The Un-Civil War

A Quaker diary tells a hair raising tale ...

Thanks to the Internet Archive I recently discovered a remarkable historical document. It's called The Record of a Quaker Conscience, and it consists of the diary of one Cyrus Pringle who appealed to the government for the status of Conscientious Objector during the US Civil War. (To find it, just do a search on the archive's website.)

The small book was published by MacMillan in 1918 and comes with an introduction by Rufus Jones, a prominent Quaker historian and theologian of that era. With no other preamble the journal begins with the receipt of the author's draft notice -- an event familiar to any of us who grew up prior to the end of the Vietnam War. Unwilling to buy his way out by paying someone to take his place (which was perfectly legal at the time), Pringle and some of his friends dutifully reported and immediately made their claim for exemption due to their religious beliefs, as provided by law.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried it (as I did myself back in 1968) that the exemption was not granted. Regardless of their community support, and the long-standing Quaker opposition to war in any form, Pringle and his few friends were declared to be in the army and were hustled off with the latest batch of recruits.

Apparently back then there was no oath given at the time of induction, so there was no such moment for anyone to refuse. In later years this was the opportunity for anyone who objected to opt for a trial and a prison sentence instead, which at least made their status clear. But in those days they were simply bundled along on the train with everyone else.

At every turn, whenever they came under the jurisdiction of a new officer, they would inform him of their position. But time and again their problem was referred up the line to higher officers, or kicked back down to non-coms. No one seemed willing to make a decision.

Meanwhile, their civilian clothes were taken from them so that they had to put on uniforms. When they refused to accept the rifles that were issued to them, the guns were strapped to their backs anyway. Finally they ended up in a series of prison camps where they often suffered severe mistreatment.

By "mistreatment," I mean for example that Pringle was stripped of his shirt and staked to the ground outdoors in the sun for hours on end. He and the others were also threatened with execution, sometimes at the point of a gun. But I suppose that nowadays, in this era of "extraordinary rendition" and "waterboarding," this should not give us cause for alarm.

Finally they were offered substitute service in a military hospital. But when they saw that their presence there released others to go to the front lines, they felt that their beliefs also compelled them to refuse this compromise, so it was back to prison again.

At length Pringle and his friends were freed to return home by the intervention of President Lincoln himself. Grateful and moved by his long correspondence with some other Quakers, Lincoln, when he learned of their plight, immediately instructed his war secretary, "It is my urgent wish that these Friends be released."

So the story has a happy end. We can only wonder how many others suffered their fate in silence, without the benefit of the President's aid. And how many more will have to endure the same struggle now, and in the future.

[For more, refer to my story about contemporary Conscientious Objector Camilo Mejia. I will have another example from World War II in time for Veterans Day.]

The Very Long Now

Instead of planning ahead, how about planning WAY ahead?

In this age of instant gratification it is unusual for any of us to plan very far into the future. Politicians are concerned only for the date of the next election. The main concern of most businesses is the next stockholders meeting and the quarterly.conference call with Wall Street. Gas and oil companies actually brag about having plenty of product to supply us "for the next 60 years," as if that is forever. And as individuals we may start saving some money toward retirement, even give some thought to the college educations of our children and grandchildren, but beyond that all is lost in the mist.

The pace of change may be partly to blame for this situation. At the rate we're going, even trying to imagine what the world will be like a hundred years in the future makes it seem impossible to plan for it. Just take a look backwards. How could the people of 1908 have planned for the advent of nuclear diplomacy, communications satellites, the manipulation of the electorate through television and email, the moral issues of human cloning, or any one of a thousand other modern problems? So how can we possibly know what will face us in 2108, let alone 3108?

It might seem hopeless, but there is one organization that is doing what it can to promote long range planning --  really long range. The Long Now Foundation (beautifully named by musician Brian Eno) aims to construct a Ten Thousand Year Clock, a mechanical device built to last and to keep accurate time for a period of 10,000 years. The clock will chime every 1,000 years as the millennium turns. They built a prototype in time for it to bong twice for the year 2000. Now we have only 992 years to complete the real thing and keep it running till the next time. Better get started right away!

Just to put this in perspective, we are talking about looking ahead as far as we can look back in the history of human civilization, to the first shards of pottery created by our ancestors. The general idea is that if we want to last for another ten thousand years we had better start planning on it. We may not know what the long term future will look like, but we do know that it will be of our own devising. So whatever we consider doing we will have to start thinking about the long range consequences.

The Ten Thousand Year Clock, or The Clock of the Long Now,  is both a monumental reminder of this concept and also an exercise in it. Just the act of planning a project on this scale will be a new benchmark in human activity. What else compares with it?

No doubt the medieval constructors of cathedrals intended them to last forever, or at least until the Second Coming, but they are already showing their age after less than a single millennium, and in spite of predictions the apocalypse still seems a long way off. The pyramids of ancient Egypt have survived for half of the ten millennium period (or even longer according to one theory), but they are just inanimate stone.

Just imagine what it will take to keep a clock running for that amount of time. Remember that on this scale empires will rise and fall, species will evolve, languages will die, humans may be replaced by artificial or genetically engineered substitutes, and space colonization may leave the whole Earth in a dusty backwater like some abandoned Sumerian city.

Author Neal Stephenson has written a new novel, Anathem, based on the premise of "millennium clocks" in which he speculates about what kind of cultural institution may have to be created just to maintain such timepieces as the centuries toll by. He imagines a kind of monastic order, not unlike the cloistered intellectuals of Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, who are insulated from the vagaries of the civilization outside their walled enclaves. In these protected bubbles they carry on a ritualized daily routine, limiting themselves to the timeless technologies of the distant past.

Of course the point of all this is that we need to learn how to plan our long term survival as a species. It may seem an empty exercise just to run a mechanical clock for so long, but it will remind us about all the other things that need long term solutions, like food, drinkable water, raw materials, biodiversity, disease control -- not to mention the man-made problems of social stability, economic viability, and the prevention of annihilating warfare. Simply building the clock is a commitment to the future. By doing so we will be accepting the responsibility of solving whatever problems may arise.

Even if we stay on this single planet forever we will still have to find a sustainable way to live. And we will have to pay enough attention to what's happening in the space around us to prevent being extinguished by collision with a stray meteor someday.

If we fulfill the destiny that many of us have on our minds and begin to move onto worlds around other suns, just the sheer distances involved will require us to learn how to think in centuries as we do now in years. How will we feel as we wave goodbye to a ship full of colonists who may not reach their destination for a thousand years? Or when the mere reply to a radio message takes many decades?

Science fiction buffs imagine there will be solutions that will make travel much quicker and communications as instant as we are accustomed to here on Earth. But even so, the reality of the vast space just in our own galaxy is likely to humble us with what is possible. Any future civilization that hopes to span the stars will confront challenges on a scale never before imagined.

One other idea the Long Now Foundation promotes is the addition of another digit to our counting of the years. Just as we recently started writing "01/01/2008" instead of the ambiguous "01/01/08," they suggest we start calling it "January 1, 02008." After all, it's only another eight millennia until the big odometer will roll over from 09999 to 10000. We'll need some time to get used to the idea.

[For more technical details on the Clock of the Long Now, see the exhibit page for the prototype which is now at the London Science Museum.]

The Rest of Tchaikovsky

What we love the most can get in our way ...

Thanks to eMusic I've embarked on another music collecting binge over the past year, and it's taught me a lesson: Being stuck on what you like can be the biggest obstacle to finding something new to enjoy.

In collecting jazz I find myself grabbing more and more of the people I like best rather than searching out those I haven't explored yet. So I've ended up with the complete catalog of Ben Webster, for example, yet little or nothing by the likes of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. I have almost every album by Eric Alexander (who I discovered in a basement club in New York a few years ago), but almost nothing by others of the new crop of talented current artists -- not even Wynton Marsalis, who is only represented in my collection by two of his classical recordings.

Slowly it dawned on me that I had similar gaps even in my classical collection, where vast amounts of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart allow scant space for all the rest. One day I realized I was totally ignorant of the 15 symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich, even though I treasure his collection of 24 preludes and fugues in every key (the only time anyone has done that since J.S. Bach).

Similarly, I was well acquainted with Schubert's "unfinished" Eighth Symphony, along with his Ninth (because it was recorded on the same album by Leonard Bernstein), yet I could tell you nothing about the rest of them. And as a big fan of Tchaikovsky's last three symphonies, how was it possible to be unaware of the other three?

This came as a shock to someone who had grown up around the feet of two classical pianists (my parents), one of whom had been to Julliard. As a child I thought nothing of going outside to play while whistling a Chopin nocturne, and took it for granted that Sunday afternoons had been intended for opera broadcasts on the radio. Admitting these gaping holes in my musical knowledge made me feel like a literature student who had written a paper on Hamlet once but had never heard of Othello or The Tempest.

Well, maybe that's going too far. The problem is more like having a familiarity with only the prominent tragedies of Shakespeare, while remaining in the dark about the lesser known histories. Or more to the point, like contenting yourself with the "best" Beethoven symphonies (3,5,6,7 and 9) but omitting the rest. I long ago worked my own way through the remaining Beethoven (1,2,4 and 8), but never got around to Schubert.

However, the problem could be solved simply enough. Immediately I started browsing through the eMusic catalog and adding lots of stuff to my Save For Later list. Soon I'd filled out the missing Schubert symphonies (not to mention his excellent Mass in A-flat) and moved on to those of Shostakovich. Speed bump! Nobody told me that Shostakovich was so tough! I had to put on the brakes when I found out how demanding he was on his listeners. I'll have to absorb them more slowly, like rich food.

But then I remembered Tchaikovsky. He was one of the first composers I discovered on my own, immediately after Gershwin. I had inherited my dad's LP of the Fifth Symphony, and went on to enjoy my own acquisitions of the Sixth and then the Fourth.

Each of these is wonderful in its own way. The Fifth is the most perfect in its classic elegance, rivaling the monumental quality of Brahms. The Sixth, or "Pathetique," is known for its slow and tremulous final movement, the get-out-your-handkerchiefs closing bow after the triumphant and trumpet-infested third movement.

The Fourth is even more of emotional roller coaster -- a lengthy first movement that seems to be all about ignoring your fate, then resisting it, and at last raging against it in an all-out childish tantrum with fists pumping and feet kicking the floor ... a second movement which is a mournful lullaby of respite ... a joyful third movement almost entirely in pizzicato on the strings ... then a finale of triumph over fate (remember that from the first movement?) with a conclusion that feels like white-water rafting down the Colorado River.

The notion that music can be "about" something emotional is an idea that first came of age with Beethoven, and turned into one of the core precepts of the Romantic school. But no one ever portrayed sheer emotion with the wild abandon of Tchaikovsky. He used to be criticized for "wearing his heart on his sleeve," which was an extreme euphemism for the way he erotically drove his crescendos to climax after climax. He seemed intent to push the orchestra to its limit, plumbing the depths of despair and reaching the heights of ecstasy, and never more so than in his greatest symphonies.

Leading up to those monsters of the orchestral repertoire are Tchaikovsky's three earlier attempts at symphonic form. But though I once heard a recording of the First, "Winter Daydreams," I didn't find it impressive enough to purchase back when "record" prices were such a large fraction of my income. And what I didn't own, I didn't listen to, and what I never listened to, I never learned to love. Over the years I came to know his piano and violin concertos, his ballet music, his overtures, the string serenade, but never the rest of the symphonies. So now at last the time had come.

The pleasure of this discovery was much the way the world would feel if a lost trove of Bach manuscripts turned up, or a missing late quartet by Beethoven. Even though the ignorance was of my own devising, the restoration of these "other" masterworks was no less a revelation.

First, they reminded me why Tchaikovsky was so accessible and satisfying to begin with. He had a gift for melodic invention uniquely his own, an apparently bottomless wellspring of tunes that were thoroughly Russian in character but universal in their appeal. Time and again while listening to these "new" works I found myself rocking in time to some lilting wordless song, or pounding along as the orchestra stampeded toward another cataclysm. You can't just sit there, you have to move.

I'm reminded of the story told by Oscar Levant, Gershwin's pianist friend, who once got out of a speeding ticket by explaining to the cop that he had been listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony on the radio. "You have to speed when you're listening to that," he said, as it it were obvious.

So now I'm beginning my acquaintance with these three new friends. Two of them have nicknames, "Winter Daydreams" and "the Little Russian," while the Third simply goes by its number. It's too early yet to know which will become favorites, but I'm already learning some of the landmarks of their inner landscapes.

The First comes on softly like the cold breath of air after a snowfall, an interestingly low-key debut. Each movement begins in mist, and there are some wonderful discordant horn parts that sound like winter. ... The Second attempts to be more grandiose, and largely succeeds. You can tell the composer is still gaining confidence in his use of the orchestra, but the results are frequently brilliant. I swear there is one passage that would be right at home in a modern opera by Phillip Glass -- as is often the case, great composers anticipate the future and help to bring it into being.... The Third is notable for having five movements instead of the traditional four, and they range from an introspective waltz to a stirring finale. The last movement even explores the fugal possibilities of its rousing theme.

Oops -- just noticed that Pyotr Illyitch also left us two suites for orchestra that I've never heard. Excuse me while I dive in to those.