All Hail Jeeves!

 Back in 2016, I listened to the autobiography of Christopher Hitchens. Called Hitch-22 (a definite nod to Catch-22, by Joseph Heller) Hitchens discussed his life and the people, events and books (authors) who added to his own in a formative way. During the early part of his memoir, he mentions the school master who introduced him to the works of P.G. Wodehouse (aka Plum) and especially his affable yet adorably boneheaded character, Bertie Wooster. 

I decided to take this as a recommendation from one of my beloved modern writers (although Hitch died in 2012) and dig into the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves, his "gentleman's personal gentleman". 

I have never looked back. Along with Tolkien, Melville, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, King, Poe, Lovecraft, Doyle, Asimov and other regular re-reads, Wodehouse now makes the grade. Absolutely.

Jeeves, whose name appears in almost every title, is Bertie's masterful, brilliant, sagacious, rock-ribbed valet who prides himself on personal equanimity, knowledge of literature and poetry and of course exquisite practical taste as regards a young gentleman's evening wear. Jeeves is essentially omnipotent and Bertie swears by his advice and council, though quite often they butt heads on elements of Bertie's poor fashion sense or taste in musical instruments.

Bertram "Bertie" Wooster is a young gentleman of the aristocracy (his uncle is a lord) with plenty of income and absolutely nothing to do. He spends his time gathering with school chums at the Drones, his club, and getting into and out of adventures with said chums and a whole bevy of young females all of whom, for one reason or another, set their sites on Bertie for marriage. He is forever engaging and then disengaging with these women, though he's far from a letch and the stories are nothing if not wholesome. Bertie desires nothing at all so much as the freedom to conduct his affairs, such as they are, as a bachelor. Other people cause Bertie no end of trouble and though he has the heart of a hero and is as chivalrous (in a good way) as a knight errant, as Jeeves might say, Bertie is "mentally negligible". 

All the stories are told from Bertie's first-person perspective and they resonate brilliantly with rollicking early 20th century jargon. Lots of 'pip pips' and 'what whats' and 'what hos', but don't let that deflect you. Bertie's humor is not to be missed, especially in his description of events, when, sometimes quite passionately put out by his school fellows or a tiff with Jeeves or a soppy female, he completely loses the point for a moment.

Between them, Bertie and Jeeves race around a kind of time donut. Nothing ever really changes or progresses and Bertie either refers back to other stories in the compendium or hints ahead at others yet to come. It's always the same era (despite when Plum was actually writing them (between 1915 and the mid 70s) and there are always points in time that readers of the stories and books can remember and look to.

There are other characters as well. Scads of them, actually. Along with Jeeves and the young goof, Bertie, there are Bertie's two elder aunts, Dahlia (the good one) and Agatha (the one who kills rats with her teeth and chews glass bottles for lunch) who are forever involving Bertie in schemes, plots, plans and chicanery. Most of the romantic catastrophes in Bertie's life come at the behest of Aunt Agatha, who believes that—in order for Bertie to settle down—he needs a woman to keep him. Aunt Dahlia, on the other hand, usually wants "the young fathead" to bring Jeeves to help her with some caper involving her publication "M'Lady's Boudoir" and clever ways of getting Uncle Tom to come across with the cash he loathes to part with to publish another edition.

Bertie's list of compeers is nearly endless, as are the goonish dolts that torture him. He is forever helping his hapless chums, like Lord Marmaduke "Chuffy" Chuffnel, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Percy Gorange, Augustus "Gussie" Fink-Nottle (also called "Spink Bottle" by Aunt Dahlia) Richard P. "Bingo" Little, Reginald "Kipper" Herring and the Rev. Harold "Stinker" Pinker, among many others, out of and sometimes into romantic entanglements.

The goons are less thick, but no less entertaining. Reginald Glossop, a nerve specialist, is forever giving Bertie the pip, as is Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup and the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn, from Bertie's boy's school, Malvern House, Bramley-on-Sea. These meatheads are always messing with our hero and add to the fun.

Jeeves, along with dispensing advice about what the well-dressed man is wearing (incidentally the title of one of Bertie's contributions to his Aunt Dahlia's aforementioned periodical) helps Bertie and his friends get out of trouble. He also makes a one-of-a-kind hangover cure (one of Jeeves’ restoratives) which produces the sensation ‘that one’s eyes have started from their parent spheres’. Usually, too, there is some dudgeon between Bertie and Jeeves brought on by Bertie's desire to wear something wildly inappropriate, like a red cummerbund or "fruity" purple socks. Occasionally, being a "pleasant light baritone" according to Jeeves, Bertie also runs afoul of his personal dictator by playing annoying instruments. The hauteur is brief, especially when Bertie learns that he is helpless at solving problems that Jeeves excels at.

Far from just silly stories, though, Wodehouse is perhaps one of those rare masters of the English language that we might easily and without hyperbole compare with Shakespeare. Far less commonly assigned for school reading, Plum's stories are no less audacious or powerfully composed. Much the way we might make the serious assertion that Prince was a modern-day Mozart by compositional standards, the same comparison is on the ticket for Wodehouse.

Like Shakespeare, Wodehouse's works are essentially English. Even the landscapes he describes are deeply and humorously English. Deverill Hall, Market Snodsbury, Chuffnel Regis, Totleigh Towers and Twing Hall, to name but a few. The language, the setting, the characters are all built from the clay of Wodehouse's peerless ability to capture Englishness. Perhaps the great marvel of this master is that he wrote much of his life's work while living in exile in America.

There are 11 Jeeves novels and 35 short stories in the Jeeves series and though one can progress linearly through the books, as I mentioned before, it doesn't matter. They will be funny regardless.

However, to truly understand and appreciate the novels, it requires a sharp mind when it comes to Englishness. Though I am a dyed-in-the-wool anglophile, these stories do not trip lightly from the page. Like with reading Shakespeare (a practice which is pedagogically dubious at best) there is so much lost in translation with Wodehouse's works. They need to be performed.

Right away, I am an excellent candidate for this, because, as must be well-known by now, I do a lot of my reading via audio books. The reader of these particular stories, then, must be good enough to capture the nuance, the cadences, the brilliance of Bertie's wonderful words.

Hitch, that is, Christopher Hitchens, agreed and preferred for this task the vocal stylings of Martin Jarvis. I'll admit, Mr. Jarvis has a decent rendering. Simon Prebble, too, does a decent job as does Ian Richardson. However each of these fellows pales by comparison with the late great Jonathan Cecil. Cecil's Bertie is bright, chipper, goofy. His Jeeves has a deep basso-profundo. Each character, from Aunt Dahlia to her French cook, Anatole, "God's gift to the gastric juices" is perfect and perfectly hilarious.

None of this means anything, of course, if you don't actually give these books a chance. They are truly laugh-out-loud stories and are worthy of the time spent listening. Whether Bertie is taking odds on handicapped sermon lengths for a bet with his dastardly cousins, Claude and Eustace, or stealing an 18th Century cow creamer for "Sir Thomas Portarlington Travers (Uncle Tom)" or avoiding the marital noose with Stephanie Bing or Madeline Bassett, nothing can make your day quite as much as delving into the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves.

But Hitch and I disagree, at least in part on one aspect of this. He (Hitch) ascribed the genius of Wodehouse as ultimately American but with a backward glance at the country that spurned him. Hitch said that Plum was mocking Englishness rather than reveling in it. Perhaps. It is possible. Like Hitch, who also came to love America as his forever home, Wodehouse never got over England. Not the people or the politics, but certainly the language. To me, a "lesser fan" by the Hitchens standard I guess, no one captures Englishness like Wodehouse. And though I tremble to argue with the man who introduced me and countless others to Bertie and Jeeves, Englishness is the point of these books.

If you read or listen to a Jeeves story, please share your thoughts below!

Is AI the Enemy? Maybe...

 Is AI the Enemy? Maybe.

If you can make it through one day without hearing the term AI, you're either living in a monastery or in prison. Modern commentators are considering that we are on the cusp of an AI "singularity", when artificial intelligence will become either sentient or at least powerful enough to challenge our ability to maintain control of the established order. With all the news regarding development of new AI platforms, it seems we might be close to this reality. Especially as, unlike other apparently important news info, the topic of artificial intelligence has real staying power in the news cycle.

I don't know if we're really on the brink of a new AI era of supremacy. History is hard to measure in the moment. However, two obvious concessions have to be made. First, AI is definitely disrupting our society (see the SAG-AFTRA strikes, where AI is quite a significant chunk of the ideological divide between movie studios and writers and actors and other movie and TV production workers). Second, AI and its apparent threat to humanity isn't remotely a new idea.

This first time I remember hearing about artificial intelligence was in 1984. In that year, a cyborg hunter from the future (in the shape of Arnold Schwarzenegger) time traveled back to downtown Los Angeles to kill the mother of the as yet unborn rebel leader who would destroy the machine-led power structure, called Skynet, in the future. That rebellion also sends back a human soldier who winds up inadvertently fathering the rebel leader. Anyone who is up on their American cinematic history will recognize that storyline. It's just a movie, folks. Terminator woke people up to the idea of a military program taking over the world, but even then, it wasn't a new idea. There was also HAL9000, from 2001, A Space Odyssey; and the computer from WarGames (shall we play a game?) and the robot servants from Isaac Asimov’s classic “I, Robot” novel.

Back then, the idea of machines taking over the world was far-fetched (albeit intensely entertaining) science fiction. No one really believed that machines would one day be a viable system able to take control of nuclear codes and launch all the warheads. Computers did help us launch rockets and make it to the moon, but those giant IBM machines couldn’t be run without humans to program them. Even as those computers became smaller and more efficient (see Moore’s Law) and required fewer people to run and program them, we didn’t consider that AI could displace the workforce, challenging the daily lives of working people in all professional arenas. No one really thought about the economic side of the discussion at all. In sci-fi, what really gets our attention is when there are aspects of war onscreen. Computer programs firing missiles at our enemies is exciting, at least for entertainment purposes. Class and wages, though, are—at least in terms of cinematic reality—rather dull for the silver screen.

And yet, humanity stands at a crossroad. More than at any other time, humans are living and earning at an incredible wage disparity. Workers in some places (see right-to-work states) are legally (for now) prevented from organizing in order to dispute their pay and benefits. CEOs of some companies are making more money than ever before, hundreds of percent more than their employees. The billionaire "class” have proven that the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts left keys to their monopolizing kingdoms, as they become the nouveau riche aristocracy in our country. Except in this current era, the trains and ships are now tech globalization, chip production and, of course, social media and AI.

Today's wages have barely kept up with the staggering inflation. In the last few years alone, more and more people are unable to afford even the most meager amenities that were once considered absolute necessities during our previous Golden Age of post World War II glory. With this financial disparity comes massive unrest, both civil and political. Something has to give, right? It already has.

The robot workforce that we have been hearing about is at hand now, but automation is not a new concept. Robots and computers have been driving industry for decades, but with smarter, more intuitive programs, the future is literally right now. These robots (from the Czech word for slave) can do the work of writers, of actors, of laborers, possibly of politicians, of teachers, maybe even of librarians. Right now, at the speed with which some companies are rolling out new AI features (looking at you, Chat GPT and Google Bard) it is almost impossible to gauge how long, let alone when artificial intelligence will become self-sustaining, but we can guess that in the next decade, it will take more jobs from many of us in the meantime.

Even this job theft isn't totally new. Failed presidential candidates and supporters for mechanization of labor have been warning for some time now that the robots are coming. The somewhat naïve response to this warning was that it might be imminent, but it hasn’t started yet. Based on their doom saying descriptions, within a few decades, robots would completely take over menial tasks in every corner of the service and machinery industries, including food prep, farming, construction, shipping and transportation. True perhaps, but it would be too slow to actually disrupt American economics except in the long term. There would be time to prepare.

Even as detractors waved their hands dismissively at the idea of robot overlords, they failed to consider a very solid truth: a robot will mop and clean restrooms for free. From there, it's only a matter of time before electronic workers are selling cars, doing your taxes, planning your estate, watering your garden and walking your pooches. It's not in the distant future. It is happening right now. The infrastructure is in place. The robots have already assumed the tasks. The take-over is happening now.

The problem with this way of describing things is that we tend to think of this reality in sci-fi terms. We imagine (as cinema has taught us) armies of robots piling to work in our stead with no warning. But this isn’t how the takeover is happening. First of all, this new workforce doesn’t look like the robots we’re familiar with from sci-fi books and movies. They aren’t metal humans with computer brains wandering around beeping and booping incoherently. We already use this workforce every day and we do so without even realizing it. If you don't believe me, go to your local grocery market or big box store. Those self-checkout machines require one employee to watch over and help with several stations. Where each cash register had one cashier and likely an entire staff to cover them over a work day just a few years ago, now only a handful of cashiers are available to actually check you out if you still want human interaction.

In this brave new world, the revenue gained from computerized unpaid workers, we assume, goes right to the bottom line. The cost to turn on and run a self-checkout station is far less, overall, than for one employee. Machines are cheaper, they don't require insurance. They don't call in sick. They don't go on vacations, have babies, get diseases or need to be reprimanded or fired for insubordination. They don't get hurt on the job or retire. Businesses can stop contributing to 401-Ks or accident protection and legal formalities. There’s no need for a pesky work schedule because the workforce is there all day, every day. Machines don’t unionize, go on strike or need to go to the bathroom. They are the ideal replacement to humans who are, if we take the business worldview, deeply annoying as employees.

If the local grocery market doesn’t have to post jobs for cashiers, it can actually work to hire more skilled, educated laborers for more complex tasks, even open up new stores and expand franchise markets. When all the cashiers have been replaced, (a contingency that is even now happening) what happens to the workers?

Those who need jobs must now have much more specialized skills and therefore more training and schooling in order to take over other positions (many new jobs in programming and machine maintenance are popping up). That training costs money and without jobs to earn those wages, or without reasonable wages to even survive, those workers are essentially stuck. 

Economics professors, in response to this unpleasant future, suggested that, in order for people to survive in an automated world, they would require a universal basic income (UBI). UBI would come from money culled from the taxes paid by the fantastically wealthy. Feasibly, it would be given to people as wages not earned, but deserved. In other words, a handout. If there are no jobs, but you still need to buy food and shelter, where does that money come from if not a government subsidy in this new automated world?

The world's billionaires all gasped and clenched in unison when that term arose. The wide and thick capitalist vein in American culture cannot and maybe will not ever be able to reconcile a person getting money without doing a job to earn it (unless they're a billionaire Bond Villain). Even people who benefit from disability and Medicare checks in America tend to frown at ‘handouts’. That’s a problem for another essay. The collective cry of agony from the monied interests in control of this country's financial destinies fainted in unison at this suggestion of subsidizing former workers replaced by artificial intelligence systems. “How are we going to afford that”, ask the insanely wealthy people who don’t like to pay their taxes as they squeamishly push away the smelling salts.

Nevertheless, it’s a really good question. With more efficient mechanized workforces doing the hard labor, revenue will increase. Higher revenue means more money for the top earners. More money (at least right now) for top earners, means more deregulation to keep politics working as a smooth pump generating legislation meant to solidify the power structures of big tech corporations. If cash means that corporations can vote and those companies keep putting their pet politicians in power, it won't be long before laborers and unskilled workers form a dystopian proletariat, wandering around hopelessly, unable to work, unable to get educations in order to get better jobs, unable to fulfill any kind of meaning to their lives. Then, it is only required that the Proles be kept docile enough with booze and entertainment so they don’t rebel. This reeks of Orwell’s Airstrip One.

So what happens to the rest of us? A lowly machinist, truck driver, fast-food burger jockey—even a gas station attendant—can stay home. Their job is being done by a machine. Will the American people yank their country’s destiny back from the precipice of corporate fascism in time to work out a system for UBI to protect and educate and help laborers fulfill their own personal destinies? It’s not even a question that AI can answer. At least not yet.

The Vale Of Woe: Explaining Marx's Opium Quote for Modern Times

One of the most commonly misunderstood and misquoted bits of philosophy in the modern age is Karl Marx's "religion is the opium of the people". 

Used as a way to explain the sterile atheism of the Stalinist regime by modern religious pundits, who missed that Stalin had set himself and Lenin up as gods—something made clear by the iconography of that era, in place of the icons of the Eastern Orthodox church of Tsar Nicholas. What these purblind pundits often fail to point out is that Marx wasn't talking about Stalin (Marx [1815-1883] died well before Stalin ever took power) but he was addressing the problem of religion as a negatively addictive social conundrum that impaired people’s ability to find true freedom within their societies.

In his introduction to his “Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right”, in which Hegel suggests that there are three concentric spheres of social life, Marx discusses several points that Hegel misses in his attempt to define social forces in any given society, including and especially the influence of religious belief on people's sense of reality. Added to his overall criticism, Marx suggests that dispelling the illusions of religious belief can only increase the good for the individual.

The full quote is actually quite literate, but taken out of context, it can still be puzzling to modern readers. Below, I've added my own interpretations to more clearly explain Marx's meaning. The translation from German is uncredited, but based on Christopher Hitchens' translation from "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything". 2007

"Religious distress is, at the same time, the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”

People feel that religion helps them cope in a situation that they also feel is hopeless; The distress of not feeling God’s presence in our lives, or at the suffering we experience even though God cares is actually distress we might feel without the religious coloring to these situations. Religious connotations give these distresses a sense of purpose for their suffering and is therefore addictive. Even though people may know that religion is ultimately man-made and made up, they opt for it, because it eases their pain, but, like with opium, becomes addictive with diminishing returns.

 

"The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the people, is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its [life's] condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions [religion].” 

Life is hard and we are to accept that, because once we embrace that life is cruel and time is short, we will have a much better appreciation of the time we do have and the many good things life has to offer, and then we won't postpone it until some ludicrous afterlife or delude ourselves with other religious consolations causing us to miss things in the moment.

"The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of the vale of woe [life and its trials, the reverence for suffering fostered by religion], the halo of which is religion [suffer in this life, celebrate in heaven, etc].” 

Criticism of religion's lies and addictive qualities is necessary to break people and ourselves from these unhappy mendacities, so that we see both the meaninglessness of thinking that suffering is good or necessary (though it is part of life), and that religion is not the actual solution.

"Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers [lies and false consolations] from the chain [of religious oppression], not so that man will wear the chain without any fantasy or consolation but so that he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower."

By flowers, here, Marx is saying that the chain of religious oppression has many little fake flowers (salvation, afterlife, forgiveness of sin, etc.) on it. People value these in favor of things of real value (time with loved ones, joy in our day, hope, freedom, etc.) He is saying he doesn't want people to just lose all appreciation for life's goodness (as religion defines it) and continue to hope for the afterlife. He wants us to lose the chain of religious belief and its fake flowers and learn to appreciate the actual true gifts that life offers us as we live ["cull (cut, pluck) the living flower"]. Live in the moment with appreciation for all we have, knowing that we no longer have illusions about our mortality or the afterlife.

Marx's meaning is clear. What Hegel fails to account for is that we are natural self-deluders. It is a perhaps ancient trick by which we can deal with life’s unpleasantness in the moment. Religion is the largest delusion that we deal with, overarching the other, more subjective day-to-day delusions. Marx suggests that, by eliminating the question of religious belief from Hegel's social philosophy, while also acknowledging religion's power over the entire social structure, Hegel's three concentric structures (abstract right [center], morality [middle sphere] and ethical life [overarching sphere]) actually work better, fit better and make more sense. But Marx also, and I believe knowingly, suggests that what we actually discover if we remove religion from the framework of Hegel's philosophy (but also the structure of our social realities, today) that we actually come off better avoiding the tendency for self-delusion especially as it tends to take on a religious quality. Marx was the son of a rabbinical line. In this, he, like Spinoza before him, took a clear stand against the legalism found in Judaism, but also against the many Christian growths in Germany and Europe in his life.

Marx gets a bad rap as the "father of communism" and for—as H.L. Mencken put it,”Hate the one who is better off than you are,” the apparent inability to reconcile his love for the worker and his loathing of the proletariat, generally—but he was actually a proponent of rational stoicism and a prophet of the failures of universal capitalism (as they show themselves, today). Any mention of Marx is automatically dismissed as a communist sensitivity or fascination with Stalin or "the reds''. This, like the blinkered misquotes about the opiate of the people mentioned above, betrays the willful ignorance about the good things Marx said and discredits him and his works without acknowledging their value.

No one thinks that Stalinism is a good political or social solution. Communism, though a fascinating idea on paper, fails miserably to cure society of the infections of greed and complacency, power and oppression, bigotry and repression. It set up a system of universal equality (a virtuous, if naïve position) and was immediately taken over by a power-hungry goon squad. Likewise, no one thinks that Nazism or any of the other fascist regimes were a good idea, either (until recently, I mean, when the far right in America became a meme of Nazi racism and lunacy). The Nazis were huge anti-communists and most far-right political movements echo this distaste enough that one can tell whether or not a political group is headed toward fascism simply by how much it professes to hate Communism. Ask any far-right goon today about Marx, and you’ll know by the ferocity of their response where they stand on fascism, even if they won’t call it that.

For modern intellectuals to discount Marx is to find a pearl discarded through pure ignorance and prejudice. The capitalist dystopia of Marx’s nightmares have become reality. Corporate influence in politics (one of the defining features of fascism) has become a reality and the economic disparities in America are part and parcel of both financial and religious oppression.  Obviously, religious ideology and its followers do not and cannot appreciate any kind of thinking that challenges their beliefs, but so are the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of intellectual slavery hammered closed. The ill effects that religious belief have foisted upon American life, most especially the move rightward under so-called Christian Nationalism, cannot be ignored. The good news is that more and more people are breaking away from religion than ever before, which can only be as a result of the connection to other people outside small social enclaves afforded by the Internet and social media.

Marx's theory about workers rights, social dysfunction, moral and ethical imbecility, the illnesses within the political systems and the mill stone-like harness of religious guilt and coercion affixed to the neck of our society are all worth discussion and need criticism. If we want true freedom, we have to be willing to criticize even those most apparently necessary and deeply ingrained prejudices we have. To put words in Marx’s mouth, the rest is a kind of social addiction where we wind up making what we believe part of our personalities, to the detriment of our societies and our freedom.

Ultimately, Marx's position is that of critical application of tough questions meant to remove our addiction to self-delusion. Anyone who is actually trying to use their critical faculties would gladly take the proffered hand of this venerable thinker and pull free of the quicksand of willful ignorance and leave the Vale of Woe. It’s time we shook off the chains and cut the flowers of today with no illusions. Marx, in his wisdom and prophetic thinking, gave us the key.