Class 2: Darwin's Tree of Life Part 2

Marx only has two beliefs in common with Darwin, but they are very crucial ones. Both Marx and Darwin believed the same lesson that all humans were connected by their common origin, and that they evolve in a steaming cauldron of war, murder and revolt. But this is only a third of Darwin’s true equation. Another third is occupied by Wagner, who believed that all things are divided, and the strong must therefore prove their strength by the defeat of the weak. Where this differs from Darwin is that Darwin sees no moral dimension in this whereas Wagner looks upon this development with approval.

Before we go any further, we have to be clear about a few things. The first is that it’s almost impossible to talk about the ideas present in music, or even opera, with any real precision. There’s a quote which over the years has been attributed to dozens of people: “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” While music can make you feel very many emotions, the whole point of expressing something in music is that you can express your feelings with such immediate urgency that no words could ever do the same. So to a certain extent, the music must do the talking for us.

And yet, with Wagner, no musician has ever demanded more discussion. And short of Shakespeare and the writers of The Bible, no artist has ever been more written about. Even now, Wagner may still be the most controversial, shocking of any genre in any part of the world.

Question: Who might you suggest as the most shocking, controversial artists in the world?

Wagner is the only composer, perhaps the only musician in any genre, whose music is almost guaranteed to cause a riot in one part of the world - even if it’s only Israel. When the Israel Philharmonic tried to perform a Wagner encore in 1981, a full-fledged riot broke out and the orchestra couldn’t finish the piece. A quarter-century later, an Israeli conductor named Daniel Barenboim announced that his German orchestra would play Wagner encore, and engaged the audience in twenty minutes of dialogue and debate in which anyone could speak up. Even in that situation, people started shouting and slammed the auditorium doors as they stormed out. Ever now that the taboo was successfully broken, nobody dared to break it again.

What is it about Wagner that’s so shocking? Let’s start with a purely musical example. This one is from 1861, when Wagner presented his opera Tannhauser in Paris and he wrote a ballet especially for the premiere that completely shocked the audience. The ballet is supposed to represent everything which goes on on the mountain of the goddess, Venus. To our ears, neither the music or the dancing would be all that shocking, though the harmonies were as avant-garde for its day as anything yet performed. But I need you all to imagine it from the standpoint of 1861 Europe, an era so repressed that they put dresses on the chair legs because they worried that the naked legs might sexually excite people.

(Play the first few minutes of the Tannhauser Venusberg Music - Munch - from 9:05)

This is extremely exciting music, but if If I told you that this music and the dancing that went with it caused full-scale physical fighting in the theater between partisans for and against it, you’d probably not believe me. But it’s still true. It was a very different era, and the goalpost for what’s shocking always changes. And yet, there are also elements of Wagner which are much, much more shocking today than they were when he wrote it - and Wagner wrote the texts to all his operas himself. Listen to this, the final few minutes of his only comedy, Die Meistersinger.

(play the monologue at the end of Die Meistersinger - Bohm - Verachtet mir die Meister nicht, from 2:10)

Habt Acht! Uns dräuen üble Streich': zerfällt erst deutsches Volk und Reich, in falscher wälscher Majestät kein Fürst bald mehr sein Volk versteht, und wälschen Dunst mit wälschem Tand sie pflanzen uns in deutsches Land; was deutsch und echt, wüsst' keiner mehr, lebt's nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr'. Drum sag' ich euch: ehrt eure deutschen Meister! Dann bannt ihr gute Geister; und gebt ihr ihrem Wirken Gunst, zerging' in Dunst das heil'ge röm'sche Reich, uns bliebe gleich die heil'ge deutsche Kunst!

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us: if the German people and kingdom should one day decay, under a false, foreign rule soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German Masters. Therefore I say to you: honour your German Masters, then you will conjure up good spirits! And if you favour their endeavours, even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German Art!

DIE VOLK Ehrt eure deutschen Meister, dann bannt ihr gute Geister; und gebt ihr ihrem Wirken Gunst, zerging' in Dunst das heil'ge röm'sche Reich, uns bliebe gleich die heil'ge deutsche Kunst! Heil! Sachs! Nürnbergs teurem Sachs!

THE PEOPLE Honour your German Masters, then you will conjure up good spirits! And if you favour their endeavours, even if the Holy Roman Empire should dissolve in mist, for us there would yet remain holy German Art! Hail, Sachs! Nuremberg's dear Sachs!

“Beware! Evil tricks threaten us if the German people and kingdom should one day decay under a false, foreign rule, soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German Masters. Therefore I say to you: honour your German Masters.”

This opera goes on for more than five hours of music, and we’ll talk about the role of length in Wagner a bit later. But this is honestly one of the greatest operas ever written and the only opera Wagner wrote about non-mythological people with ordinary problems. Most of the music sounds like it could easily have been written by Schubert or Brahms. But at the very end of this huge marathon, Wagner inserts an unmistakable moral with the story’s hero exhorting an assemblage of all his townspeople to protect Germany from evil, to which the crowdspeople respond by repeating what he says word for word and then erupting in shouts of ‘Heil!’ for the man who commanded them. It should go without saying that for Hitler, the propaganda opportunities which this scene afforded was a godsend.

But let’s look a little closer at that text. “Evil tricks threaten us...under a false and foreign rule... “

Hmmm… well, most invaders patrol the streets with enormous military force, not evil tricks. Natives would only be afraid of evil tricks perpetrated by foreigners better known for their brains than their brawn. What could this possibly be code for when it’s written by a composer who once wrote a charming passage like this?

(call on reader)

“So long as the separate art of music had a real organic life-need in it […] there was nowhere to be found a Jewish composer.... Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgement in it—yet merely to destroy it. Then, indeed, that body’s flesh dissolves into a swarming colony of insect life: but who in looking on that body’s self, would hold it still for living?”  

Richard Wagner - Judaism in Music

Many Wagnerians still deny that this finale of Die Meistersinger, and much else in Wagner’s operas, has any anti-semitic intent. And who knows? They might be right. Wagner was such a great artist that this speech is blended pretty much seamlessly into the fabric of the plot - there’s no way of accusing Wagner directly of putting proto-Nazi agitprop into his scores, but once you perceive it, the stench of some pretty offensive propaganda is rather overwhelming. There are all sorts of examples in art of places where the line blurs between art and political agitation. You can’t be sure whether the artwork is trying to exhort you to action, but it clearly seems that way.

So here’s a related question: What are some examples of artworks that might be trying to exhort us to some kind of action?

If there was action to which Wagner was trying to exhort people - and many people believe that he was trying very hard - what was it?

In order to talk about that, we need to talk as briefly as possible about the 1848 revolution and the effect it had on Wagner’s psyche. Wagner, in spite of impressing no one with his political knowledge, was very enthusiastic about the prospect of revolution - maybe even more enthusiastic than Marx. He believed in two very contradictory ideas: an absolute monarch whose authority could not be questioned, and an absolutely free people whose rights were never trod on. To put it succinctly, all he wanted a new conception of human beings in which they were all united in complete agreement all the time - such bourgeois concepts as disagreement, compromise, consensus, would  be obliterated. This would sound implausible to 99% of the world population, but perhaps Wagner thought it was possible because his own story was so implausible. A few years earlier, some music loving noblemen plucked Wagner from almost complete obscurity to be the director of the Dresden Court Opera House, one of the world’s pre-eminent musical jobs. But compromise, particularly when it came to things as banal as money, was not in his makeup, and Wagner quickly soured on his own success. Six years later, he rewarded his employers with a revolutionary plot to burn the opera house to the ground and spent the next 15 years on the run from the Saxon authorities, who wanted to jail him for life.

It was during the first four years of his exile that Wagner truly became Wagner. He stopped writing music and went back with a vengeance to his first love, the pen. During these four years, he wrote the entirety of the text to his sixteen-hour drama, The Ring Cycle, he wrote the essay, Judaism in Music, which we quoted, and many, many other essays. But the most important of them is probably ‘Art and Revolution.’

According to Wagner, drama is the highest of all the arts because it synthesizes all the others into a new whole, but true drama is wasted on the public of his own day. The society of Wagner’s day, completely unlike our own…, was tired and decadent, a compromised, bourgeois, semi-democracy, completely debased by financial concerns and valued money over people. Its citizens’ lives were so dreary that they wanted only to watch frivolous stage entertainments to forget their hopelessness rather than stage work which might enoble them. What the citizens need is an Athenian democracy, unspoiled by financial compromises, in which all people are valued, and which views art and religion as the exact same thing. In such a democracy, the premiere of a new drama is nothing less than a religious event deserving of its own festival. Such a democracy can only be attained through revolution, and when we have brought forth a true resurrection of Athenian democracy, an enthusiastic audience will embrace the writing and producing of new dramas like the Athenian tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that seamlessly blend drama, art, dance, music, and poetry. Such a democracy, purged of its dirty financial elements, would return us to the lofty, pristine glory of the Classical Athens.

Here is how Wagner put it:

(call on reader)

“To the Greeks, the production of a tragedy was a religious festival, where the gods bestirred themselves upon the stage and bestowed on men their wisdom...

As the spirit of community split itself along a thousand lines of egoistic cleavage, so was the great united work of Tragedy disintegrated into its individual factors...

Each one of these dissevered arts, nursed and luxuriously tended for the entertainment of the rich, has filled the world to overflowing with its products; in each, great minds have brought forth marvels; but the one true Art has not been born again, either in or since the so-called Renaissance. The perfect Art-work, the great united utterance of a free and lovely public life, the Drama, Tragedy, - howsoever great the poets who have here and there indited tragedies - is not yet born again: for the reason that it cannot be reborn, but must be born anew.

Only the great Revolution of Mankind, whose beginnings erstwhile shattered Grecian Tragedy, can win for us this Art-work. For only this Revolution can bring forth from its hidden depths, in the new beauty of a nobler Universalism, that which it once tore from the conservative spirit of a time of beautiful but narrow-meted culture - and stirring it, engulfed."

So let’s pause for a question: Since we never stop hearing that our American society is tired, bourgeois, decadent and frivolous, and has become so because of money. Is there any society today which might fancy itself worthy of a new kind of Greek Tragedy that marries religious belief to art?

It’s common to call Wagner a ‘romantic’ composer, not romantic in the erotic sense but in the historical sense. But there’s something missing from this definition, let’s look at how Isaiah Berlin defines Romanticism.

"a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.”

And now let’s listen to this duet from Wagner’s opera, Tristan und Isolde:

(Furtwangler/Berlin/Suthaus/Schluter '47 O sink hernieder)

BEIDE O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe, gib Vergessen, dass ich lebe; nimm mich auf in deinen Schoss, löse von der Welt mich los!	Music	TOGETHER Descend, O Night of love, grant oblivion that I may live; take me up into your bosom, release me from the world!
	TRISTAN Verloschen nun die letzte Leuchte;		TRISTAN Extinguished now the last glimmers;
	ISOLDE was wir dachten, was uns deuchte;		ISOLDE what we thought, what we imagined;
	TRISTAN all Gedenken -		TRISTAN all thought
	ISOLDE all Gemahnen -		ISOLDE all remembering,
	BEIDE heil'ger Dämm'rung hehres Ahnen löscht des Wähnens Graus welterlösend aus.		TOGETHER the glorious presentiment of sacred twilight extinguishes imagined terrors, world-redeeming.
	ISOLDE Barg im Busen uns sich die Sonne, leuchten lachend Sterne der Wonne.		ISOLDE The sun concealed itself in our bosom, the stars of bliss gleam, laughing,
	TRISTAN Von deinem Zauber sanft umsponnen, vor deinen Augen süss zerronnen;		TRISTAN softly entwined in your magic, sweetly dissolved before your eyes;
	ISOLDE Herz an Herz dir, Mund an Mund;	Music	ISOLDE heart on your heart, mouth on mouth;
	TRISTAN eines Atems ein'ger Bund; -		TRISTAN the single bond of a single breath;
	BEIDE bricht mein Blick sich wonn'-erblindet, erbleicht die Welt mit ihrem Blenden:		TOGETHER my glance is deflected, dazzled with bliss, the world palses with its blinding radiance:
	ISOLDE die uns der Tag trügend erhellt,		ISOLDE lit by Day's guileful deception,
	TRISTAN zu täuschendem Wahn entgegengestellt,		TRISTAN standing firm against deceitful delusion,
	BEIDE selbst dann bin ich die Welt: Wonne-hehrstes Weben, Liebe-heiligstes Leben, Niewiedererwachens wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch.	Music	TOGETHER then am I myself the world; floating in sublime bliss, life of love most sacred, the sweetly conscious undeluded wish never again to waken.

This is, believe it or not, just a small part in the first half of a 40-minute love duet. There are days when this duet seems like the dumbest thing on earth, and there are other days when this incredibly long duet seems to me like may be the greatest thing Wagner ever wrote. There are even moments, very rare ones, when it seems to me that perhaps Tristan und Isolde is not ridiculous, and really is the greatest work of art ever conceived by the human mind, and that Wagner is the one artist of the last four-hundred years that can bare comparison with Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists. But yes, those moments are rare.

So Question - without taking a lot of time on it: What dramatic works do you think might compare to Shakespeare and Sophocles?

But for the moment, this would seem to fit Berlin’s definition of Romanticism in every particular. It is both Romantic with a capital and a lower case-R. What Wagner is describing is a concept of sexual love which involves so much ecstasy that you literally forget you’re a separate being from the other person. And yet, like sex itself, the very concept is more than a bit ridiculous.

Wagner was a passionate follower of an eminent philosopher of the generation before Marx named Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s most important theory, and again, this is an extremely simple explanation, is that there are two sides to the Self. One self is the self which we perceive as our selves. This self is not the person within you who does the thinking, but the person within you to whom it occurs that you’re thinking. The other self, the more naive, inborn, self, is the thinking self, but is more basic than thinking. This self is the ‘Will’, or the ‘will-to-life.’ The Will is what causes us to think, to feel, to be conscious, to have instincts. The Will is also a prison from which we can’t escape, and all of the unsatisfied longings of the will can only lead to anguish. What we call pleasure, is merely the reilef we feel when we don’t feel the Will’s pain. Therefore, we have to find ways of extinguishing the pain which the Will so consistently gives us. And we’re most likely to transcend the pain of the Will through either music, philosophy, art, or the wholesale renunciation of desire.

So question: What older concepts does this philosophy sound like? (wait for someone to say Buddhism)

To anyone who’s ever read about Buddhism, this is all very familiar - particularly that last part about renunciation. Both Schopenhauer and Wagner were interested in Buddhism, and Wagner planned before he died on writing an opera about The Buddha. But at the end of this same duet, Wagner provided a rejoinder to Schopenhauer which, in his mind at least, showed another way around the power of the Will.

(play Kleiber/Dresden - So Starben Wir)

TRISTAN So starben wir, um ungetrennt, ewig einig ohne End', ohn' Erwachen, ohn' Erbangen, namenlos in Lieb' umfangen, ganz uns selbst gegeben, der Liebe nur zu leben!		TRISTAN Thus might we die, that together, ever one, without end, never waking, never fearing, namelessly enveloped in love, given up to each other, to live only for love!
	ISOLDE (wie in sinnender Entrücktheit zu ihm aufblickend) So stürben wir, um ungetrennt, -	Music	ISOLDE (as if in reflective rapture, looking up at him) Thus would we die, that together -
	TRISTAN ewig einig ohne End', -		TRISTAN ever one, without end -
	ISOLDE ohn' Erwachen, -		ISOLDE never waking -
	TRISTAN ohn' Erbangen, -		TRISTAN never fearing -
	BEIDE namenlos in Lieb' umfangen, ganz uns selbst gegeben, der Liebe nur zu leben!		TOGETHER namelessly enveloped in love, given up to ourselves to live only for love!
	(Isolde neigt wie überwältigt das Haupt an seine Brust)
	BRANGÄNES STIMME (wie vorher) Habet acht! Habet acht! Schon weicht dem Tag die Nacht.		THE VOICE OF BRANGAENE (as before) Beware! Beware! Night soon gives way to Day.
	TRISTAN (lächelnd zu Isolde geneigt) Soll ich lauschen?		TRISTAN (smiling down at Isolde) Shall I listen?
	ISOLDE (schwärmerisch zu Tristan aufblickend) Lass mich sterben!		ISOLDE (dreamily looking up at Tristan) Let me die!
	TRISTAN Muss ich wachen?		TRISTAN Must I waken?
	ISOLDE Nie erwachen!		ISOLDE Never waken!
	TRISTAN Soll der Tag noch Tristan wecken?		TRISTAN Shall Day still waken Tristan?
	ISOLDE Lass den Tag dem Tode weichen!		ISOLDE Let Day give way to Death!
	TRISTAN Des Tages Dräuen nun trotzten wir so?		TRISTAN Have we Day's menaces thus defied?
	ISOLDE (mit wachsender Begeisterung) Seinem Trug ewig zu fliehn!		ISOLDE (in growing rapture) Ever to flee its guile.
	TRISTAN Sein dämmernder Schein verscheuchte uns nie?		TRISTAN Did its dawning never affright us?
	ISOLDE (mit grosser Gebärde ganz sich erhebend) Ewig währ uns die Nacht!		ISOLDE (raising herself up with a grand gesture) May our Night endure for ever!
	(Tristan folgt ihr, sie umfangen sich in schwärmerischer Begeisterung)
	BEIDE O ew'ge Nacht, süsse Nacht! Hehr erhabne Liebesnacht! Wen du umfangen, wem du gelacht, wie wär' ohne Bangen aus dir er je erwacht? Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod, sehnend verlangter Liebestod! In deinen Armen, dir geweiht, urheilig Erwarmen, von Erwachens Not befreit! Wie sie fassen, wie sie lassen, diese Wonne, Fern der Sonne, fern der Tage Trennungsklage! Ohne Wähnen sanftes Sehnen; ohne Bangen süss Verlangen; ohne Wehen hehr Vergehen; ohne Schmachten hold Umnachten; ohne Meiden, ohne Scheiden, traut allein, ewig heim, in ungemessnen Räumen übersel'ges Träumen.	Music Music	TOGETHER O eternal Night, sweet Night! Gloriously sublime Night of love! Those whom you have embraced, upon whom you have smiled, how could they ever waken without fear? Now banish dread, sweet death, yearned for, longed for death-in-love! In your arms, consecrated to you, sacred elemental quickening force, free from the peril of waking! How to grasp it, how to leave it, this bliss far from the sun's, far from Day's parting sorrows! Free from delusion gentle yearning, free from fearing sweet longing. Free from sighing sublime expiring. Free from languishing enclosed in sweet darkness. No evasion no parting, just we alone, ever home, in unmeasured realms of ecstatic dreams.
	TRISTAN Tristan du, ich Isolde, nicht mehr Tristan!		TRISTAN Tristan you, I Isolde, no longer Tristan.
	ISOLDE Du Isolde, Tristan ich, nicht mehr Isolde!		ISOLDE You Isolde, Tristan I, no longer Isolde!
	BEIDE Ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen, neu Erkennen, neu Entbrennen; endlos ewig, ein-bewusst: heiss erglühter Brust höchste Liebeslust! (Sie bleiben in verzückter Stellung)		TOGETHER Un-named, free from parting, new perception, new enkindling; ever endless self-knowing; warmly glowing heart, love's utmost joy! (They remain in a rapturous embrace)

Notice that very last moment, you hear a dissonant chord, which thwarts the resolution of a very coital sounding climax. The illicit affair of Tristan and Isolde has just been found out, and the pain of living has just become that much more painful.

Before we get to the finish: another question: Can you name any other work of art that imply the internal experience of sex so graphically? (so I can watch it...)

Wagner’s way around the all-conquering Will is death and a mystical hope that by choosing your means of death, your death will be to a purpose. If Tristan and Isolde can’t possess each other in life, perhaps they’ll be allowed to be together in the next world. At the end of the final act, Isolde sings the music we just heard again over Tristan’s dead body, but this time, the climax isn’t thwarted by a dissonant chord, and she sort of orgasms herself to death.

Technically this story is tragedy - it ends in the death of flawed heroes. But the music is the opposite of tragedy. It meets its end ecstatically, as though death is not something to be avoided but to be celebrated. Wagner’s great operatic rival, Verdi, also specialized in tragedies, but Verdi’s tragedies sound tragic. His music sounds more interested in consoling the people left behind than it does in telling us about death’s glories.

We often like to call Wagner bombastic, and he absolutely is. But he’s bombastic in a completely different way than people think he is. Wagner’s operas are not all fat women with helmets shouting over loud orchestras. His operas contain just as much music that’s deafeningly quiet accompanying dull, high-fallutin, pseudo-philosophical conversations for the better part of an hour. But in such moments, or hours..., the music seems almost deliberately dull. Wagner never bored his listeners without knowing that that was exactly what he was doing. He was a master hypnotist. He wanted to create a sense of claustrophobia over the listeners. He doesn’t adapt to you, you can only adapt to him. You can be completely bored for a half-hour and then realize that you have another seven half-hours to go, so you might as well surrender to the experience. He’s trapped us in the opera house for the better part of a day, and uses that span to completely change our perceptions of time. At the beginnings of his operas, he releases us with only enough loud music to make us think that we might get some more on the horizon. What he demands we demands we surrender is our Will. And once we’ve surrendered our Wills to him, these loud, bombastic moments become much more frequent, more frenzied, more violent. The musical violence becomes like a narcotic which we crave.  

Question: Can you think of any filmmaker who uses the same technique? (Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, Hitchcock) Any TV show? (Breaking Bad)

The truth is that, relatively speaking, Tristan und Isolde is not that violent a piece of music. It certainly has many violent moments, almost none of which we’ve listened to today. But it’s the embryo that prepares us for the 15-hour, four day, Ring Cycle, which is where the real Wagnerian bloodbath happens, both musically and dramaturgically. Hopefully this class will go on long enough that we get to the Ring Cycle and talk about it in relation to Bismarck.

Beethoven celebrated the Self. His music demanded our attention as no musician before him ever did, but his music gives back to us a celebration of our dignity, our individuality, our generosity. But Wagner extolled self-renunciation, what he gives back to us is a sense that individuality is a curse from which our living selves can’t escape. But since we live in a godless world, we may be able to escape our individuality through death. Here is another great quote from Art and Revolution:

(call on reader)

“only Love can fathom Beauty; only Beauty can fashion Art. The love of weaklings for each other can only manifest itself as the goad of lust; the love of the weak for the strong is abasement and fear; the love of the strong for the weak is pity and forbearance; but the love of the strong for the strong is Love, for it is the free surrender to one who cannot compel us. Under every fold of heaven’s canopy, in every race, shall men by real freedom grow up to equal strength; by strength to truest love; and by true love to beauty. But Art is Beauty energized and turned to Knowledge.

And as the Knowledge of all men will find at last its religious utterance in the one effective Knwoledge of free united manhood: so will all these rich developments of Art find their profoundest focus in the Drama, in the glorious Tragedy of Man. The Tragedy will be the feast of all mankind; in it, - set free from each conventional etiquette, - free, strong, and beautious man will celebrate the dolour and elight of all his love, and consecreate in lofty worth the great Love-offering of his Death.”

This is why Wagner is still the most controversial artist who ever lived or who still lives. There is no appeal in Wagner to basic decency. In Wagner, there is only strength and weakness, and we have to prove our strength either by dying or causing death. Like all functional sociopaths, he understands us better than we do ourselves. The reason Wagner appeals to us is because we fear that he might be right.  So even if we fear and hate him, he’s far too useful for us to divorce him. He is, perhaps, the greatest creative genius who ever lived. And even if his characters are ridiculously unhuman, his music makes us feel as though we understand every thought that goes through their heads.

Like Marx, Wagner inaugurated a new, atheistic, kind of religion. But whereas Marx believed that we’re nothing more than tools formed by other tools, Wagner believes that no tool can touch us in any meaningful sense. All that matters about us is our blood, and Wagner worshipped blood both senses of the word - he worshipped bloodlines - as we’ll hopefully see in The Ring Cycle, and also worshipped the spilling of blood. Clearly the bloodlines Wagner worshipped were German, but nationalism centered around bloodline can be applied to any nationality, and has. In the 20th century, both Marx and Wagner led their followers down the same bloody path and used Darwin as an accomplice. Together, they’ve created the two main branch-divisions in Darwin’s tree. The world is now divided into those who believe that man is at the center of the world, and those who believe that machines are. Perhaps the next period of history is slated to be the one which determines that conclusion.

Class 2: Darwin's Tree of Life - Part 1

I’m going to begin this class as every science class should begin… with a passage from scripture:

(call on reader)

1. I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.

2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.

3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.

5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.

- John 15:1-6

When Darwin confessed his theory to his devoutly Christian future wife, this was the section of the Bible which she asked him to read. John, last of the four gospels to be written, is known as the most extreme and militant - certainly by Jews anyway. But Emma Wedgewood, who was, in a sense, the perfect wife for Darwin, saw that in this passage lay the entirety of the opposition to Darwin’s argument for Evolution By Means of Natural Selection. Natural Selection, like Christ himself, fits quite comfortably in the very Jewish image of the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden, which is certainly where John got the concept. But Judaism no doubt lifted the concept from similar ones in Ancient Persia and Egypt, and you can find a similar concept as far afield as Chinese and Nordic civilizations, even among certain branches of Native Americans. It is clearly a religious concept that’s been with us since the beginning of human consciousness. The fruit from the trees was the sweetest taste which early humans could know, a kind of prehistoric dessert. And the image of the tree of life comes with us all the way through history.

Here's a question: can anyone name great works of literature with the images of the Tree of Life? (Gilgamesh, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Macbeth, Tristan und Isolde, Lord of the Rings, James Cameron’s Avatar, Malick's Tree of Life...)

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the tree is the metaphor for the One True God, and we are the branches that grow out of him. We, the branches, owe our very existence to this tree, and if we eat the fruit, then Christians believe we gain salvation, Jews believe we gain knowledge. But eventually the branches die so that new branches can take its place. The branches are cut off and harvested, and John extends this metaphor perhaps past what it can hold by saying that the harvest is symbolic of damnation. 

Here's another question, a problematic one for Christianity. If all branches eventually wither and die, the best use humans have for branches is for man to gather them to cast them into fire. Does this mean that we're born to be damned? (if no response, bring up 'original sin' and Hitchens's syllogism that religion, particularly Christianity, tells us we are 'born sick and commanded to be well.' This is the paradox at the heart of Christianity, one which the religion acknowledges and gives it the reason that most of the world is damned. All except 144,000 according to the Book of Revelations)

I’m going to take it as a given that everybody in here understands the meaning of evolution through natural selection, and we’ll talk about it much, much more in later classes. Instead, we’re just going to focus on what Darwin had to say about trees:

(call on reader) 

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species; and those produced during former years may represent the long succession of extinct species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have at all times overmastered other species in the great battle for life. The limbs divided into great branches, and these into lesser and lesser branches, were themselves once, when the tree was young, budding twigs; and this connection of the former and present buds by ramifying branches may well represent the classification of all extinct and living species in groups subordinate to groups. Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear the other branches; so with the species which lived during long-past geological periods, very few have left living and modified descendants. From the first growth of the tree, many a limb and branch has decayed and dropped off; and these fallen branches of various sizes may represent those whole orders, families, and genera which have now no living representatives, and which are known to us only in a fossil state. As we here and there see a thin straggling branch springing from a fork low down in a tree, and which by some chance has been favoured and is still alive on its summit, so we occasionally see an animal like the Ornithorhynchus or Lepidosiren, which in some small degree connects by its affinities two large branches of life, and which has apparently been saved from fatal competition by having inhabited a protected station. As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications.

If you believe in the pure individualism of Christianity, then Darwin’s Tree of Life, one which evidence demonstrates is much closer to the truth, is a kind of eternal damnation on Earth; a war for survival of all against all that has not stopped for billions of years in which the vast majority of the soldiers are guaranteed to die violently and painfully. It allows none of the comfort of Christianity, or Islam, which assures us that we still have eternal life, however much we suffer in this one. In evolutionary biology, we are not divided between body and soul, we are only our bodies - composed of matter which we’ve borrowed from the universe for a short while. This is a very difficult concept for contemporary human beings to come to terms with, particularly Western ones. We in what’s traditionally called ‘The West’ have spent the last two-thousand years asserting greater and greater individuality. First we asserted the eternity of our individual souls, then we asserted the dignity of our individual selves and our rights to be free from oppression and to pursue happiness in our own ways. And yet, at the very moment before the West’s greatest triumph, only two years before the two largest nations on Earth freed their slaves and the majority of the Earth was nominally free, a scientific theory with overwhelming proof presented itself, demonstrating that the self is not all that important.

Two new questions: 
1. If evolution by means of natural selection is true, does this mean that the self not important? 
2. If the self is not important, how can we live our lives pretending it is?

In an era that seemed to eventually attain every individual right, the truth of evolution is the most crushing possible realization. We’ve been dealing with its ramifications for more than 150 years, and we’ll deal with them for many centuries yet. It may yet be as crushing a trauma for many as the realization as the realization was a millenium and a half before it that there is only one God to whom a person can entreat for favor, and not many Gods whose favors we can play off of each other. Either one is a realization as traumatic for those who believe it as those who doubt it, because it causes people who believe and doubt passionately that the only way to forward their cause is to murder those who think differently. Because no matter how what progress we’ve made, no matter how far we’ve separated ourselves from nature’s cycle, no matter how much we strive toward infinity, no matter how much our individual selves seem able to soar with the heavens, we all will die, our substances will return to Earth and eventually become indistinguishable from the dirt in which we’re buried. We were once the dirt of the earth and the dust of the air, but our matter will become is the soil from which other forms of life will grow. Perhaps a much more accurate rendering from John’s Gospel is 12:24:

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.  

So let me ask a question: If there were indisputable evidence of God’s non-existence, what are the ramifications for mankind?

Marx, who lived in London for the majority of his life, read Darwin with great interest. Marx believed himself the Darwin of the Social Sciences who discovered immutable truths about human nature which made economics, history, and philosophy into hard sciences with no less empirical proof than biology or physics. Human beings, with all their vaguaries  When he died, his partner Friedrich Engels eulogized him as social science’s Darwin at his grave. But Marx was not a scientist, and in some ways he was not a social scientist either. He was, in some ways, a religious seer who had a vision of a human future, a vision that sees human beings not as individual to individual, but as a machine, shaped by other machines, in the process of history..

Marx does not believe that our sentience makes us an object above nature. We are a natural creature; an animal like any other animal. All natural things which apply to other animals apply to us - a belief which Darwin in many ways vindicated.

According to Marx, humans differ from animals in their ability to create tools - not use them, but create them. And because we can create tools to help us provide for our basic necessities, our relationship to nature has been altered and thrown off-kilter. With every new tool we change nature itself, and there comes a new necessity which this tool creates, which creates the necessity for another tool, which creates a vicious cycle of need. Therefore, for Marx, technology was human nature itself. Technology is responsible for creating human history, and responsible for however we’ve evolved since becoming human beings. People are not different from each other by any difference in their “human natures,” which according to Marx is an unverifiable metric, but because of what they have to do in order to meet their basic needs.

Two New Questions: 
1. Is human nature an unverifiable metric? 
2. And if it isn't, is human individuality also unverifiable?

There is a lot of jargon in Marxism that would take a class of its own to explain. So I hope everyone who knows anything about Marxism realizes that I know I’m simplifying absurdly, but nevertheless, we’ll use a bit of it. Marxists believe that tools and technology form the very questions which people ask, the answers they provide, and the ideas which people form. The questions materialists looked forward to answering were nothing more than ideological constructs made by the class who controls the technology to justify keeping it in their hands. One of his famous quotes is that “The windmill gives you society with the Feudal Lord: the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.” No doubt had he lived long enough, he’d have said “The car assembly line gives you society with the multinational corporate board, the internet society with the national security state.” And just as he had then, he’d have a legitimate point.

So let me ask another question: Do we shape the technology, or does the technology shape us?

According to Marx, the answer is obvious. Technology shapes us, and since technology is always evolving, we are always evolving with it, and there is therefore no fixed human nature or human individuality. Obviously, the worldview of people who control technology is different than the people who are enslaved by it, so, once again, his point is legitimate. And in this sense, he is the very opposite of Hegel, whom we’ll talk about much more in later classes. To put it very simplistically: Hegel believed that we humans shape the material world through our false perception of eternal world, to which we are arriving at points ever closer to truly seeing by means of a process he calls the ‘dialectic.’ The dialectic is a very jargony word, but it’s an important one. It means that every subject, every truth, every thought and action, every assertion or ‘thesis’, has a shadow self, an opposite truth or thought or possibility, a doubting opposite which we called an ‘antithesis,’ when we combine the two, a process called ‘synthesis’ we arrive at a place closer to the true reality. The most famous example Hegel gives is that pure life or ‘being’, is almost indistinguishable from death, ‘nothing’. We are living and accumulating the experiences of our lives at every moment of it, and yet at the same time we are dying by the very fact that we are alive. And because every one of us is both life and death, pure being and pure nothingness, we are a synthesis of the two  - ‘becoming.’

So here’s another question: Can people name examples of the dialectic in Politics?

How about Science?

Or the Arts?

Or personal lives?

Marx also believes in the dialectic, but whereas Hegel sees the development of man as an internal process at which our perceptions always get closer to the truth, Marx sees the development of man as completely external - a material need brought on by technological innovation, and therefore we are always at war with one another so that our material needs are provided for. Marx refers to these various groups of people at war with one another as ‘classes.’ Each class is banded together by mutual interest - the acquisition of an object that will best provide them with greater satisfaction.But since greater satisfaction is often obtained at the expense of other people, there is always a class of people who are subjugated by those people who are in a position to seize control of the technology which shapes us (or what Marx calls the “Means of Production”), and whose material needs are therefore met far less often. When you view the world through that prism, the entire story of humanity can, and probably should, be seen as the story of one class to justify their power and labor extortion from lower classes so that this ‘ruling class’ can live lives of greater satisfaction. In order to do this, their subjects are required to subsist on just enough to keep them alive and productive - a process which Marx calls “surplus value.” And from this process is the need for “capital” formed, a term which in Marx’s case is mostly utilized as a less specific way of saying ‘money,' but can also include 'goods', and 'favors.'

New question: If 'surplus value' is a true concept, what are the surplus value items which we give to the working class in our country?

Now here’s where the dialectic comes in: Since the Ruling Class must employ ever-new technologies to keep their hold on the Means of Production, they must give their subjects ever-new technologies to master, and the subjects acquire ever greater abilities, which eventually give them the ability to overthrow their masters, and these rebels then become the masters themselves - thereby creating a new level of history which then creates its own culture and laws and philosophies and customs and social structures for its particular era - structures from which it is impossible to extricate one’s self to see past. Marx believes that it’s impossible to see past the social structures of our era to the truth. Nevertheless, people insist on seeing the truths of their era as universal. This is a process which Marx calls ‘alienation.’ According to Marx’s process of alienation, what we see as universal truth is nothing more than the justification given by a higher class to oppress a lower class. Everything - money, law, institutions, morality itself, even scientific and mathematical discovery (though not math and science themselves), everything believed in by everyone from the richest man to the poorest - is just the institutional means of keeping the ruling class in authority. The ruling class not only controls the means of production, the ruling class controls thought itself, and every life within this social structure becomes its own kind of prison, in which we completely lose sight of life’s natural, biological balance. Even the pattern of thought which each person holds (which Marx calls ‘ideology’) their values and beliefs, is determined by their place in the economic firmament (which Marx calls ‘superstructure’).

A different question: What are examples of allegedly universal truths that when you scrutinize them seem self-serving to us as privileged people attending a self-education class on a Sunday afternoon?

This is Marx’s vision of the dialectic. To Marx, our lives exist in history’s whirlpool, a spiral in which one class is constantly throwing over another. It’s a process which only ends when the lowest of all classes, the “Proletariat,” which possesses nothing and is treated as a commodity, rises up successfully against their oppressors that history will reach its logical end - both an end in the sense of time and an end in a sense of logical purpose. When the proletariat finally rises up, there will be no class left to oppress, and humankind will be free and equal, with no meaningful differences from person to person, and there will no longer be need for class war. Institutions which were once used by one class to oppress another will now be used purely for mankind’s benefit.

So here’s another question: What are the potential pratfalls of this particular worldview? (wait for someone to bring up dogmatic similarities to religion)

Here’s a quote from a great thinker from the second half of the twentieth century named George Steiner:

(call on reader)

“The political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts, more or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent, to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology… The decay of a comprehensive Christian doctrine… had left blank essential perceptions of social justice, of the meaning of human history, of the relations between mind and body, of the place of knowledge in our moral conduct. It is to these issues… that the great anti-theologies, the meta-religions, of the 19th and 20th centuries address themselves… The body of thought [possessed by these new mythologies] must make a claim of totality … It must affirm that the analysis which it puts forward of the human condition, of man’s history, of the meaning of your and my life, of our further expectations, is a total analysis. A mythology in this sense is a complete picture of Man in the World… It invites, if the mythology is an honest and serious one, disproof or falsification. A total system, a total explanation, falls down when and where a substantive exception, a really powerful counter-example, can be produced. It is no use trying to patch up a little corner here, or adding a bit of glue or string there. The construct collapses unless it is a whole… A mythology will have certain very easily recognizable forms of beginning and development. There will have been a moment of crucial revelation, or diagnostic insight, from which the entire system springs. This moment in the history of the founding prophetic vision will be preserved in a series of canonic texts… There will be an original group of disciples who are in immediate contact with the Master, with the Founder’s genius. Soon, some of these disciples will break away into heresy. They will produce rival mythologies,... the Orthodox in the great movement will hate such heretics, will pursue them, with an enmity far more violent than that which they bend on the unbeliever… A true mythology will develop its own language, its own characteristic idiom, its own set of emblematic images - flags, metaphors, dramatic scenarios - it will breed its own body of myth. It pictures the world in terms of cardinal gestures… The major mythologies constructed in the West since the early 19th century are not only attempts to fill the emptiness left by the decay of Christian theology and Christian dogma, they are themselves a kind of substitute theology. They are systems of belief and of argument, which may be savagely anti-religious, which may postulate a world without God, which may deny afterlife, but whose structure, whose aspirations, whose claims on the fidelity of the believer, are profoundly religious in strategy and effect.”

George Steiner - Nostalgia for the Absolute

So another question: If Steiner is correct, what are examples of these new mythologies?

Listen to the rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto. The scholarly Marx wrote very dense, difficult prose, but Marx the agitator had a gift for rhetoric that sounds as though it comes from the Old Testament prophets. Listen to this passage from the beginning of the Communist manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a

word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an

uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary

reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Anyone who has tried to read Das Kapital will tell you, it’s an incredibly boring book. It is of interest to scholars, but it is not the Marx who inspired the masses, and if the masses were not inspired, Marx wouldn’t be of interest to most scholars either. The Marx that matters is in his public pamphlets, and obviously none moreso than The Communist Manifesto. Marx seeks to create a sense of two opposing forces, and he does so by hammering home every other word with its opposite. “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guilt-master and journeyman, bourgeosie and proletariat, oppressor and slave.” Anyone who knows their Bible can’t read this passage and not think of Isaiah 5:20:

“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

Or think of his famous line: “from each according to their ability to each according to his need.” Who that knows The Bible can hear that line and not think of Genesis 1:25: - “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.”

Marx was the grandson of an eminent Rabbi, and there was simply no way he didn’t know those passages. Marxism inflamed the masses not because of its attempts at a scientific explanation, but because it was so anti-scientific. In a world in which the existence of God could finally be scientifically questioned, Marx provided one of religions first great substitutes. You could replace the perfect celestial kingdom with a perfect Kingdom on earth.

Another question: Do you believe that Marx’s vision is antithetical to human nature?

Marx’s vision is religious vision because empirical evidence is ultimately rather irrelevant to it. But let’s also be fair as we can. If Marx is ultimately a religious figure, then so are most pre-20th century philosophers, and no one moreso than Plato, the foundation on which Western Philosophy is built. Plato’s vision of the Republic is a vision of an ideal world supported by no evidence and requires the state to completely separate children from their parents, for its citizens to completely abstain from music, and have complete control over people’s education, their physical activity and their diet. According to Plato, a republican end involves a plethora of the most authoritarian means. But Plato’s belief in the Republic as the best government was in some senses proven by the last 250 years, in which a plurality of the world’s population lived longer and in much better conditions than ever before at a time when many governments gradually switched from autocracy to some form of republicanism. The Republic is not an ideal form of government, it’s might not even be a good one. But most people would agree that it’s proven to work better than anything yet tried. It took nearly twenty-five hundred years to for a type of republicanism to thrive that did not involve the most extreme forms of authoritarianism. Even if it seems unlikely from our vantage point, it is entirely possible that the far future will vindicate Marx just as we’ve vindicated Plato.