In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

Here’s a bit of our conversation:

NS: Do you feel some responsibility to confront what Oprah represents, in the form of an active, engaged social critique?

KL: It is incredibly important that we—women, men, believers, heathens, citizens—think, and think critically, about the female complaint, especially as it takes this specific form in the public sphere. Oprah is not just Oprah—she represents what has come to be a naturalized logic for women’s suffering. I would be lying if I didn’t say that writing this book was, for me, an act of feminism. But I would say that it is more important to me that it be understood as an act of criticism connected to the deep tissue of our national political and economic imaginary. So yes, this is an act of social critique. For as much as the solo striving hungry female is the object here, it is the silence of her sociality—all the while making commodity of her social receipt and struggle—that disturbs me. On her message boards, everyone testifies, but they don’t form social communities, social insurrection, or social protest. The social is incredibly absent from Oprah, even as she praises the idea of girlfriends, of groups, of clubs. The social is a rhetorical formulation leaving women exposed in their extremity without any public held accountable.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

Meanwhile, my head has of course been rapt in theories of nonviolence, inevitably summarized in Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha—truth-force—as well as in American adaptations. The overlap between this classic pragmatism and satyagraha are considerable. And indeed, both played central roles in the making of 20th century American progressive politics, in progressivism and the civil rights movement, respectively. Both, furthermore, play a part in the politics promised by the Obama administration. Think, for instance, of Obama’s well-acknowledged debt to the nonviolent legacy of civil rights and his pragmatist penchant for constructing public truths out of performance.

The connection between these systems breaks down—and for roughly this reason a friend recently described pragmatism to me as “demonic.” Menand puts the problem this way:

Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one. (p. 375)

In the brand new book Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy, Joseph Kip Kosek adds:

The radical Christian pacifists found the pragmatist view incomplete, despite their alliances with Dewey and other pragmatists on specific issues. They held that the method of weighing relative moral goods and reserving absolute commitment provided a shaky foundation during crises, namely crises of violence. (p. 9)

There is, at the heart of the pragmatist philosophical program, a fatal flaw of nihilism. In the end, it offers nothing to which we can hitch our lives. But can truth-force save pragmatism? Should we bother trying?

To begin, I’ve been assembling a list of common patches of ground shared by pragmatism and nonviolence.

• Means cannot be subjugated to ends; see my earlier discussion of this for nonviolence and, for pragmatism, I’ll quote Menand:
  

  The [pragmatist] solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. (p. 432)

• The imperative of freedom of ideas and the longing for openness to possibility
• One’s own beliefs must be treated as provisional and incomplete; particularly in James’s “pluralist” pragmatism, one must paradoxically respect the truth held by those one disagrees with
• A tendency toward radical pacifism (Jane Addams, William James, sometimes Dewey, among pragmatists)
• Truth can arise through performative acts—often it must
• We arrive at truth through a process of experimentation, trial and error, lending opportunity for analogies with Darwinism—though satyagraha alone lends it a deeper sacredness, even divinity

The way I’m thinking, it is this last point that is the crux of the difference, and of what satyagraha can lend to American pragmatism. In a limited sense, it already did, through the Christian nonviolence tradition that Kosek chronicles in Acts of Conscience (more on that to come). What it means is the conviction that there is a truth above all, within all, pervading all. Pragmatism is the story of our grasp of it. Satyagraha is the story of its grasp on us. The love of that truth is the best love out there. It’s a love you can hitch your life to. And because it’s truth, it’s true.

So what, then, might pragmatism have to offer in return? A language, one that is deeply resonant with American modernity, in all the places that a Gandhian primitivism doesn’t fit.

Thanks for your patience with these scattered notes. Next, I’m on to Rorty, to see what archaeology can be done there.

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
But other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

Every time it nearly brings me to tears. These certainties in the words are so obvious, yet every time I hear them it sounds, in this world, like a great discovery: other people have lives too that are worth living and worth keeping.

“Finlandia” is particularly moving to me after having lived at a co-op house at Brown University by that name.

Take this letter to his friend, the monk Gundulf:

When I sit down to write to you, oh soul most dear to my soul, when I sit down to write to you, I am uncertain how best to begin what I have to say. Everything I feel about you is sweet and pleasant to my heart; whatever I desire for you is the best that my mind can conceive. … Why do you entreat me though your messengers, exhort me in your letters, and constrain me by your gifts, to remember you? “If I do not remember thee, if I prefer not Gundulf among my chief friends, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” [paraphrase of Psalm 137:6]. (Quoted in R.W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, 1990: p. 144)

And then this, from the Proslogion, in the chapter before presenting the ontological proof:

Be it mine to look up to thy light, even from afar, even from the depths. Teach me to seek thee, and reveal thyself to me, when I seek thee, for I cannot seek thee, except thou teach me, nor find thee, except thou reveal thyself. Let me seek thee in longing, let me long for thee in seeking; let me find thee in love, and love thee in finding. (Prosl., chapter I)

And finally, from the next chapter, the famous definition:

And indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived.

The letter above, one of Anselm’s earliest, was written some time before the terms of “nothing greater conceived” became the ground of his proof. The language, nevertheless, is so much the same. With the same regularity, whether speaking of friends or God, he quotes the Psalms, admonishes his unworthiness, and sings praises of the other.

R.W. Southern’s 1990 biography of the saint devotes an extended chapter to the idea of friendship that emerges in Anselm’s writing and the part it played in his life. He lived at a liminal time in the history of friendship, just before the troubadours’ vision of romantic love of women would take European culture by storm. In Anselm’s time, thinking about friendship still rested on the Classical ideal: a rational, while loving, relationship between men directed at a worldly purpose. Yet he broke these rules, nudging in the direction of the romantic ecstasy that was to follow.

For Anselm, friendship was an ecstatic, even salvific event. More than purposes of government or industry, it served above all the cause of eternal salvation. The ecstasy between friends was a place along the path to heaven. The colorful language he uses for and about friends—as well as theology—was considered extreme in his Benedictine monastic life, and as he took on more official responsibility, he was obliged to cool it a little.

The connection between friendship and philosophy that I have explored in other places (here and here, for instance) plays out explicitly in Anselm. At the start of two of his major works, the Monologion and Cur Deus Homo, he explains that the ideas contained therein came first in the course of conversation with brethren, who then asked that he put them into writing. The circle completes itself in the works themselves, where language blurs the line between human friendship and abstract philosophy.