George du Maurier, Peter Ibbetson

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The writer of this singular autobiography was my cousin, who died at the ——- Criminal Lunatic Asylum, of which he had been an inmate three years.

He had been removed thither after a sudden and violent attack of homicidal mania (which fortunately led to no serious consequences), from ——- Jail, where he had spent twenty-five years, having been condemned to penal servitude for life, for the murder of —— ——, his relative.

Summary: Pierre Pasquier de la Marière, known to everyone as Gogo, spends his early, happy childhood in Paris playing with a little girl, Mimsey Sesarkier, imagining that they are looked after by the Fairy Tarapatapoum and the Charming Prince. But little Gogo's mother dies, and he is taken away to England by his uncle, Colonel Ibbetson, who insists that he be renamed Peter Ibbetson and become a proper English gentleman. Uncle Ibbetson himself, however, is a crude and crass womanizer. Peter will grow up tall and handsome, and his life will change when one day he meets in passing at a party the beautiful Duchess of Towers, who, he will discover, is Mary Sesarkier, who had known in her childhood in Paris a little boy named Gogo.

Peter Ibbetson lives a life that is turned inward. He is quiet, generally gentle, and good-natured. And he is telling us the story of his life in a lunatic asylum for the criminally insane, having savagely beaten Uncle Ibbetson to death. We see warning signs that there is something dangerous about Peter's inwardness, here and there before the terrible event, a sort of ungrounded snobbishness that looks down on the sociability of others, an occasional flight into rage over someone's cruelty to another, and unhealthy preference for his own mind rather than the world around him. And there is a quality to the book -- I don't know how to describe it except to say that it is a kind of subtle weirdness -- in which, as Peter Ibbetson becomes more and more internally driven, one sometimes wonders how much of what we get in the story is real and how much of it is Peter Ibbetson losing himself in dreams, or else looking back at himself having already lost himself in dreams. But Peter Ibbetson does not wonder; he has no doubts; he knows that he has a special connection, which he finds in dreams, with Mary Seraskier, and that they are both able to 'dream true' and revisit their memories together. And the sheer force of his sincerity in this regard goes a long way toward making the reader suspend disbelief.

And there is another side to it. It is not for nothing that one of the descriptions we give for our closest relationships with other people is 'sharing dreams'; dreams let us step outside our lives and their circumstances; and dreams are what keep Peter Ibbetson alive through his long decades of imprisonment. Our dreams at least remind us that there is more to us than our immediate surroundings.

In some ways, the work reminded me of Le Grand Meaulnes, except that book builds on a pessimistic nostalgia of memory, whereas this one builds on an optimistic nostalgia of dreams.

I also watched the 1935 movie adaptation, starring Gary Cooper and Ann Harding, which I thought very well done, particularly in its use of visual echoes to tie Gogo's childhood interactions with Mimsey to Peter's adult interactions with Mary. They simplify the course of the story, which I think makes the story somewhat blander, and they are mostly interested in the dreaminess of the tale as an opportunity for cinematic effect, but it does capture some of the sense of the story, in which there is a distinction between dream and waking, but none at all between dream and reality, because it is a story in which dreams are, or at least can be, a kind of reality.

Favorite Passage: 

We have even just been able to see, as in a glass darkly, the faint shadows of the Mammoth and the cave bear, and of the man who hunted and killed and ate them, that he might live and prevail.

The Mammoth!

We have walked round him and under him as he browsed, and even through him where he lay and rested, as one walks through the dun mist in a little hollow on a still, damp morning; and turning round to look (at the proper distance) there was the unmistakable shape again, just thick enough to blot out the lines of the dim primeval landscape beyond, and make a hole in the blank sky. A dread silhouette, thrilling our hearts with awe—blurred and indistinct like a composite photograph—merely the type, as it had been seen generally by all who had ever seen it at all, every one of whom (exceptis excipiendis) was necessarily an ancestor of ours, and of every man now living.

There it stood or reclined, the monster, like the phantom of an overgrown hairy elephant; we could almost see, or fancy we saw, the expression of his dull, cold, antediluvian eye—almost perceive a suggestion of russet-brown in his fell.

Recommendation: Recommended, although you have to go in expecting a quiet and leisurely story.

The Human Body

 To the question "What is a human body?" I intend to propose seven preliminary answers: that it is an animal body with various powers of movement, some voluntary and directed; that it is a body whose movements afford expression to intentions and purposes that thereby possess a certain directedness; that, as an expressive body, it is interpretable by others and responsive to others; that, as an interpretable body, a variety of its characteristics are signs whose meanings others can understand; that its directedness has the unity of agency; that it cannot be adequately understood except in terms of the social contexts in which it engages with others and others with it; and that it is in certain respects enigmatic, a source of puzzlement, since alone among animal bodies it occasionally emits the question "What is a human body?" and directs its powers towards giving an answer to that question.

[Alasdair MacIntyre, "What is a human body?", The Tasks of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press (New York: 2006) p. 86.]

MacIntyre takes all of these as prephilosophical; that is, they are not an explanation of what the body is, but they are what we find the body to be in experience, and that of which a philosophical account would need to give an explanation. On this basis, MacIntyre argues that common modern philosophical accounts of the body fail by not adequately explaining precisely what they would need to explain about the body.

On the Electoral College (Yet Again)

 The NY Times has an "explainer" for the Electoral College. It's not the worst I've seen -- indeed, it is better than a lot that I've seen. But there are problems. The framing of it highlights one of the major ones:

It remains one of the most surprising facts about voting in the United States: While the popular vote elects members of Congress, mayors, governors, state legislators and even more obscure local officials, it does not determine the winner of the presidency, the highest office in the land.

There is nothing surprising about it. Members of Congress, mayors, governors, state legislators, and local officials are all elected by popular vote within a single state. None of them are elected by a national popular vote, and none needs to be, and indeed, it would obviously be stupid for any of them to be. The President cannot be elected this way for the obvious reason that the President doesn't represent a state but the union of states. Thus the President will necessarily always be elected by a completely different kind of election, governed by different rules, and this would still be the case if the President were elected by national popular vote.

This leads to an intense focus on battleground states, as candidates look to boost their electoral advantage by targeting states that can help them reach the needed 270 votes of the 538 up for grabs.

The Electoral College doesn't lead to "an intense focus on battleground states"; all election systems have battleground regions, and in the United States, campaigns naturally structure themselves by states because it's a convenient already-existing unit. What the Electoral College does is create a situation in which the battlegrounds are not just the highest-populated states, but shift around from election to election.

Can a president lose the popular vote but still win the election?

No, because there is no national popular vote at all in the United States, and therefore none to lose. Each state runs a different election under different election laws. If you vote in California, who can vote, how you vote, and how the vote is counted depend on Californian election law, and if you voted in another state, all these would be different. In some states, felons in prison can vote. In others, they can't. Means of voting that are allowed in one state are not allowed in another. If you fill out your ballot incorrectly in most states, you spoil your ballot; in another state, like California, they will attempt to contact you in order to see if they can get a correct ballot in time. There are broad similarities, for the obvious reason that they are the same general kind of election, but votes in one state cannot be added to votes from another state without violating the unit rule of addition. Add the votes of a state like California, which is not very strict about voter identification, not very strict about how you have to fill out your ballots, very generous in attempting to make sure that your vote will be counted if you tried to vote (even if you bungled it), to a state which is none of these things, and you aren't adding equal things and the number you get does not, on its own, mean anything at all. You might as well try to add votes in Delaware to votes in Japan and pretend that the number gives you a precise measure of support for something. Votes are legal constructs: they just are what the laws make them in a jurisdiction, and a different election-law jurisdiction has completely different votes -- votes which cannot coherently be added together across jurisdictional lines.

What happens in the Electoral College is that we run not one but fifty-one distinct Presidential elections (fifty states plus the District of Columbia). Each of those elections can be seen as a simulation that answers the question, "Who would be President if the whole country were like this state?" We then partly weight those according to population in the same way that Congressional representation is partly weighted according to population. Thus the Electoral College votes. The apportionment of these votes is going to have to be done either by the state government agencies, as automatically following from their official vote tally, or by another body that has the room to assess whether the official vote tally accurately gives the sense of the state. As it happens, we use the latter, although attempts to restrict the room for assessment have been common over the history of the institution. Congress then counts the vote, so that the election of the President is not in the hands of any one government power: it requires the state governments, independent bodies created particularly for the purpose, and Congress.

There are arguments that the states with smaller populations are overrepresented in the Electoral College, because every state gets at least 3 electors regardless of population. In a stark example, sparsely populated Wyoming has three votes and a population of about 580,000, giving its individual voters far more clout in the election than their millions of counterparts in densely populated states like Florida, California and New York.

Again, the voters in Wyoming are voting in the Wyoming presidential election, which counts for less than the California presidential elections; voters in California are voting in the California presidential election, which counts for more than the Wyoming presidential election. This is, of course, generally true; voters in sparsely populated states are voting in elections that count for less, voters in more heavily populated states are voting in elections that count for more. There is no way to compare them as to 'clout' at the individual level. When political scientists attempt to pin down something like this, they use a very abstract and roundabout way of doing it, like the probability that an individual vote will affect a vote in the Electoral College that will decide the election. Needless to say, or it should be needless to say, this is an entirely artificial way of looking at votes, and in any case necessarily depends in reality on a number of variables that vary over time.

The idea has public support, but faces a partisan divide, since Republicans currently benefit from the electoral clout of less populous, rural states.

This is entirely false; you have only to look at the less populous states to find that they divide about evenly between Republicans and Democrats, with some shifting over time, but not much. Whether a state counts as 'rural' depends entirely on how you are defining 'rural'; perhaps the almost-truth in the above claim is that Republican political rhetoric is more closely tied to supporting the heartland, farmers, miners, etc. Republicans are also under no illusions: The reason why Democrats are so likely to support abolishing the Electoral College is entirely that they think that by doing so they could more easily leverage their control over the dense population centers of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles in presidential elections, and, whether or not this is true, Republicans are not going to go along with what would transparently be a Democratic attempt to gain electoral advantage over Republicans.

The Babylon Bee on Pollsters

 The Babylon Bee:

U.S.—After grossly miscalculating the election results in almost every possible way, pollsters are insisting that their polls were indeed 100% correct except that everyone just voted wrong.

"We stand by our polling 100%," said Ned Boop, who is a very smart pollster who wears fancy-looking glasses. "Our methodology and results were entirely correct and we're also very intelligent. It's just that all the stupid people we polled voted incorrectly like dumb-heads."

The Tumultuous Wait

 So now that Election Day has moved us from the Campaign phase of the US election to the Recount and Litigation phase, a few thoughts as we continue not to know for sure whom we have elected.

(1) This election has been a disaster for polling as a profession. It's not that they were wrong -- projections from polling are always going to be messy and even the best practices will get wrong answers. It's the combination of the following two:

(a) They were consistently wrong, repeatedly suggesting massive blowouts in favor of Biden time and again that were already large enough to make people suspicious on purely causal grounds.
(b) The polling that turned out to yield much more accurate projections than usual (Trafalgar being the most notable case) was actively disparaged and mocked by mainstream pollsters.

(2) It was a great night for pro-legalization movements, and a good night for Republicans. Both Biden and Trump had good turnout, Biden's less than had been hoped but still quite good in general.

(3) COVID Election will certainly end up crazier than the Hanging Chad Election. Recounts and litigation make everybody crazy, but they serve an important function in the process, namely, maintaining election integrity over time. Voter fraud and voter suppression do occur; indeed, in an election as large as the American election, they are guaranteed to do so. The scale gets exaggerated by the parties according to their convenience, but they do happen, and the issues need to be addressed, even while recognizing that the exaggerations will happen as well. There will be a lot of litigation this year; there will be a lot of recounts.

(4) Trump's showing among both Blacks and Latinos was impressive; it will no doubt boggle the minds of many college-educated whites, but the evidence consistently suggests that Trump is the most minority-supported Republican presidential candidate in quite some time.

(5) The US has a multi-stage election. The statutory Safe Harbor deadline, when states have to give their conclusive tallies, is December 8. The Electoral College meets to determine who will be president on December 14. Keep in mind that if the presidential election is within two or three Electoral College Votes, which this election will very likely be, it is actually too close to call until the Electoral College actually votes. The end of the presidential election comes only when the official Electoral College count occurs in Congress on January 6.

Superabundance of Love

But, in reality and truth, it was out of love that God made the worlds ; and indeed out of a superabundant love. This we may well venture to assert, and even to call it a fact; and that the divine love is also the final cause, as well as the beginning of creation. A superabundance of love in God we must, however, call the final cause ground of creation, inasmuch as He stood in no need of it; no need of the love of the creature, nor absolutely of the world itself, or created things. For in His inmost essence, where one depth of eternal love responds fully and eternally to the other, He was perfectly sufficient for himself. And yet it is even so: there is in God this superabundance of love, for He has created the worlds, and it is the divine will to be loved by His creatures. For this end and purpose has He created them; and because He would have their love, He has created them free, and given both to the pure spirits and to men a free will. The whole secret in the relation subsisting between the creature, and man especially, and the Creator, lies even in this great fact, that He has created them out of love, and requires in return the service of their love. There is perhaps something awful in this requisition, and in the relation thus found to subsist between a weak and imperfect creature and the infinite and omnipotent Being. But it is even so: we are really free, and are really required by God to give him our love.

[Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life, Lecture VI, p. 128.]

Nobody Knows

 So, tomorrow is Election Day, the consummate symbol of the perpetual fact that all Americans have an innate belief in snake-handling, in the idea that if they are only righteous enough, they can handle vipers without being poisoned. Of course, with early voting and and mail-in voting, especially this year, Election Day itself is less important than it often has been. But it's still a fitting time to reflect before things get really interesting.

We do not know who will win. Biden has been polling well, but it's a 'once bitten, twice shy' situation. And it's even worse than that, since no one can honestly believe that pollsters have any certain and reliable way of modeling how lockdown affects their polling methods or the demographics of actual voters. And while Biden has consistently done well in the polls, he has not done consistently well in them; they have bounced around a lot. What is worse, other common indicators are all over the place. Economic indicators have been bouncing around due to COVID; new voter registrations are all over the place (but tend to favor Republicans in swing states); variants of the neighbor question -- who do you think most of the people you know will vote for? -- tend to favor Trump; polls asking whether people have lied or hidden whom they are voting for from pollsters have shown remarkable percentages of people willing to admit that they sometimes mislead pollsters because they don't trust them. We may have our suspicions, but nobody knows.

My own suspicion is based on the sense that, while Biden is a much better campaigner even under these weird conditions than Clinton ever was, Democrats have generally failed to shore up their weaknesses from 2016: they continue to assume without evidence that Blacks and Hispanics will come out enthusiastically in their support, and they continue to assume against all evidence that the working class will hand them key swing states while receiving relatively little in return. I suspect we are in for four more years of Trump. But I do not know; it could be, for all I can be sure, that some other issues will stir up the numbers Democrats need in the right states.

In any case, the Senate is the real focus of this election, not the Presidency. To be absolutely sure of Senate dominance (overcoming current Republican dominance and compensating for losses), the Democrats need to seize six new seats. Fortunately for them, it's a weak year for Republican candidates, so they might do it. Regardless of who is elected president, the next two years will look very, very different depending on whether the Senate is held by the Democrats or the Republicans.

What we can be sure of is that if Republicans do badly we'll have several months of vehement complaints about voter fraud, and if Democrats do badly we'll have months of vehement insistence that due to voter suppression the normal Constitutional procedures are illegitimate, because (as I have noted before) these are the go-to excuses by which the leadership in those parties try to shove off the blame on other people. In both cases people will try to explain that they didn't 'really' lose, due to some set of ad hoc rules they've made up by which they think they would have won. In both cases, people will perform some loosely related symbolic gestures to communicate how serious they are about such things and then do nothing practical to prevent this supposedly grievous problem from happening again. The point is always to find things to complain about, not to solve any real problems. People have never really internalized the idea that participating in an election means accepting the possibility of your loss because elections are more important than your victories. Every loser wants the election to be stolen; many will jump on anything that even vaguely suggests to them that it was. All of this is entirely toxic to a free society, of course; but there are always people who cannot see beyond their own factional concerns to the requirements of a free society.

And it is worth having a bit of proportion. This election year has not been any wilder and more unsettling than any of the times Andrew Jackson ran for president; a single election will not magically turn our country into a totalitarian state (which can only occur, very slowly, from people of whatever party eroding bulwarks against totalitarianism); and, no matter how common naysayers may be today, the US Constitution still provides a structurally sound framework based on much more experience and careful thought than can be found in a thousand pundits and armchair statesmen who may criticize it. Perhaps that is an act of faith, but upholding the ideals of a republic is indeed an act of faith: it is a trust that there is still something deeper and more reliable than any partisan interest.

Whatever ends up being the case, the Gods of the Copy-Book Headings will still continue their work. Partisans come and partisans go, but some things endure forever, and our tasks remain fundamentally the same: to strive to do good for ourselves and for others, and to seek the highest things in whatever way, however muddled and flailing, that we can.