Gap Between Rich and Poor: Explained

In this morning's Salt Lake Tribune Peggy Stack summarizes a talk in yesterday's Mormon General Conference:

M. Russell Ballard, another apostle, also laid out some of the damage done to society by unbelievers.

In an increasingly materialistic world, about half of babies are born to unmarried women, more than half of marriages end in divorce, and fewer families embrace traditional values.

"Equally worrisome is the ever-growing gap between rich and poor," the apostle said. "Statistically, those who have less education and consequently lower incomes are less likely to marry and to go to church, and much more likely to be involved in crime and to have children outside of marriage."

Values come first, he said, and better situations follow.

"When children are born in wedlock and have both a mom and a dad, their opportunities and their likelihood of occupational success skyrocket," Ballard said. "And when families work and play together, neighborhoods and communities flourish, economies improve, and less government and fewer costly ‘safety nets’ are required."

Gasping, even spitting, I retrace the logic:

1. the world is increasingly materialistic

2. as a result marriage and families are crumbling

3. because families are crumbling there is a growing gap between rich and poor

4. family values will make us wealthy

5. and finally we won't need government with its social security and health insurance

There we have it. From the mouth of an apostle. Repeated, unrelenting tax cuts for the rich are irrelevant. Deregulation of banks and oil companies so they can make even more obscene profits is passé. Massive subsidies to oil companies mean nothing. People without health insurance don't have family values.

In short: if we were less materialistic we could be more materialistic.

It takes me back to 1969 when I was a missionary in Germany. I was talking with some university students who wondered if my being a missionary was a way to protest the Vietnam War and undermine the establishment. 

20-years old, politically naive, I had no answer other than to say that wasn't it at all. I did want to change the world but believed that that was done one person at a time. If I can convert a person to Mormonism and make him or her a better person, and if that is done thousands and millions of times, then the world will become better without protest or forced political change.

The students tried to explain some work by the Frankfurt School they were reading that argues that governmental and social structures can either aid or hinder us as we try to be decent human beings and that changing those structures is important.

They went back to Adorno and Habermas and I went back to knocking on doors to convert people and only later did I read Marcuse and teach a graduate class on the Frankfurt School.

Little did I know that now, in 2012, after the Occupy Movement, all that Frankfurt theory could be refuted simply by shouting "big government" and "safety net"!

Old Friends, Old Profession, Old Home, Old Religion -- New Insight

Fuhrman Hall

Vanderbilt University was my academic home for most of the 1980's. It was a wonderful place for a new Ph.D. in German, an intellectual environment that stimulated and challenged and supported.

It was (and is) also a supremely beautiful campus. Fuhrman Hall, picture to the left, was home to philosophy, Germanic and Slavic Languages, and other languages. My office, shared with colleague and friend Thom Heine, was stunning with its brick walls and high windows.

When I left there, just months after having been awarded tenure, I explained to the curious Dean of Arts and Sciences that I missed the scent of sage and that I was looking forward to the chance to teach at BYU, the university that educated my fellow Mormons.

Since then, there has been a lot of water under the bridge.

Last week I returned to Vanderbilt for the first time in over twenty years. The occasion was an international symposium on the work of Heinrich von Kleist, 200 years after his death. My paper, "Erection as Self-Assertion in Kleist's 'Die Marquise von O...'" will be a chapter in my book "On Standing" someday.

The paper went well. The conference featured about 40 Kleist scholars from Germany, Belgium, Spain, Japan, Canada, and from US universities from Berkeley to Princeton. There was, of course, tedium and pedantry and narcissism (we are German scholars, after all). And there was plenty of brilliance and good humor and insight (we are German scholars, after all).


Repeatedly I was asked why I left Vanderbilt. The only two people who really understood my answer were John Lyon, a Germanist at the University of Pittsburg, and James Rasmussen, a Comparatist out of Indiana. They're both Mormons and thus understood the BYU choice. The fact that I'm no longer a member of the LDS church, that I drank coffee by the bucketful (remember the tedium and pedantry?), that, in short, lots of water has gone under the bridge in the past 20 years, set up possible tensions but didn't seem to interfere, finally, with my conversations with John and James.

I'm still Mormon, for better and worse, even after leaving the faith.

I'm also a Germanist, for better and worse, even after having left the discipline for the most part to take the job in Integrated Studies at UVU.

Things change. Things stay the same.

The trajectory from that tight scholarly focus (which culminated with the publication of my book on Freemasonry and the German novel in 1991) to the travel writing with my friend Zarko Radakovic (the two books published in Belgrade) and to work with my friend Alex Caldiero and to my ongoing work on "Immortal For Quite Some Time" has been carefully chosen, as I explained to the PBS Ethics and Religion producer who pointed out that the moves from Princeton to Vanderbilt to BYU to UVU showed an academic career in precipitous decline.

David Lowe

Some of those choices were catalyzed by Thom Heine, a fellow Germanist out of the University of Virginia. Thom was and is a brilliant teacher of German. He's also a wonderful playwrite, full of good humor and profound insight. As he balanced his job with his creative work I too found myself broadening my fields of interest.


Returning to Nashville, the two persons I wanted to see were Thom and another friend, Evan Richards, a fine poet. Although I failed to find Evan, I did squeeze out an evening to see Thom and his wife Chris. Over good food and wine we settled effortlessly back into conversation. Unknown to us as we talked, our former colleague in Russian, David Lowe, was breathing his last breaths. For days and weeks and months on end, I sat with David in a room dedicated to 4 computers (before we all had computers of our own). David was translating what became four volumes of Dostoevsky's letters ("he's just run up another big gambling debt," David would exclaim, "and he's writing again to get some help") and I was finishing the Freemasonry book. David was also a lover of and expert on opera. And he was gay, the first openly gay person with whom I was well acquainted other than my brother John. David ate carrots by the handful, hour after hour, having heard that they strengthened the immune system.


I dedicated my Kleist paper to a third person I would have wanted to see, Hans Schulz, who died of cancer over a decade ago. As Hans died, we exchanged letters. This excerpt from one of his reveals a lot about us both:


"It’s been more than six weeks since I got your letter. I am only now coming out of the kind of hermetic self-referentiality which the news of my palpable finality engendered.. . . Your letter has a tone which expresses a lot about a flux of beliefs and the sense of loss that comes with it. Difficult for me to empathize because that is a whole field of beliefs I never entered and have always looked at as an indoor Hollywood landscape. But my own situation seems to subject a lot of things to revision too; in both cases, yours and mine, I think the results will be positive; in any case, staying in certain belief structures as if they were a nature-given exoskeleton has got to be boring in the long run."


That's it exactly. I left Vanderbilt because I had a clear sense (however subconscious it was) that staying in Nashville would be boring in the long run. The resultant years at BYU were never boring, composed of pleasure and aggravation in roughly equal parts; and the next decade at UVU hasn't been boring either -- with much less aggravation involved.


And then there was the sage.


Returning from Nashville to the mountains and valleys that shaped my childhood and that still thrill my soul, I realized that that scent and all it stood for, including the easing out into fields not exactly Germanic, was the scent of the life I wanted.

Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty died last Friday.

Thirty years ago, I watched Richard Rorty hold his and Mary Varney Rorty's new baby in a circle of LDS men while the Bishop of the Princeton Ward gave him a name and blessing. Mary had grown up LDS in Idaho. Richard had grown up the orchid loving son of Trotskiite parents. True to his pragmatic philosophy, Richard figured it might be good for their new son to grow up within some tradition, and perhaps Mormonism was a good as any other.


Fifteen years ago, I spent five afternoons with Richard looking for a lazuli bunting. He was a passionate birder and had accepted a speaking engagement in Utah on the off chance that he might spot one of the beautiful little birds. Near Stewart Falls above Sundance, I saw a flash of blue and pointed at it. He raised his big binoculars and found it, thrilled to his bones. We had dinner that night in Sundance's Tree Room and I was horrified when he ordered quail. Since that initial sighting, I have emailed Richard every spring on the day I spot the first lazuli bunting in Utah Valley. This year it was on the second of May. I'll miss sending the email next spring.

Some time after publishing his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard left the Philosophy Department at Princeton to become a professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, crossing disciplinary boundaries in order to work more broadly than before. His subsequent work Achieving Our Country drew on the American philosopher John Dewey and the American poet Walt Whitman, and Philosophical and Social Hope included a wonderfully personal autobiographical essay.


On the same day Richard Rorty died, Milo Marx Mussett Shaw was born to two of UVSC's philosophers. There's no way of telling whether the little Mussett-Shaw will be a philosopher, whether he'll engage in interdisciplinary work, whether he'll love birds, whether he'll be good to his older sister, but the balance of loss and gain feels good.