The Schisms in the Democratic Party will not Preclude Victory
Why schisms in parties, and a heterogeneity of thought in a multiplicity of disciplines, will not necessarily lead to incoherence or disunity.
By
David Gottfried
The Democratic Party is split. The manner of the split is boringly familiar: More leftist Democrats are diverging from Centrist Democrats. Some people sound the alarms and see harbingers of doom. The Democratic Party has many grave problems, but a diversity of opinion is not one of them.
Of course, a split which tears the party asunder in late October in an election year will prevent victory. But conflicts which arise early and are not ignored can eventually augment the party’s strength.
Indeed, the Republican party may very well soon plumet toward oblivion because it had refused to recognize let alone mend the severe split between traditional republicanism, which favored free trade, a stiff defense against Russia and compliance with conventional concepts of etiquette and decorum (Old school Republicans would never say “grab ‘em by the pussy” while a camera was rolling), and the MAGA psychotics, sycophants and sleazy Rudy Giuliani wannabes, and it may endure an electoral collapse in the Congressional Elections of 2026.
Likewise, the Democratic Party under President Lyndon Johnson refused to recognize the presence of opposition to the Vietnam War, and as the war soured, the American people were startled and chagrined to find that the little “police action” (Lyndon Johnson wanted as little coverage about Vietnam as possible and he preferred thinking of the conflict as a police action rather than a war) was in large part a damnable and immoral war: We were not saving South Vietnam from Communism. We were killing South and North Vietnamese because they had thrown their lot in with the communists, not because they believed in Marxist Leninism but because they were incensed at Western colonialism, first at the hands of the French and then the Americans.
How conflicts, differences, and seemingly inapposite stimuli can make political movements stronger and ideas and art stunningly beautiful
Many people stoutly condemn heterogeneity, or the mixing together of different things and types. Many people believe blacks should be separated from whites, men should be separated from women and elderly people should be separated from the young. Often, they go a step further and decree that different ideas and courses of study must be segregated.
I contend that segregation often leads to stasis and monotony and that the influx of new phenomena, or even opposing phenomena, can enliven a discipline as an electric shock can revive a person who suffered a cardiac arrest.
What made the Beatles Innovative and Creative Musicians
Among other things, John Lennon and Paul Mc Cartney went to art school. I believe their art school only dealt with visual art. Music was not part of the curriculum.
I think the Beatles may have benefited from something akin to the reverse of synesthesia. In synesthesia, one can perceive music, or actually see music, as different colors. (Footnote 1) In other words, a musical piece is split into two parts: One part which is perceived as sound and one part which is perceived as something visual.
Perhaps, in the case of the Beatles, vision was merged into the sound. Perhaps the colors and shapes of paintings and scribbles of art school informed, and became a part of, their music.
Listen to the opening of “I am the Walrus;” the sound suggests a room with a floor that is warped and never level, and I see the wavey lines of Van Gogh paintings that always take me out to sea. Listen to “All the Lonely People,” and I see Magritte’s “Man Hiding Behind an Apple” and Van Gogh’s “The Potato Eaters.”
Of course, I don’t think anyone in the art school, attended by the Beatles, intended to deprive their students of music. However, it appears that it never occurred to the art school to offer courses in music. And consider how much richer the results are when stimuli are diverse.
What Happened to the Jews, and what might be Happening to Iranians, as they read from both left to right and right to left.
English and all other tongues using the Latin alphabet are read from left to right. By contrast, Hebrew, Farsi (the chief language spoken in Iran) and Arabic are read from right to left.
The different hemispheres of the brain excel in different domains. Artistic ability is associated with heightened activity in the brain’s right hemisphere. (And this makes so many artists left-handed as a “crossover’ takes place as neurons go through the cervical spine -- the portion of the spine closest to the brain) Logical precision and accuracy is associated with heightened activity in the left hemisphere of the brain.
Perhaps one part of the brain is stimulated when we read from right to left. Conceivably, another part of the brain is stimulated when we read from left to right.
However, perhaps something truly remarkable transpires when we read one language from right to left and another language from left to right.
Perhaps different parts of the brain are stimulated at the same time, and the power and profundity of the brain synergistically soars.
Indeed, European Jews, reading both Hebrew and Latin tongues, leaped to the intellectual zenith of Europe. Today, I have read that an enormous proportion of Iranians, perhaps more than 50 percent of Iranian adult men in this country, have MD degrees. I don’t have any data on Arabic speakers who also speak English regularly, but I am strongly inclined to believe that Southern Baptists, who are slow enough to be thoroughly absorbed by a game of checkers in a barbershop in the town of Bubba-Loves-Trump, Alabama, would be swamped in any intellectual competition with Arabic speakers.
Miscegenation or one of America’s finest contributions to Art.
Many ogres in history advocated cultural segregation. White people, they held, should stay far away from the thumping and inevitable humping of black music. Frigid Northern European peoples should hold fast to songs sung by cherubs for jaded and dying spinsters. For me, the first song in his category was “Frerer Jaquez” which I suffered to learn at the age of 6.
Indeed, in Germany, Fichte went so far as to argue, in “Redden a Deutsche Volk,” or address to the German people, that things will be better and purer when they are segregated. Among other things, Fichte maintained that the German language was superior to English because English was a bastard and a mutt with traces of so many other tongues: Celtic, Latin, the German of Angles and Saxons and perhaps some French from the Norman Conquest. Fichte held that since German had not borrowed anything from any other languages, it was stunningly pure and superior.
This Nazi propaganda was majestically given the heave ho and utterly vanquished by Scott Joplin, a black man whose parents were slaves, who was born only 3 years after the Civil War ended. Joplin was one of the finest composers in America as he was the first musician to merge European symphonic music with the highly rhythmic music of Africa. The result was ragtime.
Why Pollsters and Prognosticators are Better at Predicting Elections When They Know What’s Playing on the Radio
In “Breaking Ranks,” Norman Podhoretz explained why some political prognosticators get it wrong and why some prognosticators and newsmen know who will win an election.
More specifically, he explained why some polls had the insight to realize that Gene Mc Carthy, Robert Kennedy and George Mc Govern would have surprising strength in Democratic primaries and overwhelm centrist Democrats.
According to Podhoretz, pollsters and students of political science don’t understand political science that well because, paradoxically, all they ever study is political phenomena.
Because their eyes are glued to strictly political facts and news, they are oblivious to extra political phenomena which shape politics.
More specifically: Podhoretz declaimed that Rock n Roll music, the counterculture of the 60’s, and flower power etc., dramatically altered the way many people perceived reality, encouraged a more critical way of analyzing life and had made many people support candidates who were far to the left of the American norm.
How Specialization Makes Great Minds Small – and literally leads to invalid conclusions
In the Ivied Halls of Harvard and Columbia, a biologist will rarely review a scholarly analysis of poetry and a professor of English generally will know nothing about genetics. In this world in which we suffer a dearth of great thinkers (Years ago, men like Freud and Nietzsche and Shakespeare considered all the stuff of life proper playthings for their prodigious minds to ponder and manipulate), professors, more often than not, run away from the dazzling and the exciting (Footnote 2) and study very limited things, and the crowning glory of their sort of scholarship is the monograph, a very detailed study of a very discrete and narrowly defined topic.
For example, a 50-page analysis of the conflict between style X and style Y in the pottery of Florence in the second third of the 14th century is the sort of anally retentive scholarship that will grant one tenure.
This sort of scholarship actually makes us dumber. (I have to qualify this: Sometimes an in depth analysis of a very narrowly delineated subject is helpful. However if we only look at individual grains of sand, and don’t see the erosion destroying an entire shore line, we are making a big mistake.) For example, philosophy has arguably been crippled because most philosophers only study one or two particular branches of philosophy -- and most of them do not study anything else, including physics.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle holds that whenever we measure something, we change the thing we are measuring. Hence, we can never really predict the weather or make a reasonably accurate prognosis of a patient’s future because when we do things such as perform a biopsy, to gather data about the patient, we will often change that patient, and more specifically harm that patient, when we nick a vein or a nerve or any other important cables or vessels in the course of the biopsy.
Very simply, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle dealt a decisive blow against anti-existentialists and determinists who believed that the future is determined by the past and that the idea of freedom was a childish illusion. Of course, everything might be determined by the past, but since we will always change a subject when we measure that subject, our ability to predict the future will be compromised, and we might as well insert into that gnawing void of uncertainty the audacity of human freedom.
The Male and The Female
If we don’t want humanity to die out, we must not segregate males from females. As we all know, the joinder of a man and a woman is a prerequisite for the development of the next generation. (And thank G-d we have not yet reached that unbrave new world when what Winston Churchill called “perverted science” will deform the mechanics of human reproduction)
Very simply, the copulation of male and female is a pre-requisite to the formation of a baby. This is very fundamental. Some people may say that it is so fundamental as to make this essay laughable. However, because it is so fundamental, it is as solid and as lasting as a Mountain. And this rock-solid mountain of truth is ready to create a rockslide to pulverize the argument, of fascists and bigots, that different things should be segregated.
The Hegelian Dialectic: Progress is achieved when divergent opinions do battle
Maybe I am too hung up about Hegel. But I see his theorem everywhere.
Hegel mapped out the basic trajectory of an idea:
A)An idea is born
B) That new idea contains the seeds of its own antithesis. Everything gives rise to its opposite. This is what Marx did in dialectical materialism: The rich get rich by making other people poor. In other words, the rich create their opposite, the poor.
C) The thesis, or the initial idea does battle with its antithesis.
D) A new idea, or a synthesis, is created in the aftermath of the conflict between the new idea and its antithesis.
In other words, Hegel claims that ideational progress is achieved when contradictory ideas are unleashed and fight it out.
Acid and Base Yields Water and Salt; With Divine Grace the Moles Somersault
In the late 19th Century, some scientists called themselves physicalists. They held that ideas about the world were more likely to be true if they could be supported by concrete, physical phenomena.
I am going to buttress my argument, that dissimilar things can produce something redeeming if not salutary or enriching, by examining very basic stuff pertaining to inorganic chemistry: What happens when an acid and an alkaline substance are brought together.
A scathing, deadly acid will lose its venomous properties when it touches or is in the same environs as a scathing and deadly highly alkaline substance. Both acids and alkaline substances are caustic, burning and scathing. At the same time, they are very different; acids have a very low PH while alkaline substances have a very high PH.
In any event, when acids and alkalis, ferocious armies, come together, peace arrives.
When an acid and an alkaline substance are joined, they are neutralized; the atoms rearrange themselves and the results are Water and a Salt. (By salt, I am referring to compounds which consist of a metal and a non-metal which are ionically bound).
For example, hydrochloric Acid (One Hydrogen atom joined to one atom of Chlorine) is a deadly, ferocious substance. Similarly, lye or Sodium hydroxide (One atom of sodium annexed to one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen) is deadly and scathing. Put them together, however, and the result is tame water and tame table salt, NaCl.
(Incidentally, the mainstay of inorganic chemistry, the transmission of electrons from metals to non-metals, always reminded me of intercourse. Hence, I wrote this poem, fueled by junior high school science, many, many years ago:
The Organic Essence of Inorganic Chemistry
(From Mrs. Cashman’s Eighth Grade Science Class)
.
By
David Gottfried
.
Acid and base
Yields water and salt
With divine grace
The moles somersault
.
Antinomic Ions
Spark Electric embrace
Bit part peons
Their selves they efface
.
Sodium glares
Spies chlorine, bleached queen
They forswear their spears
Become a condiment serene
—
Footnote 1 This borders on Schizophrenia, but See Silvano Arietti, Ernst Kris and Von Doremus who explicate the thin line between madness and art particularly with respect to the paleologic, or the ancient logic, present in both schizophrenia and the poetic metaphor.
Footnote 2 I once knew a brilliant and prolific writer and professor of Economics, Dr. Martin Sobel, who told me that when he submitted his Phd dissertation it was criticized for being too exciting