Re: [xmca] Gardeners and Tram Drivers

Ok. The whole thing was a bad idea and I'll go break rocks on a rock pile.
mike

On 4/3/07, Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> mike,
>
> I read the article and while it seemed so New Yorker and cutesy (Spiro
> Agnew echoing about effete whatevers) I was really dismayed by the entire
> string of claims that included (I paraphrase) '' most of us find globalism
> the best of all possible worlds" . Is that really the case? Do most of us
> (who's that?) believe that global corporate domination <=> globalism is the
> best of all possible worlds. How about "small is beautiful", a much more
> gardenlike metaphor. Perhaps humanity at the horticultural stage, pre-large
> scale crop stuff, was nobler. Probably more enjoyable no matter what the
> globalists say about life in the city is pretty.
>
> Paul Dillon
>
>
>
> *Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* wrote:
>
> The section marked in yellow (did it come through, David?) was a
> commentary
> by Eugene Subbotsky. I personally found the piece interesting, but that
> is simply my taste. I have long had a copy of Dream of the Red Chamber.
> Guess its time to look at it!
>
> mike
>
> On 4/2/07, David Kellogg wrote:
> >
> > I was being conciliatory by changing the subject, Mike. Frankly, I think
> > the Gopnik piece is a study in projection and consequently anachronism.
> I
> > don't think that Voltaire's love of gardening makes him a conservative
> > bourgeois in his social outlook. In those days, being bourgeois was not
> > particularly conservative, and had little to do with gardening.
> >
> > I think that gardening had more to do with being an artist. Monet had a
> > fabulous garden at Giverny along the same lines as Ferney (a groaning
> board
> > well surrounded by garrulous convives) and so did that other
> > pessimist-meliorist Thomas Hardy. Even Van Gogh gardened in his
> miserable
> > last days in hospital.
> >
> > "Candide" is not simply an attack on Leibniz; "il faut cultiver notre
> > jardin" was probably a jab at Rousseau. Rousseau had written to Voltaire
> > that the great Lisbon earthquake was a human disaster, not a natural
> one,
> > and "Candide" was Voltaire's rather unkind riposte. You may remember
> that
> > the actual originator of the line is not Candide-Rousseau himself but an
> > ignorant Turkish peasant. So I think "We must work our fields" is a fair
> > translation, contrary to what Gopnik says.
> >
> > Rousseau believed that falsehood, not ignorance, was the real source of
> > human error. Voltaire believed that mankind was irredeemably stupid,
> though
> > some parts of it (e.g. the English) were noticeably more intelligent
> than
> > others. In this respect, Rousseau represents the young, genuinely
> > rationalist (and genuinely bourgeois) enlightenment intellectual.
> >
> > Voltaire in his dotage was a defeated and rather cynical skeptic (as
> > well as a blithering anti-semite), casting doubt on the ability of
> knowledge
> > to ameliorate and prevent disasters without being able to cast much
> light on
> > the future. It's fairly easy to see why Voltaire would capture people's
> > imagination in our own epoch and why Rousseau would attract mostly
> ridicule.
> >
> > Interestingly, while Voltaire was writing Candide, on the other side of
> > the world the Chinese recluse Cao Xueqin was writing the world's first
> > social realist novel "Hongloumeng" (translated, rather badly, as "Dream
> of
> > the Red Chamber"). The central chronotope of the novel is a garden,
> first
> > built by the noble Jia family in honor of their daughter, who after
> having
> > been made an imperial concubine some years before, is allowed a single
> day
> > of home leave.
> >
> > The building of the garden bankrupts the family, but it gives the
> > children a kind of wonderland free of adults to discover sex and live
> out
> > their childhoods consuming crabmeat and writing poetry about it ("Blame
> not
> > the crab for walking askance; it is the ways of the world that are
> > crooked"). Early in the novel the hero Jia Baoyu rmarks on how curious
> it is
> > that a wealthy family like his own should invest its entire fortune
> > destroying nature, then building a wall around the rubble, then trying
> > desperately to reconstruct within that wall a simulacrum of what they
> had
> > destroyed. Mightn't they have simply left things as they were? Rousseau
> > would have understood his bewilderment. Voltaire would have been
> bewildered
> > by it.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------------
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> and
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Received on Wed Apr 4 07:25 PDT 2007