The Eternal City

Chapter 39 of Catch-22, “The Eternal City”, is the heart of the novel, though it stands out like an amputated thumb. It is stylistically quite unlike the rest of this five-hundred-page work. There is no humor in it. It is bleak to the point of pugilism: it pulverizes the reader. Yossarian is in Rome looking for Nately’s whore’s twelve-year-old kid sister. She has been forcibly ejected from the brothel in which her older sister worked and no one knows what has become of her. Milo, the cheerful entrepreneur, at first thinks Yossarian wants to have sex with a young virgin and offers to help. Early in the chapter, reference is made to little boys in Africa “stolen away by adult slave traders and sold for money to men who disemboweled them and ate them”. Yossarian first encounters a lone old woman left behind in the smashed apartment where the brothel used to be, the smashing and ejecting done by “tall soldiers with hard white hats and clubs”. She is obviously traumatized to the point of insanity. She keeps saying “Catch-22”. We then read: “He could picture the fiery and malicious exhilaration with which they had made their wreckage, and their sanctimonious, ruthless sense of right and dedication.” There is no one left to take care of the weeping old woman. Next Yossarian goes with Milo to meet the chief of police “who was fiddling with a stout woman with warts and two chins”. This man, Luigi, also thinks Yossarian is in search of a twelve-year-old sex partner and also offers to help. But this meeting comes to an inconclusive end, because Milo gets wind of a traffic in illegal tobacco, which distracts his businessman’s mind, “his twitching mouth slavering” with “epileptic lust”. The corrupt policeman then threatens to arrest Yossarian.

Now things get really unpleasant. Out on the street, in the cold and dark, Yossarian sees a solitary boy dressed in rags with bare feet, pale, poor, cold. He is moved by “intense pity for his poverty”, but does nothing. Immediately, a nursing mother passes “holding an infant in black rags”. He reflects on all the sadness and suffering in the world, about “how many good people were bad people”. Suddenly he is confronted by a young soldier having convulsions and being held down by six other soldiers. A jeep with two military policemen in it races by: one of them remarks, “That’s good. He’s under arrest”, “doubling over with raucous laughter at his jest” and then speeding off. Yossarian moves away and hears a female voice from above pleading, “Please don’t. Please don’t”. He then sees a drunken woman being sexually assaulted by three drunken soldiers, also saying “Pleeshe don’t”. One of them throws a bottle at Yossarian. Soon he comes across a man beating a dog: “The dog whimpered and squealed in brute, dumbfounded hysteria…and groveled and crawled on its belly”, but the man “beat it and beat it anyway”. He threatens to beat a woman who asks him to stop. At the next corner, “a man was beating a small boy brutally in the midst of an immobile crowd of adult spectators who made no effort to intervene”. The man kept knocking the boy down with “hard, resounding open-palm blows to the head, then jerking him up to his feet in order to knock him down again”. “Bright red blood was streaming from his ears”. No one interferes. Next a man with a smashed mouth waits for an ambulance that never comes, while another man is whisked away by police after having his books spilled (he cries ambiguously, “Help! Police!).  Yossarian then sees an eighty-year-old woman trying to keep up with a forty-year-old woman but being left behind alone in the night to fend for herself. “The nasty, small, gloating smile with which she glanced back at the laboring old woman was both wicked and apprehensive”. Yossarian does nothing to help. He then notices a gaunt man “with a star-shaped scar in his cheek and a glossy mutilated depression the size of an egg in one temple”, to be followed by a young woman with “her whole face disfigured by a God-awful pink and piebald burn that started on her neck and stretched in a raw, corrugated mass up both cheeks past her eyes!”. We next learn that Aarfy, a comrade of Yossarian, has raped and murdered a simple-minded servant-girl, Michaela, that very night, throwing her out of the window. Aarfy protests, “I only raped her once”, and feels convinced he will not be held accountable. Yossarian assures him he will be arrested for the rape and murder, and sure enough sirens sound. Two “large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy, unsmiling jaws” enter the room—and arrest Yossarian! He has committed the unpardonable crime of going to Rome in search of a lost girl without a pass (Aarfy is left to his own devices). So ends Yossarian’s visit to the eternal city.

I told you it was a bleak chapter. But what are we to make of it, artistically (the mutilated thumb twitching before us)? The chapter is clearly a litany of human (and animal) pain, suffering, poverty, neglect, violence, fear, malice, and indifference. It is crammed with injustice, corruption, callousness, maliciousness, brutality, and evil—all conscience-free. If there is any humor at all, it is of the blackest pitch. The rest of the book is overflowing with humor, albeit also black. This is Catch-22 at its most hard and unforgiving. I think it is intended in two ways. First, it reminds us of the horrors that lie behind the story told in the body of the book (a kind of gritty literary-realist Sergeant Bilko). One might say it points to the underlying politics of war—what we are fighting for, and against. But second, it functions as a kind of rebuke to the rest of the book—a kind of apology for it. All those laughs, the literary acclaim, the fame—but this is the reality: the human horror behind it all. We make art of it, but it isn’t art. Just to describe it, as Heller does and I repeat, is difficult, morally difficult. Really, it just makes you want to cry—to curl up in a ball and cry. And yet we admire the novel. Nately’s whore’s little sister is never found.

Philosophy Naturalized

Quine’s famous paper “Epistemology Naturalized” advocates handing epistemology over to the psychologists. No more traditional a priori epistemology; let’s have empirical science instead. Cognitive science replaces conceptual analysis—that sort of thing. This will put an end to endless irresoluble philosophical disputes and set epistemology on the path to academic respectability (you know the pitch). But Quine never wrote a paper called “Logic Naturalized” advocating abandoning traditional a priori logic in favor of the psychology of logic. That would have made his own logic books obsolete: burn Methods of Logic and replace it with Experimental Logic! Let’s have “ex-log”! We can conduct empirical studies of what subjects think about logic, how they reason, when logic takes hold of the infant mind. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, then ask yourself how you might justify abandoning traditional epistemology in favor of the new empirical epistemology withoutleaving open the similar naturalization of logic. And the point generalizes: if epistemology is ripe for scientific naturalization, why not the rest of philosophy? How can epistemology be the only branch of philosophy that should be handled by the psychologists and those who read them (and only them)? What about ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, political philosophy, philosophy of mathematics, etc.? If it’s good for epistemology, it must be good for the rest of philosophy. I won’t go into why this is a bad idea; my point is that consistency requires it. Naturalize one, naturalize all. This applies also to the philosophy of the sciences—of physics, biology, psychology, etc. We have to look at the psychological science of these subjects, i.e., the minds and behavior of scientists. The philosophy of physics will consist of psychological studies of physicists—e.g., the psychology of quantum theorists. Not the physical world but the mental world of the physicist. Likewise, for the philosophy of biology—this will become the study of the thought processes of biologists. That may be an interesting field of study, but is it the sole legitimate respectable form that the philosophy of biology should take? This wouldn’t be philosophy naturalized but philosophy destroyed. Naturalizing epistemology amounts to nothing short of eliminating philosophy altogether, once you think it through. You might want to do that, but let’s be clear about what you are doing. And if it is really what you want, why not take a degree in psychology to begin with?

America and Americans

What do you get if you remove America (the idea) from America (the place]? What if you remove American values, enshrined in the Constitution, from American society? Equality, free speech, free belief, the rule of law—what if you take all that away? The obvious answer is Americans—those individual people. But what makes them Americans, establishes their identity as a unified people, not just as the inhabitants of a particular piece of land? Nothing. You destroy America as a distinct identifiable definable nation. That is what is happening now: the essence of America is being hollowed out, leaving nothing but free-ranging individuals. Do you think these deracinated people can form a coherent viable identity? I doubt it. We will have a kind of blind anarchy. Americans will no longer be Americans, but bleached-out wanderers, clueless, lost. What makes America America is the idea of America, but that idea is being undermined from within. The country will die. It will be true to say that America no longer exists.

Anger and Morality

Anger is inseparable from morality: we are naturally angry at what is unjust, unfair, blameworthy, evil. Jesus was angry at the money lenders and pharisees. There is no point in denying it. Emotivism used to say that moral judgement is all about boo and hurrah, but it should have said that moral disapproval is anger and moral approval admiration. You boo a weak artistic performance not a heinous act. A moral person is an angry person, on the assumption of immorality in the world. Indeed, there are few things that make one angrier than unethical actions or people. Not all anger has moral content, to be sure, but most of it does (animals are seldom angry). Anger assigns blame. A person without anger is hardly a moral being at all, even if brimming with love. What does this tell us about the moral life? First, it tells us that morality is bound up with judgment: you have to judge what to be angry about. Some people have poor judgment—they are angry at the wrong things. Anger must be appropriately educated. As the ancients would say, right anger is a form of wisdom. Second, and more disturbing, anger is not a nice emotion to have: it is unpleasant, corrosive, and dangerous. It feels bad; it eats into the soul; and it can lead to violent acts. Anger is hard to handle, causing much immoral action. So, moral emotion, in the form of anger, itself has moral consequences, which can be worse than what it is anger about. The angry man might kill a man who disrespects him. This approaches paradox: morality requires anger, but anger is close to immorality. Anger at the wrongdoing of others can easily lead to further wrongdoing, sometimes serious. Mass murderers are often angry, justifiably, at the wrongdoing of others. Anger is a combustible emotion (perhaps this is partly why Kant distrusted emotion as part of moral psychology). Anger can motivate right action, but it can also trigger wrong action. It can be argued that we would be better off without it. But moral judgment without anger is a pale and insipid thing, and not psychologically realistic. Being serenely detached in the face of cruelty is not a virtue. Righteous anger is proper and correct. But it has to be properly regulated, wisely arrived at. Thus, there is a problem at the heart of our moral psychology: we need anger, but we must beware of its pitfalls. Good people are centers of anger, but the anger must be good anger. And it is also necessary that the anger not be too intense or preoccupying—or else it will corrode the soul. This is the problem of moral anger.