Wednesday, March 27, 2013

We and I

  I ended Quietly Doing One's Duty by wondering whether the ethic implied in its title might have become anachronistic—whether individual devotion to the collective good is passé.  In more and more arenas, we have adopted a market-oriented approach to communal objectives, asserting that they are best gained from the random interactions of myriad individuals, all selfishly seeking their own goals.  This is Malthusianism and social Darwinism redux, holding that the survival of the fittest in human affairs is an inviolable natural law leading to the benefit of society as a whole.

  Perhaps no societal question is more fraught than the relationship between the collective and the individual.  The pendulum of thought and power constantly swings between the two.  Daniel T. Rodgers, professor of history at Princeton, argues in his 2012 book The Age of Fracture that the last part of the 20th century involved such a swing, a massive one from the collective to the individual.  While I found the book at times tedious and rambling, I think its underlying thesis is correct, and therefore felt it was worth reading.  Consider just the following issues, some of which are thoroughly discussed in the book:

The "Greatest Generation" celebrated by Tom Brokaw, which ennobled self-sacrifice for the good of all, morphed into Tom Wolfe's "Me Generation": the baby boomers who despoiled the commons for their own advantage.   In the process, John Kennedy's famous 1961 Inaugural plea, "Ask what you can do for your country," segued into Ivan Boesky's infamous 1986 dictum, "Greed is healthy," shamefully enunciated at a UC Berkeley business-school commencement,

The top-down Keynesian macroeconomics that advocates economic regulation for the good of the commonwealth—a view widely held in the wake of the Great Depression—was displaced by a bottom-up microeconomics interested only in countless individuals and firms responding to price signals in satisfaction of their own wants.  We have put Adam Smith's invisible hand of the marketplace on steroids, although he was concerned with a measured trade in goods, not fevered gambling on derivative financial instruments.  Any measure of control of the economy is widely scorned by those who wield the greatest power in it, those who glorify Schumpeter's ideal of "creative destruction" in unrestrained capitalism (as long, perhaps, as it is not their own domains being destroyed).

The conviction that government is an active partner providing goods and services that the market cannot provide easily or at all—safety nets, infrastructure, education, defense, environmental protection—has come into disrepute by much more than a fringe.  Many consider government as an outright enemy, at best a hindrance, which gets in the way of an efficient marketplace and sops up resources better left in the hands of individuals.  The safety nets of Social Security and Medicare?  Switch them over to competition in the private sector.  Medical care for all?  Let the devil (or the emergency room) take the hindmost.  Welfare?  Consign it to private charity.  Infrastructure?  Let it crumble until a catastrophe dictates repair, or sell it off to private enterprise.  Education?  Issue vouchers for it that can be used at private schools, which will vie for them, or outsource it to competing charter schools.  Defense?  No citizen's army is needed; let its burden be assumed by the least advantaged, and outsource as much as possible to the efficiencies of mercenary market participants.  Environmental protection?  Let it function most cost-effectively in a marketplace where licenses to pollute are traded. 

The ideal of E Pluribus Unum—Out of Many, One—with all of the One subscribing to a core ethos, has dissolved into a plethora of contentious, often-hostile special-interest groups, each congealed into a power bloc.  The pendulum has swung from the stultifying conformity of the mid-20th century to a veneration of unconstrained individualism.  Hyphenated Americans fixate more on the adjective that modifies the word "American" than on "American."  It is the market again at work, this time in the political arena, where blocs striving against one another are thought to yield a greater common good than blocs cooperating or subsuming their own agendas to a common national purpose.

  This is the Age of Fracture about which Rodgers writes. There seems to be no sphere in which the market's invisible hand is not seen as a solution.  Of course, not all obeisance to the marketplace is bad per se; but the constant hosannas to its god-like powers are.  As Rodgers puts it,  "The nation disaggregated into a constellation of private acts"—those acts to be mediated for the benefit of the nation by the magic of the market. 

  In the face of such fissuring, is it any wonder that our ability to govern ourselves has plummeted?  Legislators, selfishly concentrating on their re-electability, dare not depart from the schismatic blocs to which they are beholden, dare not give priority to the commonweal.  Compromise is anathema.  Lobbyists, who seem to be more numerous than legislators, re-enforce loyalty to blocs with massive amounts of money.  The Supreme Court has ruled that money—any amount of it—is a vicar for free speech in the marketplace of ideas.  The result is a system of governance stalemated among immovable cabals.  

  To return to the question with which I opened: Is individual devotion to the collective good passé?  Perhaps temporarily, but not in the long run.  The pendulum will inevitably swing back as the damages caused by extreme individualism become more apparent to all.  The real question is, can the pendulum's oscillations be dampened so that commitment to the community and to the individual can coexist in a balanced equilibrium?

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

A Montague and a Capulet


Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set
On the fair daughter of rich Capulet:
As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;
And all combined, save what thou must combine
By holy marriage: when and where and how
We met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,
I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,
That thou consent to marry us to-day.

Romeo and Juliet,
Act 2, Scene 3


  After Helen died, I wrote a memoir for our children giving an account of our lives until we met, our married years, and her death.  I started each chapter and sometimes each section of a chapter with a quotation from the literature.  Especially when in deep mourning, I found those a balm for a sore soul.  (See Writing and Reading as Balm.)  Yet even in more normal times, when I'm not assuaging raw pain, literature comforts me, letting me know that I'm not all alone here, that I'm part of a living human fabric which comfortingly enwraps me.

  The chapter on Helen's and my marriage started with the Shakepearean passage above.  Unlike Romeo and Juliet, we were of course not from long-feuding family clans.  Still, our problem was one of clannishness, for religions are simply very large clans.  Substitute "Jewish" for "Montague" and "Mormon" for "Capulet" and you have a suggestion of our story in the couplet "… but this I pray/That thou consent to marry us to-day."

  My mother and Helen's father were against our marrying because of our difference of religion—we were caught in a tribal conflict.  Helen was less religious than I was then, so she had no misgivings when I suggested that we be married by a rabbi, thus possibly assuaging my mother, if not her father.  (Two of her siblings had already married outside Mormonism and a third was about to, but all to Christians; perhaps I was beyond the pale.) 

  Helen doubted that I would be able to find a rabbi who would agree to marry us.  Nevertheless, I set about trying to find one.  It was a disturbing revelation to my then-naīve self that none I initially asked would do so, unless Helen converted first.  I finally found a liberal rabbi who said he would require only that Helen take six weeks of lessons on Judaism and agree to raise our children as Jews.

  Although Helen was willing to meet those requirements, I couldn’t agree to placing conditions on her as a premise for our marriage, and told the rabbi so.  He responded that he felt himself bound by his own rather minimal interpretation of his duties, and reasonably pointed out that a civil marriage was available as an alternative.   I quarreled that rabbis were constantly decrying the falling away of Jews from the fold because of intermarriage.  Weren’t they concerned that their rigidity actually accelerated the trend?

  The rabbi cited the Book of Ruth: “Remember that Ruth converted,” he said, in defense of the traditional outlook.  I was stopped short by this argument.  My vague remembrance of Ruth from my Hebrew-school days was that Ruth, a Moabitess who had married the Jewish Naomi's son, had declared her conversion—famously saying to Naomi “Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God”—not in advance of her marriage, but only after her husband had died, when Naomi was preparing to return from Moab to Judah.  The marriage itself had had no strings attached; Ruth's later conversion was entirely voluntary.  Wasn’t the moral of the book one of toleration and acceptance, not of exclusion?  Only the next day, on re-reading Ruth, did I find that I was correct.  I was angry at the rabbi for having played the sophist, and chagrined at myself for not having had a response at my fingertips. 

  In the event, as the negativity from Helen's father and my mother increased, I became more and more nervous that we might not be able to withstand it, so I suggested to Helen that we immediately get married in a simple civil ceremony.  She agreed, and within days we were married in the San Francisco Superior Court, with only two close friends attending.  Ironically, the judge was the son of a rabbi and performed a touching ceremony.

  It was all an eye-opener for this ingénu.  Although Helen and I did raise our children as Jews, that personal brush with the mischief of religious tribalism was just one more spur in my long trek of distancing myself from my own "tribe"; it might also have contributed to my already growing atheism.

  E. O. Wilson says in a book I previously discussed that the tribal instinct was already deeply inbred into hominid ancestors of Homo sapiens well before our species emerged.  It led early humans to form clans to underpin their needs for identity, security and well-being.  That may be so.  Yet of all the tribal associations in which we immerse ourselves, perhaps the most pernicious is religion, possibly the cause of more pain and destructiveness than any other form of tribalism, even more than nationalism. 

  Will the clergy ever abandon their stultifying doctrines, which serve only to maim our psyches, constrain our humanity, and oftentimes lead to religiously induced mayhem?  Probably not.  I find it encouraging, though, that a few parts of the world, particularly the democracies of Western Europe, are becoming more secular.  Those countries have discovered that all of the moral and ethical behavior claimed by religions as possible only through their auspices can also be fruits of secular democracy, without any of the pitfalls.  Would that the rest of the world follow the example, including our still hyper-religious America!

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Poor Russia!

  I have spent barely two weeks of my life in a totalitarian country.  It was a sobering experience.  The year was 1971, when I was invited to present a paper at a conference in Soviet Armenia.  I was excited to be visiting the USSR for the first time.

  Initially, the warmhearted welcome I was given overshadowed the oppressiveness I knew was the hallmark of the Soviet regime, which soon became more visible.  Remember, this was not yet two decades after the death of Stalin, one of the most brutal dictators in all of history, and the apparat he had established was still in control, if a bit attenuated.  The Cold War was at its height.

  On arriving in Moscow, I was greeted at the airport by a representative of the USSR Academy of Sciences and brought to the Academy's hotel in Moscow, there to stay as the Academy's guest.  I was immediately given 1500 rubles in cash as a royalty for the translation of my book Notes on Digital Communication, which had not long before been published in Russian.  (The USSR didn't belong to the International Copyright Union, so was under no obligation to make such a payment.)  I was also offered a car with driver and guide to take me where I wanted in Moscow during the several days I would be there before going to Armenia.  So, in the first few hours, my reception had already been overwhelming.

  I knew, of course, that my treatment thus far was an expression of official government courtesy, for which I was grateful.  Yet it was amplified many fold throughout my visit by the personal hospitality and graciousness of Soviet colleagues.  One of them, whom I barely knew, was so dismayed when I mentioned in passing that I had been unable to find amber jewelry for my wife (an attempt to spend my rubles, which I wouldn't be allowed to take from the country) that he gave me his amber cufflinks, a heartfelt gesture that he wouldn't allow me to decline.  The translator of my book (whom I'd also just met for the first time), finding that I wanted to visit his home city of Leningrad, helped me overcome bureaucratic objections to changing my visa's fixed itinerary; I was thus able to spend a day wandering through that lovely city with him and being shown the marvelous art collection of the Hermitage.  These are only two examples of collegial warmth, among many.  And, to the extent that I was able to randomly meet the "man on the street," I also found nothing except expansive helpfulness and cordiality, much exceeding the treatment strangers usually get in the capitals of foreign countries.

  What have these memories to do with totalitarianism?  Nothing per se.  Rather, I feel that they represent the warmth, generosity and nobility of spirit of the Russian people, even under the yoke of tyranny.  I know such a broad conclusion would seem unwarranted were it drawn only from my short and officially delimited visit, but it is re-enforced by my reading of great Russian literature, particularly Vasily Grossman's human saga of the Stalin years, Life and Fate, about which I wrote in a previous posting, and it has repeatedly been confirmed to me by acquaintances who have lived in Russia for extended periods during both Soviet and post-Soviet times.

  Such was the heartening upside of my trip.  The downside—manifestations of the still-existing totalitarianism—did not really become evident until I arrived in Armenia for the conference.  There, among the hundreds of attendees, my American colleagues and I discerned Soviet delegates whom none of us recognized as scientists or engineers in our field.  That was not unfamiliar to us, because whenever a Soviet delegation appeared at a conference in a Western country, there were always among them those we couldn't identify.  We used to call them "commissars," our name for agents (from the KGB, we supposed) who were there to monitor the Soviet delegation, preventing defections, as well as to collect information about the other conferees.

  A Russian colleague at the conference invited me to take a stroll in the woods one evening.  It was a beautiful walk, and we conversed casually until my colleague stopped dead in his tracks.  He had noticed a dog trailing us, and went over to pet it.  I soon realized that he was not acting as a dog lover—he was actually frisking the dog for a microphone!  Reassured that there was none, he proceeded to give me messages for mutual colleagues in America.  These had nothing shocking or sensitive in them, merely pleasant greetings and technical comments on work of mutual interest.

  The incident transferred a bit of my Russian colleague's paranoia to me, and I henceforth found myself self-censoring even the mildest of my conversations with other delegates for fear of being overheard and unintentionally causing trouble for someone.  Paranoia is contagious, easily caught even by the naïf I then was.  I had previously experienced a smidgen of it during the McCarthy years in America, which had sensitized me to its harm.  I began to see how destructive it would be to live with for a lifetime.

  On returning to the Academy's hotel in Moscow after the conference, I found myself placed in a double room with a fellow professor from UC Berkeley.  This was very strange, since we both had been given single rooms when arriving in Moscow a week before and—judging by the almost complete array of keys still hanging at the reception desk and the annoyed arguments put up by Russian colleagues who were with us at check-in—it was clear that many single rooms were still available. 

  When we entered the room, my American colleague, also infected with paranoia, put a finger to his lips, and I immediately understood his concern that the room was likely bugged.  Since I was returning to the U.S. first, and he also had messages to deliver that he wanted to transfer to me, we took a night-time "stroll in the woods," except now on the rainy streets of Moscow.  (No dog followed us this time!)  He verbally gave me the messages that he had been given.  I felt as though I were in a spy movie, surreptitiously exchanging secret information, although the content of that information was quite innocent.  Needless to say, we were circumspect in our conversation on returning to the room.  I was surprised at how easily we had fallen under the pall of a totalitarian state.

  I write this posting under the title Poor Russia! because that country has been so darkened by centuries of autocracy, a night from which it cannot seem to emerge.  One had such great hope in 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that Russia would again draw close to Western Europe, whose cultural life it had shared for centuries before the Bolshevik Revolution, and whose political freedom one now dreamed it would adopt.  Yet the heritage of those centuries of despotism has taken its dreadful toll.  It appears to be so ingrained that Vladimir Putin—well trained as an apparatchik of the KGB—has all too easily aggrandized to himself the power of a tsar or Communist Party chairman. 

  Politically speaking, Russia can never seem to catch a break.  It deserves better. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Quietly Doing One's Duty

  It's been almost seven decades since the end of the Holocaust, yet revelations about it keep appearing.  One is a new book, The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 Children from the Holocaust by Fred Coleman, an award-winning journalist whose career included stints as Newsweek's bureau chief in Paris and Moscow.  He for the first time gives a full account of a small but remarkable part of the resistance to Holocaust deportations from France.

  The story centers on two young Jews, Moussa Abadi and Odette Rodenstock, who met in Paris in 1939.  Moussa, then 30, was an émigré from Syria and a Ph.D. student; Odette, 25, was a native Parisian and a medical doctor. (They eventually married, both going by the surname Abadi, so I follow Coleman in using their first names.)

  When the Nazis conquered France in June 1940, they set up a puppet French regime, centered in Vichy, which nominally governed all of France but had "sovereignty" of a sort only in its south and in France's colonies—e.g., North Africa.  Vichy collaborated with the Nazis throughout France in persecuting and rounding up Jews.  Still, there were islands of relative safety in parts of the southeast, including Nice, to which Moussa and Odette had fled. 

  The surrender by the Vichy authorities in North Africa to the Allies in November 1942 augured the soon-to-come Nazi occupation of southern France and a huge increase in deportations of Jews from the region to Nazi death camps.  Moussa resolved to save whom he could from that fate—an imperative that led him to form the clandestine Marcel Network, focused on hiding Jewish children among Christians in his area. 

  Moussa found an early ally in the Bishop of Nice, Paul Rémond.  Rémond felt that he had a duty to God higher than obedience to Pope Pius XII, who shamefully—in the face of Continent-wide Nazi barbarity—had decreed the silent neutrality of the Church.  The bishop worked closely with Moussa, providing safe havens for Jewish children in convents, church schools and orphanages, and helping to produce forged identification papers, baptismal certificates and food-ration documents for them—all under new Catholic identities that the children had to be arduously trained to assume. (The cover was often that the children were refugees from vanquished French North Africa, where original records could no longer be checked by Vichy.)  Rémond also issued pseudonymous credentials to Moussa and Odette, naming them as functionaries of the Church.

  Protestant clergymen also became instrumental in the Network, including Pierre Gagnier, pastor of the Reformed Church of Nice and Edmond Evrard, pastor of the Nice Baptist Church.  They arranged for many of their parishioners to integrate Jewish children into their families, again with new Christian identities, usually with the same cover.

  All of the members of the Network­—Moussa, Odette and confederates who helped operate it; the many clergymen, priests, nuns and families who provided hiding places for the children; smugglers who ran funds into France to support the Network's operations—were ordinary, unarmed civilians who placed themselves in imminent danger of imprisonment and worse for their participation.  (Odette was in fact caught in 1944 and spent a year in Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, surviving only because her skills as a doctor were needed.)  Through the brave efforts of such people, 527 children were saved, all surviving the War.  Moussa continued his mission for years afterward, searching for still-living parents or relatives of the children, or finding foster homes for them.

  Coleman's book tells of abominations set against selfless courage.  Yet the narrative stands as an anomaly in the history of the Holocaust, for it was unsung for half a century.  After some minimal publicity in late 1945, Moussa and Odette didn't speak of it again, nor did any of the other participants.  Most of the children were unaware that they had been saved by an operation larger than the people who hid them. 

  Then, in the 1990s, the story slowly started to re-emerge.  In 1992, after comprehensive investigation, Israel honored seven Christian members of the Network, including Bishop Rémond and Pastors Gagnier and Evrard, as "Righteous among Nations," a citation given to non-Jews—such as the better known Oskar Schindler—who put their lives at risk for Jews during the Holocaust.  Moussa and Odette themselves relented from their silence in 1995, two years before Moussa's death, when they were convinced to record seven hours of videotaped interviews for a scholarly archive on the Holocaust at Yale.  In 2008, a square in Paris near where the Abadis spent the last forty years of their lives was named after them.

Place Abadi in Paris. [Source: Coleman's book.]

  A complete account still needed to be assembled.  Coleman accomplished that through three years of investigation, ferreting out long-buried records of many of the participants and tracking down and interviewing some of the children, by then in their seventies and eighties. 

  I couldn't help asking Coleman when I met him at one of his book readings, "Why was there such silence for so long?"  According to him, everyone in the Network felt that they had simply done their duty, and that was the end of it.  When I expressed wonderment at their reticence, Coleman said that he thought it was "a generational thing." 

  That suddenly rang a bell for me.  Although I was too young to serve in the War, I have known many who did, including scores of demobilized GIs with whom I went to college.  Few ever spoke of their service as warriors unless under direct questioning, and often not then.  A recent example: Only just before the death of a friend who was eight years my senior, with whom I played tennis several times a week for almost fifteen years, did I find out by happenstance that he had been a torpedo pilot in the Pacific war, having repeatedly flown missions where his life might have been snuffed out in an instant by the devastating gunnery from ships he was attacking.  Astounded, when I next saw him I asked why he had never mentioned his war service to me.  His answer was an unassuming, "I just did my duty"; indeed, that simple declaration was the hallmark of memorial comments about him at his funeral.

  The generation of Americans who were forged by the Depression and annealed by service in World War II has been dubbed by Tom Brokaw as the "Greatest Generation."  In his words, it was a "generation of towering achievement and modest demeanor."  Brokaw could well have included the same age cohort world-wide who, like Moussa and Odette, fought the evil of fascism that was overrunning the earth.  For the righteous of that generation, who were legion, quietly doing one's duty was quite unexceptional.

  I'm afraid that "quietly doing one's duty" sounds a bit corny to the modern ear, rather Victorian.  It doesn't seem to be practiced much nowadays.  Has it become rare enough to be anachronistic?