Geoffrey E. Fox's Blog: Reflections & inquiries

For 2024, I posted four New Year’s resolutions as my alter ego The Man Who Can :    1, a new novel, this time set in Germany; 2, acquiring fluency in German; 3,  more book reviews, and 4, getting better on guitar.

I‘m part way there, on all four goals – except maybe no. 4, but I‘m still working on it. Thanks in good part to the support from our 6-member writing group „Thoth“, I now have a much clearer view of how to develop this new novel.  Duolingo and other online sources plus help from a couple of good, patient German friends have enabled me to reach at least basic fluency in German, book reviews keep coming. But no. 4 is lagging, and now I‘m going to have to give more time to music. Largely but not exclusively German.

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber by Wendy Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What are “nihilistic times”? Our times, today, when for politicians, media hosts and other opinion leaders, nothing is sacred, there is no clear standard of right or wrong, truth or falsity that they are required to observe, and thus no clear aim or purpose to any of our lives. That is, no purpose beyond “freedom”, understood to mean license to do whatever we like. This lack of clarity about principles makes us susceptible to charlatans and demagogues, “influencers” whose only claim to authority is the size of their followings— a full church, a massive throng at a rally, or even millions of voters ready to believe, or act as though they believe, whatever their leader says.
We have been here before. Scientific investigation discredited religious certainties about the creation of mankind, the purpose of life, and the physics of the Earth and the universe, a situation that Nietzsche expressed as “God is dead.” The belief that nothing is sacred or unquestionably true became sufficiently widespread in the course of the 19th century to be given the name, “nihilism”— from nihil, “nothing” in Latin.
Without God, philosophers and scientists sought, and numerous charlatans offered, some other principle for people to cling to and give meaning to their lives. The proliferation of religious sects, many newly invented, was the subject of William James masterly study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-02). Belief in the greatness and destiny of one’s “nation” became a very popular substitute for God— as suggested by the German nationalist slogan, Gott mit uns.
Political philosopher Wendy Brown sees this condition, nihilism permitting any fantasy or doctrine to be considered as valid as any other, as dangerous not only to an individual’s psychological health, but also to the survival and defense of a humane political community, able to take care of its members and solve collective problems.

View all my reviews

My fiction is often set amid upheavals that have changed the world — or attempted to. Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements in Latin America, in Welcome to My Contri; the tensions leading to the fall of the Byzantine and rise of the Ottoman Empire in A Gift for the Sultan; or the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune in Rabble!, my most recent novel. This fiction is historical, obviously, but more importantly, it is sociological. That is, it is an attempt to try to understand how these complex events had occurred, and how the various participants experienced them — and what they can tell us about our present predicaments.

Before writing fiction, I was teaching sociology in universities and writing about political and cultural change. In my research, I relied heavily on my interviews of the people affected by major changes, whether as proponents, opponents, victims or opportunists. For example, in my Ph.D.  dissertation, Working-Class Émigrés from Cuba, (Northwestern University, 1975), I sought to discover why working-class Cubans would flee a revolution supposedly made for their benefit; in my book Hispanic Nation, how and why Latinos from many different countries and social backgrounds were forging a new ethnic identity in the United States.

But for events of the more distant past, except where (rarely) some actor has left testimony of how he or she felt and acted, the only way to understand how the participants must have seen their options and to feel their emotions is to imagine ourselves in their place. And this is what I do in fiction.

The story of a complex social event is always the joint creation of all the actors together, with their different and conflicting agendas and possibilities. To see this, we view events in my fiction from different points of view, that is, through the imaginations of different and sometimes opposing actors. Some of these may be well-documented historical figures, for example the revolutionary activists Eugène Varlin and Louise Michel in Rabble!, about the Paris Commune, or the Turkish sultan Bayezid and the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos in A Gift for the Sultan. But to understand the thoughts and actions of the much larger number of anonymous actors, the masses who made the great event possible, we can create fictional characters based closely on known social types.

As did Dickens in, for example, A Tale of Two Cities; Tolstoy, in War and Peace; Stendahl, in La chartreuse de Parma; Flaubert, in Sentimental Education; or Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Balzac in various writings, and many other  authors I especially admire. Through such reconstructed, imagined characters, we want to induce our readers to feel their fears, their passions, their doubts, their joys and, when they occur, great disappointments — which has always been the job of literature. And thus to understand how such complex social changes could have occurred, and what the consequences had been for individual lives — and what may happen the next time. The clothing, customs and technology of the epoch are of course relevant, but they are not the point. My aim is not merely to provide color and sound to an adventure or a love story. Rather, I focus on a historical event to discover why and how it happened, to suggest what it shows us about human behaviors in a crisis and what we confront whenever such conflicts occur.

When, in the 1990s I was writing A Gift for the Sultan, I was anxious to see whether and how a distant historical episode, the Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1402, might help us understand current events. As I explained in this video: How and why I wrote “A Gift for the Sultan”, I wanted to understand what was fueling the emotions, ambitions, fears, desires, disgust, and rage in the Balkans wars at the time, especially the brutal siege of Sarajevo, and the relationship and antagonisms between a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic but predominantly Muslim city, and an army of mostly rural, anti-urban and anti-Muslim Serbian Orthodox Christians. In my novel, the point-of-view characters include the real Christian emperor and the Sultan besieging the city, but also fictional figures based closely on what we can know of the Ottoman warriors and their bands, cosmopolitan aristocrats and common tradesmen, foreign mercenaries in the pay of the Christian empire, and a young Christian princess whisked off from the city to be bestowed as a gift to the Sultan’s son.

And in Rabble!, I wanted to understand how working-class people, with no relevant experience and, for the most part, little education, could manage to operate such a sophisticated metropolis as Paris and keep its institutions, including health, education, and even inner city mail service, running for over two months even while suffering a devastating siege. And especially, how and why so many of those Parisian workers felt so powerfully committed to their creation that they were willing to die rather than surrender. I’ve told more about the composition and aims of this novel in this conversation with two intelligent and well-versed interviewers.

For the new novel, I’m trying to understand the reshaping of our world in the 20th century, starting with World Wars I and II and all that followed, by focusing on how Germany, Europe’s most famous center of philosophy, physical sciences, and much else, and one of the great cultural fonts in music, literature, and so on — how it had been possible for such a rich culture to suffer the distortion that produced the extreme and murderous nationalism of the Nazis. And how that extreme generated, in opposition, the bold but often rigidly intolerant resistance movements in Spain and across Europe. And finally how, from Nazism’s ashes, had emerged two Germanies, the Communist regime in the East calling itself the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic in the West.

I think a critical moment, one from which we can view the whole process that led to the failure of the Left and the triumph of what called itself the “Third Reich”, was November 1918, especially the most heated days of the German revolution, November 3 to 18, beginning with the mutiny of the sailors in the Imperial High Seas Fleet in Kiel. And here is where I am beginning the new novel, working title as yet undecided. But it will have something to do with what I see as the shape-shifting Geist, ghost or spirit, that the Germans call Freiheit.

I see this book as a necessary sequel to my novel on the Paris Commune: the continuing life of the spirit that the French called Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, lives on, reshaped in the imaginations of German-speakers as Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichheit. This spirit became the inspiring vision of Marx and Engels and their followers and rivals, including Ferdinand Lasalle and the leaders of what became the powerful Social Democratic Party of Germany. And it also had powerful effects on internationalists from other lands, including the Poles Rosa Luxemburg and her long-time lover, comrade and later antagonist, Leo Jogiches, and the Russians Lenin, Trotsky and others.

A note on academia.edu prompted me to reread this article from 2015. If you have any interest in Poland, or in filmmaking, you may enjoy it.

End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope

Back on January 1, I posted my New Year’s Resolutions, here. Sorry to report less than satisfactory progress on all but one goal, learning German. Thanks to the exercises on DuoLingo, that’s going quite well. I can now read texts much more easily, though still with frequent recourse to the dictionary.

However, my main purpose in learning this language was to advance the writing  of my new novel, which deals with the complicated role of Germans — some very brave and humanitarian, other, as we know, quite horrible — in shaping Europe and the world since 1918. And besides research for the novel, to enable me to read current thinking by some of Germany’s most important thinkers, starting with Jürgen Habermas.

This brings up my problems with Facebook. Part of the reason for poor progress on writing what will be my novel #3 — which for now I’m simply calling “N3” — has been the time-consuming effort to restore access to my Facebook account, which has been hacked over and over recently. That is, I recover access, and then the hacker strikes again, and I have to go through the complicated steps to demonstrate that I am I, the true account owner.

This has made me reflect that my time is too valuable to waste on this, and that I can live and work better without that distraction. I shall turn 83 in a couple of days, so it’s time to devote all my best energy to what I’ve set as my most important goals. I may have not more than a decade or two left to do it, so I need to get busy!

If I do manage to restore access to my Facebook account one more time, I’ll post a link to this blog note, and invite anyone intrested in maintaining contact to subscribe to the blog. And then I’ll  terminate that account! Wish me luck.

 

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

ALBANIA! If you haven’t yet read Lea Ypi’s delightful and surprising book about growing up in that eccentric little country, you must!
From the death of « Uncle Enver », as patriotic tots like little Lea called maximum leader Enver Hoxha, through the sudden and unexpected collapse of communism and the confused and sometimes violent transition to something Albanians think must be capitalism, with stunning examples of the conflicts, aspirations and self-redefinition you won’t find anywhere else. And it will also give you some context for considering Jared Kushner’s mega investment project there, reported in today’s NYT.
Amazingly, considering where she came from, Lea Ypi has become a very well-read and discerning writer and professor of political science, in English (one of her several languages) in the London School of Economics. She also shows herself to be a witty writer.

View all my review

The Man Who Can is the most potent and most pragmatic of my alter-egos, the one who solves problems and gets things done, but he has been unavailable, hors de combat for much of this past year. Two overseas trips — to the U.S. in June and Italy in October — interrupted my, and his, work. And then a long-awaited operation, performed on November 22, made it impossible for me to do anything physically strenuous, or even make serious mental effort, even with his help; my body needed all its energy to heal itself.

But the scheduled healing period is nearly over, to be complete on January 3, so in 2024 I shall be calling on the Man Who Can to help me solve neglected problems and, most importantly, to accomplish these projects:

1, a new novel, for now called simply N3 (because it will be my third published novel), which will pick up and develop the story of the revolutionary spirit described in my novel of the Paris Commune, Rabble, by following that movement through the late 19th and then 20th century, in Germany, Russia and beyond;

2, acquiring fluency in German, not just because I’ll need it for research for this new novel but also because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do;

3, writing pending reviews of books read this past year, mostly related to my  novel’s theme;

and for something completely different,

4, recovering and developing facility in playing “classical” guitar, including pieces from Tárrega, Sor to much more recent work by Rodrigo, Brouwer et al., just for my own amusement and mental and manual exercise.

So there are my New Year’s resolutions!

The coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, was a tremendous shock — not because it was unexpected, which it wasn’t, but because it was so much more violent and murderous than we, or at least I, had imagined, in a country long known for its civility, its culture, and its rational and orderly manner of settling disputes.

It was also a monstrous crime, not only by the treasonous armed forces commanders in Chile, assaulting the government that they had sworn to protect, but, shamefully, by the political and economic powers of my home country, the United States. It was then very obvious, and today since the release of more documents it is even more clear and with more detail, of how that bloody coup was instigated, encouraged and supported by the US Government — with close direction from President Nixon and Henry Kissinger —and the US corporations most heavily invested in Chile.

I was then 32, teaching sociology at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, focused especially on processes of social change in Latin America. I had been a community organizer in working-class neighborhoods of Venezuela and, later, in Puerto Rican and Mexican sections of Chicago and as a faculty member, was active in the organizations of “Latino” students. I and they had been following the increasingky tense politics of Chile very closely. Thus when the coup occurred, we wanted to find some way to come to the aid of its victims. What could we do?

Thus I became one of the organizers and participants in the Chicago Commission of Inquiry Into the Status of Human Rights in Chile.  We were a very mixed group, including two former labor union presidents, a Chicago alderwoman, a Catholic priest and political science professor, and the father of one of the two young Americans murdered by the military in the first days of the coup, Frank Teruggi. We spent about a week in the country in February 1974, mostly in Santiago but also in the copper-mining center further south, .observing and questioning officials  in the army and police, and the U.S. Embassy, but more importantly prisoners held in the Estadio Chile, and, on one memorable night, some important figures of the depose government who had found refuge in the Swedish embassay.

Upon our return to the States, we did what we could to make Americans aware of the terrible tortures, murders and suppression of liberties instigated and paid for by the US Government. In my case, this included much public speaking and a long, fully documented article for the American Teacher, the newspaper of my union, the American Federation of Teachers, commissioned by the very progressive editor of that paper, Dave Elsila. But when the top leaders saw its harsh critique of US Government culpability, the article — already edited and typeset — was cut. For the story of this editorial battle, and more detail about our Chicago Commission of Inquiry and what we accomplished, see this article by Greg Godels.

I think we did manage to save a few lives, by helping trade union activists and others to escape from Chile, many to Sweden but even some few to the United States. Our mission was a gesture, not a solution. but it was something and we hope we did modify American opinion about the presumed menace of democracy in other countries, where the interests of American big business are at state.

See  also my earlier blog post, on our visit to Unidad Popular activists in the Swedish embassy.

The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise To Power by Bnjamin Carter Hett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the clearest and most concise of all the books I have read (many) to understand how Germany, known for its philosophers, scientists and artists, and with the largest social democratic party in Europe or anywhere could be turned into the monstrously aggressive Nazi state.
It’s a complex story, with many actors pursuing contradictory agendas, but Hett makes it clear that it was the social disaster of the great war, 1914 to 1918, that allowed the most racist, anti-rational and extreme nationalists to mobilize a large part of the population to act on their fears and most violent impulses.
In particular, while anti-Jewish sentiment had long been one of many popular prejudices in Germany (and not only Germany), it had not seriously threatened, on a national scale, the lives and careers of all Germans who could be identified as Jewish.
That is, not until the commanders of the army that had just lost the war, to protect their own reputations, refused to sign the Armistice that they themselves had demanded from the Kaiser, with its onerous but unavoidable provisions (no standing army, huge reparations payments, etc.). Leaving that task to the provisional government of the Social Democratic Party, they then could claim not they, but the traitorous Jews in the government had “stabbed the German Empire in the back” as signatories, beginning a huge and hugely false version of history.

View all my reviews

Like many of my friends, I too have been appalled by the scale of the rioting in France, which can’t be explained entirely by the police killing of young Nahel. I’ll say something obvious, which is pretty much what French and other opinion writers must be saying:

1st, there is a lot of deep resentment in the banlieues, populated mainly by families from France’s former colonies, against a “white” system that doesn’t treat them as equal French citoyens, and particularly against the police. 2nd, while this feeling may be more or less intense at particular moments, depending on the individual’s experiences and aspirations, most people live with it, voicing it only rarely, for years.

But in just the past few years, the examples of the huge gilet-jaune protests — not racially inspired so much as rural and small town vs. a Parisian élite that seemed to ignore them— and the vandalism of the “black blocs”, then the yihadistes, and maybe the tensions built up during the pandemic, all together along with the proof of how easy it is to summon a crowd with online media, have given a lot of youth both pretext and strategy for protest. Maybe some are acting out of true, personal rage, but I ‘d bet that’s a minority. Some, probably most, for the excitement and to go along with their crowd. And some, like whoever it was who drove a car to crash into the mayor’s house, must be acting out of some dark conspiratorial plan.If I’m right in this string of hypotheses, there’s no quick fix. The government and especially the state and its institutions, including the police, have to regain or gain the confidence of all the French, including those whose ancêtres were not les Gaules but people from any of France’s former colonies in Africa or Asia or immigrants from elsewhere.  Regaining such confidence may be beyond this government’s capacity. Macron’s approval ratings are in the cellar.In the short run, I think the police must work much more closely with community-based NGOs and that the police command must weed out its most racist and/or violent members. This would surely reduce the violent protests of the banlieues, giving time for the other needed reforms. Urgent, because in the slightly longer run, a serious danger is that the scale of the disturbances may lead to the election of a far-right government, Le Pen or worse, on the promise of restoring order by even tougher and more ruthless police actions.And if that happens we can expect the victims’ rage to spread and intensify for an even greater explosion.