David Bohm

After reading this article I tend to be pro David Bohm rather than con David Bohm:

http://www.gaia.dk/International/ExternalArticles/bohm-lifework.pdf

The universe is a verb. Nouns are just apparent. Makes sense to me.

(One can get the essense of his thought by just reading the pages three through five, starting at the heading "Holomovement and the Implicate Order" - subtitled "Thoughts about Thinking.")

Thoughts, anyone?

A belated comment: you have to separate out at least three things: David Bohm's "orthodox" contributions to physics, his attempt to come up with an alternative to the baffling modern interpretation of quantum mechanics, and his later philosophical views.

I can't comment on the first two, but the latter seem very New Agey: warm-making words that don't have any concrete meaning.

But ... I am sympathetic to the anything that attempts to analyze our language/mental concepts and how these may affect our view of reality. I think this has been wrestled with throughout the 20th Century, by philosophers and linguists, without much progress.

Would you recommend anything else on Bohm?

> 3

Well, I haven't read any of his books - I only know of him because he and his ideas are mentioned now and then in other physicists' s books written for laypeople.

The first two reader reviews of this book by Bohm pretty much lays out his major thoughts on the big issues:

http://www.amazon.com/Essential-David-Bohm-Lee-Nichol/dp/0415261740/ref=sr_1_1?i...

Thanks for this.

I personally think that what you might call experimental philosophical linguistics is an unexplored field. After an intriguing start by Whorf and Sapir in the first half of the 20th Century, it seems to have petered out. Bohm's throw-away line, "nouns are just frozen verbs" is one of those little flashes of insight that makes you want to say, "More, more!" I suppose the people engaged in "consciousness studies" are the closest set of researchers to what Bohm was interested in.

4> That reminds me of a book on linguistic evolution I recently read, except that actually most of our verbs evolve from nouns.

It also reminds me of The Incomplete Enchanter where the basic idea of traveling between worlds is based on something you might call experimental philosophical linguistics.

There was a fellow who was an anthropologist back in the fifties, who got interested in linguistics and thought, and designed an artificial language which he called Loglan. (If you're a SciFi addict, you may remember that Mannie programmed Mike in Loglan, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)

It was supposed to be speakable predicate calculus, where you could be absolutely unambiguous, if you wanted to be. And it had lots of other interesting featrues. But it never took off. I tried to persuade my first wife that, if we had children, we should raise them to speak Loglan exclusively, but she wouldn't buy it.

how remarkably sane of your wife.

I met Bohm when he came to my department to give a symposium. At this remove, mostly I remember him as extremely soft-spoken.

Probably worth mentioning that he was hounded out of the States in the witch-hunts of the '50s. Not only was he not allowed to work on the MAnhattan Project, but

... the calculations (of collisions of protons and deuterons) that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!"

I think his membership of the Young Communist League worked against him. Paranoid right-wing witchhunters thought people who loved the Soviet Union might give their espionage service information about the atomic bomb. Can you imagine such nonsense!!??

Well, Einstein was willing to go to bat for him. Oppie vouched for his work, but wasn't able to persuade Groves. Princeton fired him, and refused to rehire him even after he was found not guilty of contempt of HUAC - even after Albert F. Einstein put in a word. He never worked in his native land again.

Not hiring a leftie grad student for the Manhattan Project was one thing - but, given that he hadn't actually worked on the bomb - ruining the career of a young academic in witch hunt was probably a bit excessive.

Nowadays communists are more likely to love their own country than Russia. There was more naivety back then but even so I think it was true then. Communists want to change their country because they love it.

Bob is right keeping him away from security issues is sensible. Anything more is paranoid right-wing witchhunting. No different from the disgraceful treatment of say Paul Robeson.

Well, I happen to agree. If we excluded from intellectual life all the people who had Marxist sympathies in their youth, we would lose half our Nobel Prize winners, and the conservative magazine National Review would never have been founded. (Of course, not all will agree that both of those eventualities would have been equally bad.)

I don't know where Bohm stood, politically, in the late 40s. Was he like Oppenheimer -- by then, a pretty conventional liberal -- or was he still seeing the Soviet Union as the hope of mankind? Even if it was the latter, he should have been allowed to keep teaching, so long as he was kept away from anything militarily valuable to the Soviets.

Good Communists, by the way, do not "love their country". They understand, with Marx, that "the working men have no country", and their loyalty is to the working class, wherever it is, not to some accident of geography and a state which is the state of the class enemy.

If the working class has taken power somewhere, then of course they take that into account in their loyalty to states. No good Communist who had the chance to pass information about nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union in the 1940s would have passed it up.

Of course, by then, there were "Communists" who were recruited during the Popular Front turn, who probably did believe all that folk-song nonsense about "this land is our land", instead of understanding that was for the fur-coated ladies of Westchester County.

Tell me Doug when did you become the person to decide which Communists were good?

>12 Doug1943: where Bohm stood

No clear answer emerges from Infinite Potential. On the one hand, he seemed to still be pro-Soviet while in Brazil and Israel, even after the end of Stalin. On the other hand, by the early '60s he downplayed his association to a few months during the War, when Russia was an ally against the Nazis. There are also contradictions between what Oppenheimer said he told his students when they were called up by the HUAC and what others remembered.

13> sorry Doug cut that off a bit short, while most if not all communist ideologies pay lip service to internationalism. it hard to find a comuinist who does.

the communist bloc countries even under their comunist leaders were continually trying to break away from Russian control.

It is not idealism that allows china to influence North Korea but Realpolitik.

Simon: The reason I can pontificate with some confidence about what "good" Communists believed is that I know a fair amount about the history of Marxism, and of Bolshevism and the Comintern in particular. So, instead of "good", let me substitute something like "adhering to the ideas of Marxism, and of Leninism in particular."

What I said is not really controversial. Communists (the original Leninist brand anyway) have to operate within national frameworks, but they are supposed to be internationalists, whose ultimate aim is the abolition of national states.

Of course, this stance is quite difficult to maintain. The pressures on members of a state to be loyal to it, to be "patriotic", are immense, as Marxists discovered when World War I began and most of the supposedly-Marxist parties supported their own governments in the war.

Lenin was shocked to learn that the German Socialists had voted to support the war. (His stance was "revolutionary defeatism," working for the defeat of your "own" government. No "patriotism" there.)

The various Communist Parties which actually achieved state power on their own, as opposed to getting it with the help of the Red Army, tended to put their own national interests, as they saw it, first. But by then, it was pretty clear that this is what the Russian Communists were doing, too.

Those Communist Parties which were not in power, but still loyal to Moscow, used (after the Popular Front turn of 1935) the rhetoric of patriotism, but remained essentially Soviet border guards. This began to change after Kruschev's "secret speech" of 1956 and the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in that same year.

By the way, I don't see anything at all dishonorable in not being a "patriot" if your loyalty is to something that you consider more important and on a higher plane. "Patriotism" is too often a substitute for thought. Should a German in 1939 have been a "patriot"? A citizen of Stalin's Russia?

We can argue that when "patriotism" means unthinking loyalty to your own state, and to whomever happens to control it, then it's time to question it.

Communists who spied for Russia did not do it for money, but because they thought this was advancing world socialism, which would bring true democracy, peace, equality, and prosperity to all of the people of the world. They saw their "own" country as actually being controlled by a tiny minority, the capitalist class, and it was to these people, the exploiters, that they were being "disloyal", in the interests of being loyal to the masses.

People who begin shouting about "patriotism" are usually trying to pick your pocket.

Warm feelings towards "your own" are natural. But rational individuals have to make their judgments on more than tribal loyalties.

So I fault the people who spied for the Soviet Union on their political judgment -- they wanted to see the Soviet Union as the hope of humanity, and closed their eyes to the ugly reality -- but not on their lack of patriotism. If they had been right -- if the Soviet Union had been the world's first true democracy, and if the United States was simply a state controlled by the rapacious bourgeoisie, etc -- then what they did would have been right.

Well I must say it refreshing to find someone who think the ideal communist is good.

Meanwhile peoples everywhere resist the encroachment of their putative liberators.

The communist ideal was always a bit fuzzy. I think most Communists did not at all envision a world of human worker-ants, but something very different, and not far off what any thinking person would like to see for our species.

Their apologias for the Soviet Union, at least at first, were based in the understanding that the sort of society that would emerge in the future, on the basis of an enormous expansion in the forces of production, universal education, etc. would be very different from the society inherited by the world's first workers' state, where a decimated working class -- or the Party supposedly representing it -- had a fragile hold on power, suspended above a sea of hostile peasantry, and surrounded by hostile powers, some of which were far superior to it militarily.

They saw the restrictions on liberty in the USSR as unfortunate necessities, in the same league as the restrictions on civil liberties that existed in the US during the Civil War.

Later, Soviet lack of liberty was simply denied, overlooked, or made into a virtue. People like to have simple models of good and evil. Anyway, the USSR was a long way away, capitalist newspaper lied about many things so why not about the USSR, and the Communists seemed to be the most consistent and dedicated people fighting for Negro rights, unions, etc.

When you look at how many really very intelligent and well-educated people of good will became apologists for mass murder and slave labor camps, you can react by feeling superior, or you can take it as a warning not to be too confident in anything you believe, because the same things that made them make such a grievous error are present in everyone.

Reading Orwell or any of the early Fabians tells us that they were good hearted people in the main.but communism was "The Great dream and the swift disaster" In Russia it never survived the looting of the winter palace, from then on Russia was a false beacon that sucked in far to many idealists. to founder on the rocks of totalitarianism. on an regime that existed to protect itself, to protect looters.

Well ... the problem was, that the decent middle -- the democratic socialists, the Constitutional Democrats, the more moderate of the Social Revolutionaries -- got ground between the two extremes.

Any democrat who wanted to oppose the Bolsheviks had to deal with the fact that their enemies were pretty nasty anti-Semitic pro-Tzarist monarchists, who would have, had they won, hung anyone they found wearing glasses, restored land to the landlords, and shot military deserters. This tended to paralyze the middle. The Bolsheviks looked preferable to these types.

Also, remember that lots of people supported the Bolsheviks, who had no intention of setting up a totalitarian state. Even within the Bolshevik Party, there was plenty of discussion and debate, and Lenin was never a revered god-leader, above criticism. This all came later. The whole thing was, to quote the title of a fairly recent book about the Revolution, a Peoples Tragedy.

>19 SimonW11:
My reading of Orwell was that he was considerably grouchier. Certainly by 39.

20> I do not disagree, but Stalinism grew out of the seed that were planted then. He did not suddenly emerge a fully formed evil genius, Rather he learned by watching the others Lenin and Trotsky and having learnt he then turned their own arguements against them.


21> Orwell was no saint, as he would to tell you. Wasn't it In the road to Wigan pier that that he admired beating his servant in Malaya? but I respect the man immensely, a grouch? what a strange choice of word. he went from naive to embittered because he was a realist surrounded by people clinging desperately-to their idealistic view of Russia.

>22 SimonW11:
Believe me, I meant "grouch" in the best sense. For instance, his exasperation in "Inside the Whale" with the (then) "purposeful" or "Marxised" poetry of Auden and Spender, which he reproaches for its "Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community singing." That line always makes me laugh.

Orwell is one of the few people that both Left and Right can admire, with few reservations.

He wasn't a deep thinker, but he had integrity. His Homage to Catalonia is probably more responsible, than any other book, for making young Americans of my generation into Marxists.

How can you not read something like this, and remain unmoved?

"This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet
it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events
have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or
1905, for that matter.

I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles,
but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at
that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.

The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution
was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it
probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was
ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was
something startling and overwhelming.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.
Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red
flags ow with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled
with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties;
almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and
there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and
cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the
bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.

Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.
Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody
said 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else
'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping
had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a
lift-boy.

There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered,
and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and
black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in
clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like
daubs of mud.

Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where
crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were
bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was
the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all.

In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased
to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were
no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class
clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform.

All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some
ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of
affairs worth fighting for. "

And on the other hand, Animal Farm is a powerful antidote to just those feelings.