A Prairie Home Companion

from Lake Wobegon

No this is not a movie post – but rather a post about a movie made by Robert Altman, about Garrison Keillor. I still remember listening to A Prairie Home Companion in 1980’s when Reagan was in office – it was back then -- indeed a ray of hope coming from small town America. Keilor has been deservedly called the head of satirical opposition in America. A tilte he has carried enduringly well.

He is the author of 11 books, including Lake Wobegon Days (1985), The Book of Guys (1993), The Old Man Who Loved Cheese (1996), Wobegon Boy (1997), and Me, By Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente (1999). He is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and was recently presented with a National Humanities Medal by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His radio Show, A Prairie Home Companion, broadcast weekly on NPR from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon has been a staple of the American Left since it went national in 1979, and the subject of Altman’s movie. In the radio show listeners hear items such as:

Original comedy sketches performed by Keillor and cast, and punctuated by sound-effects wizard Tom Keith; Music by guests like guitarist Leo Kottke, singer Greg Brown, jazz pianist-singer Diana Krall, and Delta bluesman John Hammond; Stories from the town "that time forgot and decades cannot improve" in Keillor's signature monologue, "The News from Lake Wobegon."

Each season features special shows, including the annual "Talent from Towns Under 2,000" contest, the annual Joke Show, and continuing sketches like Lives of the Cowboys, Guy Noir -- Radio Private Eye, Bob the Young Artist, and musical spoofs such as "La Influenza," a five-minute opera about the common cold.

It appears that Keilor approached Altman to make the movie, and in it he plays himself as well as claiming the writing credits for the movie. The cast is stellar, and Altman shows once again his knack for developing character through dialogue. IMDB page

Foucault the Neohumanist?

By RICHARD WOLIN, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chronicle Review

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, comparative literature, and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press, 2004) and The Frankfurt School Revisited (Routledge, 2006).

In 1975 and 1976, Michel Foucault published two books that single-handedly reoriented scholarship in the humanities: Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. Thereby, Foucault fundamentally altered the way we think about power ( we must not forget Madness and Civilization, HT).
For centuries, power had been associated with the negative capacity to deny or forbid. In spatial terms, it stood at the apex of a vertical axis. This view suited our modern conception of political sovereignty as a top-down phenomenon. Power reputedly consisted ......of a relationship between sovereign and subjects. It bespoke the capacity of rulers to censure or to control the behavior of those they ruled. That was the traditional model of power that Foucault vigorously challenged in these path-breaking studies. As he remarked laconically: "In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king." By remaining beholden to an anachronistic notion of power, the human sciences, Foucault claimed, remained impervious to the distinctive modalities and flows of power in modern society, tone-deaf to the diffuse and insidious operations of "biopower": modern society's well-nigh totalitarian capacity to institutionally regulate and subjugate individual behavior — via statistics, public-health guidelines, and conformist sexual norms — down to the most elementary, "corpuscular" level.
What would happen if we reconceived power as operating on a horizontal axis, wondered Foucault? What if the traditional vertical focus on sovereignty, governance, and law were diversionary, leading us to mistake power's genuine tenor and scope? What if power's defining trait were its productive rather than its negative or suppressive capacities? In that case, power's uniqueness would lie in its ability to shape, fashion, and mold the parameters of the self, potentially down to the infinitesimal or corpuscular level. Following Descartes, we have typically been taught to conceive of the self as a locus of autonomy or freedom. But what if this autonomy were in fact illusory, concealing potent, underlying, and sophisticated mechanisms of domination?
That is the hypothesis Foucault sets forth during his later, "genealogical" phase. Just as Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, tried to show that the Western ideas of good and evil derive from an ethos of weakness — specifically, from the "slave revolt" in morals against aristocratic society — Foucault, in a similar vein, seeks to demonstrate the compromised origins of the modern "subject." In his view, the illusions of autonomy conceal a deeper bondage. The so-called subject is merely the efflux of what Foucault construes as a totalizing "carceral society." From early childhood, the subject is exposed or "subjected" to what Foucault labels the "means of correct training": an all-pervasive expanse of finely honed behavioral-modification techniques that suffuse the institutional structure of civil society — schools, hospitals, the military, prisons, and so forth.
In this way, Foucault boldly upends the modern narrative of progress. What we have customarily interpreted as evidence of expanding civic freedom — that is, the triumph of rights-based liberalism — when viewed in a Foucauldian optic has in fact produced more effective mechanisms of social control. Foucault audaciously stands the standard, Enlightenment view of the relationship between insight and emancipation on its head. Knowledge, which we traditionally thought would set us free, merely enmeshes us more efficiently in the omnivorous tentacles of "biopower." The popular Foucauldian coinage "power/knowledge" suggests that the modern ideal of value-free knowing is illusory. Instead, knowledge is perennially implicated in the maintenance and reproduction of power relations. The reign of biopower is buttressed and facilitated by the scientific disciplines of criminology, medicine, public administration, and so forth. In Foucault's view, moreover, the Enlightenment-inspired discourse of the human sciences is a prime offender. The so-called sciences of man function as the handmaidens of a nefarious "disciplinary society," furnishing it with data that serve the administrative needs of "governmentality": the Orwellian technique of turning citizens into pliable and cooperative "docile bodies." Little wonder that in The Order of Things — a manifesto of French antihumanism — Foucault unabashedly celebrates the "death of man" and implies that, in the aftermath of his disappearance, the world will be much better off.
Contra Hegel, truth does not yield "absolute knowledge." Instead, as Foucault maintains in a 1977 interview, truth must be reconceptualized "as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements." As such, truth is "linked in a circular relation with systems of power, which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power, which it induces and which extends it." In his celebrated essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault carries this analysis a step further, claiming provocatively that "all knowledge rests upon injustice. ... [The] instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind)."
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault raised the alarm concerning the perils of "normalization." The notion that one should possess a normal sexual identity, he suggested, testifies to the workings of biopower. It is a mechanism of social control that reinforces conformist sexual practices and criminalizes "deviancy." In Foucault's view, the 1960's ethos of sexual liberation, as prophesied by Wilhelm Reich and Norman O. Brown, was merely another manifestation of normalization: Under the guise of sexual emancipation, we were instructed by "experts" to define ourselves in terms of having a positive and determinate sexual identity. Yet, as normative, all such conceptions are by definition limiting, exclusionary, and fundamentally repressive. The only way to counteract the pitfalls of "normalization," Foucault suggests (following the lead of Georges Bataille), is through an ethos of radical "transgression."
Yet, at times, the maw of biopower as described by Foucault seems so inescapable and totalizing that one is at a loss as to how one might combat it. After all, how can we ensure that a given instance of transgression is not merely a ruse on the part of biopower to further ensnare us? At The History of Sexuality's conclusion, all we are left with is a tantalizing yet frustratingly nebulous appeal to a "different economy of bodies and pleasures."
In North America, Foucault's innovative conception of biopower inspired new research models, above all in the areas of feminism, gender studies, and "queer theory." Auspiciously, The History of Sexuality appeared in English in 1978, just as the feminist and gay-rights movements had attained a measure of respectability and political prominence. That was also the moment when first-wave or rights-oriented feminism seemed to have run out of steam. Second-wave feminism, which embraced and affirmed women's "difference," emerged to fill the void. Although liberal political thought excelled at theorizing basic rights — and thus well suited the needs of first-wave, egalitarian feminism — it had little to say about trickier questions of female "self-realization": how women might fulfill themselves as women. Here, conversely, Foucault's bio-power paradigm, with its endemic suspicions of "norms" and "normalization," not to mention its manifest sympathy for "marginal sexualities," excelled, especially where considerations of "difference" were at stake.
In American academe, that's the gist of the Foucault story. He has been venerated and canonized as the messiah of French antihumanism: a harsh critic of the Enlightenment, a dedicated foe of liberalism's covert normalizing tendencies, an intrepid prophet of the "death of man."
But increasingly that perception seems wrong, or, at best, only partially true. Considerable evidence suggests that, later in life, Foucault himself became frustrated with the antihumanist credo. He underwent what one might describe as a learning process. He came to realize that much of what French structuralism had during the 1960s rejected as humanist pap retained considerable ethical and political value.
That re-evaluation of humanism redounds to his credit as a thinker. It stems from a profound and undeniable moral insight: If one wishes to become an effective critic of totalitarianism, as Foucault certainly did, the paradigm of "man" remains an indispensable ally. After all, it is the totalitarians themselves who seek to quash or eliminate man. As antitotalitarian political analysts and actors, our responsibility is to spare him that fate.
It would not be a misnomer to suggest that in fact the later Foucault became a human-rights activist, a political posture that stands in stark contrast with his North American canonization as the progenitor of "identity politics."
The major difference between the two standpoints may be explained as follows: Whereas human rights stress our formal and inviolable prerogatives as people (equality before the law, freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and so forth), identity politics emphasize the particularity of group belonging. The problem is that the two positions often conflict: Assertions of cultural particularism often view an orientation toward rights as an abstract, formalistic hindrance. Thus identity politics risks regressing to an ideology of "groupthink." Or, as a percipient German friend once observed with reference to the American culture wars, "Identity politics: That's what we had in Germany between 1933 and 1945." He correctly insinuated that unless multiculturalist allegiances are mediated by a fundamental respect for the rule of law and basic constitutional freedoms, the door will have been opened to fratricidal conflict.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault embraced the thesis of "soft totalitarianism" to describe the carceral system of the modern West. To his credit, he would eventually criticize with equal vigor the post-Stalinist variant of totalitarianism predominant in Eastern Europe. (Among left-leaning French intellectuals, a veritable turning point and awakening came with the publication of Solzhenitsyn's magisterial Gulag Archipelago in 1974.) If, during the 1960s, the heroes of the French left had been developing-world revolutionaries such as Che, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, during the late 1970s dissidence was in vogue. Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Lech Walesa, and a cast of less-heralded oppositionists became the new standard-bearers for the figure of the engaged intellectual.
With acumen and enthusiasm, Foucault boarded the antitotalitarian bandwagon. Since his election to the prestigious Collège de France in 1970, he increasingly cultivated the persona of an intellectual activist. During the 1970s, Foucault justly inherited Sartre's mantle as the prototype of the intellectuel engagé. One of his first forays in this regard consisted of a vigorous defense of the so-called New Philosophers — ex-Maoists, such as André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Guy Lardreau, who had finally seen the light and reinvented themselves as un-relenting critics of left-wing political despotism. In many respects, the New Philosophers were Foucault's intellectual progeny. Using conceptual tools he had developed such as "power/knowledge" and disciplinary surveillance, they merely extended his critical position to encompass the Soviet-dominated lands of, in Rudolf Bahro's words, "really existing socialism."
In 1977 Foucault took to the pages of the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur to publish a ringing justification of Glucksmann's antitotalitarian screed, The Master Thinkers, for daring to speak truth to power. Undoubtedly, Foucault saw through much of New Philosophy's rhetorical histrionics and shallow posturing. In his view, what was primarily at stake was a larger political point: delivering a coup de grâce to the French left's naïve infatuation with Marxism. Previously, French intellectuals had developed a network of sophisticated rationalizations to justify left-wing dictatorships. However, in view of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Prague, the unspeakable depredations of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot's gruesome reign of terror in Cambodia, such justifications were wearing increasingly thin. Wasn't a distinctly grisly and horrific political pattern beginning to emerge? In this way, Foucault sought to call the bluff of his fellow leftists. In his review-essay "The Great Rage of Facts," he pointedly mocked the idea, once popular among the left, that the historical necessity of socialism could ever trump basic human or moral concerns.
Far from being a one-time gambit, Foucault's spirited endorsement of the antitotalitarian ethos set the tone for many of his later intellectual and political involvements. In 1978, Bernard Kouchner, the human-rights activist and Doctors Without Borders founder, contacted Foucault to support the plight of the Vietnamese "boat people," who were fleeing persecution by the recently installed Communist government. As a result, the group "A Boat for Vietnam" was founded, with Foucault as one of its leading activists. Along with Glucksmann, Kouchner, Sartre, and Raymond Aron, the organization successfully lobbied President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to increase France's quota for Vietnamese refugees.
The alliance with Kouchner and Glucksmann transformed Foucault into a passionate advocate of humanitarian intervention, or le droit d'ingérance: the moral imperative to intervene in the domestic affairs of a nation where human rights are being systematically violated. In 1981, Foucault addressed a major conference held at U.N. headquarters in Geneva where these themes were debated and discussed. In his speech, Foucault eloquently praised the responsibilities of"international citizenship," which, he claimed, "implies a commitment to rise up against any abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims." "Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Médecins du Monde," he continued, "are the initiatives which have created this new right; the right of private individuals to intervene effectively in the order of international policies and strategies." If Foucault retained aspects of his earlier, antihumanist worldview, they were certainly undetectable in his moving Geneva speech.
Later that year, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in Poland, brutally suppressing Solidarity, Eastern Europe's first independent trade union. The response by most Western European statesmen was a deafening silence. They judged the matter to be a purely "internal" Polish affair. They feared fanning the flames of the cold war. (Ronald Reagan's presidency had begun earlier that year.) So much for international solidarity. Better that the civilian populations of Eastern Europe passively endure the yoke of authoritarian rule. The recently elected French Socialist government had an additional, domestic political motivation to look the other way. It had come to power in an alliance with the French Communists. A rift over the "Polish question" risked fracturing the alliance.
At the behest of Pierre Bourdieu, Foucault once again sprang into action. The two intellectual luminaries jointly drafted an impassioned statement urging the Socialists not to repeat the ignominious blunders of 1936 — refusing to come to the aid of the embattled Spanish Republic — and 1956 — countenancing the Warsaw Pact's brutal invasion of Budapest. The statement was broadcast on French radio. Among its signatories were Glucksmann, Kouchner, Yves Montand, and Simone Signoret. Thereafter, the French government enacted a sudden volte-face, vigorously protesting the declaration of martial law. President François Mitterrand released a statement in support of the oppressed Poles. Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy abruptly canceled a forthcoming diplomatic visit to Warsaw. Led by Foucault, French intellectuals had risen to the occasion. It was not quite the Dreyfus affair. But it was a worthy performance nevertheless.
During the late 1970s, Foucault became acquainted with Robert Badinter, an influential jurist who was an avowed admirer of the philosopher's work on prisons and punishment. In 1981, Badinter became Mitterrand's minister of justice. One of his first official acts was to abolish the death penalty. Other progressive legislative measures followed: A draconian 1970 anti-riot act was invalidated, police surveillance of homosexuals was forbidden, and the dreaded maximum-security wings of French prisons were shut down. Badinter and Foucault developed a deep friendship. Undoubtedly, many of the minister's ideas on progressive penal reform had been inspired by Foucault's teachings and doctrines.
But did Foucault's new political self-understanding as a human-rights activist have any repercussions on his philosophical views? Emphatically so. This theme is the centerpiece of Eric Paras's provocative new book, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (Other Press). Paras deftly and painstakingly culls his evidence from Foucault's later Collège de France lectures, most of which remain unpublished. If his insights are correct, his study portends a veritable sea change in Foucault scholarship.
As Paras shows, in his later years Foucault had clearly become disenchanted with the research program he had honed during the mid-1970s in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality. The treatment of "power" in these works proved too suffocating and monolithic. The idea of resistance to power seemed all but ruled out.
Two developments lend crucial support for Paras's hypothesis concerning Foucault's momentous paradigm shift, which, significantly, foreshadowed a rehabilitation of "man" and "subjectivity." First, Foucault abandoned the methodological tack he had outlined in The History of Sexuality, which focused on sexuality as a means for "power/knowledge" to extend its sinister hegemony. Instead, during his later years, he turned to a more positive concept of subjectivity, centered on the "art of living" in ancient Greece and Rome. Foucault had come to believe that such pre-Christian, pagan approaches to the idea of self-cultivation represented a valuable heuristic — a means to overcome the deficiencies of modern conceptions of the self. Second, the term "power/knowledge" itself is entirely absent from his later lectures and texts — a telling indication of how radically dissatisfied Foucault had become with the limitations of his earlier approach.
Paras's most radical and potentially controversial claim concerns Foucault's later re-evaluation of the idea of subjectivity. During the 1960s, as a card-carrying structuralist, Foucault, along with Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser, had celebrated the "death of the author" as a pendant to the fashionable postmodernist thesis concerning the "death of man." But as Paras remarks, if we know a great deal about Foucault's challenge to "the hegemony of 'man,' we are comparatively ignorant of the process by which he abandoned his hard structuralist position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty, individualism, 'human rights,' and even the thinking subject."
The goal of Foucault 2.0, then, is to fill this void. In fact, given Foucault's avowed fascination with Greco-Roman techniques of self-formation in studies such as The Care of the Self and The Use of Pleasure, it would be entirely reasonable to speak of a return of the subject in his later work. As Foucault remarks in a late interview, "I think it is characteristic of our society nowadays, that subjectivity has the right to assert itself, and to say ... 'that I cannot accept,' 'that I don't want,' or 'that I desire.'"
The evidence for this return is copious. In several key later texts, Foucault demonstrates an avowed fascination with what he calls an "aesthetics of existence": an approach to the self-mastery predicated on considerations of "style" or "aesthetics." According to Foucault (here, closely following Nietzsche), the Christian idea of self-mastery culminated in self-renunciation or self-abnegation. Hence, it was disturbingly life-negating. Conversely, in the ancient world, care of the self focused on "the choice of a beautiful life." Here, the goal of self-rule or autonomy was primarily aesthetic — hence, it was profoundly life-affirming. As Foucault enthusiastically remarks in a late interview, "The idea of the bios [life] as material for an aesthetic piece of art is something that fascinates me."
In Foucault's view, the Greco-Roman idea of aesthetic self-cultivation meshes with the central ideas of two main theorists of the modern self, Baudelaire and Nietzsche. Baudelaire's "dandyism" — his idea of turning one's own persona into a veritable work of art — became for the later Foucault a positive model of individual self-realization, as did Nietzsche's celebrated injunction in The Gay Science "to 'give style' to one's character — a great and rare art!" As Foucault explains: "What strikes me is the fact that in our society art has become something which is related to objects and not to individuals, or to life. ... But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
Thereby, Foucault's work seems to have come full circle. Under the sign of aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and vindicates the rights of subjectivity. As Foucault avows, his new normative ideal is "the formation and development of a practice of Self, the objective of which is the constitution of oneself as the laborer of the beauty of one's own life."
French critics have long pointed to the central paradox of the North American Foucault reception: that a thinker who was so fastidious about hazarding positive political prescriptions, and who viewed affirmations of identity as a trap or as a form of normalization, could be lionized as the progenitor of the "identity politics" movement of the 1980s and 1990sa movement that, as Christopher Lasch demonstrated, had abandoned the ends of public commitment in favor of a "culture of narcissism." Paras's case for the "neohumanist" Foucault is persuasive and well documented. One wonders how long it will take Foucault's North American acolytes to reorient themselves in light of Paras's impressive findings. That would mean abandoning the fashionable preoccupation with "body politics" — the obsessive concern with a "different economy of bodies and pleasures" as a mode of transgression — and, following the later Foucault, according the claims of humanism their due.

A Letter from 18 Writers

including three Nobel Prize recipients

The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner--and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis--there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.
That this "kidnapping" was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources--most particularly that of water--by the Israeli Defense (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.

Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly--who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?

Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.

This has to be said loud and clear, for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognized for what it is and resisted.

PS: As Juliano Mer Khamis, director of the documentary film Arna's Children, asked: "Who is going to paint the 'Guernica' of Lebanon?"

John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, José Saramago, Eduardo Galeano, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Charles Glass, Richard Falk, Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Thomas Keneally, Chris Abani, Carolyn Forché, Martín Espada, Jessica Hagedorn, Toni Morrison.

This letter has been printed in newspapers throughout the world, including The Nation, Le Monde, El País, The Independent and La Repubblica.

Betraying Spinoza

The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein The New York Times
MONDAY, JULY 31, 2006

Thursday marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.

The Spinoza anniversary didn't get a lot of attention. But it's one worth remembering - in large measure because Spinoza's life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable.

The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the creator's partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life - he died in 1677 at the age of 44 - studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance.

The Jews who banished Spinoza had themselves been victims of intolerance, refugees from the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews on the Iberian Peninsula had been forced to convert to Christianity at the end of the 15th century. In the intervening century, they had been kept under the vigilant gaze of the Inquisitors, who suspected the "New Christians" of carrying the rejection of Christ in their very blood. It can be argued that the Iberian Inquisition was Europe's first experiment in racialist ideology.

Spinoza's reaction to the religious intolerance he saw around him was to try to think his way out of all sectarian thinking. He understood the powerful tendency in each of us toward developing a view of the truth that favors the circumstances into which we happened to have been born. Self-aggrandizement ...can be the invisible scaffolding of religion, politics or ideology.

Against this tendency we have no defense but the relentless application of reason. Reason must stand guard against the self-serving false entailments that creep into our thinking, inducing us to believe that we are more cosmically important than we truly are, that we have had bestowed upon us - whether Jew or Christian or Muslim - a privileged position in the narrative of the world's unfolding. Spinoza's system is a long argument for a conclusion as radical in our day as it was in his: that to the extent that we are rational, we each partake in exactly the same identity.

Spinoza's faith in reason as our only hope and redemption is the core of his system, and its consequences reach out in many directions, including the political. Each of us has been endowed with reason, and it is our right, as well as our responsibility, to exercise it. Ceding this faculty to others, to the authorities of either the church or the state, is neither a rational nor an ethical option.

Which is why, for Spinoza, democracy was the most superior form of government. The state, in helping each person to preserve his life and well-being, can legitimately demand sacrifices from us, but it can never relieve us of our responsibility to strive to justify our beliefs in the light of evidence.

It is for this reason that he argued that a government that impedes the development of the sciences subverts the grounds for state legitimacy, which is to provide us physical safety so that we can realize our full potential. And this, too, is why he argued against the influence of clerics in government. Statecraft infused with religion is intrinsically unstable, since it must insist on its version of the truth against all others.

Spinoza's attempt to deduce everything from first principles - that is, without reliance on empirical observation - can strike us today as impractical, and yet his project of radical rationality had concrete consequences. His writings, banned by greater Christian Europe, but continuously read and discussed, played a role in the audacious experiment in rational government that gave birth to the United States.

The Declaration of Independence, that document first drafted by Thomas Jefferson, softly echoes Spinoza. John Locke, Spinoza's contemporary, is a more obvious influence on Jefferson than Spinoza was. But Locke had himself been influenced by Spinoza's ideas on tolerance, freedom and democracy.

If we can hear Locke's influence in the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," we can also catch the sound of Spinoza addressing us in Jefferson's appeal to the "laws of nature and of nature's God." This is the language of Spinoza's universalist religion, which makes no reference to revelation, but rather to ethical truths that can be discovered through human reason.

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic now, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity."

Broken Flowers

I"ve been following Jarmush since the 1980's. This movie is probably his best since night on earth and takes us back to his early days of more is less and his road trip movies such as Mystery Train, and Stranger than Paradise (both among my Jarmush favorites). The movie also features a wonderful soundtrack of mostly Ethiopean Jazz -- itself worth buying. Below are some reviews:


Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum --A movie of uncommon sweetness and delight...

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert--No actor is better than Bill Murray at doing nothing at all, and being fascinating while not doing it. Buster Keaton had the same gift for contemplating astonishing developments with absolute calm. Buster surrounded himself with slapstick, and in Broken Flowers Jim Jarmusch surrounds Murray with a parade of formidable women.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy--An engaging exercise in mature poignancy, existential consciousness and deadpan drollery, Broken Flowers is a return by Jarmusch to the road movie structure of such films as "Stranger Than Paradise," "Night on Earth" and "Dead Man."

Village Voice Jessica Winter--With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)

Operation "Save Israel's High Command"

By CHARLES GLASS--Charles Glass lived in Lebanon from 1972 to 1976 and from 1983 to 1995. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and was kidnapped by Hizballah in 1987. His new books on the Middle East are The Tribes Triumphant (Harper Collins) and The Northern Front (Saqi Books). His website is www.charlesglass.net. ]

In 1982, an unusual sight appeared on the Mediterranean horizon. Like the death ship in Star Wars, a World War II battleship threatened the Lebanese shore. US naval spokesmen claimed the USS New Jersey was the most fearsome artillery platform on the high seas. The Reagan administration had re-commissioned her and a few other seagoing dinosaurs to pursue gunboat diplomacy from Nicaragua to Iran. The New Jersey's advance propaganda impressed the Lebanese, who had already endured seven years of civil war, Syrian occupation and two Israeli invasions. The sixteen-inch guns aboard the New Jersey, the Navy said, would send payloads the size of Volkswagens to clear areas big as football fields. Why a Volkswagen rather than a small Ford was never explained, anymore than whether the football referred to was the kind the Lebanese or the Americans played. A Marine officer I knew pointed at the summit of Mount Lebanon above Beirut one day. He told me that, if the New Jersey fired at that mountain, it wouldn't be there anymore. It seemed an extravagant claim, but most of us were willing to believe him - until the New Jersey actually fired.
When the New Jersey unleashed its Volkswagens on 14 December 1983, we saw flames a mile away shoot out of its muzzles. What we didn't see was much destruction - not by Lebanese standards anyway. A few houses in the Druze hills of the Shouf were demolished. Hundreds of ...people, mostly Shiites and Druze, died. The summit of Mount Lebanon remained intact. There were no flying Volkswagens, no football fields. The Lebanese, faced with a bluff called, lost their fear of the New Jersey and, indeed, of the United States. They continued blowing up American embassies and military barracks. By February 1984, the New Jersey killed a Syrian army general while covering the "redeployment" of the Marines from Beirut. The Marines were ordered to abandon Lebanon and the French, British and Italian allies that Secretary of State George Schultz had conned into joining them in Lebanon as the so-called Multi-National Force. US spokesmen insisted that redeployment did not mean retreat. It looked like retreat to us in Lebanon, especially when the fleet and the Marines next redeployed to the United States. The New Jersey was mothballed in 1991, the year the US threw Iraq out of Kuwait and invited the Syrians to end the war by assuming control of most of Lebanon.
The biggest military mistake the Americans made in Lebanon was to use the New Jersey. As a threat, she caused fear. In reality, she caused a bit of damage. I won't go into the political mistakes, which were so many that the Reaganite Mideast specialists almost make George W. Bush's neo-cons look competent (I said, almost). An army can frighten people with a devastating weapon, until it uses it. Israel has used its weapons so often in Lebanon that the Lebanese don't care. They are suffering, but they are standing up to the displacement of a half million people and the loss of many hundreds of men, women and children. "The resistance isn't playing the role of victim," Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian Arab Member of the Israeli Knesset wrote in Al Ahram Weekly. "It didn't ask for international sympathy with the victims but for solidarity among freedom-seeking peoples." So, what other tricks can Israel perform that are not old-hat to the Lebanese? Bombardment? The Israelis have been bombing Lebanon since the late 1960s. Invasion? They played that card in 1978 and 1982 and left a thousand soldiers dead on the field before they withdrew in 2000. What's left in the arsenal? Occupation, again? The Lebanese realized sometime in 1983 that Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil were not ferocious warriors so much as targets. Israel could give them more targets, like the eight or nine Israeli soldiers who died on Wednesday in the small Shiite border village of Bint Jbeil (a place that made shoes until Israel occupied and nearly emptied it in 1978).
Israeli propaganda, except in the United States where there isn't any other kind, doesn't work its old magic. In 1982, a few people may have believed that Ariel Sharon sent his troops into Lebanon to avenge the wounding of Israel's ambassador to Britain, but no one is falling for the ruse that the current devastation is an operation to rescue two captured Israeli solders. The planners are having such problems with that slender pretext that, unusually, they have yet to give this mission a name. The operation that dare not speak its name has yet to join its immediate predecessors, Operation Accountability in 1993 and Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, in the list of creatively branded onslaughts. How about calling this one Operation Infinite Repetition?
Operation Cover-Up might do, given that the soldiers scurrying into Lebanon and being shot by Hizballah today are trying to make up for the incompetence of officers who let three men under their command be captured by Hamas and Hizballah. Where is the American taxpayer's money going if officers cannot keep their troops from abduction by young guerrillas whom they watch day and night with the most sophisticated technological eavesdropping devices that American-Israeli genius can produce? If the army had not been so careless, they would not now be bombing the hell out of Gaza and Lebanon - unless, of course, the politicians wanted to bomb the hell out of Gaza and Lebanon anyway. If so, what better excuse than a few missing in action?
The prescient Mideast scholar Patrick Seale wrote in the Saudi-owned newspaper Al Hayat on 21 July, "By their cross-border raids and the capture of three Israeli soldiers, Hizballah and Hamas humiliated the Israeli army and dented its deterrent capacity. In Israeli eyes, this cannot go unpunished." But who should be punished and who should be approached with an offer to save the soldiers' lives? Perhaps punish the high command for its negligence. Maybe approach Hamas and Hizballah for a trade of the kind Israel and its adversaries have made often - the last time in 2004, when a foolish, allegedly retired Israeli army major allowed himself to be taken in Beirut and Israel freed 400 prisoners to get him back. Israel knows it can pick up another 400 anytime it wants, so what's the problem? At the moment, it holds almost 10,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners and detainees. Using the 2004 ratio as a guide, the quick release of 1,200 detainees would do the trick without costing a single life.
Prime Minister Ehud Ohlmert has come clean with added objectives for Operation Untitled. On 15 July, his spokeswoman Miri Eisen told Agence France Presse, "The Prime Minister is prepared to finish our operations in Lebanon if Hezbollah releases our two soldiers, stops its rocket fire and if the Lebanese Government decides to implement UN Security Council resolution 1559."The resolution requires the disarmament of all militias in Lebanon. That means Hizballah, because the other militias disarmed under Syrian pressure years ago. Hizballah claimed however that its armed wing was a resistance movement - the only one capable of protecting south Lebanon from Israeli attack - and not a militia. On 21 July, another spokesman added a new Israeli shopping item, "One of the conditions for a ceasefire is that Hezbollah no longer receives arms supplies from Iran and Syria once it is enforced." As Operation Save the High Command annihilated Lebanon's post-war infrastructure - the airport, roads, bridges, army bases, clinics, telecommunications networks and lots of houses - without achieving anything, Ohlmert added a new condition: a NATO force in south Lebanon to stop Hizballah from hitting Israel. How about a force in north Israel to protect Lebanon?
This will go on and on. When Operation Get-Even ends, the respite may last a year or so. There will be other crises, other kidnappings by both sides, other murders, other wars. And it will not stop until Israel makes peace on terms that the Palestinians and Israel's neighbors have said they will accept: enforcement of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the end of Israeli land confiscations in the West Bank. If you think the land grab is over, ask the Palestinians whose property is fenced off and seized for the Israeli settlers almost daily. If you think Israel is content to leave the natives alone to get along with it, ask the Bedouin of the Negev desert (who serve in the Israeli army and have been loyal citizens) about the creative deployment of the Monsanto-manufactured herbicide Roundup Ready to destroy their crops so they will abandon their ancestral lands once and for all. Goat by goat, dunum by dunum, the old Zionist adage went, the settlers redeem the land. As the Arabs lost their goats and their dunums of land, they got bullets and bombs.

The War on Terror, or the Iliad Revisited

Between East and West (British though his father, Lebanese through his mother, and Parisian by culture), Percy Kemp* feels equally at home in Paris, London and Beirut.A consultant at Tactical Studies, a company specializing in strategic intelligence, he is also the author of the best seller "Le système Boone", a spy thriller which takes place in the Lebanon against a background of global geopolitical stakes. He talked to Les Dialogues Strategiques on the day after the London bombings of July 2007.

Véronique Anger : Percy Kemp, you are a consultant in international affairs. You are also a writer, and your novels often have geopolitical undertones. How do you interpret the bombings perpetrated in London on July 7th, when terrorists originating from a world in which you were raised, violently attacked a country to which you belong?

Percy Kemp : Being born to a British father and a Lebanese Arab mother, I am, symbolically at least, both a victim and an executioner of the 7/7 London bombings. You will therefore understand that I do not wish to express myself on the subject in my capacity as an "expert". This indeed requires a distance from the event which I lack. However, I will readily confide to you my feelings as a human being and as a writer. Confronted with these bombings, I cannot help think that fate is at play and that the sad London events were somehow pre-ordained by other, and equally sad, events in which the victims had been executioners.

VA : What do you mean by "Fate"? Is it the Arabic "mektub"? Is it your Oriental half expressing itself here?

PK : The fate I speak of is neither heavenly nor supernatural. It rests on historical grounds. The 7/7 London bombings, together with the 9/11 US bombings and the 3/11 Madrid bombings, were predictable. From the moment the West decided to extend its domination over the Muslim world following to the collapse of the Soviet Union, terrorism became the inevitable corollary of this Western will for power. There is no need, really, to be an expert or a strategist to understand what's going on. One merely needs to read the Iliad more carefully. This epic poem illustrates the Achaeans' drive for power and their settlement on the coast of Asia Minor, beyond the Hellespont. Both Herodotus and Thucydides considered the Trojan War as the first expression of the conflict between Asia and Europe,.. between East and West. And here are our leaders today, embarking on another Trojan War. Taking advantage of the implosion of the Soviet Union, they sought pre-eminence in South-West Asia after half a century of absence due to the decolonisation process and to the Cold War, and this intrusive and aggressive Western policy triggered a violent reaction on the part of some Muslim Arabs. What has been taking place in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War, including the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, the export of democracy and the pressure exerted on Muslim countries to prevent them from achieving nuclear power status, brings to mind the war between the European Achaeans and the Asiatic Trojans, as described in Homer's Iliad.

VA : President George W. Bush, draws his inspiration from the Bible, and more specifically from the Book of Revelations. Are you not doing the same with the Iliad?

PK : George Bush has a Manichean vision of the Bible, dominated by the struggle between good and evil. It is a black and white vision which leaves no room for grey. I have a more historical perception of the Iliad. The Iliad is not concerned with good and evil: Homer does not depict the Greeks as nice, civilised people, in opposition to wicked Trojan Barbarians. Indeed, the very word Barbarian, in Greek, merely refers to the nations that do not speak Greek. The absence of value judgements in the Iliad is all the more remarkable since Homer has an obvious bias for the Greeks. Besides, George Bush refers to the Book of Revelations in order to act upon and shape the world, whereas when I read the Iliad, I seek in Homer's epic poem an analytical frame that might help me better understand the Western ethos and interpret in light of it the events with which we are confronted. For instance, we now know that Saddam Hussein's regime, for all its unsavoury aspects, neither possessed weapons of mass destruction nor was involved in international terrorism. We therefore know that the war against Iraq was based on lies, and that US President Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair are, well, liars. In the Iliad, it is equally clear that the Trojan War was not caused by Helen's abduction (Helen being the wife of Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother) by Paris, the son of Priam King of Troy. Paris had in fact ravished Helen in the literal sense of the word: He had seduced her, and she had followed him of her own free will. By waging war on Troy, Agamemnon was mainly seeking to loot the immense riches of the city while avenging the flouted honour of his cuckolded brother. Helen's abduction was but a pretext for Agamemnon to rally his allies to the Atreides. It is as simple as that. As simple, in fact, as the fallacious pretexts invoked by Bush and Blair in order to convince their public opinion and their allies to back them in their war against Saddam Hussein. Reading the Iliad, I realise that Bush is not acting any differently from Agamemnon. That he is neither better nor worse than Agamemnon. And I sleep better for that.

VA : What do you mean by that?

PK : I mean that as a human being and as a Westerner, I had to come to terms with the contradictions that haunted me and I had to bring myself to the idea that the war against Iraq was founded on lies. I also had to reconcile myself to the fact that, despite their obvious lies, the two leaders of the Coalition were subsequently and triumphantly re-elected by their own people, which happens to be my people. I then had to reconcile myself to the fact that those Western leaders, who had initially refused to follow Bush on Iraq (hence, German Chancellor Schroeder, French President Chirac), eventually rallied to his side and condoned his actions. Oddly enough, it is Homer's Iliad that enabled me to resolve all those contradictions. The Iliad teaches us that the false pretexts put forward by Agamemnon - protector of his people- to launch his war on Troy do not in any way detract from his glory. Why is that? Because beyond his petty lies and the equally petty goals he pursues (avenging a cuckolded brother, ransacking Troy), Agamemnon objectively serves a design that is greater than him: A Grand Design. Agamemnon symbolises the Greeks' will for power and embodies their strong desire to expand. That is what the Iliad teaches me. The Iliad enables me to go beyond Bush's clumsy lies, beyond Cheney's lust for wealth, beyond Rumsfeld's thirst for vengeance, beyond Wolfowitz's lack of physical courage, and even beyond the greed of Halliburton and of the oil majors, to view the war in Iraq and the US plans for the Middle East as being the historical embodiment of the West's renewed dynamism and their rekindled will for power in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. All of which goes far beyond subjectivity and far beyond the egotistical and short-sighted motivations of this or that Western leader. Reading the Iliad, I understand that I must make a choice. The same choice to which Kipling's Kim was confronted when the holy man realized he was but a little white man. I either accept to be part of this Western will for power and I help spread the values of freedom, democracy and good governance (even if the spreading of such values is based on blatant lies), in which case I must follow Bush-Agamemnon, right or wrong, or else I refuse and I become an outcast (a su'lûq, as the Arabs say). In either case I would have resolved my contradictions. I would then be at peace with myself, and I would sleep soundly at night.

VA : Is it not too much honour comparing Bush to Agamemnon? Are you not taking the risk of proving him right?

PK : Once again, my point is not to pass judgement on President Bush, or on King Agamemnon. The comparison between the two men makes historical sense. Both are God-blessed heroes, and this is a mere matter of historical "casting", not of personal worth. Agamemnon was no doubt as arrogant, as fallible and as venal as Bush is, but this is beside the point. We could broaden Homer's historical cast and compare today's Western leaders to the Greek chieftains of the Trojan War. Besides Bush as Agamemnon, I see Sharon as Menelaus, urging his elder brother Agamemnon to go fight the Trojans, one of whom had wronged him. I can picture myself Tony Blair as Ulysses, more cunning than strong and more clever than rich. Chirac, the oldest G8 leader, I see as old Nestor, the only Greek chief who fights on a chariot, and the only one, too, who does not kill anyone under the walls of Troy. As for the anti-war liberals, I see them as Thersites, mocking and stirring up ill feelings, but unable to stand their ground.

VA : In that case who would be Achilles, the most glorious and fearsome Greek warrior, and the archetype of the mythical hero ?

PK : Alas there is no Achilles in our modern Iliad. For there can be no Achilles without a Hector. Achilles' glory matches Hector's glory. Yet we deny our enemies any heroism. We deny them worth and courage: Saddam is but a bloodthirsty dictator, Ben Laden a murderous madman, Zarqawi a second-rate criminal, Muslim kamikazes are suicidal cranks, Iraqi insurgents are drug-addicts and drop-outs, the Taliban are lunatics, the new Iranian president is a despicable hostage taker, etc. How can we possibly gain glory by fighting such enemies? Caesar drew his glory from Pompey, Richard the Lionheart from Saladin, Wellington from Napoleon, but what kind of hero can possibly produce a war waged against madmen, maniacs, lunatics, cowards and criminals? We will only have an Achilles when we will have acknowledged a Hector in the opposite camp. And the same thing goes for the Asians, who still refuses to acknowledge an Achilles in the Western camp.

VA : But these terrorists attack innocent people.

PK : You are right. George Bush is St George, and Usama Ben Laden is the dragon. I would nonetheless remind you that the West burst onto those people uninvited. Western crash-gating indeed goes back a long way. Along the road, we had colonisation, the creation of the State of Israel and the constant support given by Western countries to local regimes lacking totally in legitimacy. The dragon only came out of its cave when Saint George sought to impose his law upon him. Worst still, the dragon was invoked by George who needed the dragon to be St. George! My point, however, is not to judge, but to understand. In order to understand, I have to shift the debate from a moral perspective to an historical one. What do we see, historically? Soon after the First World War, the Western powers refused to set up an Arab State on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, preferring, instead, to carve up the land and dominate it. Later, the West used a secular Iraq to fight Khomeinist Iran, then unhesitatingly broke down the Iraqi State and imposed sanctions on Iran. The West further emasculated Pakistan by neutering its "Islamic bomb", and it kept Muslim Turkey at bay as if it were a mistress one ought to be ashamed of. In truth, the West did it utmost all along to prevent the emergence of a strong Arab or Muslim State in the Middle East. Ought we be surprised, then, if orphaned Arabs and Muslims now turn en masse to the modern incarnations of the Old Man of the Mountain and of the sect of the Assassins?

VA : But past or present Western wrongdoings can hardly justify the bombings and the death of innocent people!

PK : Innocence is a moral notion. Politically, innocence makes no sense whatsoever. Politically speaking, there are only embarrassing deaths and others deaths that can be exploited. What is far more interesting that this moral issue is the fact that those who are killing people in New York, Madrid and London, but also in Indonesia, Turkey and Iraq, do it without distinction of race, nationality, or religion. In other words, their victims, be they British or Iraqi, Christian or Muslim, are not politically embarrassing for them. The terrorists are as disconnected from their own society as they are from the Western society they are fighting. They do not need their co-religionists any more than they do the "infidels". It is the principle of takfîr wa hijra- that is to say "excommunication and exile"- according to which the holy warriors anathematise the society in which they live (takfîr), before excluding themselves from it (hijra) and waging war against it.

VA : The use of terrorism would thus be the proof of infinite powerlessness. Is that to say that the new Trojan War is about to end?

PK : Terrorism is indeed the weapon of the weak and the remaining New Trojans may well be about to succumb. Yet the war will not end with the fall of Troy. As Carl Schmitt once wrote, war is not a test of strength but a test of will: One is only defeated when one acknowledges defeat. The Muslim Arabs, who do not seem to have elaborated a political theory of defeat (in the same way the Germans and the Japanese did after World War II), still do not consider themselves beaten. And on the subject of the Trojan War, may I remind you that despite the Greeks' victory and the destruction of Troy, Aeneas - a Trojan hero and a member of the royal household - survived to the fall of the city. Homer tells us that his sons ruled over parts of Troad after that, and Augustus, the Roman emperor, later strived to build himself a mythical genealogy linking him to Aeneas In the fifteenth century, Mehmed II, the Ottoman sultan who had conquered Constantinople, identified himself totally with Aeneas and his descendants. Once, passing by Troy, he is said to have exclaimed: "God bestowed upon me the privilege of avenging this city and its inhabitants: I tamed their enemies, devastated their wealth (…) For, those who had devastated this city were Greeks, Macedonians, Thessalians and Peloponnesians, and it was their descendants who finally paid back to me the debt that their impious folly had contracted towards us, the Asians." One of these days, soon maybe, some Asian hero, feeling Trojan to the core and identifying himself with Aeneas, might well bloody the Westerners' nose and make them pay back the debt he would consider their "impious folly" to have contracted towards the Asians. The epic tale of the Greeks and the Trojans is, alas, a never ending one, and now and then the fortunes of war simply change side. This is precisely the reason why I started our talk with a reference to an historical fate.

VA : Can one escape this vicious circle?

PK : The answer to your question is probably in the Iliad. In the war between the Greeks and the Trojans, Homer tells us that the Olympian gods were more or less equally divided between the two camps: whereas Poseidon, Hera and Athena fought for the Greeks, Apollo, Artemis and Ares fought with the Trojans. The Greeks and the Trojans indeed worshipped the same gods, and Priam sacrificed to Zeus as did Agamemnon. The Greeks and the Trojans were not so much separated by the gods than by water: by the strait of the Hellespont. A far cry from the new Trojan War! Bush's god has nothing in common with Ben Laden's. In his preface to the French translation of the Iliad, Pierre Vidal-Naquet rightly points out that a king of Chios (a Greek island, therefore) was named Hector (a Trojan name); that Hector was worshipped in Thebes (a Beotian Greek city); that one of the brotherhoods of Thasos, five centuries BC, had taken the name of Priam; and that eight centuries later, in the third century AD, one could still see in Troy a statue of Hector facing one of Achilles. If we truly want to break the vicious circle of war between East and West, we ought at least to acknowledge that Judeo-Christian civilisation and Arab Islamic civilization are but two aspects of a single reality. For what is the East, if not the place where the sun rises? And what is the West, if not the place were the sun sets? Yet whether it rises or sets, the sun god, Helios, remains the same.

VA : Nonetheless we have trouble acknowledging this. The fierce opposition, within Europe, to the entry of Muslim Turkey into the European Union, testifies to this?

PK : True. Zeus, the supreme power, may have as much sympathy for the Trojans as he does for the Greeks, but underneath Zeus less important Olympian deities are still settling scores through human proxies. As long as we are willing to be the playthings of the minor gods, we will continue to relive, again and again, the Trojan War that sticks to us like some karma. And as long as we do, we will remain prisoners of the Iliad where the gods treat humans as they would toys, and we will be unable to embark, as we should, on the Odyssey where man truly begins to master his own destiny.