The late Professor Paul Jacoby taught philosophy at Seton Hill College, now Seton Hill University. The previously all female school, located in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, is situated on a hill (that seems obvious, doesn’t it?), one of seven hills in the community (making Greensburg one of at least two urban centers built on seven hills * ). The physical setting is significant here because it plays a role in the following tale about Paul, a consistently mild-mannered man, short, bald, and rather quiet in social settings. Call him unflappable and reserved. I assume that years of wading through thick volumes of philosophers like Schopenhauer and theologian-philosophers like Aquinas and Spinoza made him a patient man.
From the hill on which he lived Paul drove to the school every day, descending from his hill and then winding up the school’s long bending driveway colonnaded by two rows of bark-pealing sycamore trees. At the top, he parked in an assigned place on a terrace behind one of the buildings. On one warm day, just as he was pulling into his parking place with his driver’s window down, he passed a family visiting the campus. As he made the slow turn to park, the father asked him for directions. Distracted by the question, Paul hit the gas instead of the brake, and drove off the terrace down a short embankment. The startled family looked on wide-eyed as Paul opened his car door, climbed the hill with briefcase in hand and said, “I’m sorry, what were you looking for?” Yep. No apparent concern about what happened and definitely no apparent concern for his wrecked car. I want you to think of that incident as my introduction to the process of “letting go.”
Attachment to Ideas
Listening to “Live and Let Die,” the eponymous Bond film song by Paul McCartney and Wings, I realized that I had recently followed the advice in the lyrics with regard to some recent blog entries and that almost like Paul Jacoby, I let those blogs die—as in I did not publish them, but left them as wrecks on my hard drive.
Sometimes what we do just isn’t worth the effort we spend; sometimes the ideas we have add nothing to the treasure chest of the intellect. Be happy I never posted those essays. Fortunately for you, they were wrecks you never had to witness.
So, I wrote and scrapped. I let go. After spending time writing, revising, and revising again, I realized that what I wrote recently in several essays wasn’t what I thought I was writing. It’s not easy to let go of something that took time to develop. For many of us, holding onto what we do and the possessions we have is a matter of pride. But as we all know, in the long run pride begets grief either for the proud or others. Of course, I have to ask myself whether I am proud when I say that by dropping those several essays to focus on other matters, I am like Paul after he dropped his car over the embankment—suffering no loss because I relinquished any attachment to the ideas in those essays.
Attachment to Ideology
Letting go is difficult, especially letting go of a favored idea, ideology, or belief. In this, I think of the recent push among some politicians to move the United States toward socialism. In short, I think of Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “Social(ist) Democrat.” Having dubbed himself “social Democrat” when he moved from the elephant to the donkey, Bernie sticks with his appellation. And he has “evangelized” a large following among America’s youth. Surrounded by the wealth created by a modified capitalist system, many of America’s young people have lined up behind this hoary-haired pied-piper politician.
Now, I confess that I haven’t been inside Bernie’s head to discover how he came to the conclusion that socialism in any form is a good thing. I have read on page 8 of his book Our Revolution, that he calls Hitler a “right wing lunatic.” ** I find that interesting. By almost any standard of reasonable assessment, Hitler was a lunatic, true, but his party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, auf Deutsch: Nationalistiche Deutcshe Arbeiterpartei. Bernie makes the point on the same page that the Nazis were responsible for killing one third of the Jewish population and for a sizable proportion of the fifty million plus people killed during World War II. So, I’m just perplexed by Bernie’s somehow adopting a political philosophy that included genocide of Jews and by his joining as a college student at the University of Chicago the Young People’s Socialist League (18). I’m also surprised that with the numbers of people impoverished, enslaved, and killed under socialist regimes in the twentieth century, that Bernie thinks socialism is good for humanity. Though too young (b. 1941) to have witnessed the savage democide of Russians by Stalin, he was old enough at 18 to know what happened when Castro took iron-fisted control of Cuba with the help of his own doctor of torture and “Mengele-like” Che. Bernie was also old enough to have witnessed both waves of migration that brought more than 300,000 Cubans to the United States as they fled Castro’s communism in the 1060s and 1980s. Surely, in the years since those and other socialist-driven atrocities, he has become aware that Venezuela lost millions of citizens who fled the socialism of Chavez and Maduro. And surely, Bernie has seen how a mandated redistribution of wealth by the few always ends up in making an oligarchy of those in charge, people who believe they are exempt from their own rules and who reap benefits they deprive others from having.
But Bernie and his young proteges in Congress continue to hold onto the promise of socialism, believing, I guess, that “this time it will work.” And, as he and they continue to push for redistribution of wealth, they become models of hypocrisy because they do not deny themselves material possessions, and they do not redistribute what they have. Certainly, Bernie can’t live in his three homes simultaneously. What about all those poor people living on the streets of American cities and all those poor people crossing the border by the tens of thousands? He could redistribute a few bedrooms, couldn’t he? Do it for the children, Bernie. Do it for the cause you hold onto so tenaciously, the political view that you can’t let go.
Ideologies are among the possessions that we can’t let go. I, for example, can’t let go my opposition to socialism. Am I one to “live and let die,” a cold-hearted person whose license to kill means license to kill healthcare for all, universal wealth distribution, and free education? How could I be so cold? I’m not rich; shouldn’t I favor a little redistribution? Maybe I don’t have to have a yacht like the very rich, but I might enjoy some government-provided rowboat on the water outside Bernie’s lake house.
Everywhere I look I see socialism as an avenue for special classes of individuals to separate themselves from the masses just as in the old Soviet Union there were those relegated to block housing while some privileged few enjoyed a vacation in the family dacha. The elite among the ruling class enjoyed world travel whereas the typical Soviet citizen was locked behind what Churchill called the Iron Curtain. The very class division that socialists like Bernie claim their political ideology will eliminate is engendered by socialism. But then, Bernie might argue that “someone has to decide,” and that he and his class of self-appointed leaders know what is best for the masses. But as he holds onto his ideals, he ignores that unaccountable government officials with unlimited funding often use the money for their own interests—as evidenced by the General Services Administration’s party in Las Vegas in 2010. *** Ah! Bernie, Yes, in a perfect world, we will all share everything, treat each other with respect, and never fall prey to Greed.
I don’t believe that arguments based on how many people died under socialist rule, how many people were kept from achieving their individual goals, or how many people were imprisoned by socialist governments would have any effect on Bernie’s belief in the efficacy of his ideas. The car might have plunged off the terrace many times in the twentieth century, but Bernie isn’t letting go. He’s sticking with the car, with the ideology. Bernie is no Paul Jacoby.
Paul Jacoby as the Model of Humility
Okay, so Bernie is no Paul Jacoby, but then, neither am I. I lack humility; I hold onto many ideas I’ve had for decades. What ideas have I let go? What have I sacrificed by junking a few blogs? Those unpublished essays I wrote in the last two weeks and sent not to my website, but rather to the cloud and the hard drive are insignificant not only in your life, but also in mine. In fact, maybe because I still have access to those ideas, I might be tempted to go down that embankment to retrieve them sometime soon, arguing that “Well, if I thought it, it must be good.” See? Pride.
Letting go is hard. It’s hard to let go of possessions and even harder let go of ideas. I suppose letting go of emotions is equally as hard. So, I find myself being a hypocrite, able to point out the folly of Bernie’s ideas, but incapable of pointing out the folly of my own. I’m asking him to leave socialism behind while I leave little of my own ideas behind.
Maybe I could benefit from Paul’s example. He seemed to live in the present moment. The car went over the embankment, but in the next moment he was concerned about what the parent needed. It’s in the present that ideologies prove their value. It’s in the present that ideologies manifest themselves in efficacious action.
In which moment has socialism been of practical benefit to individuals as individuals? With regard to the everyday needs of individuals, a socialist philosophy means nothing regardless of its loftiness and ideals. Those 162 million people who died under socialism in the twentieth century can’t be brought back to life. Those millions who sought and still seek to escape socialist governments do not seem to have Bernie’s ear. Maybe he can’t hear them as he sticks with the car as it rolls over the embankment. Certainly, he isn’t walking up the embankment to discover their specific—and very individual—needs.
Notes:
*Come on, now, did I have to tell you “Rome”? Rome’s seven hills are Quirinal Hill, Viminal Hill, Capitoline Hill, Esquiline Hill, Palatine Hill, Caelian Hill, and Aventine Hill, in case that comes up in conversation at dinner tonight. The Eternal City makes them famous. Greensburg’s hills have local names and ward numbers. I attended, for example, Fourth Ward School, then Sixth Ward School, and then Eighth Ward School, the latter two on hills named “Ludwick” and because of the dense Italian population, “Dago Heaven.”
**Sanders, Bernie. 2016. Our Revolution. New York. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press.
***https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/gsa-official-las-vegas-conf-scandal-finally-gets-charged/ Accessed October 28, 2021.
From the hill on which he lived Paul drove to the school every day, descending from his hill and then winding up the school’s long bending driveway colonnaded by two rows of bark-pealing sycamore trees. At the top, he parked in an assigned place on a terrace behind one of the buildings. On one warm day, just as he was pulling into his parking place with his driver’s window down, he passed a family visiting the campus. As he made the slow turn to park, the father asked him for directions. Distracted by the question, Paul hit the gas instead of the brake, and drove off the terrace down a short embankment. The startled family looked on wide-eyed as Paul opened his car door, climbed the hill with briefcase in hand and said, “I’m sorry, what were you looking for?” Yep. No apparent concern about what happened and definitely no apparent concern for his wrecked car. I want you to think of that incident as my introduction to the process of “letting go.”
Attachment to Ideas
Listening to “Live and Let Die,” the eponymous Bond film song by Paul McCartney and Wings, I realized that I had recently followed the advice in the lyrics with regard to some recent blog entries and that almost like Paul Jacoby, I let those blogs die—as in I did not publish them, but left them as wrecks on my hard drive.
Sometimes what we do just isn’t worth the effort we spend; sometimes the ideas we have add nothing to the treasure chest of the intellect. Be happy I never posted those essays. Fortunately for you, they were wrecks you never had to witness.
So, I wrote and scrapped. I let go. After spending time writing, revising, and revising again, I realized that what I wrote recently in several essays wasn’t what I thought I was writing. It’s not easy to let go of something that took time to develop. For many of us, holding onto what we do and the possessions we have is a matter of pride. But as we all know, in the long run pride begets grief either for the proud or others. Of course, I have to ask myself whether I am proud when I say that by dropping those several essays to focus on other matters, I am like Paul after he dropped his car over the embankment—suffering no loss because I relinquished any attachment to the ideas in those essays.
Attachment to Ideology
Letting go is difficult, especially letting go of a favored idea, ideology, or belief. In this, I think of the recent push among some politicians to move the United States toward socialism. In short, I think of Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed “Social(ist) Democrat.” Having dubbed himself “social Democrat” when he moved from the elephant to the donkey, Bernie sticks with his appellation. And he has “evangelized” a large following among America’s youth. Surrounded by the wealth created by a modified capitalist system, many of America’s young people have lined up behind this hoary-haired pied-piper politician.
Now, I confess that I haven’t been inside Bernie’s head to discover how he came to the conclusion that socialism in any form is a good thing. I have read on page 8 of his book Our Revolution, that he calls Hitler a “right wing lunatic.” ** I find that interesting. By almost any standard of reasonable assessment, Hitler was a lunatic, true, but his party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, auf Deutsch: Nationalistiche Deutcshe Arbeiterpartei. Bernie makes the point on the same page that the Nazis were responsible for killing one third of the Jewish population and for a sizable proportion of the fifty million plus people killed during World War II. So, I’m just perplexed by Bernie’s somehow adopting a political philosophy that included genocide of Jews and by his joining as a college student at the University of Chicago the Young People’s Socialist League (18). I’m also surprised that with the numbers of people impoverished, enslaved, and killed under socialist regimes in the twentieth century, that Bernie thinks socialism is good for humanity. Though too young (b. 1941) to have witnessed the savage democide of Russians by Stalin, he was old enough at 18 to know what happened when Castro took iron-fisted control of Cuba with the help of his own doctor of torture and “Mengele-like” Che. Bernie was also old enough to have witnessed both waves of migration that brought more than 300,000 Cubans to the United States as they fled Castro’s communism in the 1060s and 1980s. Surely, in the years since those and other socialist-driven atrocities, he has become aware that Venezuela lost millions of citizens who fled the socialism of Chavez and Maduro. And surely, Bernie has seen how a mandated redistribution of wealth by the few always ends up in making an oligarchy of those in charge, people who believe they are exempt from their own rules and who reap benefits they deprive others from having.
But Bernie and his young proteges in Congress continue to hold onto the promise of socialism, believing, I guess, that “this time it will work.” And, as he and they continue to push for redistribution of wealth, they become models of hypocrisy because they do not deny themselves material possessions, and they do not redistribute what they have. Certainly, Bernie can’t live in his three homes simultaneously. What about all those poor people living on the streets of American cities and all those poor people crossing the border by the tens of thousands? He could redistribute a few bedrooms, couldn’t he? Do it for the children, Bernie. Do it for the cause you hold onto so tenaciously, the political view that you can’t let go.
Ideologies are among the possessions that we can’t let go. I, for example, can’t let go my opposition to socialism. Am I one to “live and let die,” a cold-hearted person whose license to kill means license to kill healthcare for all, universal wealth distribution, and free education? How could I be so cold? I’m not rich; shouldn’t I favor a little redistribution? Maybe I don’t have to have a yacht like the very rich, but I might enjoy some government-provided rowboat on the water outside Bernie’s lake house.
Everywhere I look I see socialism as an avenue for special classes of individuals to separate themselves from the masses just as in the old Soviet Union there were those relegated to block housing while some privileged few enjoyed a vacation in the family dacha. The elite among the ruling class enjoyed world travel whereas the typical Soviet citizen was locked behind what Churchill called the Iron Curtain. The very class division that socialists like Bernie claim their political ideology will eliminate is engendered by socialism. But then, Bernie might argue that “someone has to decide,” and that he and his class of self-appointed leaders know what is best for the masses. But as he holds onto his ideals, he ignores that unaccountable government officials with unlimited funding often use the money for their own interests—as evidenced by the General Services Administration’s party in Las Vegas in 2010. *** Ah! Bernie, Yes, in a perfect world, we will all share everything, treat each other with respect, and never fall prey to Greed.
I don’t believe that arguments based on how many people died under socialist rule, how many people were kept from achieving their individual goals, or how many people were imprisoned by socialist governments would have any effect on Bernie’s belief in the efficacy of his ideas. The car might have plunged off the terrace many times in the twentieth century, but Bernie isn’t letting go. He’s sticking with the car, with the ideology. Bernie is no Paul Jacoby.
Paul Jacoby as the Model of Humility
Okay, so Bernie is no Paul Jacoby, but then, neither am I. I lack humility; I hold onto many ideas I’ve had for decades. What ideas have I let go? What have I sacrificed by junking a few blogs? Those unpublished essays I wrote in the last two weeks and sent not to my website, but rather to the cloud and the hard drive are insignificant not only in your life, but also in mine. In fact, maybe because I still have access to those ideas, I might be tempted to go down that embankment to retrieve them sometime soon, arguing that “Well, if I thought it, it must be good.” See? Pride.
Letting go is hard. It’s hard to let go of possessions and even harder let go of ideas. I suppose letting go of emotions is equally as hard. So, I find myself being a hypocrite, able to point out the folly of Bernie’s ideas, but incapable of pointing out the folly of my own. I’m asking him to leave socialism behind while I leave little of my own ideas behind.
Maybe I could benefit from Paul’s example. He seemed to live in the present moment. The car went over the embankment, but in the next moment he was concerned about what the parent needed. It’s in the present that ideologies prove their value. It’s in the present that ideologies manifest themselves in efficacious action.
In which moment has socialism been of practical benefit to individuals as individuals? With regard to the everyday needs of individuals, a socialist philosophy means nothing regardless of its loftiness and ideals. Those 162 million people who died under socialism in the twentieth century can’t be brought back to life. Those millions who sought and still seek to escape socialist governments do not seem to have Bernie’s ear. Maybe he can’t hear them as he sticks with the car as it rolls over the embankment. Certainly, he isn’t walking up the embankment to discover their specific—and very individual—needs.
Notes:
*Come on, now, did I have to tell you “Rome”? Rome’s seven hills are Quirinal Hill, Viminal Hill, Capitoline Hill, Esquiline Hill, Palatine Hill, Caelian Hill, and Aventine Hill, in case that comes up in conversation at dinner tonight. The Eternal City makes them famous. Greensburg’s hills have local names and ward numbers. I attended, for example, Fourth Ward School, then Sixth Ward School, and then Eighth Ward School, the latter two on hills named “Ludwick” and because of the dense Italian population, “Dago Heaven.”
**Sanders, Bernie. 2016. Our Revolution. New York. Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press.
***https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/gsa-official-las-vegas-conf-scandal-finally-gets-charged/ Accessed October 28, 2021.
RSS Feed