Where we are now.

In December, 2018 no response has been received by me to my communications to American police, prosecutors, judges and justices, nor from U.S. newspapers or other media.

All of these entities are "prohibited" from complying with laws that require a "good faith" response to my inquiries (and those of others) as a matter of due process under the U.S. Constitution.

It is not unusual for an individual to be afraid of the authorities and seek to avoid the law. 

It is slightly more unusual for the authorities and media to be afraid of an individual's questions and what they reveal or point to in the legal system of an American jurisdiction. 

Continued silence is one indication of the paralysis of government agencies in America resulting from political and cultural divisions in U.S. society. 

Official silence is especially disturbing when innocent persons are endangered or when damage to the integrity and perception of a legal system can only worsen. 

Lies and cover-ups on the part of New Jersey lawyers and Trenton's Office of Attorney Ethics (OAE) have rendered whatever allegations, if any, remain concerning my ethics ludicrous or laughable even if they are part of a bogus "unsigned" background report.

It is difficult to understand how officials and judges involved in a cover-up that does so much harm to so many people can live with themselves.

When contemplating New Jersey's legal system I am equally divided by, on the one hand, an impulse to laugh at a comically incompetent government and, on the other hand, overwhelming disgust at the appalling corruption that pervades what is now universally regarded as a "failed legal system." Using the U.S. Constitution as toilet paper should preclude the OAE from commenting on anyone's ethics or commitment to legality. My next essay examining new issues in New Jersey's legal and political system -- including a recent scandal involving elected officials, judges, lawyers and police in partnership with organized crime figures as well as the mess in Atlantic City -- will be sent to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts; the U.S. Attorney General (whoever that person may be when I mail out my next package of materials); the Cuban Embassy to the United States of America; and The Boston Globe newspaper.

I have listed books and other sources as they occurred to me while I was writing this essay and drawing from them in developing my argument. I am not on Facebook or Twitter. I have never been accused of a crime. I am not a Republican or Democrat.   

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideals of the Sublime and Beautiful (New York: Dover, 2008, 1st ed. 1759), pp. 29-31.

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (New York: Prometheus, 2000, 1st Ed. 1790). (J.H. Bernard translation. I am especially concerned with the final sections of Kant's essay on aesthetics.) 

R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1958, 1938), pp. 286-299. 

Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1977, 1st ed. 1949), pp. 38-66. (Bernard Frechtman translation.) 

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006, 1st Ed. 1967).

Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 83-222. (Rodney Livingstone translation. Please see especially the discussion of "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.")   

Mary Warnock, Imagination (Los Angeles Berkeley: UCLA Press, 1978), pp. 131-195. 

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding (New York & London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 153-165. 

George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: U. Chi. Press, 1989), pp. 53-134.

James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollections (New York: Vintage, 1997), pp. 207-231.

Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge MA: Harvard U. Press, 1989), part 3. 

John Bayley, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (London: Methuen, 1998). 

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: U. Chi. Press, 1978). (Alan Bass translation of the collected text.)

Terry Eagleton, Against the Grain: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 181-184.  

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1995). (A 4 volume compilation of the 12 novel series.)

Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time (New York: Random House, 1998), p. xi.

Christina Howells, Derrida: Deconstruction From Phenomenology to Ethics (London: Polity, 1999), pp. 43-71.

Palle Yourgrau, "From Kant to Star Trek: A Philosophical Guide to Time Travel," in Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe (Chicago & La Salle: Open Court, 1999), pp. 69-122. (''Interstellar': A Movie Review.") 

Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York & London: Harper & Collins, 2001), pp. 621-643.

Peter Gay, Savage Reprisals: Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Buddenbrooks (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). ("Stendhal called the novel a 'mirror moving along a highway.' ...") 

Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (London: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 1-21.

Will Self, "Where did I go wrong?," Junk Mail (New York: Black Cat, 2006), pp. 55-58.

Fred Inglis, History Man: The Life of R. G. Collingwood (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009), pp. 288-313. 

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012), pp. 167-225.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, A Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2013). 

Amy Poehler, Yes Please (New York: Harper & Collins, 2014). (Heaven help us. This person is not Gloria Anzaldua.)

Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 85-107. 

Ian Pears, Arcadia (New York: Vintage, 2013). (Time is theme and protagonist, in a way, in this novel that gestures at "Alice in Wonderland" and Bell's Theorem in quantum mechanics.)  

The Invisible Committee, To Our Friends (Paris & London: Semiotexte, 2015), pp. 21-40. (Robert Hurley translation.) 

Claire Messud, "Anthony Powell by Hillary Spurling -- Review 'Deliciously Readable on the English Proust,'" The Guardian, September 28, 2017 posted at http://www.theguardian.com/books/sep/28/anthony-powell-dancing-music-time-review.

Bob Harrison, "A Question of Identity," Philosophy Now: The Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics the Nature of the Real (London: The Manson Group, 2018), p. 38. 

Michael Allen Fox, "A New Look at Personal Identity," Philosophy Now: The Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics the Nature of the Real (London: The Manson Group, 2018), p. 41. 

Roger Scruton, "Scientism in the Arts and Humanities," The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, November, 2018 re-posted at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/scientism-in-the-arts-and-humanities.   

Hillary Spurling, Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), pp. 368-379. 

Charles McGrath, "How Anthony Powell Wrote His Twelve-Volume Masterpiece," The New Yorker, November 12, 2018, posted online at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/how-anthony-powell-wrote-his-twelve-volume-masterpiece.  

David Runciman, How Democracy Ends (London: Profile, 2018), pp. 120-164, pp. 165-206. (Mr. Runciman owes a debt to Jean-Francois Revel's How Democracies Perish from the 1970s.)

Stephen Mulhall, "How Complex is a Lemon?," The London Review of Books, October, 2018, p. 23. ("Guerrilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.") 

Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018).

Will Self, "The Printed Word in Peril," Harper's Magazine, October, 2018, p. 23.

Mia Levitin, "Sex With a Switch," FT Weekend, "Life & Arts," Saturday, 3, November/Sunday, 4, November, 2018, p. 9. ("'Ex Machina': A Movie Review.") 

Kate Devlin, Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). ("'Westworld': A Review of the TV Series.")

Simon Schama, "A House Divided," FT Weekend, "Life & Arts," Saturday, 3, November/Sunday, 4, November, 2018, p. 1. ("Is truth dead?")

Brad Leithauser, "The 64-Square Universe," The Wall Street Journal, Saturday, 10, November/Sunday, 11, November, 2018, p. C8. ("Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers.") 

Brin-Jonathan Butler, The Grandmaster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018). (Magnus Carlson's genius of the chessboard.)

Peter Baker & Alissa J. Rubin, "'America First' Draws Rebuke at Ceremony: Still, Much of Europe Echoes Trump's Views," The New York Times, November 12, 2018, p. A1.

Charlie Savage, "President's Appointee for Acting Attorney General Faces Court Challenge," The New York Times, November 13, 2018, p. A17.  

Peter Baker, "Trump Bashes and Defends Decision to Skip Cemetery Visit," The New York Times, November 14, 2018, p. A6.

Katrin Bennhold & Steven Eerlanger, "Merkel Joins Macron in Calling for Self-Reliance and a 'Real European Army,'" The New York Times, November 14, 2018, p. A9.

Eric Schmidt, "U.S. Military Has Diminished, A Congressional Panel Finds," The New York Times, November 14, 2018, p. A9.

"Chief Justice Roberts Rebukes Trump Over 'Obama Judges' Comment," The New York Times, November 25, 2018, p. A3. (Perhaps my situation that has now been brought to the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court provides an opportunity to establish the degree, if any, of judicial independence among federal courts as opposed to the "tribunals" of the state of New Jersey. Events involving Mr. Trump's and his friends' recent legal troubles have led to doubts about the U.S. Attorney General's and Justice Department's "independence" and ethics when it comes to politically-sensitive prosecutions, or investigations, which may explain the mysterious silence that still shrouds my matters.)

Andrew E. Kramer, "Ukraine Says Russia Fired on its Ships, Wounding 6," The New York Times, November 26, 2018, p. A6.

Pam Bulleck, "Gene Editing Scientist Defends His Work, but Others Call it Irresponsible," The New York Times, November 29, 2018, p. A10. ("'Blade Runner 2049': A Movie Review.") 

James Politi, "Trump Set for Xi Talks at Summit as Storm Clouds Gather at Home: US President Will Use G20 to Press Beijing on Trade But Has Not Built Coalition of Allies," FT Weekend, 1 December/2 December, 2018, p. 2. (Freeze on tariff wars predicted.) 

Radhim Shebber & Joshua Chaffin, "Mueller Inquiry Lands First Blow on President's Inner Circle," FT Weekend, 1 December/2 December, 2018, p. 3. (Mr. Cohen has requested "leniency" from his sentencing judge. Mr. Trump may request leniency for another "Mr. Cohen.")

Anjana Ahuja, Nicole Liu & Luise Lucas, "Mastering Evolution," FT Weekend, 1 December/2 December, 2018, p. 5. (Dr. He Jiankui has created the first gene edited babies to make them less susceptible to HIV virus among other things. At issue, legally, is exactly who or what entity owns the technologies and "gene sequencing" method involved in these procedures?)

Steven Erlanger & Katrin Bennhold, "Rift in Alliance Leaves Europe Fuming at U.S.," The New York Times, February 18, 2019, p. A1. (I told you so.)         

"A Dance to the Music of Time."

On my twice-weekly trips to my local laundry in Manhattan (the basement washing machine in my building is more solicited and occupied than Ms. Stormy Daniels), I take with me whatever masterpiece of a novel I happen to inhabit for the sheer delight of two hours of uninterrupted blissful reading punctuated by the occasional wistful glance at my clothes tumbling in the drier.

I am currently in the midst of Anthony Powell's twelve-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. 

One of the lessons of Mr. Powell's great book is that all human identity has a temporal nature. 

The ultimate concern of literature and, particularly, of novels that achieve lasting importance is the unfolding or revelation of character in "plot-time." 

The rise and fall of a civilization may also be a kind of biography, detective plot, comedic farce, horror story, or a tale of adventure depending on how the story is told. 

Tolstoy, Dickens, Proust and many others (Gore Vidal among them) have been fascinated by this theme concerning how we live in time. 

It may well be that what we can imagine, think, or become is bounded not only by the history that we must "live" or inherit, but also by how we have -- collectively and individually -- interpreted or understood that history. 

History is a novel that we all must write and read because we are also its protagonists. 

Nowhere is this lesson more clearly seen than in Mr. Trump's recent disastrous visit to France to commemorate the centenary of the armistice that ended the First World War. 

I doubt that Mr. Trump reads very much or has any great sense of history or literature. 

Henry Kissinger (Richard Nixon's Secretary of State) pointed out that if anything can prepare a person for the challenge of high political office it is a knowledge of history. 

Mr. Kissinger came to government service from a comfortable position as a professor of history at Harvard University. 

Dr. Kissinger was able to find inspiration for his "machinations" in the life and adventures of Germany's nineteenth century Chancellor Metternich. 

If the study of history is the best preparation for politics Mr. Trump is not very well "prepared" for the office to which he has risen:

"PARIS -- Dozens of leaders from around the globe marched in the soaking rain ... on Sunday, expressing solidarity for an international order that had its origins in the end of a world war 100 years ago, an order now under increasing pressure on both sides of the Atlantic." (N.Y.T., 11-12-18, p. A1.)

The First World War was the result of, yes, "entangling alliances" but also -- and, perhaps, more importantly -- it was caused by nineteenth century "nationalism" that led to militarism then imperialism which could only result in global conflict among the most important commercial powers of the age. ("Images and Death.") 

The very word "nationalism" has a different meaning in Europe, especially France, from what Mr. Trump assumes the word to mean based on his cushy life in America after the hard-won victories of the West in the two global wars of the twentieth century. 

Arnold Toynbee insisted that the World Wars were really a single protracted and leisurely attempt at suicide by European civilization.

Far from being equated with "patriotism" (defined as love of country leading to a concern for all of the people of one's nation) "nationalism" and jingoistic rationalizations of greed or military power inevitably lead to fascism, militarism, brutal and destructive wars with other nations that only produce the suffering of one's fellow citizens as well as pain and destruction for persons in other countries. 

Ms. Merkel certainly believes this paradox of nationalism to be one of the more painful lessons of German history. 

Humanism and international law were the global response to the lessons of the so-called "World Wars." 

Creation of NATO and the UN were efforts, primarily, by the United States of America to avoid the mistakes (nationalism of an irrational kind being the greatest of these blunders) that produced the horrors of the bloodiest century in history. 

Mr. Trump's foreign policy, in the European view and in the opinion of many American intellectuals and students (myself included), by withdrawing from zones of conflict and retreating into a nationalistic form of isolationism, may be a betrayal of generations of U.S. diplomats serving the policies of presidents of both parties that aimed at enshrining a lasting peace among the world's great powers and an enduring regime of international legal rules.

President Trump's hostility to all forms of institutionalism and his brutal "America First" nationalistic selfishness is diminishing America's influence in the world by creating unprecedented opportunities for rival powers, such as Russia and China, to step into or take advantage of the void in order to dominate the Middle East, for example, and/or Central Europe as only one result of America's baffling decline and foolish mistakes.

Mr. Putin's brazen indifference to world opinion in conflicts with Ukraine or Lithuania are evident examples of the disdain for President Trump and disregard for American power today. 

In the BBC coverage of the recent and tactfully described "naval incident" involving Russian and Ukrainian forces the UN and European Union were mentioned, but the U.S. was not discussed at all since it was assumed by all parties -- UK included -- that the American view is irrelevant or determined by Russia. 

It is one thing if a great power is defeated by a rival empire; it is far worse (or quite another thing) for a superpower to defeat itself. 

This self-defeat may be a unique achievement for America in world history. 

On a much smaller scale the failure to perceive the significance of my dilemma that has been brought to the attention of American authorities (not only by me) reflects a similar ignorance and loss of values in U.S. courts and among many politicians who are not well known internationally for their scholarship or appreciation of history. 

The conclusion that the U.S. is in irreversible decline and incompetently governed at the moment is a widely shared (if painfully held) opinion in the world: 

"No one has done more to break up the postwar global system in the last couple of years than Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin. As the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I was commemorated on Sunday, Mr. Trump's brand of 'America First' nationalism was rebuked from the podium while he sat stone-faced and unmoved, alienated from some of America's strongest allies, including his French hosts." (N.Y.T., 11-12-18, p. A1.) 

Mr. Macron went out of his way to explain several crucial distinctions to Mr. Trump not as an adversary but as friend who sees America's genuine "success" as also the triumph of France and Europe as well as the freedom-loving portion of humanity. 

I agree with Mr. Macron on this point as does German Chancellor Angela Merkel, even if Mr. Putin does not, but it may be impossible for anyone to make it clear to Mr. Trump that discussions of ideas and strategy at this crucial moment in our shared Western history may determine all current leaders' policies and place in the chronicles of our times and the fate of millions of his fellow citizens. 

Discussion of ideas is not a minor matter at the moment. 

Worse, it may be impossible to convey to Mr. Trump the notion of the "moral success" of a nation or the linkage of cultural self-realization for a people with its material prospects and welfare:

" ...'Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,' President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a speech at the Arc de Triumphe, welcoming the leaders and extolling an old system now under siege. 'Nationalism is a BETRAYAL of patriotism by saying: 'Our interest first.' 'Who cares about the others?' ..." (N.Y.T., 11-12-18, p. A10, emphasis added.) 

The absence of historical awareness or sense of transcendent values, the poverty of Mr. Trump's vocabulary, his failures of imagination and affect as regards the feelings (or concerns) of others combined with ethical callousness (or obtuseness) may be lethal to his deeply flawed administration and America's interests for decades to come. 

To the extent that an ideology or "Trump doctrine" may be formulated to describe the administration's foreign policy it seems to amount to an incoherent theory of victimized virtue: 

"We are the good guys and everybody takes advantage of us." 

Mr. Trump continues to express such opinions while sulking in international gatherings like a spoiled 8-year-old boy.

Perhaps some day we will come to understand the unfortunate series of events that has led to Mr. Trump's presidency. ("'This is totally amazing!' -- Donald J. Trump.")

More difficult to appreciate or describe rationally is the decline of American journalism along with the intelligentsia which still fails to make these points that are made by others in the world or to say anything useful at all. 

Is this silence from literary types, or increasing media irrelevance, a result of "selling-out" on the part of intellectuals? Ignorance? Apathy? All of the above?

I write these words at great personal cost and against a tidal wave of computer crimes and obstructions that are meant to prevent me from writing in a nation that guarantees every citizen "freedom of speech."

Public censorship is greeted with apathy today by writers and scholars as long as they are not the victims of it. 

If censorship is allowed to prevail against anyone it will become a device for controlling everyone in a democracy.

I have yet to receive a response to my communications from American police, prosecutors, judges and other officials whose corruption and incompetence in my matters is now far too obvious for denials.  

A deeper failure by U.S. thinkers and writers is the inability to explain the crucial history and philosophical ideas at issue in the new raging international discussion or lurking behind current events and new conflicts. 

This deeper failure cannot be blamed on Mr. Trump and is connected to some of the points I have struggled to make about American "culture" and education in the second decade of the new century. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.") 

"Reading, Writing, and the Tyranny of the Virtual."

Will Self (real name?) begins a recent essay by deploring the cultural transformations that have led to the abandonment of the novel for newer forms of "entertainment" that require people to stare at a screen rather than the more intellectually active process of reading a printed text with a bizarre attack on Norman Mailer.

There are probably more people reading Mailer's books today than ever have (or will) read Will Self's writings. It is certainly true that Mailer was a much better writer than Mr. Self and may have dealt with this very topic in a more profound way:

" ... nearly everything I have written" -- according to Mailer -- "derives from my sense of the value of fiction. There is little in this book, even when it comes under the formal category of non-fiction or argument, that has not derived, then, from my understanding of how one writes fiction."

I urge Mr. Self to pay attention to these next words by Mailer, especially to how the words "reality" and "fiction" as well as "truth" are used in this paragraph:

"It has always seemed to me that our best chance of improving those private charts of our most complicated lives, our unadmitted maps of reality, our comprehension, if you will, of the way existence works, seems to profit most if we can have some little idea, at least, of the warp of the observer who passes on the experience. Fiction, as I use the word, is a reality that does not cohere to received axes of facts but is breathed in through the swarm of our male and female movements about one another, a novelistic assumption, for we perceive the truth of a novel by way of the personality of the writer. We tend to know, in our unconscious at least, whether the author is to be trusted, and where we suspect he is more ignorant than ourselves." (Mailer, p. xi.) 

The point to be extracted from Mr. Self's "convoluted gibberish" borrowing without acknowledgment from Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Desmond Mccarthy, and possibly Terry Eagleton and others, is that transformations in technology usually result in alterations in the inner-lives of men and women.

Changes in how we apprehend the world through the use of our tools or means of enhancing our faculties, in other words, are always also transformations in our very selves, minds, languages. 

These last three words may point to the same phenomenon or entity. 

Cultural changes are not necessarily always for the better nor are they likely to be pleasing to all sectors of society in the same way or to an equal extent:

" ... as for my attempts to express the impact of the screen on the page, on the actual pages of literary novels, I now understand that these were altogether irrelevant to the requirement of the age that everything be easier, faster, slicker in order to compel the attention of screen viewers. It strikes me that we're now suffering collectively from a 'tyranny of the virtual,' since we find ourselves unable to look away from the screens that mediate not just print [texts?] but, increasingly, reality itself." (Self, Harper's, p. 24.)

One is reminded of "coalition forces" pushing buttons on controls in fighter planes or computer terminals producing death for many persons seen only on video screens resembling computer game simulations.

The fact that "real" persons were being killed with the push of one of these buttons did not seem to sink-in for young men reared in an environment of "virtual" realities or in "playing spaces" filled with cartoon violence -- violence that is now also part of our cinematic "realities" and, indeed, often just as much a feature of the evening news broadcast or familial relationships for that matter. 

Part of what is being lost with the abandonment of reading serious literature as an aspect of the intellectual/aesthetic lives of educated persons is empathy and/or the subtle and nuanced thinking only made possible by creative or imaginative expansions (reinventions) of syntax and language that are incidental to absorbing great literary texts.

We feel less than we once did "for" or "with" others. We understand ourselves less well than we once did when Henry James is replaced by a Sony Play Station II, or when young people embarking upon their university educations report that the one work of literature they have read voluntarily in their lives is Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.  

The shallow and empty "persons" produced by our inescapable technological environment -- an environment that may also render subjects more adept with gadgets of all sorts as well as increasingly variable in their interests if also less focused or very quickly distracted -- are often indifferent to suffering in other places among strangers as distinguished from the pain of people like themselves. ("'The Stepford Wives': A Movie Review.")    

To see "customers" wrestling with each other to purchase toys, usually intended for adults on "Black Friday," is to appreciate that Americans now more than ever descend to the level of spoiled children very quickly and will do so throughout their lives. 

Mr. Trump may be the perfect president for such people. ("Is truth dead?")  

What seems stupid to older and more language-based "Guttenberg persons" (like me) is simply described as more flexible or apt behavior for the beings I see strolling around Manhattan "texting" their so-called "friends" while listening to what they call "music" or something described as a "podcast" as they pass the Chrysler Building without actually seeing it. 

For such curious beings it may be meaningless or laughable to worry about the "feelings" of others since humans besides themselves only matter to the extent that they benefit or may be useful for the I-phone user (or consumer) while any book is merely a poor substitute for "binge-viewing" one's favorite TV show. 

For many such "persons" (I use the word loosely) Donald J. Trump is as profound and interesting as, say, Jacques Derrida or Richard Rorty may be for me. 

No doubt The Art of the Deal is as great a philosophical treatise as Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference for Mr. Trump's loyalists as opposed to "old-fashioned" readers and thinkers like me.

Some would no doubt further claim that President Trump is "better" than Derrida because "the Donald" is more understandable to them. This logic would also make Donald J. Trump a more important thinker than, say, Einstein or Stephen Hawking for the same people. ("Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.") 

I read Thomas Mann or Jean-Paul Sartre and they -- these I-phone creatures -- ponder the wisdom of Amy Poehler and/or Rachel Maddow because, I am assured, "it's all relative" or "it's whatever you like" since "it doesn't matter anyway." 

No wonder my daughter's generation is defined by a single hideous word: "Whatever." 

To object to this sad state of affairs is to be called an "elitist": 

" ... as our capacity for narrative engagement is compromised by new technology, we experience less 'transportation' (the term for being 'lost' in a piece of writing), and as a further consequence become less capable of experiencing empathy. [emphasis added] Why? Because evidence from real-time brain scans tells us that when we become deeply engaged with reading about Ana Karenina's adultery, at a neural level it looks pretty much as if we were committing that adultery ourselves, such is the congruence in the areas of the brain activated." (Self, Harper's, pp. 26-27.) 

Mr. Self does not make the additional point that studies indicate passive screen viewers display brain waves comparable to persons in hypnotic states or close to the condition of sleepers. 

What looks like boorishness and ignorance of history on the part of Mr. Trump in France to a person immersed in books, again like me, may seem to his supporters like an admirable realism or practicality on the part of a president unwilling to be taken advantage of by those damned foreigners. 

Ayn Rand, weirdly, is still admired by a generation celebrating and even embodying the "virtue of selfishness."

Mr. Self has written in the past of evil as a terrible loss of affect or thoughtlessness that accompanies the commission of the most horrible crimes. 

This absence of feeling, or total inability to identify with others, is becoming much more than a form of individual pathology detected in the increasing number of serial killers in First World nations. 

In a smaller degree and with far less serious consequences, so far, the loss of affect is becoming social and generalized as well as more widespread throughout the population and only in its acute form limited to disturbed individuals. 

Worse, there is a concentration of symptoms of such alienated states among many young people in America and elsewhere. 

Bad taste or total loss of aesthetic standards seems to parallel or follow from these psychological developments. 

It is not simply that large numbers of persons today prefer the worse or lesser to greater works of art (this has always been true), but that they can no longer tell what is higher or more profound rather than banal or second-rate in aesthetic works and do not trust any so-called experts to guide them on this subject. 

All "opinions" concerning cultural matters are regarded as equal. 

No distinction is recognized between educated judgments and visceral reactions to art or philosophical works. After all, everything in the realm of values, we are told, is and must be "subjective." ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")     

These developments in culture are associated with new attitudes, again particularly among young people, indicating that Americans care much less than they once did about what their government does to others or concerning the consequences of U.S. actions "for" others in the world. 

Apathy is especially likely if concern for others, or curbing action that may be harmful to others, intrudes or diminishes in any way one's comfort, pleasure, or interferes with greed or so-called "virtuous" selfishness: 

"Not since Dr. Karl Berg wrote The Sadist, his book on the German serial killer Peter Kurten, in the 1920s has such a garrulous and intelligent embodiment of evil come to tell us of his inner life." 

Will Self draws a comparison in this earlier and better essay between Jeffrey Dahmer and British mass murderer Denis Nilsen:

"For if listening to the Celtic mystic pop music of Clannad while drinking Bacardi and Coke, preparatory to sawing up a corpse of a young drifter you have garotted, performed various sex acts with and then kept sitting in an armchair for several days isn't evil, then I don't know what is." (Self, Junk Mail, p. 57.) 

Perhaps the same trendy champions of relativism who have tried to argue with me in the past would continue to insist these days that my "disapproval" of torture and murder is only my "opinion" and, hence, merely "subjective" whereas other persons may approve entirely of sex with a corpse produced for the purpose in one's home on the weekends merely for the laughs. 

Who is to judge the personal lives of others? 

"Whatever floats your boat is fine by me!" say the I-phone users.

The crucial word once again is "me." Donald Trump's brand of narcissism is contagious and spreading on a daily basis. 

Is there any hope that things will improve? 

Between Meaning and Desire.

As I write these words Mr. Trump is meeting colleagues and counterparts at this year's G20 summit held in Buenos Aires. 

A planned encounter with Vladimir Putin has been cancelled by President Trump because of the seizure of Ukrainian naval ships that the U.S. insists should be "given back." 

No doubt the confiscated vessels will be returned by Russia, eventually, since the men from the Kremlin have made their point and even posted a video of the incident online. 

European powers have neither joined Mr. Trump's actions nor criticized them; France's President Macron is weakened by a loss of popular support due to taxes on petrol that has led to massive protests at home; Ms. Merkel has been legally "curtailed" in her powers and is a "lame dunk" German chancellor; President Trump is facing new evidence of lying about his interests in Russia during the campaign, also cooperation by Michael Cohen in new allegations by Special Prosecutor Mueller of "misleading" answers to the U.S. Congress and his investigators -- not only by Mr. Cohen but also by Mr. Manafort -- the latter may well have been "set up" to report on aspects of Mr. Mueller's investigation to Mr. Trump's lawyers that were totally "bogus" in a "obstruction of justice trap" aimed, ultimately, against the U.S. president. Finally, British P.M. Teresa May is overwhelmed by the "Brexit" nightmare and efforts by her own party "loyalists" to topple her from power to pose any threat to Mr. Putin.   

Mr. Putin strides like a colossus on the world stage while China is perceived as offering Mr. Trump a simplified and non-elective course in "globalized" economics.

Whether Mr. Trump can absorb the points made to him concerning who actually pays for tariffs and/or the likely consequences not only for the U.S. economy but, far more, for the economies of several of the nations at this very summit of his current course of action is anyone's guess. I doubt it. 

Pondering these developments I am driven back to the writings of scholars, unknowingly, pointing to the collisions of "realities" or world-views on display in these almost comical (or tragic) misunderstandings in Argentina.  

Developments in European philosophy after the death of Jacques Derrida have solidified the tendency towards mediated or "Critical Realist" approaches derived from Kant -- "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology" among them -- to say nothing of the unification of hermeneutics as a consequence of creative innovations in aesthetic theory exported to other, seemingly distant, branches of learning such as political theory (jurisprudence) and economics. ("Markus Gabriel's 'Neo-Existentialism' and the "New Realism.'")  

Recent articles in The London Review of Books and the excellent Financial Times are helpful for persons seeking to put the pieces together in order to understand the new mental climate in which political relations between countries and the various other "fictions" that we must live unfold or become "realities":   

"Harman is reluctant to call this position 'panpsychism'; but that is simply because his claim is not that to exist is to perceive, [Berkeley] but rather that to relate is to perceive, [Hegel] which he thinks is better called 'polypsychism.'" (Mulhall, LRB, p. 28.)

Steven Mulhall comments on this feature of Graham Harman's thinking that may amount merely to a restatement or reinterpretation of Kant's metaphysics of art and epistemological humility in today's "post-analytical philosophy" stage of Western thought:

"Harman's second proposal concerns aesthetics, which he presents as the roots of all philosophy, and as driven by insights he derived from the Spanish philosopher [Jose] Ortega y Gasset. On this account, metaphor is the heart of art; and the heart of metaphor is a complex transaction between subject, real object and sensual object. Suppose a poet says: 'The cypress is the ghost of a dead flame.' This metaphor is experienced by the reader as positing a revelatory [revealing?] identity between (some of) the sensory qualities of a flame and the reality of the cypress itself. But since Harman (unlike Ortega) thinks the real cypress is necessarily inaccessible, he believes that we can only make sense of this by positing some other real object that is always present in any aesthetic experience: the subject of that experience, the reader. It is we who stand in for the absent cypress and support its freshly anointed flame-qualities; we are method-actors playing a cypress playing a flame." (Mulhall, LRB, p. 28.) ("Metaphor is Mystery.")  

Professor Harman's philosophical protest against analytical philosophy's brutal reductivism transforms "Speculative Realism" into a new form of Critical Theory in which "speculation" overwhelms the "realism" so that any resulting "ontology" -- while it may be "oriented" towards objects -- never fully encompasses those objects in their totality, or escapes the knowing agent's all-too human epistemic limitations and/or capacities. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness.") 

This is to restore the "noumena" versus "phenomena" distinction in Western thought where what escapes linguistic or conceptual representations is, by definition, eternally beyond us and what we know is never independent of how we know it, that is, the content of the knowledge claim is inextricable from the knowing agent making the claim while remaining, when valid, fully objective or "true." 

Kierkegaard spoke of the "surd" at the bottom of existence that always transcends all forms of representation like the foam at the bottom of the beer mug after we have consumed the beer in the glass. 

We never escape our "representations" to reach the bedrock of "reality" because "something" about the world we try to know and others we seek to understand must inevitably remain "beyond our grasp and ken."

A great writer once explained that "truth is at the bottom of a bottomless well." 

For Professor Harman it is "reality" that is at the bottom of the well and this is a "truth" that we can know with confidence.  

Graham Harman disclaims idealism but fails to elude the idealistic conceptual system's postulates that if aspects of reality are beyond the human conceptual/cognitive machinery, by definition, it must follow that we cannot say what these aspects are in-themselves nor can we ever hope to know empirically ALL of reality. 

We are dreaming creatures, then, telling "stories" to one another (science is one such story) or making art, laughing and playing in order to forget that we must die.

Some of this "laughing and playing" is a serious business as, for example, when our games have to do with power or wealth. 

Will Donald win the game? Or Xi? Or Vladimir?

Many people may die to decide this issue and, anyway, many "real" children will certainly suffer while the game is being played.

Various versions of what is taking place in the world economy and science as well as the transformations of culture that redefine boundaries and maps for nations and empires must be fitted into the narratives or myths that we call "history" or the "progress of philosophy" or the new "legal order in the world" or "how the universe works." 

The U.S., China, Russia and other countries have already offered interpretations of the G20 summit in which they -- each of these countries and their leaders -- are described as the "clear winners" as new dire warnings about climate warming and the resulting threat to the human species are greeted with indifference by these same nations even if they indicate that all countries at this gathering are "losers." 

The one shared assumption among these conflicting interpretations is that there are no "meanings" attached to what is taking place in Buenos Aires (nothing happened) until we decide to impose such meanings on the events (we say what happened or what it all means). 

This presumption may seem like arrogance, but it coincides with what quantum mechanics tells us about the essential role of consciousness in bringing about the collapse of the wave function as well as with what the latest "important" philosophers are saying about the Lebenswelt. By this German term is meant the networks of meanings (or cultures) in which we must live as persons:

"It is quite striking that a supposedly realist philosophy, which rejects from the outset any form of idealism (which typically claims that objective reality must be understood in relation to [in a dialectic with] subjectivity), finds itself making the human subject the primary object and actor in art, and reinterpreting relations between objects as primitive versions of the kind of relations subjects have with objects." (Mulhall, LRB, pp. 28-29.)

Simon Schama notices the many incidents of violence against Jews and African-Americans immediately before the recent American interim elections that, in turn, generated countering aggression from white nationalist groups blamed for the attacks and subjected to reprisals. 

Each of these groups today is struggling to impose a definition of national identity on all others in American society. 

For one powerful group America is about "inclusiveness" of those who are "different" or "marginalized" and this allows for bizarre reinterpretations of culture and national symbols to celebrate the "acceptance" of others and something called "otherness."  

For another equally powerful group of Americans who feel threatened by the "invasions" of strangers into the country too much "inclusion" may and often does result in violent "exclusion" of much and many already at the center of the nation, or with regard to the fragile ideals "constituting" the U.S. as a republic. 

This "conflict of interpretations" transcends the volatile American context and is tearing Europe apart -- literally, in France this week -- and in the UK and Germany earlier in the year. 

There is indeed a "revolution" now exploding in the Western world. Lenin reminded posterity that a "revolution is not a tea party." 

Our currently burning revolution is primarily a cultural war or a kind of intellectual "tea party" in which philosophy is perhaps the main battleground. 

Is it O.K. to perform Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at the Public Theater in New York or in Central Park with all lead characters played as "flaming homosexuals" where not one actor is a white person and with deliberate alterations of the text into hip-hop terms to reflect our wonderful "otherness"? 

I experienced this ghastly performance and witnessed persons walking out of the Delacorte Theater using expletives one does not expect to hear spoken by members of the federal judiciary.

Why does a work as harmless and charming as Norman Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" inspire hatred and a commercial photographer's outrage (or satire) that is equated by some persons with the artistic achievement of a painter using oil on canvas?

Regardless of whether we share all of the traditional ideas and ideals of the United States of America can we hate those ideals or values and remain Americans?

This is, of course, an old debate in America which is worsened by the rejection of any universally accepted "framework" for a discussion of the foundational issues, such as, what is meant today by "American ideals" and the sincerity of the traditional commitment to any set of principles or the U.S. Constitution. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.") 

We often reject conventional notions of rationality as well as what was traditionally deemed a structured view of such matters. 

Truth has been abandoned, at least formally, for a generation of Americans who say, absurdly, "your truth is not my truth" just before they complain that President Trump lies to the public. (Again: "Is truth dead?")

As an old-fashioned thinker fond of the quaint concept of truth and still devoted to the laborious effort to reason well about epistemological issues if we are to arrive at truth about anything, I am alarmed by recent developments that threaten democracy and diminish the quality (or level) of American civilization. 

There is a difference between chaos and revolution as there must be between liberty and anarchy:

"There are other ways, too, in which a democracy can be hobbled," Professor Schama writes, "not least through an assault on truth, leaving voters at sea about whom to believe or else cynical that the facts of the matter can ever be securely established -- the 'he said; she said' courtroom conundrum applied to an election." (FT, 11-1&2-18, p. 2, "Weekend Arts.") 

This observation leads Professor Schama to reflect on the Trump phenomenon:

"Trump inaugurated his political career with the claim that Barack Obama was no American at all, having been born in Kenya, a falsehood that for a long time no birth certificate could gainsay. When DNA evidence exonerated the African-Americans wrongly convicted of raping and assaulting a Central Park jogger, Trump continued to insist on their guilt. [OAE?] For him, whether a matter of law or the fate of the earth's climate science" -- and logical validity? -- "is only another opinion. It is, to be sure, a truism that most politicians [and judges] treat the truth as a matter of convenience. But there has never been a president for whom the falsification of fact has been to such an extent the driving engine of allegiance." (FT, 11-1&2-18, p. 2, "Weekend Arts.") 

I began by suggesting that history is a novel in which we, as characters, find ourselves trapped between "meanings" emerging from our adventures that are often not chosen by us and the "desires" for happiness or power that we seek to realize. 

Like "Alice in Wonderland" we also discover ourselves to be the authors of our adventures and the only readers of our stories. 

We are the "dancers to the music of time" whose greatest fear and motivation is that the music must stop sooner rather than later. 

The music of our time (history) has become discordant and shrill, but let us keep dancing for as long as we can.