Italian Advice on How to Live the Good Life: Cigarettes, Tomatoes, and Other Picturesque Small Pleasures

“I guess everybody’s got a dream and we’re all hop­ing to see it come true,” mus­es Gio­van­ni Mim­mo Man­cu­sou, a philo­soph­i­cal native of Cal­abria, the love­ly, sun-drenched region form­ing the toe of Italy’s boot, above. “A dream com­ing true is bet­ter than just a dream.”

Film­mak­ers Jan Vrhovnik and Ana Kerin were scout­ing for sub­jects to embody “the very essence of nos­tal­gia” when they chanced upon Man­cu­sou in a cor­ner shop.

A lucky encounter! Not every non-actor — or for that mat­ter, actor — is as com­fort­able on film as the laid­back Man­cu­sou.

(Vrhovnik has said that he invari­ably serves as his own cam­era oper­a­tor when work­ing with non-actors, because of the poten­tial for inti­ma­cy and intu­itive approach that such prox­im­i­ty affords.)

Man­cu­sou, an advo­cate for sim­ple plea­sures, also appears to be quite fit, which makes us won­der why the film’s descrip­tion on NOWNESS dou­bles down on adjec­tives like “aging”, “old­er” and most con­fus­ing­ly, “wis­ened.”

Mer­ri­am-Web­ster defines “wiz­ened” with a z as “dry, shrunk­en, and wrin­kled often as a result of aging or of fail­ing vital­i­ty” … and “wis­ened” not at all.

Per­haps NOWNESS meant wise?

We find our­selves crav­ing a lot more con­text.

Man­cu­sou has clear­ly cul­ti­vat­ed an abil­i­ty to savor the hell out of a ripe toma­to, his pic­turesque sur­round­ings, and his cig­gies.

“Seren­i­ty, joy, ecsta­sy” is embroi­dered across the back of his ball cap.

His man­ner of express­ing him­self does lend itself to a “poet­ic thought piece”, as the film­mak­ers note, but might that not be a symp­tom of strug­gling to com­mu­ni­cate abstract thoughts in a for­eign tongue?

We real­ly would love to know more about this charm­ing guy… his fam­i­ly sit­u­a­tion, what he does to make ends meet, his actu­al age.

Home movies accom­pa­ny his nos­tal­gic rever­ie, but did he pro­vide this footage to his new friends?

Did they hunt it down on ebay? It def­i­nite­ly fits the vibe, but is the man with the eye­brows Man­cu­sou at an ear­li­er age?

Our star pulls up to a small petrol sta­tion, declares, “All right, here we go,” and the next frame shows him wear­ing a head­lamp and mag­ni­fi­er as he peers into the work­ings of a pock­et watch:

Time out of mechan­i­cal. It’s mag­ic.

Is this a hob­by? A pro­fes­sion? Does he repair watch­es in a dark­ened gas sta­tion?

The film­mak­ers aren’t say­ing and the blurred back­ground offers no clues either. Curse you, depth of field!

We’re not even giv­en his home coor­di­nates.

The film, part of the NOWNESS series Por­trait of a Place, is titled Par­adiso, and there is indeed a vil­lage so named adja­cent to the town of Belvedere Marit­ti­mo, but accord­ing to cen­sus data we found on line, it has only 14 res­i­dents, 7 male.

If that’s where Man­cu­sou lives, he’s either 45–49, 65–69, 70–74, or one of two fel­lows over age 74…and now we’re real­ly curi­ous about his neigh­bors, too.

No shade to Sign­or Man­cu­so, but we’re glad to know we’re not the only view­ers left unsat­is­fied by this por­trait’s lack of depth.

One com­menter who chafed at the lack of speci­fici­ty (“this video is a ran­dom por­trait of basi­cal­ly any­one in the world that is hap­py with the lit­tle he has”) sug­gest­ed the omis­sions con­tribute to an Ital­ian stereo­type famil­iar from pas­ta sauce com­mer­cials:

Peo­ple in Italy actu­al­ly work and have ambi­tions you know? And often are very well-edu­cat­ed and hard-work­ing. The per­spec­tive of Italy that you have comes from the Amer­i­can media and Ital­ian post-war neo­re­al­ism. Indeed, Oscar-win­ning Ital­ian peo­ple com­plained about the fact that what the media wants is see­ing Ital­ians wear­ing tank tops doing noth­ing if not mafia or smelling the ros­es.

Watch more entries in the NOWNESS Por­trait of a Place series here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness? Lessons from a 75-Year-Long Har­vard Study

A Guide to Hap­pi­ness: Alain de Botton’s Doc­u­men­tary Shows How Niet­zsche, Socrates & 4 Oth­er Philoso­phers Can Change Your Life

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Online Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

The Sci­ence of Well-Being: Take a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale University’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

 

Watch Hannah Arendt’s Final Interview (1973)

Even before the elec­tion of Don­ald Trump, as some crit­ics began to see the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a win, talk turned to his­tor­i­cal names of anti-fas­cism: George Orwell, Sin­clair Lewis, and, espe­cial­ly, Han­nah Arendt, author of The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism, On Rev­o­lu­tion, and Eich­mann in Jerusalem, her series of arti­cles for The New York­er about the tri­al of the Naz­i’s chief bureau­crat. Arendt close­ly observed author­i­tar­i­an regimes and their after­math, detail­ing the way ide­ol­o­gy seeps in through banal polit­i­cal careerism.

Since 2016, her warn­ings have seemed all-too-pre­scient, espe­cial­ly after a coup attempt last Jan­u­ary that has been all-but hand-waved out of polit­i­cal mem­o­ry by the GOP and its media appa­ra­tus, while can­di­dates who deny the legit­i­ma­cy of elec­tion out­comes they don’t like increas­ing­ly get their names on bal­lots. The degree to which Arendt saw the polit­i­cal con­di­tions of her time, and maybe ours, with clar­i­ty has less to do with fore­knowl­edge and more with a deep knowl­edge of the past. Cor­rup­tion, tyran­ny, deceit, in all their many forms, have not changed much in their essen­tial char­ac­ter since the records of antiq­ui­ty were set down.

“Dark times,” she wrote in the 1968 pref­ace to her col­lec­tion of essays Men in Dark Times, “are not only not new, they are no rar­i­ty in his­to­ry, although,” she adds, “they were per­haps unknown in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, which oth­er­wise has its fair share, past and present, of crime and dis­as­ter.” Had her assess­ment changed a few years lat­er, in what would be her final inter­view, above, in 1973 (aired on French TV in 1974)? Had dark times come for the U.S.? The Yom Kip­pur War had just begun, the seem­ing­ly-end­less Viet­nam War dragged on, and the Water­gate scan­dal had hit its crescen­do.

Still, Arendt con­tin­ued to feel a cer­tain guard­ed opti­mism about her adopt­ed coun­try, which, she says, is “not a nation-state” like Ger­many or France:

This coun­try is unit­ed nei­ther by her­itage, nor by mem­o­ry, nor by soil, nor by lan­guage, nor by ori­gin from the same. There are no natives here. The natives were the Indi­ans. Every­one else are cit­i­zens. And these cit­i­zens are unit­ed only by one thing and this is true: That is, you become a cit­i­zen in the Unit­ed States by a sim­ple con­sent to the Con­sti­tu­tion. The con­sti­tu­tion – that is a scrap of paper accord­ing to the French as well as the Ger­man com­mon opin­ion, & you can change it. No, here it is a sacred doc­u­ment. It is the con­stant remem­brance of one sacred act. And that is the act of foun­da­tion. And the foun­da­tion is to make a union out of whol­ly dis­parate eth­nic minori­ties and reli­gions, and (a) still have a union, and (b) do not assim­i­late or lev­el down these dif­fer­ences. And all of this is very dif­fi­cult to under­stand for a for­eign­er. It’s what a for­eign­er nev­er under­stands.

Whether or not Amer­i­cans under­stood them­selves that way in 1973, or under­stand our­selves this way today, Arendt points to an ide­al that makes the demo­c­ra­t­ic process in the U.S. unique; when, that is, it is allowed to func­tion as osten­si­bly designed, by the con­sent of the gov­erned rather than the tyran­ny of an oli­garchy. Arendt died two years lat­er, as the war in Viet­nam final­ly came to an inglo­ri­ous end. You can watched her full tele­vised inter­view — with Eng­lish trans­la­tions by the uploader, Phi­los­o­phy Over­dose — above, or find it pub­lished in the book, Han­nah Arendt: The Last Inter­view and Oth­er Con­ver­sa­tions.

What would Arendt have had to say to our time of MAGA, COVID-19 and elec­tion denial­ism, mass polit­i­cal racism, misog­y­ny, homo­pho­bia, and xeno­pho­bia? Per­haps her most suc­cinct state­ment on how to rec­og­nize the dark times comes from that same 1968 pref­ace:

I bor­row the term from Brecht’s famous poem ‘To Pos­ter­i­ty,’ which men­tions the dis­or­der and the hunger, the mas­sacres and the slaugh­ter­ers, the out­rage over injus­tice and the despair ‘when there was only wrong and no out­rage,’ the legit­i­mate hatred that makes you ugly nev­er­the­less, the well-found­ed wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse. All this was real enough as it took place in pub­lic; there was noth­ing secret or mys­te­ri­ous about it. And still, it was by no means vis­i­ble to all, nor was it at all easy to per­ceive it; for, until the very moment when cat­a­stro­phe over­took every­thing and every­body, it was cov­ered up not by real­i­ties but by the high­ly effi­cient talk and dou­ble-talk of near­ly all offi­cial rep­re­sen­ta­tives who, with­out inter­rup­tion and in many inge­nious vari­a­tions, explained away unpleas­ant facts and jus­ti­fied con­cerns. When we think of dark times and of peo­ple liv­ing and mov­ing in them, we have to take this cam­ou­flage, ema­nat­ing from and spread by ‘the estab­lish­ment’ – or ‘the sys­tem,’ as it was then called – also into account. If it is the func­tion of the pub­lic realm to throw light on the affairs of men by pro­vid­ing a space of appear­ances in which they can show in deed and word, for bet­ter or worse, who they are and what they can do, then dark­ness has come when this light is extin­guished by ‘cred­i­bil­i­ty gaps’ and ‘invis­i­ble gov­ern­ment,’ by speech that does not dis­close what is but sweeps it under the car­pet, by exhor­ta­tions, moral and oth­er­wise, that, under the pre­text of uphold­ing old truths, degrade all truth to mean­ing­less triv­i­al­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

Large Archive of Han­nah Arendt’s Papers Dig­i­tized by the Library of Con­gress: Read Her Lec­tures, Drafts of Arti­cles, Notes & Cor­re­spon­dence

Han­nah Arendt Explains Why Democ­ra­cies Need to Safe­guard the Free Press & Truth … to Defend Them­selves Against Dic­ta­tors and Their Lies

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Jean-Paul Sartre & Albert Camus: Their Friendship and the Bitter Feud That Ended It

At the end of World War II, as Europe lay in ruins, so too did its “intel­lec­tu­al land­scape,” notes the Liv­ing Phi­los­o­phy video above. In the midst of this “intel­lec­tu­al crater” a num­ber of great thinkers debat­ed “the blue­print for the future.” Fem­i­nist philoso­pher and nov­el­ist Simone de Beau­voir put it blunt­ly: “We were to pro­vide the post­war era with its ide­ol­o­gy.” Two names — De Beau­voir’s part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre and his friend Albert Camus — came to define that ide­ol­o­gy in the phi­los­o­phy broad­ly known as Exis­ten­tial­ism.

The two first met in Paris in 1943 dur­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion. They were already “deeply acquaint­ed” with one another’s work and shared a mutu­al respect and admi­ra­tion as crit­ics and review­ers of each oth­er and as fel­low resis­tance mem­bers. Both “intel­lec­tu­al giants” were tar­get­ed by the FBI, and both would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture (though Sartre reject­ed his). Their fame would con­tin­ue into the post­war years, despite Camus’ retreat from philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing after the pub­li­ca­tion of The Rebel.

While we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly brought you sto­ries of their friend­ship, and its bit­ter end, the video above digs deep­er into the Sartre-Camus rival­ry, with crit­i­cal his­tor­i­cal con­text for their think­ing. Their ini­tial falling out took place over The Rebel, which cham­pi­oned an eth­i­cal indi­vid­u­al­ism and cri­tiqued the moral­i­ty of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence. Instead of explor­ing sui­cide, as he had done in The Myth of Sisy­phus, here Camus explores the prob­lem of mur­der, con­clud­ing that — out­side of extreme cir­cum­stances like a Nazi inva­sion — vio­lent polit­i­cal means do not jus­ti­fy their ends.

The book pro­voked Sartre, a doc­tri­naire Marx­ist, who had issued what Camus con­sid­ered fee­ble defens­es for Joseph Stal­in’s purges and gulags. A series of scathing reviews and angry ripostes fol­lowed. The per­son­al tone of these attacks chilled what lit­tle warmth remained between them. When the Alger­ian war for inde­pen­dence erupt­ed a few years lat­er, the staunch­ly anti-colo­nial­ist Sartre took the side of Alge­ri­a’s Nation­al Lib­er­a­tion Front (FLN), excus­ing acts of vio­lence against civil­ians and rival fac­tions as jus­ti­fied by French oppres­sion. Such events “were beyond jus­ti­fi­ca­tion in the mind of Camus.”

While Sartre belit­tled Camus as “a crook,” the “acute­ness of the sit­u­a­tion was all the stronger for Camus since Alge­ria was his home­land. He could not see it in the ide­o­log­i­cal warped black and white of Sartre’s cir­cle or the con­ser­v­a­tive French gov­ern­ment.” The state­ment might sum up all of Camus’ thought. As Sartre final­ly con­ced­ed in a posthu­mous trib­ute; he “rep­re­sent­ed in our time the lat­est exam­ple of that long line of moral­istes whose works con­sti­tute per­haps the most orig­i­nal ele­ment in French let­ters.… he reaf­firmed… against the Machi­avel­lians and against the Idol of real­ism, the exis­tence of the moral issue,” in all its com­plex ambi­gu­i­ty and uncer­tain­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sartre Writes a Trib­ute to Camus After His Friend-Turned-Rival Dies in a Trag­ic Car Crash: “There Is an Unbear­able Absur­di­ty in His Death”

The Exis­ten­tial­ism Files: How the FBI Tar­get­ed Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assas­si­na­tion

Albert Camus Writes a Friend­ly Let­ter to Jean-Paul Sartre Before Their Per­son­al and Philo­soph­i­cal Rift

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Philosopher Bertrand Russell Talks About the Time When His Grandfather Met Napoleon

Maybe our gen­er­a­tional enmi­ty has grown too great these days, but once upon a time, pri­ma­ry school teach­ers would ask stu­dents to inter­view an elder as an eye­wit­ness to his­to­ry. Most of our elders didn’t par­tic­i­pate in His­to­ry, big H. Few of them were (or stood adja­cent to) world lead­ers. But in some way or anoth­er, they expe­ri­enced events most of us only see in pho­tographs and film: the Viet­nam War, seg­re­ga­tion and the Civ­il Rights Move­ment, the Cold War and its end…. It’s not hard to see how this rel­a­tive­ly recent his­to­ry has shaped the world we live in.

Hear­ing from peo­ple who lived through such world-his­tor­i­cal events can give us need­ed per­spec­tive, if they’re still liv­ing and will­ing to talk. It offers a sense that the apoc­a­lyp­tic dread we often feel in the face of our own crises – cli­mate, virus, war, the seem­ing end of demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions – was also acute­ly felt, and often with as much good rea­son, by those who lived a gen­er­a­tion or two before us. And yet, they sur­vived — or did so long enough to make chil­dren and grand­chil­dren. They saw glob­al cat­a­stro­phes pass and change and some­times wit­nessed turns of for­tune that brought empires to their knees.

Indeed, when we step back just a gen­er­a­tion or two before the oft-maligned boomers, we find peo­ple whose elders lived through the event that has come to stand for the hubris­tic fall of empires — Napoleon’s defeat and cap­ture at Water­loo on March, 20, 1815. The philoso­pher, writer, social crit­ic, and pub­lic fig­ure Bertrand Rus­sell was such a per­son. Both of Rus­sel­l’s par­ents died when he was very young, and his grand­par­ents raised him. In the restored, col­orized and “speech adjust­ed” 1952 inter­view just above, you can hear Rus­sell rem­i­nisce about his grand­fa­ther, the 1st Earl Rus­sell, who was born in 1792.

Rus­sel­l’s grand­fa­ther was a world leader. He served as prime min­is­ter between 1846 and 1856 and again from 1865 to 1866. Or as Rus­sell puts it to his Amer­i­can inter­view­er, “He was prime min­is­ter dur­ing your Mex­i­can War, dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tions of 1848. I remem­ber him quite well. But as you can see, he belonged to an age that now seems rather removed.” A time when one man could and did, in just a few years time, place near­ly all of Europe under his direct con­trol or the con­trol of his sub­or­di­nates; before mod­ern war­fare, guer­ril­la war­fare, cyber and drone war.…

Earl Rus­sell not only met Napoleon, but became a late ally. After a 90-minute meet­ing with Bona­parte dur­ing the self-pro­claimed Emper­or’s exile, “Rus­sell denounced the Bour­bon Restora­tion and Britain’s dec­la­ra­tion of war against the recent­ly-returned Napoleon,” notes the video’s poster, “by argu­ing in the House of Com­mons that for­eign pow­ers had no right to dic­tate France’s form of gov­ern­ment.” The younger Rus­sell, him­self born in 1872, also saw his­to­ry swept away. He lived in “a world where all kinds of things that have now dis­ap­peared were thought to be going to last for­ev­er,” he says.

One may be remind­ed of the Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo’s “all that is sol­id melts into air.” Rus­sell gives no indi­ca­tion that his grand­fa­ther, a con­tem­po­rary of that world-his­tor­i­cal doc­u­men­t’s author, ever inter­act­ed with Karl Marx. But Rus­sell him­self met an impos­ing his­tor­i­cal fig­ure who looms just as large in world his­to­ry. Hear him above, in 1961, describe how he met Vladimir Lenin in 1920.

via @TamasGorbe

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Orson Welles Crossed Paths With Hitler (and Churchill): “He Had No Per­son­al­i­ty…. I Think There Was Noth­ing There.”

Bertrand Russell’s Advice For How (Not) to Grow Old: “Make Your Inter­ests Grad­u­al­ly Wider and More Imper­son­al”

Bertrand Russell’s Advice to Peo­ple Liv­ing 1,000 Years in the Future: “Love is Wise, Hatred is Fool­ish”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Self-Encounter: The 10-Episode TV Show That Introduced Existentialism to Americans in 1961

“Exis­ten­tial­ism is both a phi­los­o­phy and a mood,” says Hazel Barnes by way of open­ing the tele­vi­sion series Self-Encounter: A Study in Exis­ten­tial­ism. “As a mood, I think we could say that it is the mood of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry — or, at least, of those peo­ple in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry who are dis­con­tent with things as they are. It express­es the feel­ing that, some­how or oth­er, all of those sys­tems — whether they be social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or sci­en­tif­ic — which have attempt­ed to define and explain and deter­mine man, have some­how missed the liv­ing indi­vid­ual per­son.”

Exis­ten­tial­ism was on the rise in 1961, when Barnes spoke those words, and the sub­se­quent six decades have arguably done lit­tle to assuage its dis­con­tent. By the time of Self-Encounter’s broad­cast in ’61, Barnes was already well-known in philo­soph­i­cal cir­cles for her Eng­lish trans­la­tion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Noth­ing­ness. When she took on that job, with what she lat­er described as “three years of bad­ly taught high school French and one year­long course in col­lege, and a bare min­i­mum of back­ground in phi­los­o­phy,” she could­n’t have known that it would set her on the road to becom­ing the most famous pop­u­lar­iz­er of exis­ten­tial­ism in Amer­i­ca.

Five years after the pub­li­ca­tion of Barnes’ Sartre trans­la­tion, along came the oppor­tu­ni­ty to host a ten-part series on Nation­al Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion­al Tele­vi­sion (a pre­de­ces­sor of PBS) explain­ing Sartre’s thought as well as that of oth­er writ­ers like Simone de Beau­voir, Albert Camus, and Richard Wright, between drama­ti­za­tions of scenes drawn from exis­ten­tial­ist lit­er­a­ture. Self-Encounter was once “thought to be entire­ly lost, the orig­i­nal tapes hav­ing been report­ed record­ed over,” writes Nick Nielsen. But after the series’ unex­pect­ed redis­cov­ery in 2017, all of its episodes grad­u­al­ly made their way to the web. You can watch all ten of them straight through in the near­ly five-hour video at the top of the post, or view them one-by-one at the Amer­i­can Archive of Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing.

Self Encounter was pro­duced in 1961 and first broad­cast in 1962,” Nielsen writes. “I can­not help but note that Route 66 aired from 1960 to 1964, The Out­er Lim­its aired from 1963 to 1965, Rawhide aired from 1959 to 1965, and Per­ry Mason aired from 1957 to 1966” — not to men­tion The Twi­light Zone, from 1959 to 1964. “It would be dif­fi­cult to name anoth­er tele­vi­sion milieu of com­pa­ra­ble depth. Our men­tal image of this peri­od of Amer­i­can his­to­ry as being one of sti­fling con­for­mi­ty is belied by these dark per­spec­tives on human nature.” And as for the social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, sci­en­tif­ic, and of course tech­no­log­i­cal sys­tems in effect today, the exis­ten­tial­ists would sure­ly take a dim view of their poten­tial to lib­er­ate us from con­for­mi­ty — or any oth­er aspect of the human con­di­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Exis­ten­tial­ism with Hubert Drey­fus: Five Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Albert Camus’ Exis­ten­tial­ism, a Phi­los­o­phy Mak­ing a Come­back in Our Dys­func­tion­al Times

The Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, the First Exis­ten­tial­ist Philoso­pher, Revis­it­ed in 1984 Doc­u­men­tary

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Exis­ten­tial­ist Phi­los­o­phy of Jean-Paul Sartre… and How It Can Open Our Eyes to Life’s Pos­si­bil­i­ties

Exis­ten­tial Phi­los­o­phy of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus Explained with 8‑Bit Video Games

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Aldous Huxley Predicts in 1950 What the World Will Look Like in the Year 2000

I’ve been think­ing late­ly about how and why utopi­an fic­tion shades into dystopi­an. Though we some­times imag­ine the two modes as inver­sions of each oth­er, per­haps they lie instead on a con­tin­u­um, one along which all soci­eties slide, from func­tion­al to dys­func­tion­al. The cen­tral prob­lem seems to be this: Utopi­an thought relies on putting the com­pli­ca­tions of human behav­ior on the shelf to make a max­i­mal­ly effi­cient social order—or of find­ing some con­ve­nient way to dis­pense with those com­pli­ca­tions. But it is pre­cise­ly with this lat­ter move that the trou­ble begins. How to make the mass of peo­ple com­pli­ant and pacif­ic? Mass media and con­sumerism? Forced col­lec­tiviza­tion? Drugs?

Read­ers of dystopi­an fic­tion will rec­og­nize these as some of the design flaws in Aldous Huxley’s utopian/dystopian soci­ety of Brave New World, a nov­el that asks us to wres­tle with the philo­soph­i­cal prob­lem of whether we can cre­ate a ful­ly func­tion­al soci­ety with­out rob­bing peo­ple of their agency and inde­pen­dence. Doesn’t every utopia, after all, imag­ine a world of strict hier­ar­chies and con­trols? The original—Thomas More’s Utopia—gave us a patri­ar­chal slave soci­ety (as did Plato’s Repub­lic). Huxley’s Brave New World sim­i­lar­ly sit­u­ates human­i­ty in a caste sys­tem, sub­or­di­nat­ed to tech­nol­o­gy and sub­dued with med­ica­tion.

While Huxley’s utopia has erad­i­cat­ed the nuclear fam­i­ly and nat­ur­al human reproduction—thus solv­ing a pop­u­la­tion crisis—it is still a soci­ety ruled by the ideas of found­ing fathers: Hen­ry Ford, H.G. Wells, Freud, Pavlov, Shake­speare, Thomas Robert Malthus. If you want­ed to know, in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, what the future would be like, you’d typ­i­cal­ly ask a famous man of ideas. Red­book mag­a­zine did just that in 1950, writes Matt Novak at Pale­o­fu­ture; they “asked four experts—curiously all men, giv­en that Red­book was and is a mag­a­zine aimed at women—about what the world may look like fifty years hence.”

One of those men was Hux­ley, and in his answers, he draws on at least two of Brave New World’s intel­lec­tu­al founders, Ford and Malthus, in pre­dic­tions about pop­u­la­tion growth and the nature of work. In addi­tion to the ever-present threats of war, Hux­ley first turns to the Malthu­sian prob­lems of over­pop­u­la­tion and scarce resources.

Dur­ing the next fifty years mankind will face three great prob­lems: the prob­lem of avoid­ing war; the prob­lem of feed­ing and cloth­ing a pop­u­la­tion of two and a quar­ter bil­lions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three bil­lions, and the prob­lem of sup­ply­ing these bil­lions with­out ruin­ing the planet’s irre­place­able resources.

As Novak points out, Huxley’s esti­ma­tion is “less than half of the 6.1 bil­lion that would prove to be a real­i­ty by 2000.” In order to address the prob­lem of feed­ing, hous­ing, and cloth­ing all of those peo­ple, Hux­ley must make an “unhap­pi­ly… large assumption—that the nations can agree to live in peace. In this event mankind will be free to devote all its ener­gy and skill to the solu­tion of its oth­er major prob­lems.”

“Huxley’s pre­dic­tions for food pro­duc­tion in the year 2000,” writes Novak, “are large­ly a call for the con­ser­va­tion of resources. He cor­rect­ly points out that meat pro­duc­tion can be far less effi­cient than using agri­cul­tur­al lands for crops.” Hux­ley rec­om­mends sus­tain­able farm­ing meth­ods and the devel­op­ment of “new types of syn­thet­ic build­ing mate­ri­als and new sources for paper” in order to curb the destruc­tion of the world’s forests. What he doesn’t account for is the degree to which the over­whelm­ing greed of a pow­er­ful few would dri­ve the exploita­tion of finite resources and hold back efforts at sus­tain­able design, agri­cul­ture, and energy—a sit­u­a­tion that some might con­sid­er an act of war.

But Hux­ley’s utopi­an pre­dic­tions depend upon putting aside these com­pli­ca­tions. Like many mid-cen­tu­ry futur­ists, he imag­ined a world of increased leisure and greater human ful­fill­ment, but he “sees that poten­tial for bet­ter work­ing con­di­tions and increased stan­dards of liv­ing as obtain­able only through a sus­tained peace.” When it comes to work, Hux­ley’s fore­casts are part­ly Fordist: Advances in tech­nol­o­gy are one thing, but “work is work,” he writes, “and what mat­ters to the work­er is nei­ther the prod­uct nor the tech­ni­cal process, but the pay, the hours, the atti­tude of the boss, the phys­i­cal envi­ron­ment.”

To most office and fac­to­ry work­ers in 2000 the appli­ca­tion of nuclear fis­sion to indus­try will mean very lit­tle. What they will care about is what their fathers and moth­ers care about today—improvement in the con­di­tions of labor. Giv­en peace, it should be pos­si­ble, with­in the next fifty years, to improve work­ing con­di­tions very con­sid­er­ably. Bet­ter equipped, work­ers will pro­duce more and there­fore earn more.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Novak points out, “per­haps Huxley’s most inac­cu­rate pre­dic­tion is his assump­tion that an increase in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty will mean an increase in wages for the aver­age work­er.” Despite ris­ing prof­its and effi­cien­cy, this has proven untrue. In a Freudi­an turn, Hux­ley also pre­dicts the decen­tral­iza­tion of indus­try into “small coun­try com­mu­ni­ties, where life is cheap­er, pleas­an­ter and more gen­uine­ly human than in those breed­ing-grounds of mass neu­ro­sis…. Decen­tral­iza­tion may help to check that march toward the asy­lum, which is a threat to our civ­i­liza­tion hard­ly less grave than that of ero­sion and A‑bomb.”

While tech­no­log­i­cal improve­ments in mate­ri­als may not fun­da­men­tal­ly change the con­cerns of work­ers, improve­ments in robot­ics and com­put­er­i­za­tion may abol­ish many of their jobs, leav­ing increas­ing num­bers of peo­ple with­out any means of sub­sis­tence. So we’re told again and again. But this was not yet the press­ing con­cern in 2000 that it is for futur­ists just a few years lat­er. Per­haps one of Huxley’s most pre­scient state­ments takes head-on the issue fac­ing our cur­rent society—an aging pop­u­la­tion in which “there will be more elder­ly peo­ple in the world than at any pre­vi­ous time. In many coun­tries the cit­i­zens of six­ty-five and over will out­num­ber the boys and girls of fif­teen and under.”

Pen­sions and a point­less leisure offer no solu­tion to the prob­lems of an aging pop­u­la­tion. In 2000 the younger read­ers of this arti­cle, who will then be in their sev­en­ties, will prob­a­bly be inhab­it­ing a world in which the old are pro­vid­ed with oppor­tu­ni­ties for using their expe­ri­ence and remain­ing strength in ways sat­is­fac­to­ry to them­selves, and valu­able to the com­mu­ni­ty.

Giv­en the decrease in wages, ris­ing inequal­i­ty, and loss of home val­ues and retire­ment plans, more and more of the peo­ple Hux­ley imag­ined are instead work­ing well into their sev­en­ties. But while Hux­ley failed to fore­see the pro­found­ly destruc­tive force of unchecked greed—and had to assume a per­haps unob­tain­able world peace—he did accu­rate­ly iden­ti­fy many of the most press­ing prob­lems of the 21st cen­tu­ry. Eight years after the Red­book essay, Hux­ley was called on again to pre­dict the future in a tele­vi­sion inter­view with Mike Wal­lace. You can watch it in full at the top of the post.

Wal­lace begins in a McCarthyite vein, ask­ing Hux­ley to name “the ene­mies of free­dom in the Unit­ed States.” Hux­ley instead dis­cuss­es “imper­son­al forces,” return­ing to the prob­lem of over­pop­u­la­tion and oth­er con­cerns he addressed in Brave New World, such as the threat of an over­ly bureau­crat­ic, tech­no­crat­ic soci­ety too heav­i­ly depen­dent on tech­nol­o­gy. Four years after this inter­view, Hux­ley pub­lished his final book, the philo­soph­i­cal nov­el Island, in which, writes Vel­ma Lush, the evils he had warned us about, “over-pop­u­la­tion, coer­cive pol­i­tics, mil­i­tarism, mech­a­niza­tion, the destruc­tion of the envi­ron­ment and the wor­ship of sci­ence will find their oppo­sites in the gen­tle and doomed Utopia of Pala.”

The utopia of IslandHuxley’s wife Lau­ra told Alan Watts—is “pos­si­ble and actu­al… Island is real­ly vision­ary com­mon sense.” But it is also a soci­ety, Hux­ley trag­i­cal­ly rec­og­nized, made frag­ile by its unwill­ing­ness to con­trol human behav­ior and pre­pare for war.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

via Pale­o­fu­ture

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Dis­cov­ers the Secrets of Aldous Hux­ley and His Art of Dying

Hear Aldous Hux­ley Read Brave New World. Plus 84 Clas­sic Radio Dra­mas from CBS Radio Work­shop (1956–57)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

John Locke’s Personal Pancake Recipe: “This Is the Right Way” to Make the Classic Breakfast Treat

No stu­dent of West­ern polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy can ignore John Locke, whose work defined the con­cepts of gov­er­nance we now know as lib­er­al­ism. By the same token, no stu­dent of West­ern cui­sine can ignore pan­cakes, a canon­i­cal ele­ment of what we now know as break­fast. The old­est pan­cake recipe we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture dates to 1585. Ernest Hem­ing­way had his own pre­ferred pan­cake-mak­ing method; so do Simon and Gar­funkel, though theirs are of the pota­to vari­ety.

Locke, as you might imag­ine, opt­ed for a more tra­di­tion­al­ly Eng­lish recipe. Three cen­turies on, how well his vision of lib­er­al­ism has held up remains a mat­ter of active debate. As for his pan­cakes, Maris­sa Nicosia at Cook­ing in the Archives put them to the test just last year. “When David Armitage post­ed this recipe for pan­cakes in the Bodleian col­lec­tion on Twit­ter, I knew that I want­ed to try it,” Nicosia writes. Her tran­scrip­tion is as fol­lows:

pan­cakes
Take sweet cream 3/4 + pint. Flower a
quar­ter of a pound. Eggs four 7 leave out two 4 of
the whites. Beat the Eggs very well. Then put in
the flower, beat it a quar­ter of an how­er. Then
put in six spoon­fulls of the Cream, beat it a litle
Take new sweet but­ter half a pound. Melt it to oyle, &
take off the skum, pow­er in all the clear by degrees
beat­ing it all the time. Then put in the rest of
your cream. beat it well. Half a grat­ed nut­meg
& litle orange­flower water. Frie it with­out but­ter.
This is the right way

“From the start, I was intrigued by the cross-outs and oth­er notes in the recipe. It appears that it was first draft­ed (or pre­pared) using sig­nif­i­cant­ly few­er eggs.” As metic­u­lous in his cook­ing as in his phi­los­o­phy, Locke clear­ly paid close atten­tion to “the details of sep­a­rat­ing and whisk­ing eggs as well as adding just the right amount of orange blos­som water (‘litle’) and nut­meg (‘Half a grat­ed nut­meg’) — an excep­tion­al, expen­sive amount.”

Draw­ing on her sig­nif­i­cant expe­ri­ence with ear­ly mod­ern pan­cakes, Nicosia describes Lock­e’s ver­sion as “a bit fluffi­er and fat­ti­er than a clas­sic French crêpe,” though with “far less rise than my favorite Amer­i­can break­fast ver­sion”; her hus­band places them “some­where between a clas­sic Eng­lish pan­cake and a Scotch pan­cake.” Per­haps that some­what norther­ly taste and tex­ture stands to rea­son, in light of the con­sid­er­able influ­ence Lock­e’s non-pan­cake-relat­ed work would lat­er have on the Scot­tish Enlight­en­ment.

The final line of Lock­e’s recipe, “This is the right way,” may sound a bit stern in con­text today. But whether you work straight from his orig­i­nal or from the updat­ed ver­sion Nicosia pro­vides in her post, you should end up with “pan­cakes made for a deca­dent break­fast.” Lock­e’s inclu­sion of an extrav­a­gant amount of nut­meg and splash of orange-blos­som water “ele­vates this spe­cif­ic pan­cake recipe to a spe­cial treat.” Nicosia includes a pic­ture of her own hon­ey-driz­zled Lock­ean break­fast with the a copy of Two Trea­tis­es of Gov­ern­ment and a cup of cof­fee — the lat­ter being an espe­cial­ly ide­al accom­pa­ni­ment to pan­cakes, and one that also comes thor­ough­ly philoso­pher-endorsed.

via Rare Cook­ing

Relat­ed con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Hobbes, Locke & Rousseau: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Their Polit­i­cal The­o­ries

The Polit­i­cal Thought of Con­fu­cius, Pla­to, John Locke & Adam Smith Intro­duced in Ani­ma­tions Nar­rat­ed by Aidan Turn­er

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

A 1585 Recipe for Mak­ing Pan­cakes: Make It Your Sat­ur­day Morn­ing Break­fast

Tast­ing His­to­ry: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Oth­er Places & Peri­ods

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Martin Heidegger Talks Philosophy with a Buddhist Monk on German TV (1963)

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger is often called the most impor­tant philoso­pher of the 20th cen­tu­ry. I’m not in a posi­tion to eval­u­ate this claim, but his influ­ence on con­tem­po­rary and suc­ces­sive Euro­pean and Amer­i­can thinkers is con­sid­er­able. That influ­ence spread all the way to Thai­land, where Bud­dhist monk and uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Bhikku Maha Mani came to think of Hei­deg­ger as “the Ger­man philoso­pher.” (A con­cep­tion, writes Otto Poggel­er in an essay on Hei­deg­ger and East­ern thought, that may have “per­vert­ed the monk’s want­i­ng to talk” to the philoso­pher, “since phi­los­o­phy nev­er lets itself be embod­ied in an idol.”) The Bud­dhist monk, also a radio pre­sen­ter who lat­er left his order to work for Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion, met the Ger­man philoso­pher in 1963 for an inter­view on Ger­man TV sta­tion SWR. Maha Mani asks his ques­tions in Eng­lish, Hei­deg­ger responds in Ger­man. See the first part of the inter­view above, the sec­ond below.

This was not at all the first time the Ger­man philoso­pher had dia­logued with an East Asian thinker. In a study on the Bud­dhist and Taoist influ­ences on Heidegger’s work, Rein­hold May writes that Heidegger’s “direct con­tact with East Asian thought dates back at least as far as 1922” when he began con­ver­sa­tions with sev­er­al major Japan­ese thinkers. Nonethe­less, Hei­deg­ger appar­ent­ly had lit­tle to say on the cor­re­spon­dences between his ideas and those of East­ern philoso­phers until the 1950s, and the lit­tle that he did say seems mar­gin­al at best to his main body of work.

May’s claims of “hid­den influ­ence” may be high­ly exag­ger­at­ed, yet Hei­deg­ger was famil­iar with Bud­dhist thought, and, in the inter­view, he makes some inter­est­ing dis­tinc­tions and com­par­isons. In answer to the Bhikku’s first, very gen­er­al, ques­tion, Hei­deg­ger launch­es into his famil­iar refrain—“one ques­tion was nev­er asked [in “Occi­den­tal” phi­los­o­phy], that is, the ques­tion of Being.” Hei­deg­ger defines “the human being” as “this essence, that has lan­guage,” in con­trast to “the Bud­dhist teach­ings,” which do not make “an essen­tial dis­tinc­tion, between human beings and oth­er liv­ing things, plants and ani­mals.” For Hei­deg­ger, consciousness—“a know­ing rela­tion to Being” through language—is the exclu­sive pre­serve of humans.

In the sec­ond part of the inter­view (read a tran­script here), Bhikku Maha Mani asks Hei­deg­ger what he thinks about the con­tra­dic­to­ry West­ern ten­den­cy to iden­ti­fy peo­ple with­out reli­gion as “com­mu­nists” and those who live “accord­ing to reli­gious rules” as insane. Hei­deg­ger responds that reli­gion, in its most rad­i­cal sense, sim­ply means “a bond­ing-back to pow­ers, forces and laws, that super­sede human capa­bil­i­ty.” In this respect, he says, “no human being is with­out reli­gion,” whether it be “the belief in sci­ence” of com­mu­nists or “an athe­is­tic reli­gion, name­ly Bud­dhism, that knows no God.” Hei­deg­ger goes on to explain why he sees lit­tle pos­si­bil­i­ty of “imme­di­ate and sim­ple under­stand­ing” between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent reli­gions, philoso­phies, and polit­i­cal groups. While it may be tempt­ing to view Heidegger’s work—and that of oth­er phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal, exis­ten­tial, or skep­ti­cal philosophers—as work­ing in tan­dem with much East­ern thought, as per­haps “the” Ger­man philoso­pher him­self would cau­tion, the dif­fer­ences are sig­nif­i­cant. In the inter­view above, Hei­deg­ger large­ly faults Ger­many and “all of Europe in gen­er­al” for a gen­er­al lack of human har­mo­ny: “We do not have any clear, com­mon and sim­ple rela­tion to real­i­ty and to our­selves,” he says. “That is the big prob­lem of the West­ern world.”

Cours­es on Hei­deg­ger’s phi­los­o­phy can be found in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Love Let­ters of Han­nah Arendt and Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger

Heidegger’s “Black Note­books” Sug­gest He Was a Seri­ous Anti-Semi­te, Not Just a Naive Nazi

“Hei­deg­ger in the Kitchen”: Alain de Botton’s Video Essay Explains the Philosopher’s Con­cept of Being

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