We need to look closely at what’s happening, especially now with the advent of the iPad, at what we may be losing, but also and probably more important, at what we are, I think, clearly gaining.

I would say first of all that the issue lies not with the intrinsic value of “News,” the subject matter of the best of our publications, or the great importance of the bringers of the “News.” The place of the news, its importance in our lives is, largely thanks to the internet and the new electronic media, greater now than ever before.

The issue that we are concerned with is much less than that. Newsprint, book paper, the printing presses, those are the “lives” that are facing their end, just as were ended, some time after Homer, the oral bringers of the news.

For 3000 years or more writing on papyrus, parchment, and much more recently paper became more effective and more efficient than oral transmissions in bringing the “news” to the people. Would we even have had an Odyssey, that is, an oral account of Odysseus’s journey, if our own “media” had been present at the time of that journey?

So, yes, of course the advent of electronic media does represent a loss, as does every change, from that of the clipper ship to the steamboat, the horse and carriage to the automobile, and all the myriad other instances when what seemed to be a vital part of our lives was abandoned by the side of the road as we moved on and into a widely different future time.

Now we are faced with the loss of the paper book, the newspaper, and the magazine. But is there any doubt that the digital transmission of words is more effective, more complete, certainly much less costly, much less a drain on our natural resources and hence more environmentally  friendly?

Again, it’s important not to forget that the “News” is not threatened, only the means of transmission. If that is fully understood we will stop bemoaning the loss of the newspaper, and the book, and fully partake of the much greater news opportunities of the digital world.

The strange thing is that now, when there are so many who daily experience the internet, there are almost as many who don’t understand that their new habit doesn’t mean the loss of anything vital, but that it’s only a correction, a change in vehicle, with actually much better news coverage than ever before.

How would one defend the loss of what we call “hard copy?” Book lovers say, —”Oh don’t take my book… I have it by my bed at night, in my pocket when I go to the beach, with me when I travel. Furthermore, I can’t imagine my life without my own library of books. For books, probably no less than my wife and children and now grandchildren, have been and still are such a huge part of my daily life.”

I understand this. The books I own, probably only a few thousand remaining of the 10s of thousands I have owned in my lifetime, comfort me and call me back to all, or nearly all the important moments of my past life.

The French writers, André Gide and Albert Camus, whom I read while in Medical School (and ended up dropping out as a result). Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and others of his works recalling my time in graduate school at Columbia in the 60s. The bilingual, French and Classical Greek editions of the Greek and Roman classics that I read while teaching at St. John’s College in the late 60s.

Alston Hurd Chase’s A New Introduction to Greek, the text I used in my teaching of that language while at St. Johns. Pirandello’s complete works, especially the hundreds of his short stories, one for every day of the year, that I read and reread as I wrote my PhD dissertation (never finished) while living in Florence, via Michelangelo,  …

And it goes on and on, right up until the present. In the 90s I stocked my shelves with Russian books while I taught myself to read that language following six months in the Soviet Union, and most recently I’ve been purchasing from Amazon’s used book network political science books, books about evolution, cosmology, the history of the earth, also calculus texts, the study of which had been cut short while being taken up with the running of a school I started with my wife in the 70s…

Anyway, am I implying that books, such as the ones that have accompanied me throughout my life, should somehow live forever? And to make sure that they do we ought to keep the printing presses rolling?

Well yes, and no. No because paper texts are probably not the best means of assuring the survival of men’s knowledge and discoveries. Paper texts can be lost, as was the case during the fire in Alexandria in the first century before the present era, and during the Inquisition and the Nazi periods in Germany and Southern Europe when books were first banned and then burned. That which still happens I’m sure.

In fact, books are easily destroyed and we should have better ways of preserving the best of what men have thought and written.

And as we think about these sorts of things we need to distinguish between books, what is it that they contain and that we need and want to preserve, and the news, what we no less want to preserve, the papers, journals, and magazines that contain the accounts of what the few have witnessed and/or experienced and written down for the benefit and enjoyment of the many.

In fact, of the two I would say that the “News” is the most important. It is the news that precedes the book, the news of the experience or the thought that one has had. The news that Odysseus left Troy and successfully made it home to Ithaca where Penelope was waiting. The book is just one person’s account of that trip. Present day media facilities would have given us myriad accounts.

In the news we learn that drone fired missiles are destroying segments of the Al Qaeda leadership in North Waziristan…. The book that often follows the news accounts is someone’s interpretation of what happened, perhaps a much fuller treatment of what it means, say, for the U.S. to fire missiles into the wild border regions of Pakistan. But the News came first.

In my opinion we should concern ourselves less with the writing of the book, because books will be written with or without our support. The news is at greater risk. We need to be sure that the News can reach us, and for that to happen someone has to be there and has to have whatever it takes to write it down and then transmit it…

We need to be mightily concerned that this sort of thing never stops. I would even argue that the news coming into our homes, now in electronic format, ought to be considered no less vital to our well being than the electrical, gas, water, sewer and other supply lines.

This is already happening with broadband hookups. Children are now growing up, attached as much or more to the internet supply line to their homes as to the water running from the tap, or to their parents returning into the house from the store with the groceries.

What if the News were to be treated like a utility, like heat, water, and electricity? Is it no less essential to our well-being, our completeness? In fact, is there anyone who gets by on heat, water, and electricity alone?

Actually we pay now for news coming into our household via cable or satellite. Why wouldn’t payments of this nature be enough for the creators of the all important News? Why do we also need advertisers? The latter do not accompany the arrival in our homes of the other “utilities.”

Well, after having said all this, I guess I do think that there is still a place for hard copies. For books and journals etc., the kind of thing you put in your pocket and take to the beach, and the kind of thing I have so many of in my library at home.

But electronic publications don’t need to threaten the book. Both can exist. We still need to find out how they might best coexist. Perhaps books are to computer screens as candles to electric lights? Is anyone without candles in their home? An interesting, but probably not a valid analogy.

I know the e-readers. I have a Kindle, and I also have access at no cost to many of the classics through the Project Gutenberg. But it would never occur to me to keep, say, Melville’s Moby Dick, Chekhov’s and Pirandello’s short stories, only in digital format, and this in spite of their being readily available for download to my computer. I still need to have them in book form.

Even though in the long run my books will be dead the way I’ll be dead (although as I look over my library shelves it is clear that their life spans will outdo my own), returned as dust to the earth…. while, although the jury is still out, the electronic form of the book may be as close as anything in our possession to being immortal.

During my life time books on paper will have fulfilled an essential role, perhaps one that electronic books, even the digital versions of the books of my library, will never fulfill. Perhaps because of this, to some extent anyway, the printing presses will continue to roll as does the horse and carriage (although not the steamboat). I guess this is what the “issue” I mention above is all about….

At best partly socialist governments (partly because there are no fully socialist governments among the developed nations of the world) are providing help for those who cannot provide for themselves. At worst, as is too often the case in our own country, these governments are also subsidizing small but powerful pressure groups such as the sugar growers of the South, and the farmers of the Mid-West, groups who are no longer in need of special government favors and who ought to be left alone to do for themselves.

If there were no such spreading around of the wealth by the government, if there were no redistribution, no “socialism,” wouldn’t we then be a third world country still with our thousands of super rich, but also with our hundreds of thousands, millions of super poor, of those not able to provide for themselves, many of whom would be out there sleeping and defecating in the streets? For some on the Left this is already the case in our largest cities.

And yet in spite of being socialist ourselves we go on talking about socialist countries, especially those in Europe, and about how we don’t want to be like them. We are like them. Why don’t we accept this?

The only substance to calling one of our political candidates socialist (as opposed to his capitalist opponent) is that he may be in favor of greater government activity in support of social justice than his opponent, who may advocate for smaller government and support for private entrepreneurial activity.

Probably only in this sense, a heightened concern for social justice, can we still use the word socialist and mean something substantive by it. It’s certainly not in the sense conveyed by the oft repeated mantra, “ownership of the means of production.” In fact, this may have happened only once ever, and to boot in that least socialist of nations, the former Soviet Union.

While having these idle thoughts and others, and while reading Michael Harrington earlier today I encountered a 1969 quote from the French political writer and author, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, founder of the French news magazine, L’Express, and author of the 1967 book, Le Défi Américain.

This is what Servan-Schreiber said: “… the fundamental truth of our epoch is that social justice is not only a moral objective but the condition of industrial growth. If that is what it means to be socialist, we should be socialist. But if, according to the dogmas and catechisms, proceeding toward the abolition of competition, authoritarian planification, and the collectivist society are socialist, then we are not.”

To be a socialist, according to Servan-Schreiber, means that one believes that social justice is not just a moral objective but should accompany industrial growth. In other words, go ahead and innovate, and invent, and grow your business, create new wealth, but don’t act as if this were enough. It’s not.

As an accompaniment of the economic growth, essential for all governments, socialist or not, there must be an active concern for social justice, in particular for what that growth will do to improve the lives of all people, not just fill the pockets of the innovators and entrepreneurs themselves.

Our President may very well be a socialist in this sense. And so am I. And so would most of us be if we understood this to be the meaning of the word, that is, a high priority concern for social justice. This reasoning gets us to the point where we ought to be.

No more name calling. Rather united in determining how best to grow the amount of social justice in the life of our country. Having fewer prison inmates, for example, creating better and richer and fuller lives for our children in the inner cities, providing more hope to the immigrants who come to our country to realize their dreams just as we all did before them. A better system of health care.

These considerations also make clear what may be the real differences among us, between Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative. the differences are really about the best way to grow the amount of social justice in the country. Nobody, I trust, wants to hinder its growth.

So the important question is, how do we do it. Is it through less government and more private enterprise (not one or the other since we will always be well supplied with both)? Perhaps President Obama has greater confidence in the power of government than in an unfettered free enterprise system to bring about increased social justice. Perhaps not. I don’t know.

But the differences among all of us must be differences of degree, not of kind as the talking heads would have it. The only question today, as in the past, is not whether, but how much help the government should provide.

Take health care which is such a big part of the present Washington conversation about this one form of social justice. What we have now is clearly not working. The costs of medical care are growing exponentially and if nothing is done to reign in these costs existing government programs, in particular Medicare and Medicaid, will take a larger and larger and ultimately unsupportable portion of the Federal budget. Also, some 40 million Americans are without health insurance entirely.

At present the major players in the health care drama are just two, the government and the private insurance companies. They ought to be working together. But instead the insurance companies seem to have it going all their  way. The other way, the public way, or a public option, a kind of Medicare for all, is being put down as a government take over of health care. It’s not of course.

We moved into our home last January, before all the work had been completed, and only now, some 8 months later, benefiting from the cash from refinancing, are we able to finish the work, mostly doing the work ourselves. Anyway, all this to say I’ve had little time for what I like most, reading and writing, and for this Blog.

But idle thoughts are always coming to me. Here are a few from this morning while I was taking a break from building book shelves and reading Michael Harrington’s Socialism interspersed with articles from this week’s Economist Magazine.

Our politicians are not talking about the right things. Rather than backing blanket subsidies for all kinds of needs, for health insurance, home ownership, even jobs, they ought to limit themselves to whether or not the safety net, the proper function of government, is in place is adequate. Do our present programs do enough for those with real needs?

Certainly for some of our citizens we do too much, for the old and affluent, for example, who receive social security payments (admittedly they have paid for these themselves over their working lives), health insurance through medicare, mortgage deductions if they don’t yet own their homes etc. Can we afford to go on doing this?

Whereas for others we don’t do enough, for ex-offenders, the mentally handicapped, the children, more and more of them, of failed families, most of all for the young jobless males a good number of whom are destined to become part of a prison population already numbering some 2 million.

We ought stop talking about such unachievable ends as health care for all, college education for all, home ownership for all — this kind of talk is pure demagoguery because we can’t provide such, and in any case we don’t know how, and we don’t have the resources, and can’t afford it, especially now when we are in an economic depression and waging war at high cost on multiple fronts.

Or in other words governments, our government shouldn’t be in the business of caring for those who can (even if they will not) care for themselves. Just as schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching those who have no interest in learning.

Why haven’t we learned that we really can’t do much for those who can’t or won’t do for themselves? There are certainly those who merit the government’s help, but in number they do not at all approach the millions, say the 40 million who, as we are told over and over again, are currently without health insurance.

Dr. James Hansen (writing in the Huffington Post of July 9):  “It looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it’s no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon. I share that conclusion, …. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth’s remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.”

For a good while, back in the 70s, Paul R. Ehrlich et al. were threatening us with the population bomb. Now it’s Al Gore,  James Hansen, and many more with their climate bomb. And of course not having gone anywhere during all this time, and still waiting in the wings is the nuclear bomb.

Poor humanity! How can we possibly survive all three? Other than the fact that we seem to be doing it I have no idea. In any case both fossil fuels, the culprit in the present scare, and humanity, following the fuels by hundreds of millions of years, are fairly recent arrivals to the 5 billion year old earth.

Is James Hansen telling us that we should be afraid of change? Yet that’s what our planet has always been most about. Might it not be better that we go along with it? In the present instance, for example, might we not to our advanatage move onto the planet’s scarcely inhabited tundra biome?

Now as I think about these things, agriculture, wasn’t that in its time a “bomb,” one that actually did destroy the hunter-gatherer society, or the planet as humanity of the time knew it? And the gasoline engine, how many earlier societies did that destroy and is still destroying?

Is Hansen saying that our planet is everything we want it to be right now and that we don’t want it to change any more, and that we should do whatever it takes at whatever cost to stop it from changing?

Well, maybe, I guess I can understand that. I would like the earth to be forever just what it was during one of those Allagash river canoe trips that we took when we were young.  That was a time! Would that we could return and it could be forever.
P

Why, he would say to himself, doesn’t everyone want to be free? Well no, not everyone does want to be free. We just saw the truth of this again in Iran, when the people’s bonds were loosened a bit, but only to be tightened again, almost without their opposition, just a few days later.

Rousseau’s statement, that “Man is born free, but everywhere is found enslaved and in chains” is well known. Not so well known is this statement by the French writer and diplomat, Joseph de Maistre, who unlike Rousseau lived to experience the Revolution:

“It would be equally correct [Jean-Jacques] to say that sheep are born carnivorous and everywhere eat grass.”

Eric,
Twittering does seem like a good way to keep in touch. Do you twitter?  I know you do FaceBook, where that question, “What are you doing now?” (or is it what’s on our mind? what are you thinking about?) is also asked.

I just signed up to twitter, … although most of the time now, here in the Tampa Spring, the birds are twittering and I’m out there listening to them, in the garden, but not saying a word, just planting, orange and lime trees, and queen palms and much else. Here everything grows.
OP

On Apr 26, 2009, at 11:28 PM, Eric Degardin wrote:

Oncle Philip,

Forgive me my late (reply). I’m not twittering this time, but, in a future, why not? … But let me say that gardens are better and nicer that men,… this is why you are right to take care of yours.
See you later,
Eric

De : Philip Waring
Envoyé : lundi 27 avril 2009 14:37
À : Eric Degardin
Objet : Re: Twitter?

Eric, Since you say, “why not?” well now you need only to go to Twitter.com, sign up (name and password), and then put me down as someone you want to “follow.”
Start twittering yourself, and we can at least “follow” one another, and perhaps over time find others to follow and still others to follow us?
So, what are you doing, in 140 letters, including spaces, or less?
OP

On Apr 28, 2009, at 3:47 AM,
Eric Degardin wrote:

OP, I’m (not) sure that I have such an important life, to shout to everybody that I am lacing my shoes or peeling potatoes; and I’m pretty sure that not everybody cares about my special palpitations while reading the Idiot of Dostoievski!

But, because you ask to me for it, I am going to tempt a try.

By the way, the light of your last trip to France is again in my heart and my head. Good to walk with you in Paris and go to the French Bank, to meet with French bankers with nice ties and fine words on their tongues.
Eric

de Philip Waring
April 28, 2009 10:52 AM EDT
To Eric Degardin

Eric, you’re correct about tying shoelaces, peeling potatoes etc., but if I had (I don’t) a network of 10 or 15 good friends, wouldn’t it be bracing, sometimes joyful (pass the bottle!) to hear from them on a regular basis, as if we were living next door?

Twittering, representing a network that I seem incapable of establishing having lost contact with all those people whom I’ve known in my lifetime and who might have happily twittered with me now,… yes twittering could recreate some of the pleasures of human contacts that we’ve (I’ve) mostly lost.

Now too many spend too much of their time with their cherished pets and flat screens (because they do need warmth and comfort —I’m not yet there, praise the Lord), but how much better it would be if people could spend more of their time with people, if only for that regular and frequent exchange of 140 letters and spaces, the number that Twitter, the taskmaster, allows us.

Oops! I’ve just gone well over the 140 allotment.

But Eric, you do have a network of good friends, that you’ve often told us about on several occasions during our Paris visits. Do they twitter? Maybe I could get to know them too through your twitter network, if you crete one?
OP

ps: Another thought. Ivan doesn’t write, doesn’t like to write the way we do, but he (and Julie) might like to join a Twitter network with us. Twitter instead of FaceBook? Why bother? Well Twitter does seem simpler, more essential, and probably will take up much less of our time. The next time you go to Ivan’s you might talk about all this. He does play the flute, which of all the musical sounds does come closest to twittering.

At the present time the camps are not coming together, and we are not a peace. And the good life is not yet within the reach of most. We have instead, in the words of Frank Rich in today’s Times: “an obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s.” And Rich quotes the President in his budget message to Congress, “There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few.”

The President, according to Rich, was calling for fundamental fairness, not as in earlier times class warfare. In Rich’s words, “America hasn’t seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.”

And the question is still, que faire, сто делатъ, what to do? And as in the past there are only three answers, more government, more reliance on market forces and individual initiative, and more of something in between. And if we would be at peace the answer has to be number three.

But, alas, the loudest and most unruly voices are coming from one side or the other, and the voices of reason are not being heard. Instead we hear, “Bail out the banks and the automobile companies. Don’t bail them out.” “Launch expensive new health, education, and environmental protection programs. Don’t, at least until we we can pay, for them without raising taxes or going even further into debt.”

The U.S. economy, no less than the world economy, seems to be on its own trajectory, down, and all of our efforts to reverse its direction have been, so far, without effect. It’s a wife who has decided to do her own thing and a husband, whose efforts to reign her in, are totally without influence.

It seems all we can do is wait. The two camps are as far apart as ever. And the “gaping inequality” of which the President speaks is not about to be lessened by the actions of his team. We are, as were the inhabitants of New Orleans by Katrina, caught up in a destructive storm, the power of which is clearly beyond our ability to check.