EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES – SUMMER 2000

THE SPIRIT OF THE (NOW DEPARTED) MILLENNIUM

Readers will, I hope, forgive us for imposing on them one last look at the recent shift from 19 to 20 hundreds of years in the most commonly used calendar. If you are like me, you probably OD’d on the millennium hype of December 31, 1999-January 1, 2000, and had hoped the subject was dead and buried. I apologize for raising it once more, but ask you to consider two mitigating factors. First, this is being written in early January (SCIENCE & SOCIETY has a long lead time to publication). Second, S&S, after all, is the journal that celebrated the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution in 1990, and the 100th birthday of Frederick Engels in 1998! We tend to be a bit slow on the uptake. There is the final circumstance that a review of the “high points of the (second) millennium” enterprise will only become even more stale in the future; this material must be used now, or never.

I attempt nothing like a comprehensive or systematic survey. The obvious point is the rampant individualism in the variety of projects designed to identify the greatest man/woman/thinker of the millennium, or the top 10, or top 100, or whatever. Contributions to history, or to progress, or to human well being, are made in this view by individuals rather than by great movements of large numbers of people. Even with this significant – and largely unexamined – limitation, however, all manner of political storms (or tempests in teapots) were generated.

Thus, a BBC News poll, reported by the BBC Online Service on October 1, 1999, named Karl Marx the “greatest thinker of the millennium.” The report states that Albert Einstein, “who had led for most of the month” (of September), had been pushed into second place. (Would either Marx or Einstein have agreed to participate in this “contest”?) Among the top ten in this poll were Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes and Stephen Hawking. This was one of a series of BBC polls; the others of which I am aware were for greatest explorer, greatest woman (Indira Gandhi won that one), and greatest man.

Facts about the greatest man contest were forwarded to me by email. The top ten, at a moment when the poll was still in progress, were, from top to bottom: Mahatma Gandhi, Leonardo da Vinci, Nelson Mandela, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ, Sir Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and – Karl Marx. My friend, who sent this information, wrote: “Karl won the September “Thinker of the Millennium” vote, got tons of publicity, and he stands a real chance now – so VOTE NOW!” And: “As you can see, our man Karl is trailing in tenth spot. Help boost Karl to first (we did it once
before. . .).” Thus reduced to a popularity campaign, the contest, one might argue, is totally unfair: of the top ten candidates only three (the other two being Jesus and Dr. King) have movements of people behind them that could mobilize a vote. By simple numerical standards, especially if the individual in question is to represent the entire millennium, the top spot should by right have gone to Jesus. (Again, I have no idea what the final outcome was.)

But enough of British democracy. In the United States, the A&E cable television network presented its top 100 “Biographies of the Millennium,” in a two-part program narrated by Harry Smith. Here the selections were made by an aristocracy of notables – people such as Newt Gingrich, Henry Kissinger, Hillary Clinton, Gloria Steinem, Thomas Hoving, C. Everett Koop, Abraham Paiz, and Richard Holbrooke, among many others. In the socio-political area, Holbrooke played a significant role, and his commentaries do not, to put it mildly, inspire confidence in his judgement. For the record, we report, in the accompanying box, the top 25 individuals selected, in descending order. You will notice that there is not a single woman on the list (there were several among the top 100).

Well, it appears that Marx just beat out Einstein a second time. Aside from the dubious presence of Genghiz Khan and Adolph Hitler (A&E dubbed the latter “madman of the millennium,” a characteristic failure to seek understanding), one feels in the presence of genuine greatness, and I imagine, as with Marx and Einstein, that none of these creative individuals would be greatly interested in jockeying for position on a list of this type. There is an issue concerning the vast variety of fields of endeavor, and whether these can be compared in any meaningful way. There is another issue concerning omissions: why, for example, Martin Luther and not John Calvin? Why Newton and not Leibnitz? Why Locke and not Rousseau? Why Darwin and not Wallace? Where are the chemists? The musical composers? And so on.

There is a “deficiency of the telescopic faculty” as we look back toward the early part of the millennium: Acquinas is the only figure representing the first four centuries. Certainly, progress was made in the later period over the achievements of the earlier, but isn’t that always the case? The early years are slighted. How will our meager 21st century efforts look to the framers of a retrospective on the third millennium in the year 2999?

A&E was clearly pleased to be able to spring its big surprise: Guttenberg, inventor of the movable-type printing press, is placed in the number 1 position, the most important biography of the millennium. This prompts us to inquire: what is the meaning of “important”? Suppose we accept the notion that printed books and newspapers were the key to major social advance – perhaps confusing cause and effect. How relevant to this understanding is the biography of the single individual credited with the invention of printing?

The historical materialist saying, “necessity is the mother of invention,” undoubtedly applies here. Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber and political scientists William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, early in the 20th century, documented the widespread fact of simultaneous invention and discovery in the history of science and technology (their findings are summarized in Leslie White, The Science of Culture, ch. 8: “Genius: Its Causes and Incidence”). Thus, in 1843, the Law of Conservation of Energy was formulated by one scientist, and in 1847, independently, by four others. The discovery of the cellular basis of animal and plant tissue was proclaimed simultaneously by seven men, all around the year 1839. Sunspots were discovered independently by Galileo, Fabricus, Scheiner, and Harriott, in 1611. The parallax of a star was measured by Bessel, Struve, and Henderson, all in 1838. Oxygen was discovered by Scheele, and by Priestly, in 1774. The list continues. Human endeavor in the arts, literature and the sciences is cumulative and interactive, and no particular individual’s work, no matter how it stands out for intrinsic or ideological reasons, could have occurred without the prior and simultaneous activity of countless others.

EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES – SUMMER 2000 (continued)

Of course, the deepest historical materialist insight is that the work of great men (and women) rests in a fundamental way on a platform of labor activity by millions, mostly exploited and dominated, which provides the surplus and the developmental stages that set the questions and the preconditions for answers. Marx expressed this in his proposition that humankind only sets itself problems when the conditions for their solution have come into existence. Leslie White proposed the existence of patterns, or periods, in a particular phase of development in a scientific or cultural field:

The development of a pattern is the labor of countless persons and of many generations or even centuries. But the pattern finds its culmination, its fulfillment, in the work of a few men – the Newtons, Darwins, Bachs, Beethovens, Kants, etc. Men working both before and after the time of fulfillment of the pattern have less, usually much less, chance of winning distinction. The men whose accident of birth has placed them somewhere along the slope of the pyramid of the developing pattern have no chance to win the sort of achievement and fame given to those whose births place them at the peak. (Patterns of Culture, 216.)

White quotes the mathematician Ferdinand Lagrange: Newton was a great genius but fortunate as well, “for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish” (217).

So if the effort to write down the names of the millennium’s top 100 people is misguided and naive, is there any other way to proceed? Might we try to find representative people who embody, in their achievement but also in their potential, what we would want to remember about the past?

Focusing not on the millennium but only on the 20th century, two candidates from my personal experience come to mind.

About 35 years ago, I was working in a photo-offset print shop in Cleveland, Ohio. I discovered a workmate, call him Bill, who operated huge cameras shooting camera-ready mechanicals and turning them into film negatives. As we were working in the vicinity of Severance Hall, home of the Cleveland Symphony, talk turned to music, and as soon as it did, Bill would rise to prominence. If, for example, the orchestra was doing a choral piece by Paul Hindemith, and if a review had stated the cliche that Hindemith was “all craft and no heart,” Bill would say something like this: “For Hindemith, structure and symmetry were mystical and communicative; they were transfusions of truth, the juice of a piece. The spirit is in the letter: getting a chord in tune means the truth is at stake.” On hearing this, you would immediately want to ask him: who are you?

Bill was, it turned out, holder of a Masters Degree in Music History, and the more you got to know him, the more you sensed the boundlessness of his profound knowledge and love of music. Why, then, was he running cameras in a print shop? Because, as he said, 15 years earlier he had a young family, children to feed, and he could not make a living teaching or doing music history.

But the person I really want to tell about is Luisa.

I met Luisa in the late 1960s, in New York. A political meeting was taking place at her apartment on the Lower East Side, and I had been invited to attend. I had been told that she was of Puerto Rican descent, and worked in the garment district. Arriving a few minutes early, I was met by Luisa at the door and ushered to a sofa. On the coffee table was a college-level textbook in linear algebra. As a graduate student in economics, I was of course attracted to this book; picking it up, I saw that it was being used actively and intelligently by someone, who was underlining the text, inserting missing steps into the proofs, writing marginal notations and questions.

I inquired, and Luisa indicated that the book was hers! Why would a garment worker be doing college-level math? Well, she said, it was just a hobby; she did it because she enjoyed it. She said she had worked through a calculus text, and when she was done with this one she would go on to advanced calculus, or perhaps set theory. Then she told me the most amazing part of the story.

Years earlier, Luisa was failing miserably in her high-school algebra class. Her white, male teacher called her in and told her he would pass her with a D grade so that she did not have to repeat the course, but that she should never, never take math again! She was distraught, and she received the implication very strongly that it was her status as a woman, and a Hispanic woman at that, which was responsible for her utter incapacity to do math!

For years she lived in fear of math, until her own son was in high school and having difficulty in algebra. “What could I do”? she said. “I had to try to help him.” When she opened her son’s textbook, the material in it all started to gell. As clarity descended, and the crisis of the moment passed, Luisa went further and further into the subject, so that when I met her she was doing math, for the sheer pleasure she derived from it.

I think I was angrier than she was. I have no idea whether, in a non-racist and non-sexist society, Luisa would have developed into a major mathematician whose name would wind up on somebody’s list of the top 100 geniuses. More likely, she could have been a valued math teacher, or perhaps an actuary, or statistician, or applied economist. Now multiply that loss by hundreds of thousands, and millions. An image begins to form of the countless people of the millennium who should have been celebrated: not instead of, but along with, Einstein, Darwin, Beethoven – and Marx.

All three articles in the present issue raise critical questions about Marxism, and offer connections to other perspectives, perspectives that call for incorporation into a growing, developing enterprise. We may take for granted, of course, that a scientific and humanist body of thought cannot be stagnant; it either assimilates new elements from outside of itself constantly, or it dies. The three perspectives are: feminism; religion; and (what might be called) cultural historicism.

We are pleased to present, first, an analytical retrospective study, “The Domestic Labor Debate Revisited,” by Lise Vogel. Vogel, who for two decades has been a major contributor to new thinking at the intersection of feminism and Marxism, now re-examines central issues – not only in the characterization of women’s unpaid family work in capitalist societies, but also in the understanding of the social sources and nature of the subordination of women, the interaction of ancient and modern historical developments in the determination of the social realities defining and affecting women’s roles, and the implications of this re-examination for the continuing transformation of both feminist and Marxist theory.

Re-examination of the studies of the unwaged labor of housework, childbearing and childrearing, done in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, is still relevant and important, Vogel argues; this literature “followed an intellectual agenda that has not been well understood.” We expect and hope that Vogel’s reappraisal will inspire a fruitful discussion in future issues.

Dialog between Marxism and religion has blossomed at intervals, often in periods of growth and positive ferment in popular struggles, as in Western Europe in the 1960s and Latin America in the latter decades of the 20th century. This mutuality has played an important part in building unity around shared goals, while the deeper philosophical questions have not always been faced. Now author John Brentlinger (“Revolutionizing Spirituality: Reflections on Marxism and Religion”) addresses the Marxist left directly with a claim: popular religious movements and communities of faith have not merely been “allies” with confused ideological and ethical positions. On the contrary, their profession of a spiritual dimension and connection underlying the struggle against exploitation and for new social realities offers something that the Marxist left has been missing all along, and to its detriment. The heart of the matter is Brentlinger’s claim that enlightened self-interest alone cannot be a sufficient basis for the left to succeed; and that the religious movements carry a tradition of spirituality which supplies the missing element. Spirituality, then, as opposed to its embodiment in particular religious doctrines and ideologies, is the attitude and reality of being “bonded reverently to the world”; without this, Brentlinger argues, the secular left has been defenseless against the penetration of the de-spiritualizing pressures of capitalist society. This, in turn, accounts, at least in part, for some of the failures of the left in the 20th century, and a grasp of this fact is therefore crucial to any left renewal in the 21st.

Part Two of Oscar Berland’s study, “The Emergence of the Communist Perspective on the “Negro Question” in America, 1919-1931″ (the first installment appeared in our Winter 1999-2000 issue) presents a richly detailed account of the developing consciousness in the early Communist Party concerning the condition of African-derived peoples in the United States, and of the variety and change in the theories advanced to explain this condition in relation to Marxist fundamentals and worldwide realities. The connection to the other articles’ interrogation of Marxism from the standpoints of feminism and religion, respectively, lies in Berland’s ultimate skepticism concerning the possibility of a fruitful Marxist “theory” of the condition of Blacks in the United States; any such theory – and quite a number are recounted in Berland’s study – must finally do violence to the complex reality that it seeks to encompass. Just as in the case of women and spiritual communities, the Black community constitutes an irreducible reality for Marxists, and cannot be subsumed within its foundation categories. The CPUSA, and the Comintern, never did make the contribution they aspired to make, with their evolving understandings of the Negro Nation, etc.; they did, however, make a signal contribution, especially in relation to the “Scottsborough Case,” to placing the African-American people firmly on the national and international political agenda.

Finally, our “Communications” section offers two contributions to ongoing discussion. Paul Saba’s paper, “Theorizing the Cultural Front,” continues the discussion of Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, begun by Gerald Horne in Spring, 1999. Saba defends Denning against some of the arguments raised by Horne, while still calling for a more nuanced blending of objective and subjective factors in the explanation of the decline of the left cultural momentum of the 1930s and 40s. Michael Munk (“Socialism in Czechoslovakia: What Went Wrong”?) addresses the proposition that socialists themselves were responsible for the “world-historic defeats” of socialism in the 20th century, by re-examining in detail the experience in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

SOURCE : SCIENCE AND SOCIETY

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