the assumptions which are forced on it by herd suggestion, the tendency being for it to find more or less elaborately rationalized justifications of them. This is in accordance with the enormously exaggerated weight which is always ascribed to reason in the formation of opinion and conduct, as is very well seen, for example, in the explanation of the existence of altruism as being due to man seeing that it “pays.” {38}It is of cardinal importance to recognize that in this process of the rationalization of instinctive belief, it is the belief which is the primary thing, while the explanation, although masquerading as the cause of the belief, as the chain of rational evidence on which the belief is founded, is entirely secondary, and but for the belief would never have been thought of. Such rationalizations are often, in the case of intelligent people, of extreme ingenuity, and may be very misleading unless the true instinctive basis of the given opinion or action is thoroughly understood.

This mechanism enables the English lady, who, to escape the stigma of having normal feet, subjects them to a formidable degree of lateral compression, to be aware of no logical inconsequence when she subscribes to missions to teach the Chinese lady how absurd it is to compress her feet longitudinally; it enables the European lady who wears rings in her ears to smile at the barbarism of the coloured lady who wears her rings in her nose; it enables the Englishman who is amused by the African chieftain’s regard for the top hat as an essential piece of the furniture of state to ignore the identity of his own behaviour when he goes to church beneath the same tremendous ensign.

The objectivist finds himself compelled to regard these and similar correspondences between the behaviour of civilized and barbarous man as no mere interesting coincidences, but as phenomena actually and in the grossest way identical, but such an attitude is possible only when the mechanism is understood by which rationalization of these customs is effected.

The process of rationalization which has just been illustrated by some of its simpler varieties is best seen on the largest scale, and in the most elaborate form, in the pseudosciences of political economy and ethics. Both of these are occupied in deriving {39} from eternal principles justifications for masses of non-rational belief which are assumed to be permanent merely because they exist. Hence the notorious acrobatic feats of both in the face of any considerable variation in herd belief.

*

Thus far sensitiveness to the herd has been discussed in relation to its effect upon intellectual processes. Equally important effects are traceable in feeling.

It is obvious that when free communication is possible by speech, the expressed approval or disapproval of the herd will acquire the qualities of identity or dissociation from the herd respectively. To know that he is doing what would arouse the disapproval of the herd will bring to the individual the same profound sense of discomfort which would accompany actual physical separation, while to know that he is doing what the herd would approve will give him the sense of rightness, of gusto, and of stimulus which would accompany physical presence in the herd and response to its mandates. In both cases it is clear that no actual expression by the herd is necessary to arouse the appropriate feelings, which would come from within and have, in fact, the qualities which are recognized in the dictates of conscience. Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal. A dog and a cat caught in the commission of an offence will both recognize that punishment is coming; but the dog, moreover, knows that he has done wrong, and he will come to be punished, unwillingly it is true, and as if dragged along by some power outside him, while the cat’s sole impulse is to escape. The rational recognition of the sequence of act and punishment is equally clear to the gregarious and to the solitary animal, but it is the former only who understands {41} that he has committed a crime, who has, in fact, the sense of sin. That this is the origin of what we call conscience is confirmed by the characteristics of the latter which are accessible to observation. Any detailed examination of the phenomena of conscience would lead too far to be admissible here. Two facts, however, should be noticed. First, the judgments of conscience vary in different circles, and are dependent on local environments; secondly, they are not advantageous to the species to the slightest degree beyond the dicta of the morals current in the circle in which they originate. These facts—stated here in an extremely summary way—demonstrate that conscience is an indirect result of the gregarious instinct, and is in no sense derived from a special instinct forcing men to consider the good of the race rather than individual desires.

*

The next feature of practical interest is connected with the hypothesis, which we attempted in the former article to demonstrate, that irrational belief forms a large bulk of the furniture of the mind, and is indistinguishable by the subject from rational verifiable knowledge. It is obviously of cardinal importance to be able to effect this distinction, for it is the failure to do so which, while it is not the cause of the slowness of advance in knowledge, is the mechanism by which this delay is brought about. Is there, then, we may ask, any discoverable touchstone by which non-rational opinion may be distinguished from rational? Non-rational judgments, being the product of suggestion, will have {44} the quality of instinctive opinion, or, as we may call it, of belief in the strict sense. The essence of this quality is obviousness; the truth held in this way is one of James’s “a priori syntheses of the most perfect sort”; to question it is to the believer to carry scepticism to an insane degree, and will be met by contempt, disapproval, or condemnation, according to the nature of the belief in question. When, therefore, we find ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form, or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a non-rational one, and probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.

Opinions, on the other hand, which are acquired as the result of experience alone do not possess this quality of primary certitude. They are true in the sense of being verifiable, but they are unaccompanied by that profound feeling of truth which belief possesses, and, therefore, we have no sense of reluctance in admitting inquiry into them. That heavy bodies tend to fall to the earth and that fire burns fingers are truths verifiable and verified every day, but we do not hold them with impassioned certitude, and we do not resent or resist inquiry into their basis; whereas in such a question as that of the survival of death by human personality we hold the favourable or the adverse view with a quality of feeling entirely different, and of such a kind that inquiry into the matter is looked upon as disreputable by orthodox science and as wicked by orthodox religion. In relation to this subject, it may be remarked, we often see it very interestingly shown that the holders of two diametrically opposed opinions, one of which is certainly right, may both show by their attitude that the belief is held {45} instinctively and non-rationally, as, for example, when an atheist and a Christian unite in repudiating inquiry into the existence of the soul.

A third practical corollary of a recognition of the true gregariousness of man is the very obvious one that it is not by any means necessary that suggestion should always act on the side of unreason. The despair of the reformer has always been the irrationality of man, and latterly some have come to regard the future as hopeless until we can breed a rational species. Now, the trouble is not irrationality, not a definite preference for unreason, but suggestibility—that is, a capacity for accepting reason or unreason if it comes from the proper source.

This quality we have seen to be a direct consequence of the social habit, of a single definite instinct, that of gregariousness, the same instinct which makes social life at all possible and altruism a reality.

It does not seem to have been fully understood that if you attack suggestibility by selection—and that is what you do if you breed for rationality—you are attacking gregariousness, for there is at present no adequate evidence that the gregarious instinct is other than a simple character and one which cannot be split up by the breeder. If, then, such an effort in breeding were successful, we should exchange the manageable unreason of man for the inhuman rationality of the tiger.

The solution would seem rather to lie in seeing to it that suggestion always acts on the side of reason; if rationality were once to become really respectable, if we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a foul disease, then the dangers of man’s suggestibility would be turned into advantages. We {46} have seen that suggestion already has begun to act on the side of reason in some small part of the life of the student of science, and it is possible that a highly sanguine prophetic imagination might detect here a germ of future changes.

Again, a fourth corollary of gregariousness in man is the fact expounded many years ago by Pearson that human altruism is a natural instinctive product. The obvious dependence of the evolution of altruism upon increase in knowledge and inter-communication has led to its being regarded as a late and a conscious development—as something in the nature of a judgment by the individual that it pays him to be unselfish. This is an interesting rationalization of the facts because in the sense in which “pay” is meant it is so obviously false. Altruism does not at present, and cannot, pay the individual in anything but feeling, as theory declares it must. It is clear, of course, that as long as altruism is regarded as in the nature of a judgment, the fact is overlooked that necessarily its only reward can be in feeling. Man is altruistic because he must be, not because reason recommends it, for herd suggestion opposes any advance in altruism, and when it can the herd executes the altruist, not of course as such but as an innovator. This is a remarkable instance of the protean character of the gregarious instinct and the complexity it introduces into human affairs, for we see one instinct producing manifestations directly hostile to each other—prompting to ever advancing developments of altruism, while it necessarily leads to any new product of advance being attacked. It shows, moreover, as will be pointed out again later, that a gregarious species rapidly developing a complex society can be saved from inextricable confusion only by the appearance of reason and the application of it to life. {47}

Again, of two suggestions, that which the more perfectly embodies the voice of the herd is the more acceptable. The chances an affirmation has of being accepted could therefore be most satisfactorily expressed in terms of the bulk of the herd by which it is backed.

It follows from the foregoing that anything which dissociates a suggestion from the herd will tend to ensure such a suggestion being rejected. For example, an imperious command from an individual known to be without authority is necessarily disregarded, whereas the same person making the same suggestion in an indirect way so as to link it up with the voice of the herd will meet with success.

The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

 Bigger Issue

This, of course, brings us to the bigger issue, which is, how do we know what really happened? The answer to that question is historical research, but that is precisely what the delict "holocaust denial" has been created to prevent. Holocaust denial is another word for Jewish control of discourse, in particular historical discourse, in particular historical discourse about World War II. If a historian publishes something that a powerful Jew, which is to say a Jew with powerful backers, dislikes, that person will be punished. If the person in question lives by writing books, as David Irving once did, the Lipstadt brigade will get him blacklisted in the publishing industry. If the person in question is a professor, the big Jews will try to get him fired, as Deborah Lipstadt herself did in the case of Professor David O'Connell. In this instance, Lipstadt failed, but David O'Connell's case is not typical in this regard.

More typical is the case of Norman Finkelstein, who was fired from his job at DePaul University in Chicago. The fact that Finkelstein was a Jew himself doesn't matter. It's the big Jews, in this case Alan Dershowitz, who decide who is to live and who is to die in academe and publishing. Finkelstein wrote a devastating critique of Dershowitz's book The Case for Israel, and, as a result, Dershowitz set out to destroy Finkelstein's career. It was, in many ways, a typically Jewish response, the academic version of "You'll never work in this town again." What followed was equally Jewish. In fact Finkelstein characterized the dispute as a contest over "who was the toughest Jew from Borough Park." The definitive answer to that question is in: the big Jew from Borough Park is Alan Dershowitz, who got Finkelstein fired with the collaboration of the supine Catholic priest who is president of DePaul University. Among other things, this also shows that a selection process is at work among Jews in academe. Any Jew who goes against the interests of organized Jewry will get destroyed by the ruthless academic enforcer Jews who represent their interests. Most Jews are immune to struggles like this because they fall into the broad, gray middle category of fellow travelers, Jews who go along with the agenda in order to collect big salaries for a cushy job.

But there are larger lessons to be learned here. First of all, when if comes to a choice between money and principle, Catholic universities go for the money. Secondly, the fact that academe has become the site of unseemly brawls like this is largely the result of Jewish influence in academe. As Professor Lipstadt made abundantly clear in her talk, the university not the place where the big Jews seek the truth. The university is a place where Jews settle scores. It's where they punish people who threaten the Jewish hegemony over discourse.

This should not surprise us. The university is not a Jewish creation. It is a Catholic creation of the Catholic Middle Ages, and so it should not come as a surprise that Jews have all of the difficulties which come with functioning in an alien environment when they are admitted to universities. For over 600 years, from roughly the beginning of the13th to the middle of the 19th century, Catholics were involved in the creation and preservation of the university as a place where one engaged in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. This was also the place and period of time during which representational art reached its culmination as well. The link between these phenomena--art and the university as manifestations of the Logos which finds its embodiment in Christ and its cultural expression in Catholicism--is no coincidence. Conversely, the Jewish subversion of academe is similar to the Jewish subversion of the art world, something which occurred during the same period of time and, as Israel Shamir points out in a brilliant article "A Study of Art," in his book, Caballa of Power, for the same reasons.

Modern art is controlled by Jews. Shamir is sensitive to the sensibilities this claim offends -- "'Does it matter that they are Jewish?' asks the annoyed reader" -- but the facts speak for themselves:

The Jewish influence in modern art is well attested. By 1973, some estimated that 75-80 percent of the 2500 core "art market" personnel of the United States-art dealers, art curators, art critics, and art collectors-were Jewish. In 2001, according to ARTnews, at least eight of the "Top Ten" US art collectors were Jewish: Debbie and Leon Black, Edythe and Eli Broad, Doris and Donald Fisher, Ronnie and Samuel Heyman, Marie-Josee and Henry R. Kravits, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, and Stephen Wynn.

"Today," wrote Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "Jews enjoy every phase of the art world: as artists, dealers, collectors, critics, curators, consultants, and patrons. In fact the contemporary art scene has a strong Jewish flavour. In some circles, the wheelers and dealers are referred to as the Jewish Mafia since they command power, prestige, and most of all money."

In 1996 Jewish art historian Eunice Lipton explained that she went into a career as an art historian in order to be in a field dominated by Jews: "I wanted to be where the Jews were, that is, I wanted a profession that would allow me tacitly to acknowledge my Jewishness through the company that I kept." The field of art history was filled with Jews. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (former publisher of the New York Times) eventually became its chairman. He oversaw an institution in which Jews, said George Goodman, "have enriched every area of the Museum's collections . ..."

By the 1980s, four of the ten board members that dole out the MacArthur Foundation "genius awards" were also Jewish; two Jews also sat on the board of the Russell Sage Foundation. The Kaplan Fund also has had an important impact on the art community in divvying out awards. One of J. M. Kaplan's daughters was the Chairman of the New York State Arts Council. Joan Kaplan Davidson was appointed as chairman of the $34 million New York State Arts Council in 1975 despite the fact that she was "not professionally trained in the arts." The Getty Museum . . . has consistently had Jews at the economic helm. . . . [former chairman] Harold Williams . . . was "raised in a Labor Zionist home in East Los Angeles." The new president of the J. Paul Getty trust is another Jewish administrator, Barry Munitz, . . . .

After a summary that covers the whole spectrum of modern art, Shamir concludes nonetheless that, "The fact that Jews are so dominating in the art world is very rarely publicly acknowledged. It is forbidden-for anyone, anywhere -- to discuss the subject for fear of being branded 'anti-Semitic.'"

The art world is dominated by Jews, not because they are good at producing art, but rather because during the course of the 20th century, Jewish ascendancy rose in America and American ascendancy rose in the world and the art world as well. As a result: "The artist as creator of art disappeared and gave place to the museum curator, the collection owner. It is he who decides what sort of junk will be displayed, whose name will be written under the photo of tinned soup or a dead rat."

Shamir is basing his verdict in this instance on a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, a Jewish creation (both the architect Frank Gehry and the funders, the Guggenheim family, were Jews) which is filled with junk and, inexplicably, an exhibition of Armani suits. In this world of Jewish art, "Only the Armani brand reigns supreme, impervious to the curator's will." The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao provides "a good place to contemplate the present decay, nay, demise of European visual art," which is now made up of "Rotten decomposed pig trunks in formalthehyde," pornography, and anything else that "became a piece of art by the decision of two Mammonites, the curator and the collector."

How did this happen? The crucial middle term in both equations (art and the university) is capitalism. The "economic freedom" of capitalism is traceable to the distinction between the Jewish prohibition on taking usury from a fellow Jew, and the permission which allowed it to be taken from "strangers." This differential first brought about a "complete transformation of commerce and industry," and then once capitalist principles became the cultural norm, other institutions (including art and academe) as well:

The theory of price in the Talmud and the Codes in so far as it affected trade between Jew and Jew, is exactly parallel to the scholastic doctrine of justum pretium which was prevalent in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. But as between Jew and non-Jew, there was no just price. Price was formed, as it is today, by the "higgling of the market." . . . The differential treatment of non-Jews in Jewish commercial law resulted in the complete transformation of the idea of commerce and industry in the direction of more freedom. If we have called the Jews the Fathers of Free Trade, and therefore the pioneers of capitalism, let us note here that they were prepared for this role by the free-trading spirit of the commercial and industrial law, which received an enormous impetus towards a policy of laissez-faire by its attitude toward strangers. Clearly, intercourse with strangers could not but loosen the bonds of personal duties and replace them by economic freedom. (Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, pp. 246-7).

The spirit of capitalism brought about a similar transformation of both the art world and academe. Shamir calls this spirit "Mammon," something which he considers

the personification of capitalist Class Interest. A capitalist may wish to sell drinking water, but Mammon wants to poison all water in order to force everybody to buy drinking water. A capitalist may build the mall; but Mammon wants to destroy the world outside the mall, for the outside world interferes with the only meaningful occupation, shopping.

Since "Mammon will try to eliminate every distraction to shopping," the Jewish spirit which created the system of Mammon known as capitalism will "turn every kind of art into Conceptual art" because "For Mammonites, Art is a distraction from the most important occupation, adoration of Mammon. Mammonite reviews of Art concentrate on the price of Art."

Jews are never content to integrate themselves into existing structures, whether those structures are states, universities, art museums or the military. They feel compelled to infiltrate and subvert the institutions which admit them as members. In the art world, the name this Jewish infiltration and subversion goes by is "conceptual art." In an article which appeared in The New Statesman, Ivan Massow, then chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, "noticed the damage this causes for the artists who are forced to fit into the Procrustean bed of this anti-art":

It seems sad that so many talented young artists, clawing to be noticed for their craft, are forced to ditch their talent and reinvent themselves as creators of video installations, or a machine that produces foam in the middle of a room, in order to be recognized as contemporary artists. ... We need art lovers to tell artists that they're not obliged to reinvent themselves into creators of piles of crap, or pass their work around like samizdat.

As some indication that Deborah Lipstadt's affliction is shared by other descendants of the Cheka, shortly after those words appeared in print, Massow got sacked. Massow's expulsion from the synagogue that the British art establishment had become was, as Shamir points out,

led by the Jewish cultural tsar Nicholas Serota, and by the Jewish art collector and advertising magnate, a friend of Pinochet, Thatcher, and Conrad Black, Charles Saatchi. His power is unique, and an art critic, Norman Rosenthal of the British Royal Academy, suggested that "the Saatchis are probably the most important collectors of modern art anywhere in the world."

Conceptual art isn't art, but it is Jewish. It signals the culmination of the Jewish take-over of modern art. Conceptual art requires no artistic ability, talent or skill. That's why Jews gravitate toward it and promote it. It's an example of Jews defining art as what they do rather than defining art in its relationship to Logos. It's as if, Shamir says at another point, we all woke up one day and found that only cripples could compete at the Olympics. Or, to give another example, to find out that the high jump had been replaced by a chess match. Jewish domination of the art world was not "due to the great achievements of Jewish artists." Quite to the contrary, Shamir points out that 

The Jews were extremely ill-equipped for their conquest of Olympus. For many generations, Jews never entered churches and hardly ever saw paintings. They were conditioned to reject image as part of their rejection of idols. In the course of a two thousand-year-long selection process, the visual gifts of Jews were not developed, as opposed to the abilities to learn, argue, and convince, honed to perfection in the Talmudic environment.

Shamir goes on to add that "Rejection of Christ," the Logos incarnate who is the "main fountain of creativity," was the ultimate reason why Jews could not be artists, because

There is no visual art or poetry outside of God; at best the godless person can imitate art. For this reason, Jews are, as a rule, poor painters and sculptors. . . .While their mastery of word and ideology is very high (well above the average of 100 at 130), their average visual ability is only 75, extremely low. One can consider it a scientific proof of "no art without Christ." Indeed, until recently there were no important Jewish painters or sculptors. The Jewish temple was supposedly built by Phoenecians and Greeks, and it had very few images. Even the Illumination of Jewish manuscripts was usually done by non-Jewish artists, who made very obvious errors trying to copy Jewish letters.

The same thing applies, mutatis mutandis to the university. The people whose defining characteristic is rejection of Logos cannot excel in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. If they are allowed into the university they will subvert the principles of the university and redefine academic achievement things that Jews do well. If the university were the Olympics, chess would replace basketball. If Jews controlled the Olympics as effectively as they controlled the art world, only cripples could compete.

In order to disguise their total lack of artistic talent, "Visually handicapped Jews created a similar anomaly -- that of non-visual 'conceptual' art" because "Preparation of these items places no demand on artistic abilities. They can be done by anybody. Such art is perfectly within Jewish abilities. Moreover, Jews with their good ability to produce ideas and read iconography will surely succeed in it. Jews bend art to fit their abilities, in order for them to succeed in this difficult (for them) occupation."

The culmination of this trend to conceptualize and thereby redefine art can be found in works of "art," like "Piss Christ," an artifact which kills two birds with one stone, combining Jewish subversion of the art world with Jewish hatred of Christ. "Piss Christ" is a work of art because, as Marcel Duchamp once said, it is "in a museum." "Piss Christ" is a work of art because a museum curator said it was. In this instance, the man responsible was Leonard Lauder, the Jew who runs the Whitney Museum, a man who was, according to Shamir, "a great friend of Ariel Sharon." Are we talking about a conspiracy? Shamir lays the blame at the feet of Group Interest:

For Jews, their Group interest lays in undermining visual art, for they can't compete in it. The even deeper Group Interest of Jews is to undermine Christianity, their main enemy. We see this interest satisfied . . . by their relentless attack on Mel Gibson, who dared to produce a film about Christ. ... As sacrality in Europe is unavoidably Christian, profanation of art is certainly within Jewish Group Interests. It does not mean the Jews, or even some Jews, understand that they act in their own group interest.

This is not a new phenomenon. Shamir sees the Saatchis of the world, the Jews responsible for the creation of conceptual art, as the descendants of "The Jews [who] were prominent in the great tragedy of Byzantine art, the iconoclasm. The contemporary writers leave us no doubt: Jews (a powerful community in those days as nowadays) were extremely active in promoting this concept."

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the university; however, I see the cause of this convergence in the form, which is to say, formal causality. The student of formal causality who attempts to deal with Jewish influence at the university is confronted with a curious philosophical phenomenon. People regularly refer to Catholics, Methodists, and Baptists (As for example, when they say 'Baylor is a Baptist university'), but the minute one refers to Jews, the term is stricken as impermissible.

The issue is philosophical. It is based on a philosophical error known as nominalism, which maintained that there was no such thing as "trees," only individual birches, pines, oaks, etc. This extreme form of nominalism was noticed by Hilaire Belloc in the 1920s in his book on The Jews, when he wrote, "If anyone referred to a swindler as a Jew, he was an anti-Semite," but exposing the absurdity of the claim did little to stop the tendency.

In order to unravel this error at the bottom of what is in reality a ban on thought, we need to distinguish between essence and existence. If I say that a dog is a four-legged creature with fur, I am referring to essence not existence, and my claim is not refuted when someone says, "Yesterday, I saw a hairless, Mexican dog with three legs."

Similarly, the philosophical validity of the term "Catholic" or "Jew" is not refuted when someone claims "I know a Catholic who is proabortion." Or "Are you saying my Jewish mother-in-law is a revolutionary?" Both the Catholic and Jew get their identity qua Catholic or Jew from the form. In the case of Catholics, that form is acceptance of Christ the Logos as defined or determined by the Catholic faith, i.e., by scripture, tradition and the Magisterium. In the case of Jews, that form is defined by rejection of Christ and Logos, as determined by rabbinic interpretation of the Talmud. Catholics are formed by the gospels; Jews are formed by the Talmud. The result is two radically different cultures.

If the culmination of Catholic culture was the creation of the university, the culmination of Jewish culture was capitalism, which, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century in America, gradually devoured the university, by restructuring it according to capitalist, which is to say, Jewish principles, in particular those articulated by Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, a gang of thugs which rivals Professor Lipstadt in its brutality. The institution of tenure, which was a relic of the Middle Ages, was subverted and then replaced by a system in which Jewish superstar professors like Stanley Fish could earn six figure salaries (While at UIC, Stanley Fish earned more per annum than the Governor of Illinois), while the majority of the teaching was done by wage slave adjuncts. 

During the more than half a millennium when Catholics were using the university to develop theology, metaphysics, physics and eventually the sciences that led to the industrial revolution, scholarship for Jews meant studying the Talmud, which meant among other things, learning how to cheat the goyim in business transactions and then justify those practices with a veneer of pious rationalization. This is not my opinion; it is the verdict of Heinrich Graetz, the father of Jewish historiography, who claimed in his magnum opus that the study of the Talmud led to the moral corruption of the Polish Jews:

To twist a phrase out of its meaning, to use all the tricks of the clever advocate, to play upon words, and to condemn what they did not know . . . such were the characteristics of the Polish Jew. . . . Honesty and right-thinking he lost as completely as simplicity and truthfulness. He made himself master of all the gymnastics of the Schools and applied them to obtain advantage over any one more cunning than himself. He took delight in cheating and overreaching, which gave him a sort of joy of victory. But his own people he could not treat that way: they were as knowing as he. It was the non-Jew who, to his loss, felt the consequences of the Talmudically trained mind of the Polish Jew.

This assertion and what follows are recounted in my book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History. The only thing that saved Graetz himself from the fate of Polish Jews was German culture, the German Enlightenment in particular, and role models like Moses Mendelssohn and Salomon Maimun, who saw their own separation from Talmudic culture as a liberation from Jewish bondage.

And yet in spite of that liberation and the rise of the maskilim in the Pale of the Settlement, when the Jews were finally admitted to the university in significant numbers, as happened in Russia in the mid-19th century, they used the university as a staging ground for revolutionary activity. The same thing happened in America. In his memoir Commies, Ronald Radosh describes how he and other Jews in the Young Communist League were sent from New York to Wisconsin to take over the university there.

The same thing happened in slightly different fashion at Notre Dame. As one has come to expect, the main culprit in this matter was the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC. In addition to being the president who stole Notre Dame from the Catholic Church, Father Hesburgh has the distinction of hiring the first Jew at Notre Dame, Samuel Shapiro, who was brought into the history department. I knew Shapiro for the last 20 some years of his life; he would show up at my house and plunk himself down on the living room sofa periodically. I visited him in the hospital when he was dying, and I wrote his obituary after his death. In the Middle Ages Catholics were told to avoid contact with Jews because, they were told, the only time a Jew wants to talk with a Christian is to subvert his faith or corrupt his morals. For over 20 years Sam Shapiro tried to do just that. He attempted to undermine my faith -- largely by trying to convert me to Darwinism -- and I tried to get him to convert to Catholicism. In the end, neither project was successful. I have written about this elsewhere; the obituary can be read at culturewars.com. For now I'd like to propose the Jewish corollary to the above statement, namely, all too often the only time a goy wants to talk to a Jew is when the goy wants big money. This was true of the princes in Medieval Europe, and it led to misery among the population at large and pogroms against the Jews, who were granted privileges that were invariably economically ruinous for the population at large in exchange for the low interest loans they provided to princes. Needless to say, this deal often included princes of the church.

L'affaire Williamson:

The Catholic Church and Holocaust Denial

By E. Michael Jones

Humility, Gratitude and Patience

 Humility

Our society encourages navel-gazing and celebrates entitlement and exuberance. Economic interests lie not in humility but in pride and hubris, while to call something or someone ‘humble’ most often connotes that the thing or person is simple, contemptible, or of little worth.

To distinguish it from modesty is the first step in finding humility. Like ‘humiliation’, ‘humility’ derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Modesty on the other hand derives from modus, ‘manner’ or ‘measure’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), the character of Uriah Heep is notable for his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in a bid to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and internal. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

True humility, on the other hand, derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one person among billions on a small planet among billions, like a bacterium on a titbit of cheese. Of course, human beings cannot remain this level-headed for longer than three winks, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more aware of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges upon non-existence. A mote of dust does not consider itself superior or inferior to other motes of dust, or concern itself with their comings and goings. Enthralled by the miracle of existence, truly humble people live not for themselves or their image, but for life itself.

Drunk on their humility, humble people can sometimes come across as arrogant. In 399 BCE, at the age of 70, Socrates was indicted for offending the Olympian gods and breaking the law against impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’. At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates turned around to the 501 jurors and said:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates, who looked like a tramp, had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chærephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the Pythian priestess replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’

Was Socrates lacking in humility at his trial? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he put on an arrogant display because he wanted to die, because he was ill or infirm and knew that by dying the death of a martyr his thought and teachings would be preserved for posterity. Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant, in which case humble people may need to hide their humility under a cloak of… modesty—which, at his trial, Socrates was unwilling to do.

To be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or belittled, and attack us in return. Because humble people are in fact very big, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty.

Socrates is not the only humble person who occasionally comes across as arrogant. In fact, there is a propensity for such ‘arrogance’ among celebrated thinkers and artists. Even doubting Descartes had his moments. In an appendix to his Discourse, he let slip: ‘I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.’

Erasmus said that ‘humility is truth’. Humble people are disinclined to conceal the truth because they are by nature truth seekers: it is often through philosophy that they found humility, and this humility in turn invites philosophy. Philosophy, the art of perspective, if carried out in earnest, eventually leads to clarity of thought, such that humble people are often highly productive or prolific. If a person is insightful and inspired, chances are good that he or she is also humble.

Religious traditions are keen to emphasize humility in their teachings. In Greek mythology, Aidos, the daimona of shame, reverence, and humility, held people back from doing wrong. In around the eighth century BCE, Hesiod wrote: ‘Aidos and Nemesis with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods…’ Some of the most vivid Greek myths, like those of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Œdipus, Phæthon, Œdipus, and Icarus, who famously flew too close to the sun, can be read as warnings against hubris, which is the defiance of the gods from excessive pride, leading to downfall or nemesis.

In the Christian canon, pride is the original sin, since it is from pride that the angel Lucifer fell from Heaven to become Satan:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

The Book of Numbers speaks of Moses as ‘a man exceeding [sic.] meek above all men that dwelt upon earth’, and the Book of Proverbs teaches that ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’. Similarly, Matthew says that ‘whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted’.

St Augustine (d. 430 CE) held that humility is the foundation for all the other virtues: without humility, one can have only the appearance of virtue, but not the thing itself. In one of his sermons, he preached: ‘Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.’

In the Buddhist tradition, humility is part of the spiritual practice, and an outcome of it: one cannot attain enlightenment unless one has perfected humility. In Taoism, humility is one of the Three Treasures, or basic virtues, along with compassion and frugality. As for Islam, the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission (to the will of God)’.

But not all of the canonical philosophers thought highly of humility. Aristotle omitted it from his list of virtues, and Hume and Nietzsche went so far as to condemn it.

(...)

There is much to chew upon in Nietzsche’s master-slave dichotomy, but he and Hume seem to confuse or confound humility with modesty or meekness. Both humility and modesty involve self-abnegation, but whereas modesty involves self-abnegation for the sake of others or for the sake of short-term ease and favour, humility involves self-abnegation for the sake of a higher truth and better self.

There is more and more evidence to suggest that, far from being inhibiting, humility is a highly adaptive trait. Researchers have linked it to pro-social dispositions such as self-control, gratitude, generosity, tolerance, and forgiveness; and associated it not only with better personal and social relationships, as might be expected, but also with better health outcomes, superior academic and job performance, and a more effective leadership style.

Because humility de-emphasizes the self, it diminishes the need for self-deception, which in turn frees us to admit to and learn from our mistakes; contemplate alternative perspectives and possibilities; recognize the qualities and contributions of others; and respect, value, and submit to legitimate authority.

In sum, humility could not be more different from mere modesty or meekness. If humility resembles anything, it is in fact the ancient concept of piety, or right relations, but stripped or abstracted of piety’s more concrete and sectarian religious dimensions.

Humility is the real religion.

Gratitude

Gratitude [Latin gratia, grace] never came easily to us men and women, and is a diminishing virtue in modern times. In our consumerist society, we tend to focus on what we lack, or on what other people have that we do not, whereas gratitude is the feeling of appreciation for what we already have. More than that, it is the recognition that the good in our life can come from something that is beyond us and beyond our control—be it other people, nature, or a higher power—and that owes little or nothing to us. Gratitude is not a technique or stratagem, but a complex and refined moral disposition. It has been defined poetically as ‘the memory of the heart’ or ‘the moral memory of mankind’.

It is easy enough, both for the debtor and the benefactor, to mistake indebtedness for gratitude. Indebtedness is a much more contained and restricted obligation, or perceived obligation, on the part of the debtor to recompense or otherwise compensate the benefactor, not because recompense is a pleasure but because obligation is a pain. Unlike gratitude, indebtedness can lead the debtor to avoid and even resent the benefactor.

As philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) put it:

In the case of certain men, the more they owe, the more they hate. A trifling debt makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him an enemy.

Gratitude should also be distinguished from appreciation, which is the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of a person or thing, but without the dimension of awe, reverence, and humility that is at the core of gratitude.

Gratitude is magnified if the conferred benefit is unexpected, or if the benefactor is of a higher social standing than the debtor. But if a benefit comes to be expected, both it and the benefactor tend to be taken for granted by the beneficiary—a common feature of tired relationships, and a rationale for doling out gifts and favours on a variable ratio schedule. Every Christmas, I give the refuse collectors in my street a bottle of wine. One year, the gift failed to materialize, and when it eventually did, some time in February, they accepted it only grudgingly.

Gratitude is also magnified if, in benefiting us, the benefactor touches our feelings. Unless our feelings are moved, we tend to respond not with gratitude but with mere appreciation—which is why a gift ought to be accompanied by a thoughtful card. By the same token, the teachers whom we hold dearest in our hearts are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to the world.

In paying homage to something outside ourselves, gratitude enables us to connect with something that is not only larger than ourselves but also benevolent, even nurturing. By turning us outward, it opens our eyes to the miracle that is life, something to marvel at, revel in, and celebrate, rather than forget, ignore, or take for granted as it passes us by. Gratitude encourages us to joy, tranquillity, awareness, enthusiasm, and empathy, while removing us from anxiety, sadness, loneliness, regret, and envy, with which it is fundamentally incompatible. All this it does because it opens us up to a bigger and better perspective, shifting our focus from what we lack or strive for to all that we already have, to the bounty that surrounds us, and, above all, to life itself, which is the fount of all opportunity and possibility. This eagle or godlike perspective frees us to live life, no longer for ourselves, but for life itself.

For this reason, the philosopher Cicero (d. 43 BCE) called gratitude the greatest of the virtues, and, more than that, the mother of all the other virtues. Today, science has begun to catch up with Cicero. Studies have linked gratitude with increased satisfaction, motivation, and energy; better sleep and health; and reduced stress and sadness. Grateful people engage much more with their environment, leading to greater personal growth and self-acceptance, and stronger feelings of purpose, meaning, and connectedness.

We can be grateful not only for past and present benefits but also for likely future benefits. Forward gratitude promotes optimism, and optimism faith. So it can be no surprise that both Western and Eastern religious traditions strongly emphasize gratitude. In many Christian denominations, the most important rite is Holy Communion or Eucharist—a word that derives from eucharistia, Greek for ‘thanksgiving’. Luther himself spoke of gratitude as ‘the basic Christian attitude’. More than a mere feeling, Christian gratitude is a virtue, or disposition of the soul, that shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and that is developed and exercised through a remembered relationship with God and His Creation.

In contrast, ingratitude—which can range from mere lack or absence of gratitude to Brutus’ murder of Cæsar—is hurtful because it ignores the efforts and sacrifices of the benefactor, thereby affronting him or her, and, by extension, life itself.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), Lear cries out:

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child

Than the sea monster!

…

How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

Hume maintains that ‘of all the crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude…’ For Kant, ingratitude is, quite simply, ‘the essence of vileness’. Ingratitude, which, of course, has become the norm, corrodes social bonds and undermines public trust, leading to societies built on rights and entitlements rather than duties and obligations, on me rather than us, and in which every aspect of human life has to be regulated, recorded, and monitored.

Despite the great and many benefits that it confers, gratitude is hard to cultivate. It is opposed to some deeply ingrained human traits, in particular, our need to feel in control of our destiny, our propensity to credit ourselves for our successes while blaming others for our setbacks, and our unconscious belief in some kind of cosmic equality or justice—that is, our refusal to accept that life is fundamentally unfair. Today, we seek more and more to exist as independent individuals rather than as a social collective, and gratitude undermines our ego illusion.

As human nature does not leave much place for it, gratitude is an attainment of maturity, or, to be more precise, emotional maturity, which can arrive at any age or, more commonly, not at all. Children who are taught to parrot ‘thank you’ mean it even less than their parents do. Many people express gratitude, or a semblance of it, simply because doing so is useful or the ‘done thing’. Gratitude is good manners, and good manners aim at aping profundity when profundity is lacking.

Real gratitude, in contrast, is a rare and accomplished virtue. There is a fable in Æsop about a slave who extracts a thorn from the paw of a lion. Some time later, the slave and the lion are captured, and the slave thrown to the lion. The starved lion bounds and roars towards the slave, but upon recognizing his friend fawns upon him and licks his face like a lapdog. ‘Gratitude’ concludes Æsop, ‘is the sign of noble souls.’

Like all virtues, gratitude requires constant cultivation, until such a day as we can say, ‘Thank you for nothing.’

Patience

An old man shared his deepest regret. ‘I wish’ he said, ‘that I had understood the unfolding of time.’ Patience (or forbearance) comes from the Latin patientia, ‘patience, endurance, submission’, and, ultimately—like ‘passivity’ and ‘passion’—from patere, ‘to suffer’. It can be defined as the quality of endurance or equanimity in the face of adversity, from simple delay or provocation to tragic misfortune and excruciating pain.

Being both adaptive and difficult, patience is often thought of as a virtue, but it can also be understood as a complex of virtues including self-control, humility, tolerance, generosity, and mercy, and is itself an important aspect of other virtues such as hope, faith, and love. Patience is, therefore, a paradigm for the ancient notion of the unity of the virtues.

In Buddhism, patience is named as one of the Six Perfections [paramitas] and extends to the non-return of harm. The Book of Proverbs, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, speaks very highly of patience: ‘He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.’ This is echoed in Ecclesiastes, which teaches, ‘The patient in spirit is better than the proud of spirit. Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.’

The opposite of patience is impatience, which can be defined as the inability or disinclination to endure perceived imperfection. Impatience is a rejection of the present moment on the grounds that it is tainted or marred, and ought to be replaced by some more ideal imagined future. It is a rejection of the way things are, a rejection of reality. Whereas patience recognizes that life is a struggle for each and every one of us, impatience takes umbrage at people for being the way they are, betraying a kind of disregard, even contempt, for human nature in its finitude.

Impatience implies impotence, that is, lack of control or command over a situation, and this impotence gives rise to frustration. Like anger (Chapter 16), impatience and frustration are as misguided as they are miserable, and as sterile as they are self-defeating. They can lead to rash and destructive action, and also, paradoxically, to inaction, or procrastination, since to put off a demanding or boring task is also to put off the frustration to which it is bound to lead.

Today more than ever, patience is a forgotten virtue. Our individualistic and materialistic society values ambition and action (or, at least, activity) above all else, whereas patience involves a withdrawing and withholding of the self. And things are only getting worse: In a study of millions of Internet users, researchers found that, within just ten seconds, about half of users had given up on videos that had not yet started to play. What’s more, users with a faster connection were fastest to click away, suggesting that technological progress is actually eroding our patience.

Waiting, even for a very short time, has become so unbearable that much of our economy is geared at eliminating ‘dead time’. In The Art of Failure, I argue that such restless impatience is an expression of the manic defence, the essence of which is to prevent feelings of helplessness and despair from entering the conscious mind by distracting it with opposite feelings such as euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.

Even in pre-modern, pre-technological times, the so-called egocentric predicament made it difficult to exercise patience. Because I have privileged access to my own thoughts, I blow them out of all proportion and, as a result, lose perspective over a situation. For example, if I am impatient in the checkout line, this is largely because I am under the impression that my time is more valuable, and my purpose greater, than that of the mugs standing in front of me, about whom I know nothing at all. In a belief that I could be doing a better job at the till, I give dagger eyes to the cashier—failing to recognize that he or she is coming at it from a different angle and with different skills and abilities. In the end, my frustration in itself becomes a source of frustration as I vacillate between biding my time in the queue, switching queues, and even abandoning my shopping.

Patience can be regarded as a decision-making problem: eat up all the grain today, or plant it into the ground and wait for it to multiply. Unfortunately, human beings evolved not as farmers but as hunter-gatherers, and have a strong tendency to discount long-term rewards. This ancestral short-sightedness is borne out by the Stanford marshmallow experiment, a series of studies on delayed gratification led by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conducted on hundreds of four- and five-year old children, Mischel’s studies involved a simple binary choice: eat this marshmallow or hold back for fifteen minutes to be given a second one. Having explained this choice to a child, the experimenter left the child alone with the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. Follow-up studies carried out over forty years found that the minority of children who had been able to hold out for the second marshmallow went on to enjoy significantly better life outcomes, including higher test scores, better social skills, and less substance misuse.

Even so, patience involves much more than the mere ability to hold back for some future gain, as some of the children did. Exercising patience (note the use of the verb ‘to exercise’) can be compared to dieting or growing a garden—or, indeed, writing a book. Yes, waiting is involved, but one also needs to have a plan in place, and to work at that plan. And so, when it comes to others, patience amounts not to mere restraint or toleration, but to an active, almost complicit, engagement in their struggle and welfare. In that much, patience is a form of compassion, which, rather than disregarding and alienating people, turns them into friends and allies.

If impatience implies impotence, patience implies power, power borne out of understanding. Rather than make us into a hostage to fortune, patience frees us from frustration and its ills, and affords us the calm and perspective to think, say, and do the right thing in the right way at the right time—while still enabling us to enjoy all the other things that are good in our life. Faced with a long checkout line, I might choose to abandon my shopping, but, even then, I can do so without losing my cool and ruining my day.

Exercising patience need not mean never protesting or giving up, but only ever doing so in a considered fashion: never impetuously, never pettily, and never pointlessly. Neither need it mean withholding, just like ageing a case of fine wine for several years need not mean withholding from wine during all that time. Life is too short to wait, but it is not too short for patience.

Last but not least, patience enables us to achieve things that would not otherwise have been possible to achieve. As the philosopher Jean de La Bruyère (d. 1696) put it, ‘There is no road too long to the person who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honours too distant to the person who prepares himself for them with patience.’ Michelangelo compressed this thought into just four words when he said: ‘Genius is eternal patience.’

Patience is much easier, maybe even pleasant, to exercise if one truly understands that it can and does deliver much better outcomes, not just for ourselves but for others too. In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester replicated the marshmallow experiment. But before doing so, they split the participating children into two groups, exposing the first group to unreliable experiences in the form of broken promises, and the second group to reliable experiences in the form of kept promises. What they found is that the children in the second group (exposed to reliable experiences) waited an average of four times longer than those in the first group.

In other words, patience is largely a matter of trust, or, some might say, faith—including in our political, legal, and financial systems.

Heaven and Hell The Psychology of the Emotions

Neel Burton

Claims About Holocaust Revisionists

Untrue and wrong:

They deny that Jews were persecuted
They deny that Jews were persecuted
They deny that Jews were deprived of civil rights
They deny that Jews were deported
They deny the Jews were herded into ghettos
They deny the existence of concentration camps
They deny that Jews were put to forced labor
They deny the existence of crematoria in concentration camps
They deny that Jews died for a great number of reasons: epidemics, malnutrition, diseases, mistreatment
They deny that other minorities were also persecuted as well, such as gypsies and political dissenters
They deny that the treatment of the Jews was unjust
They deny the victims their dignity
They deny the victims to be remembered
They deny to show compassion for the victims

This is what they claim:

They deny that there was a plan to murder all Jews
They deny that Jews were murdered systematically
They deny the existence of gas chambers for mass murder
They deny that six million Jews died in the Holocaust

Source
https://germarrudolf.com/germars-views-2/101-false-claims-about-revisionism/

Ego defences

 Abstraction

Abstraction involves trying to ignore or suppress the source of anxiety so that it no longer seems to exist.

All the ego defences discussed in this section aim, or aim primarily, at abstraction.

1

Denial

Denial, probably the most basic of ego defences, is the simple refusal to admit to certain unacceptable or unmanageable aspects of reality, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

An example of denial is a physician who ignores the classic signs and symptoms of a heart attack—crushing central chest pain radiating into the left arm, associated with sweating, shortness of breath, and nausea—and casually carries on with his game of golf.

(...)

In her classic of 1969, On Death and Dying, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced a model of bereavement commonly referred to as the Five Stages of Grief. The model describes, in five discrete stages, a process by which people react to grief and tragedy, especially terminal illness or catastrophic loss.

The five stages are:

Denial

Anger

Bargaining

Depression (or grieving), and

Acceptance.

Just as people might move back and forth between the stages, often at speed, so they might get stuck in one of the earlier stages, failing to come to terms with their loss.

The model has been criticized on a number of grounds, but Kübler-Ross did emphasize that all five stages need not occur, or occur in the given order, and that reactions to illness, death, and loss are as diverse as the people experiencing them.(...)

It is none other than Sigmund Freud (d. 1939) who first formulated the concept of denial as an ego defence. His daughter Anna Freud (d. 1982) thought of it as an immature ego defence, first, because it is mostly used in childhood and adolescence, and, second, because its continued use into adulthood leads to unhealthy or unhelpful behaviours and a complete failure to engage or come to terms with reality.(...)

An ego defence that is closely related to denial is negative hallucination, which is the failure to register uncomfortable sensory stimuli, for instance, the failure to see something that ought to have been seen, hear something that ought to have been heard, or feel something—like crushing chest pain—that ought to have been felt. Thus, a common occurrence in conversation or in a social setting is for a person to ‘edit out’ a challenging or contradictory remark. The person momentarily goes blank, and then carries on as though the thing had never been said. The ability to hear, or at least register, painful truths is one of the many pre-requisites of being a good listener.

2

Repression

Repression can be thought of as ‘motivated forgetting’: the active but unconscious forgetting of unacceptable drives, emotions, ideas, or memories.

Unsurprisingly, repression is often confused with denial: but whereas denial relates to external stimuli, repression relates to internal, that is, mental, stimuli. Nonetheless, the two ego defences often work hand in hand, and may be difficult to disentangle—as in the following, harrowing case. (...)

Freud thought of repression as the basic ego defence, since it is only when repression is fragile or failing that other ego defences come into play to reinforce and rescue it. In other words, repression is an essential component or building block of the other ego defences. To understand this better, let’s look at an example of the ego defence of distortion, which is the reshaping of reality to suit one’s inner needs. A teen who got dumped by her boyfriend no longer recalls this episode (repression), and comes to believe that it was she who dumped him (distortion). As you can see, the distortion not only builds upon but also buttresses the repression.

Repressed material, though out of the conscious mind, is no less present, and can (and usually does) resurface in disturbing forms. Beyond an obvious lack of insight and understanding, the inability to process and come to terms with repressed material is associated with a range of psychological issues such as anxiety, irritability, insomnia, nightmares, and depression; maladaptive and destructive patterns of behaviour such as anger and aggression in the face of reminders—such as Tumbling Woman—of the repressed material; and any number of superimposed ego defences.

‘Neurosis’ is an old-fashioned term that describes the various forms in which repressed material can resurface (anxiety, irritability, and so on). In Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud with his colleague Josef Breuer formulated the theory according to which neuroses have their origins in deeply traumatic and consequently repressed experiences..(...)

The mental operation of suppression is similar to repression but with one critical difference, namely, that the ‘forgetting’ is conscious rather than unconscious. Thus, suppression is the conscious and often rational decision to put an uncomfortable (although, clearly, not totally unacceptable) stimulus to one side, either to deal with it at a more opportune time or to abandon it altogether on the grounds that it is not worth dealing with.

As it is a conscious operation, suppression is not, strictly speaking, a form of self-deception, but rather the conscious analogue of repression. Needless to say, suppression is much more mature than repression, and, as with all conscious operations, tends to favour much more positive outcomes.

Let’s look at a concrete example of suppression. A pair of friends who are holidaying in a larger group start arguing, so ferociously that they fall out with each other. The next day, they put their differences to one side and behave as though nothing had happened so as not to cast a cloud over the group and ruin everyone’s holiday. That day, they share some good times and special moments, and, by evening, it has become safe enough to bring up the argument and put it behind them. By dealing with their argument in this way, the pair have deepened rather than undermined their friendship.

3

Dissociation

The basic form of dissociation, isolation of affect, involves a separation (or ‘dissociation’) of thoughts and feelings, with the feelings (the ‘affect’) then removed from conscious attention to leave only the thoughts.

Isolation of affect is probably most evident when someone refers to an emotionally loaded event or situation in a casual, matter-of-fact, or otherwise dispassionate way. This can be called for in certain circumstances, for example, in providing the distance and objectivity that a physician needs to make optimal decisions about the care of her patients. But too much detachment neither makes for a good physician, and, as with most psychological processes, detachment is best if it can be conscious and pragmatic rather than rigid and defensive.

Isolation of affect is very common. When I catch it in conversation, I often find myself interjecting with something like, ‘Wait, hang on, what did you just say?’ Other forms of dissociation, while much more dramatic, are also much less common, and can take one of several sometimes overlapping forms such as amnesia, possession trance, or stupor. These rarer forms are serious enough to count as mental disorders, and are referred to in diagnostic manuals as ‘dissociative disorders’. They are usually precipitated by a highly traumatic event, leading to a disruption in the normally integrated functions of consciousness, memory, and identity.

In dissociative amnesia, the person suffers a loss of memory, most commonly for the period surrounding the traumatic event. Dissociative amnesia, or something closely resembling it, has long been recognized.

Already in the first century, the naturalist Pliny the Elder remarked:

Nothing whatever, in man, is of so frail a nature as the memory; for it is affected by disease, by injuries, and even by fright; being sometimes partially lost, and at other times entirely so.

In possession trance, the person reacts to the traumatic event by entering into a dissociative state, in which her identity is replaced by that of another agency such as a ghost, spirit, or deity. In many cultures, certain forms of trance are recognized and even exalted as expressions of religious fervour or manifestations of the divine. Therefore, possession trance should only be seen as problematic, or potentially problematic, if it is not a normal feature of the person’s culture or sub-culture.

In dissociative stupor, the person reacts to the traumatic event by becoming mute (speechless) and stuporous (motionless), failing to respond to stimuli such as the human voice, bright lights, or extremes of hot and cold. Dissociative stupor—that is, stupor in reaction to a traumatic event—is but one form of stupor, and the medical team ought to consider and rule out other causes of stupor such as severe depression, schizophrenia, and organic brain disease.

A fourth kind or pattern of dissociative disorder is dissociative fugue, in which the person embarks on an unexpected journey that may last for up to several months. During this journey, there is memory loss and confusion about personal identity or even assumption of another, entirely different identity. When the fugue comes to an end and the person returns to her normal self, the memory of the journey is usually lost.

* * *

Denial is, of course, an important element of any dissociative disorder. Although often described in the psychiatric literature in terms of a ‘compartmentalization of experience’, dissociative disorders are, arguably, no more than an extreme form of denial. As our journey into self-deception has begun to reveal, ego defences do not, for the most part, exist in splendid isolation, but involve a great deal of overlap between mutually reinforcing ego defences. Ours is a very dirty business.

4

Intellectualization

Isolation of affect—the dissociation of thoughts and feelings, followed by the removal of the feelings from conscious attention—is closely related to intellectualization.

In intellectualization, the uncomfortable feelings associated with a problem are kept out of consciousness by thinking about the problem in cold, abstract, and esoteric terms.

A ambitious medical student once asked me whether she should take up a career in academic medicine, despite (or so it seemed) having already made up her mind on the matter. After raising some arguments in favour, I raised some arguments against, including that the vast majority of people engaged in medical research never go on to make a significant breakthrough. As she did not seem to be taking this argument on board, I asked her to name just one major breakthrough in psychiatric research in the past fifty years. Instead of naming one, or accepting that there had not been any, she resorted to questioning the definition of a breakthrough and even the value of making one—which may have been legitimate things to do, had she first accepted, or at least entertained the idea, that there had not been any.

Here’s another example of intellectualization. After being discharged from hospital, a middle-aged man who had almost died from a heart attack spent several hours a day on his computer researching the various risk factors for cardiovascular disease. He typed out long essays on each of these risk factors, printed them out, and filed them in a large binder with colour-coded dividers. After that, he became preoccupied with the vitamin and mineral contents of various kinds of food and devised a strict dietary regimen to ensure that he took in the recommended amounts of each and every micronutrient. Despite living on a shoestring budget, he spent a great deal of money on a high-end steamer on the basis that it could preserve vitamins through the cooking process. But not once did he consider cutting back on his much more harmful thirty-a-day smoking habit..

* * *

The focus on abstract notions, trivial footnotes, and peripheral digressions belies a sort of ‘flight into reason’. The emotionally loaded event or situation is thought of in terms of an interesting problem or puzzle, without any appreciation of its emotional content or personal implications. Instead of coming to terms with the problem, or just having a good cry, the person may split hairs over definitions; undermine reasonable assumptions, facts, and arguments; and cloud her mind with nebulous arguments and abstruse minutiæ. But by failing on purpose to see the bigger picture, she also fails to reach the appropriate conclusion or conclusions—which, as with our medical student or heart attack victim, may hit her very hard in five, ten, or thirty years’ time.

Intellectualization is typically associated with poor reasoning, especially informal fallacy. The person may, for example, raise irrelevant or trivial objections, reject an argument on the basis of a bad example or exceptional case, or use exact numbers to talk about inexact or abstract notions. I discuss formal and informal fallacies at much greater length in Hypersanity—but from our discussion here it is already clear that sound reasoning is not simply a matter of intelligence.

5

Rationalization

Intellectualization, with its barrage of pseudo-rational activity, is easy to confuse with rationalization, which is the use of feeble or far-fetched arguments to skirt over something that is difficult to accept, or to make it more palatable.

A person who has been rejected by a love interest convinces herself that he rejected her because he did not feel up to her standards, and, moreover, that the rejection is a blessing in disguise insofar as it has freed her to find a more suitable partner.

The first rationalization—that her love interest rejected her because he did not feel up to her standards—is a case of skirting over something that is difficult to accept, sometimes called ‘sour grapes’. The second rationalization—that the rejection has freed her to find a more suitable partner—is a case of making it more palatable, also called ‘sweet lemons’.

Here’s another example. A teenager who fails to secure a place at a leading university tells herself that the university is sexist (sour grapes), and that taking a gap year to re-apply is a precious opportunity to travel and see the world (sweet lemons).

The teenager uses these rationalizations to reduce the psychological discomfort of holding contradictory beliefs or thoughts (‘cognitions’), on the one hand the cognition that she is smart and ready enough to get into the university of her choice, and on the other hand the cognition that she failed to do so.

Alternatively, she could have reduced this so-called cognitive dissonance by revising her self-image (‘I am not so smart or prepared as I thought’), but, on the whole, finds it less disturbing to rationalize, that is, to undermine or discount, the cognition that is inconsistent with her self-image.

In When Prophecy Fails (1956), Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world predictably failed to materialize, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalizing that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith.

Smokers typically experience a high level of cognitive dissonance with respect to their habit. To decrease this tension, they might (1) quit smoking, or (2) deny the evidence that links smoking to life-threatening conditions such as emphysema and lung cancer, or (3) rationalize their smoking so as to make it compatible with competing cognitions such as ‘I want to live a long and healthy life’ or ‘I am a rational person who makes sound, evidence-based decisions’.

Here are some of the rationalizations that smokers commonly use:

Smoking’s my only way of coping.

There’s nothing else to do.

What’s the point of living if I can’t enjoy life?

Only heavy smokers are at any real risk.

That’s fine, everyone’s got to die someday.

Everyone’s got to die from something or other, so it might as well be this.

The first three rationalizations are instances of sour grapes, and the last three of sweet lemons.

* * *

For the story, ‘sour grapes’ derives from one of the fables attributed to Æsop (d. 564 BCE), The Fox and the Grapes.

One hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a bine which had been trained over a lofty branch. ‘Just the thing to quench my thirst,’ quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the branch. Turning round with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: ‘I am sure they are sour.’

For the poor fox, the cognitive dissonance arises from the cognitions ‘I’m an agile and nimble fox’ and ‘I can’t reach the grapes on the branch’; and the rationalization—which is, of course, a form of sour grapes—is ‘I’m sure the grapes are sour’. Had the fox gone for sweet lemons instead of sour grapes, he might have said something like, ‘In any case, there are far juicier grapes in the farmer’s orchard.’

* * *

Rationalization is used to great comedic effect in Voltaire’s satirical masterpiece, Candide (1759). The novella is an attack on Leibniz’s philosophy that the world is the best of all possible worlds, embodied by Candide’s tutor Professor Pangloss, who rationalizes a succession of tragic events so that they are in keeping with Leibniz’s philosophical optimism.

In Chapter 4, Candide chances upon Pangloss, now reduced to the condition of a beggar. Pangloss, it turns out, contracted a venereal disease, leaving him covered in scabs and coughing violently.

Upon seeing his old tutor in so diminished a state, Candide ‘inquires into the cause and effect, as well as into the sufficing reason that had reduced [Pangloss] to so miserable a condition’.

P: Alas ... it was love; love, the comfort of the human species; love, the preserver of the universe; the soul of all sensible beings; love! Tender love!

C: Alas ... I have had some knowledge of love myself, this sovereign of hearts, this soul of souls; yet it never cost me more than a kiss and twenty kicks on the backside. But how could this beautiful cause produce in you so hideous an effect? ...

P: Oh my dear Candide, you must remember Pacquette, that pretty wench, who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the pleasures of paradise, which produced these hell torments with which you see me devoured. She was infected with an ailment, and perhaps has since died of it; she received this present of a learned Franciscan, who derived it from the fountainhead; he was indebted for it to an old countess, who had it of a captain of horse, who had it of a marchioness, who had it of a page, the page had it of a Jesuit, who, during his novitiate, had it in a direct line from one of the fellow adventurers of Christopher Columbus...

C: O sage Pangloss ... what a strange genealogy is this! Is not the devil the root of it?

P: Not at all ... it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease, which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal...

* * *

Human beings are not rational, but rationalizing animals. They find it frightening to think and painful to change, because thought and change threaten the beliefs that make up their sense of self.

Given this state of affairs, any tectonic shift in a person’s outlook, any major realignment with the truth, is only ever going to occur, if at all, by small increments.

A possible accelerator is, in fact, a deterioration in the person’s life circumstances, so severe that it overwhelms her ego defences and leaves her in the depressive or undefended position..

Hide and Seek

The Psychology of Self-Deception

Neel Burton

The Roads to Sata - Alan Booth

 Author's Note

Few people (warns the publisher, grumbling) are likely to know where Sata is, so I had better locate it in this note. Sata is the name of the southernmost cape of the southernmost of the four main islands of Japan. I walked there from Soya, the northernmost cape of the northernmost island, and the roads between, and the things I saw and heard and did along them, are the subjects of this book.

Japan is a long country. If I had walked the same distance across the same latitudes in North America, the trek would have taken me from Ottawa to Mobile, Alabama; and if I had started in Europe, I would have marched from Belgrade through the Middle East to the Gulf of Aquaba. The distances I walked are given here in kilometers, not miles, because it is in kilometers that most Japanese think, and that I thought every morning, noon, and evening of my journey.

If I could, I would individually thank the men, women, and children who populate these pages, but I never knew the names of most of them, and I have thought it in their interests to alter those names I did know. Where names are used, they are used in the Japanese manner: family name first, given name last.

I have tried to avoid generalizations, particularly "the Japanese." "The Japanese" are 120,000,000 people, ranging in age from 0 to 119, in geographical location across 21 degrees of latitude and 23 of longitude, and in profession from emperor to urban guerrilla. This book is about my encounters with some twelve hundred businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, fishermen, housewives, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, soldiers, policemen, monks, priests, tourists, journalists, professors, laborers, maids, waiters, carpenters, teachers, innkeepers, potters, dancers, cyclists, students, truck drivers, Koreans, Americans, bar hostesses, professional wrestlers, government officials, hermits, drunks, and tramps.

***

A light went on in the hut. Through the condensation on the window I could see the wood stove the old man had burning. I saw his shadow move across the dry wall and watched him peer out through the lighted window and stare at me lying on his step. Then I heard him move to the door. The door opened a little and, by turning an inch, I could see his face silhouetted in the doorway. He stood there for what seemed a very long time and I tried to think of something to say, but in the end, I was spared the necessity of saying anything. Quietly but firmly he closed the door of his hut and turned the key in the lock.

It was light by five and the rain had stopped. I got up, shivering, retrieved my groundsheet from the beach, beat the sand off it with a sodden branch, and began to pack my rucksack. The caretaker sat staring at me through the window of his lodge. He looked as though he had been sitting there all night. His old face was tired but his eyes were remarkably sharp. I knew he was staring at me as I rolled up my sleeping bag and strapped it to the pack and as I folded the groundsheet and laced my boots.

"Sayonara," I said as I got up to leave.

I expect he was still staring when I reached the trees.

The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one.

Like most Hokkaido people, he knew the value of hot water. He had an oil stove going now, in mid-July, and he poured the water that he had pumped up out of the ground very carefully into his small metal teapot and set it on the stove to boil.

Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals—far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.

"There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."

He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.

"You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they're really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want."

I nodded pleasantly, having no food.

"If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's thirty meters away from you, you've no need to worry. The bear will run away. It'll be far more frightened than you are."

"Well, well!" I said, and sipped my tea.

"If you turn a corner and you see a bear, say, twenty meters away, there's still a good chance it won't bother you. It'll roar a bit just to let you know it's there, but if you stand quite still it'll probably get bored and go back into the forest."

"Mm," I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance.

"And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it's five or ten meters away from you..."

"Then, presumably, I should start to worry," I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.

"Not really," he said. "You've no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it's five meters away it'll certainly kill you. There's no point in worrying at all."

*

The offshore island of Sado—the largest of japan's many minor islands—was notorious from the twelfth century as a place of exile, and its rocky shores and misty valleys have furnished a prison for some of the glummest characters in Japanese history.Mongaku was one—a sort of twelfth-century Japanese Rasputin. He began his career by lusting after his cousin and killing her by mistake (he had meant to kill her husband), for which piece of carelessness he shaved his head, became a monk, and religiously persuaded the powerful general Yoritomo to wage all-out war against his rivals at court. Yoritomo was successful, and for a while Mongaku enjoyed the fruits of victory. But, alas, not content with provoking mere war, he went on to hatch a plot against the emperor Gotoba, and when his protector Yoritomo died in 1199, Mongaku was whisked off to Sado, where he fretted away the rest of his life.

The other famous clergyman to suffer in Sado was the militant evangelist Nichiren, less a Rasputin than a thirteenth-century Ian Paisley. Nichiren insisted on a firm bond between church and state—so long as it was his church, and his alone, that the state paid any attention to. So vehemently did Nichiren denounce all other Buddhist sects (he once exclaimed that the government would have done better to execute the "heretic" priests than the emissaries of Kublai Khan) that he was packed off" to Sado in 1271, where he passed two years in a mud hut and suffered from chronic diarrhea.

The highest-ranking exile was the emperor Juntoku, sent to Sado in 1221 for attempting to overthrow the military regents. He spent 20 years there, died on a hunger strike, and had 650 years to wait before he was officially reinstated. The founder of the Noh theater, Zeami Motokiyo, lived eight of the last years of his life in Sado. The courtier Hino Suketomo, who had tried to raise an army on behalf of the powerless emperor Godaigo, was shipped to Sado in 1324 and assassinated there by the glum governor. And as late as the mid-nineteenth century a penal colony was working the dreary Sado gold mines.

The afternoon grew overcast. I sat on the beach at Teradomari—the beach from which all these exiles had set sail—and stared across at the gray mounds of the island, remembering my walks there, the meadows and caves and the lingering snows of Mount Kimpoku in May, and thinking of my own seven-year exile in Tokyo.

Ah, toward Sado

the trees and the grass bend.

Ar'ya ar'ya ar'ya sa.

Near Izumosaki a bent old woman was scrubbing out a dusty little wayside shrine and lighting candles. The houses in the villages had been battered by the wind and salt to a uniform gray-brown. They were fenced off from the sea by gray bamboo palisades, the tops of which were rough and frayed, and the houses were so patched and weatherblown that they looked as if they had been camouflaged for an invasion. Between the oily, littered beaches the sea pounded on high stone walls and in the first shower of rain I went for a swim and cut my foot on a broken whiskey bottle.

The shops in the town of Izumosaki displayed four or five sticks of baked flyblown fish in each of their windows and little else. Down the coast towards Kashiwazaki a solitary gas rig straddled a small patch of rain-pocked sea, and in one tiny village an incongruous Hotel Japan loured over its own private bit of beach where three young girls paddled aimlessly about under torn, wind-whipped umbrellas.

"What are you doing, arubaito?" asked a toothless woman pushing a wheelbarrow. (Arubaito is the German word arbeit, which the Japanese have commandeered to mean a part-time job.) The rain had blown over and I was sitting on a beer crate under the awning of a grocer's shop.

"No, I'm not doing arubaito. I'm having a rest."

The woman stopped, and the three dogs that were following her lurched, yapping and sniffing, into the grocer's rubbish bins.

"You speak good hyojungo (orthodox Japanese). Where did you learn it?"

"I live in Tokyo."

"Ah!"

The woman brushed away a bluebottle that was caught in her head-scarf

"I was born in Tokyo. In Toyo-cho. I bet you don't know where that is."

"I bet I do. I had a friend who owned a futon shop there. We used to go drinking at a folk-song bar in Asakusa."

The woman's mouth dropped open so wide I thought she was trying to catch the bluebottle.

"Maa! Asakusa! Natsukashii! (Ah! Asakusa! That brings back memories!) I haven't heard anyone talk about Asakusa for more than seventeen years. That's how long I've lived here. Seventeen years and four months. Asakusa, ah! Have you seen the Sanja Festival?"

"All three days of it."

"Maaaa! Natsukashii! And the log-rolling festival on the Sumida River? And the old Tokyo firemen's dances...?"

She pulled back her headscarf and grinned me a toothless grin that was half rueful, half delight.

"My husband comes from Kashiwazaki though."

"And you've never been back to Tokyo?"

"Never. Not once."

She shifted from foot to foot and I patted one of the dogs that was trying to scrape an empty sausage skin out from under the crate I was sitting on.

"Asakusa, ahhh...!"

"Don't you like it here?"

She nodded once, perfunctorily.

"I like it." And she looked at the sea as though it had just materialized. "Oh, I like it. Kashiwazaki's all right..."

She called to the dogs and lifted her barrow, smiling the same wide toothless smile.

"Yes... oh, yes... and you knew Asakusa..."

The exile walked on with her barrow and dogs.

Above the city of Kashiwazaki a layer of mist sliced Mount Yoneyama in half like an orange. Sado had disappeared, hidden in the rain clouds, and the column of smoke from the city rose to merge with the dense pall of the sky. On an empty beach a solitary painter sat, daubing his canvas with the grays of cloud, the brown-gray of the smoke, the white-gray of the mist, the pink-gray of the buildings.

*

Eiheiji is a vast, beautiful temple, its rooms and halls connected to each other by corridors and long flights of covered wooden steps. Black-robed monks with shaven heads and trainee monks in loose black jackets and trousers sauntered through the corridors and halls with little smirks on their scrubbed faces, ignoring the tourists who were being ushered about, shuffling and whispering; and as the rain still fell, the rustle of robes, the ring of curious fingers brushing a gong, the patter of slippered feet on the cold, smooth boards or the shush of silk tabi socks over soft straw matting—all rose and fell in volume like the gasps of air in a bamboo flute and left in their wake a greater silence than before.The churches of Europe—the great ones—soar up in dizzying verticals at the sky. Eiheyi hugs the contours of the earth. When the sun strikes the stained-glass windows of a cathedral they explode in primary colors like a carousel. But the colors of Eiheiji are earth colors—the somber greens of the garden, the browns and grays of smooth polished wood and slate, the soft gold color of old tatami. The builders of the Christian churches of Europe―churches in which a religion of humility is preached—seem often boastful, often to be saying to us: "Now, look here, this is the House of God. It is here—here—not over the road with those dingy Presbyterians but here in this church that God dwells." The builders of Eiheiji were a lot less strident: "Oh, God dwells in our temple, if you like. But then, he dwells in everything else as well—in clods of earth, in the eyes of the blind, in the pebbles of the seashore as well as in our shrines."The landscape of the mountains,

the sound of streams—

all are the body and voice of Buddha.

Eiheiji was founded in the middle of the thirteenth century by the author of that poem, a priest named Dogen. Dogen had spent four of his most formative years in China, being trained in Zen at Mount T'ien-t'ung, and because the Chinese are a practical people, his revelations, when they came, were of a practical kind. Dogen did not look for spirits in the air or worship an arcane, invisible Buddha who moved only in mysterious ways. "The truth is everywhere," he insisted. "The truth is where we are. One small step separates earth from heaven."

Despite the comparative sobriety of its architecture, Zen often seems to inspire in its adherents a supercilious attitude to the rest of mankind; an attitude that delights in one-upmanship, in riddles, puzzles, and the power of extraordinary experience. But Dogen maintained that in order to grasp the meaning of existence it was not necessary for a per-son to be unusually clever or to spend his life doing remarkable things. Simply by "sitting still and doing nothing" a man could discover what there was to be learned about life. Prayer and ritual .were important to Dogen, but not much more so than cooking or sweeping the yard. All functions of the body, including the most basic, became, in the temple he founded, limbs of Zen. The toilet in Eiheiji contains an altar to Ususama Myo-o (The Guardian of the Impure), and together with the bath and the meditation hall, it is one of the three places in the temple where speech is forbidden and where a particularly strict code of contemplative behavior is observed by everyone who enters. It was Dogen's intention to make of Zen not an abstract philosophy, but a practice. The advice he gave his meditating disciples was blunt, straightforward, and mind-wrenchingly practical:

Think of not thinking.

How do you think of not thinking?

By not thinking.

The rain had stopped when I left Eiheiji and began the long descent of the mountain. Blue dragonflies danced over the grass by the road-side and parched brown grasshoppers with lemon-colored wings flitted with soft clicks from stalk to stalk. I imagined the dragonflies dancing around Dogen on his trips to and from the temple, and his seeing in them, as he saw in all things, an endlessly renewable shard of the Buddha.