Moving Day

This blog is on the move! From here on in, tune your dial to: neilverma.net, where I’ll also be putting up content from other projects.

Titans

Flannery O’Connor didn’t live a flashy life – “from Georgia, liked birds, died of lupus” – says Jamelah Earle, who might not recommend Brad Gooch’s biography to you, unless you want to know how somebody comes up with a story about a bible salesman who steals a girl’s prosthetic leg …

In his critique of a new book on the financial crisis, Judge Posner notes a misreading: “The passage in The General Theory is not about excesses, and it does not argue that “animal spirits” should be damped down. It is about the danger of paralysis in the face of uncertainty …”

Next month is Eudora Welty’s centennial; Eric Banks describes preliminary celebrations.

“If this book had gone through the normal publishing procedures,” said the author, “it wouldn’t be worth writing.”  Have you noticed how frigging fast they’re publishing public affairs books nowadays?

“The middle style is clear, clear, clear:” one of many true facts to be found among D. G. Myers’ classroom notes from J. V. Cunningham’s history of criticism seminar at Washington University in 1976.

They “found him in his room, blue with fright, his door barricaded with a chest of drawers and other furniture:” Nigel Beale on the daemonic Cecil J. Rhodes and his epiphany.

The Two Languages of Unrest

For a couple of months I’ve been trying to get a handle on a wispy problem that seems to be clouding debates about the current economic crisis.  Something feels deeply wrong about how these discussions function as discussions, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint the shadowy rhetorical origin of this disquiet, if it exists.

I think that I’ve got my finger on a piece of it now, after listening to this morning’s coverage of the GM bailout.  My hypothesis is that in discussing these big, unprecedented economic policy decisions we tend to make extraordinarily unstructured use of two very different languages – one having to do with fairness, another with pragmatic expediency.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with either of these terminologies or the types of meaning that they field.  Both languages possess clear and predictable metrics of value, and neither will easily devolve into mystification.  People know fairness in a deep way; they also understand expediency in their very bones.  The trouble is that the way that we entwine these two registers of understanding lacks discipline, consistency and integrity.  This dearth of true structure impedes consensus about what is at stake in our situation and confuses our decisions about how to proceed.  As a consequence, unrest is increased by the very protocols of illuminated discussion that attempt to dismiss it.

Let’s consider an example.

Here is an excerpt of CNN’s story on today’s bailout plan of GM, which extends a lifeline to the company:

Some of Michigan’s congressional delegation weighed in after the announcement, laying out the stark reality the automakers that call their state home are now facing.

“The road ahead is going to be very difficult and painful, although, as the president said, there is potential for both companies to emerge from restructuring as stronger, more competitive companies,” said Rep. John Dingell, D-Michigan. “I stand ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work.”

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Michigan, said he is confident the companies will meet Obama’s demands.

“We can do no less because the domestic automotive sector is the heart of the U.S. industrial base, and as the President said, ‘it is a pillar of our economy,’” he said in a press release Monday.

But not all politicians see the plan as fair.

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-California, said Monday that it’s not time to “hollow out our manufacturing sector” while providing taxpayer dollars to AIG, which faced public backlash over multimillion-dollar bonuses.

“All of the creditors of General Motors are losing substantial amounts — even people who worked their whole lives expecting retirement benefits and health benefits when they retire,” Sherman said. “What about the rich and powerful that AIG was owed money to? They are getting paid every penny. They demand it, and it comes from the American taxpayer.”

Notice how Dingell and Levin use the language of hard-headed pragmatism: our situation is “painful” but there is potential for “stronger, more competitive” results, let’s “roll up our sleeves;” we have no choice but to intervene when there are threats to a “pillar” of the “heart” of our “base.”  The mixed metaphor is pretty ugly, but all of its components have to do with infrastructure – the holy guts of human work, an obdurate world of hard facts and appropriate responses to those facts, of cost-and-benefit-analysis and circumstances-beyond-our-control.

If the “tone” of these two speakers seem saturated in pragmatism, that pragmatism results directly from language choices.

Contrast this with the story that Sherman lays out: a conflict between workers who are losing benefits and rich CEO’s who get paid come Hell or high water.  This story is about good guys and bad guys, about who deserves what and why.  By foregrounding a contrast instead of foregrounding a situation, Sherman summons a very different type of thought, one in which the reader is not called upon to understand a wrong but to right it instead.  Perhaps Dingell pays too much attention to our woeful economic circumstances, but Sherman pays practically no attention to it at all.

That’s why, from a rhetorical point of view, Sherman not only fails to rebut Dingell and Levin, he does not even really abut Dingel and Levin.  The two sides are having different discussions, because there isn’t one question on the docket, but two: 1) is this necessary? and 2) is this fair?  And the prose has no way of separating one question from another, instead pretending that they are identical and simultaneous despite the fact that one side of the argument is going for a touchdown and the other is going for a home run.

The same schizoid tendency can be found in the context of a single point of view.  Consider this post by Alan Wolfe at TNR.  In this reproduction, I mark passages that seem to belong best to an expediency debate in bold and those that seem to belong to the fairness debate in italics:

History may remember Obama’s caution and unwillingness to punish those who got us into this mess as his finest hour. As we work our way through this crisis, one question is paramount: What is the best way to get money as quickly as possible into the hands of those who need it most? The interests of many need to be consider, but the interests of those who are losing their jobs, their live savings, and, in some cases, their lives themselves must be considered first. Justice demands nothing less. And so does economic recovery, which depends on the ability of struggling ordinary people to afford housing and medical care, let alone consumer goods and cars.

If punishing those guilty for sending the economy into its tailspin would help those victimized by their recklessness, the Obama plan would be the right way to go. But it is a fact of capitalist life that the rich and privileged can effectively blackmail everyone else to get what they want. This is one of those times when we have little choice but to give into their blackmail. Not doing so is a luxury the worst off among us cannot afford.

Yes, it is galling to see people not held accountable for greedy, if not criminal, actions. Their actions were inexcusable, and if there is a world beyond this one, one hopes they are punished for their deeds. But in this case, statesmanship requires gritting one’s teeth and doing what has to be done.

See how scattered this feels?  At one moment we’re supposed to make judgments based on one set of outcomes (expeditious recovery) and the next moment we’re supposed to make judgments using an entirely different kind of analysis (just deserts for all parties).

I have no quarrel with Wolfe’s decision to foreground expediency over fairness.  Actually, this is in many ways the most intelligent of approaches: openly and honestly sequestering the decisions over which we actually have a choice  from those from which we do not.  But I don’t have enough technical understanding to really make such a separation.  And at any rate, my worry is that the reasoning is just too unstructured, organized so that the language of expediency and the language of fairness can only approach one another long enough to be vexing.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having one of these debates or having the other.  Also, there’s no problem with having one debate then having the other.  In fact, there’s no problem with arguing about whether one debate is more apt than the another.  The problem arises when we try to have both debates at once without recognizing that’s what we’re doing, so that writers end up answering a pragmatism-based suggestion with a justice-based objection, and one statement barely darkens the door of the other.  It is a practice that produces incoherent chatter that makes everybody involved seem like an unserious boob.

It also makes good answers pretty hard to come by.  Because we erroneously assume that the question what we must do is identical with the question what is fair, the possibility that these two questions might actually have different answers will not compute.

C Notes

So this is my 100th post, folks. Huzzah!

Writing duckanddrakes has been a rewarding pastime over the last year.  During the next few weeks, I’ll be giving some thought to this blog and its future.

For the time being, here’s an index to a few posts that exhibit what I’ve been trying to do here.

The mission of this blog has been to entertain the notion that thought and writing are meaningfully synchronous, asking how they enhance, mystify and confuse one another in a series of concrete instances.  I don’t have an axe to grind on this site, but I do have a modest mission statement here.

Some of the most popular posts on this blog belong my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s efforts to make litcrit more like the sciences (Part I, Part II, Part III and there’s also this), probably just because Gottschall got a lot of press last year. There has also been some interest in my series on Roger Scruton’s attack on “militant” atheists (Part I, Part II, Part III), although I personally don’t feel that the series is very well written.

My most popular single post is a critical look at Prof. Laurie Fendrich’s ideas about taste.  My least visited post is this one on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road manuscript, and the man charged with keeping it in good condition.

A handful of my posts have been on word usage, like this one on using “taser” as a verb, and this one on the term”pushback.”  I don’t do reviews often because this site is supposed to be about rhetorical choices, so I don’t feel like I can responsibly assess whole books.   One exception is my review of James Wood’s How Fiction Works.

While I try to keep this party polite, I do get feisty sometimes.  Here, I take issue with David Runciman’s ideas about political commentary; here, I critique an article about the relationship between crime and crime fiction; here I interrogate Saul Smilansky’s propositions about “sorriness.”

My favorite part about this blog is looking at propositions and rejoinders together, to uncover the underpinnings of a dispute – for an example, check out this post on Gerald Graff vs. Mark Bauerline.  I also like to write about how questions are answered by the online public, as I feel that this process often helps to reveal deeper questions – here’s one on the relationship between science and ethics.

Finally, here are some favorites from my ongoing series on handwriting: Charles Guiteau, John Sloan, and Hannah Waterman King.

Thanks for reading!  It’s been a joy to write this over the last year.

Through The Cracks

From argle-bargle to snollygoster: are these the 100 funniest words in English?

On this day in 1970, James Dickey published Deliverance.  His son Christopher recalls: “it seemed to me then and for a long time afterward that forces of self-indulgence and self-destruction, which were always there in my father but held in check, were now cut loose.”

Check out Oronte Churm on Nabokov’s Pnin: “The presentation is all boldness, shining threads of gold, and beautiful mists, but it’s that “distance” that wreaks havoc…”

And another totally great reading: David Bordwell’s microanalysis of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, which is a movie that I think about often, even though I didn’t enjoy it at all.

“… but he is our academic peer…” Should James Franco give a commencement speech?

The 2009 Diagram Award for the Oddest Book Title has a winner: The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais.

This is total bullshit.  The Large Sieve and its Applications was robbed.

Churston Ferrers

More handwriting: a gracious note from novelist Agatha Christie to filmmaker Billy Wilder.

Christie praises Wilder’s successful adaptation of Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, probably the strongest film version of her work that we’ll ever see.

You can buy the letter at this bookstore, if you’re in Baltimore and can spare $6,000.

Crystal Clear

You can find a new article extolling the value of the humanities just about every day of the week.  Scroll down on this very site, stranger, and you’ll find a pile of links to such articles, many of which I’ve discussed during the year (!) that I’ve maintained this blog.

The preponderance of such articles is no mystery.  There are few topics on which a historian of sixteenth-century Tunisian goat herders and a student of Tennysonian spondees can professionally converse, but both can grouse about how their pursuits are disparaged.  And when you aggregate all the Tunisian ladies and Tennysonian fellows they form a real market, so there is an incentive to fill academic sites with occasional defenses of the category that unites them: the humanities.

Does there exist a study of the defense-of-the-humanities as a genre?  It’s not hard to picture what such a study might turn up.  Like all genres, the one has a recipe: start with signs of impending doom, add a recent report, stir in terms like “life of the mind,” then stew.  Of course, variations exist – some insist that the humanities impart useful skills; others argue for an inherent value that is not reducible to utilitarian terms – but among even these writers there  is seldom an explosive innovation in how one goes about writing such a defense.

That said, the genre is definitely full of interesting rhetorical lessons and it can be a fine vehicle for other propositions.  This is the case in Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s recent paper in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, which shows some real hustle.  In this post, I’ll consider how Harpham tees up the problem of valuing the humanities nicely but also fails to follow through.  I don’t have a strong judgment about this effort, but I expect a close look at it will reveal a little about how the present economic crisis is beginning to affect how writers go about defending the humanities as a field of endeavor.

Harpham begins by citing a set of belligerent questions that he supposes are being asked by shabby administrators who dispute the “value” of the humanities:

Why should society support the humanities when so many people are suffering from the effects of the economic crisis? What claim do the humanities, or scholarship generally, have on increasingly limited resources? Shouldn’t such pursuits be considered luxuries at a time when we should be focusing on essentials?

Note that the imagined antagonist begins with a pivotal opposition – luxuries versus essentials – and it is only as a result of this binary that the humanities seems dispensable.

Also note that Harpham discusses the humanities as if it didn’t already exist, like a proposed hospital addition.  Simply by using “why should” instead of “why is,” this paper announces that it will not explain the reasons why millions of reasonable people have already seen fit to support the humanities to the point that it is already embedded in our traditions.  Instead, the paper will explain why people ought to support humanistic learning right now, as if it had suddenly occurred to them to do so.

So, at least one potentially valuable avenue of argumentation has been closed off.  This move is not new.  One major feature of the defense-of-humanities genre is that it tends to take the form of either a policy argument or a historical explanation.  It is seldom the case that both kinds of propositions travel a single line of reasoning.  Is this a problem?  What motivated Harpham to diminish the story of how the humanities have contributed to the life of the nation even during times darker than our own?

Well, let’s see how the setup jives with Harpham’s central claim:

Our most immediate concerns cannot be our only concerns. While we are struggling through the morass of the present, we must retain both our memory, which sustains us, and our imagination, which must light the way forward …

Memory and imagination place us in the general domain of the humanities. And that leads to my main argument: The humanities are, if not the top priority right now, at least one of the areas that must be recognized as crucial, and supported accordingly. The present crisis does not eclipse the humanities but rather reveals the need for the skills, dispositions, and resources that the humanities, and only the humanities, cultivate.

See that?

After characterizing the debate as a policy question rather than a historical one, Harpham is free to associate the humanities not only with the fusty old tomes with which it is commonly associated (“memory”) but also with predictions of the future (“the imagination”).

Meanwhile, he has reformulated the choice before us.  Instead of asking about luxuries versus essentials, the argument structures itself around different categories – (1) that which is “immediate” “right now” “present,” and (2) that which helps to “cultivate skills” and “light the way forward.”  Because he has sidestepped the history of the humanities a little, Harpham has ultimately been able to promulgate a philosophy of history, one in which a society without humanistic learning is stuck in the present (a static situation) while a society with the humanities is capable of heading towards the future (a teleological situation).  To embrace the humanities is to exist in forward-directed time capable of fruitful growth; that’s why it’s “cultivated.”

It’s a neat trick.  Harpham develops it by getting deeper into what he takes to be the source of our present financial travails.

What was missing, some analysts have concluded, was a deeper understanding of the relationship between value and confidence. It was presumed that the value of, say, houses was always going to rise. Beneath that assumption was another, that the value had a certain solidity, like the house itself. However, as Paul S. Willen, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, recently noted, “The price of an asset, like a house or a stock, reflects not only your beliefs about the future, but you’re also betting on other people’s beliefs.” He went on, “It’s these hierarchies of beliefs - these behavioral factors - that are so hard to model.”

The key factor, then, escapes abstract models because it is human and social, not mathematical - a vast imaginative construction composed of hopes, fears, illusions, calculations, judgments. Unlike the house, the imaginative construction that determines the house’s value can be destroyed by a pinprick - hence the term bubble.

Harpham uses the term “projective retrospection” to describe the skills that humanists develop to assess forward-directed thought – hopes, fears, illusions, calculations and judgments – proposing that failures of projective reasoning are remediable by application of humanistic thought.  Economists failed to understand what “confidence” really is, and that’s something we can help them out with.  This is a much bolder claim than the old shibboleth that the humanities are good because they impart “critical thinking,” a term that only a scholar can love.

Alas, right after proposing that humanistic thought could be a crystal ball that shows the way forward, Harpham drops it.  Instead of giving precise examples of the successful use of projective retrospection, he veers off course to explain how consumer confidence operates a lot like fiction, which is something that humanists can presumably help the public understand.

Sure, fine, okay.  But this move buries the real achievement of this essay.  Because he has pinned the value of his model of the humanities to an ability to amend errors in how leaders conceptualize human confidence, Harpham desperately needs to give a example of the improved process that he proposes, to turn projective retrospection from sorcery into science.  Without doing so, the proposition seems just like ordinary retrospection and Harpham’s glass goes cloudy, which is a pity for such a promising paper.

Anyway, even if we credit Harpham’s idea, why should we even want to enable more effective speculation?  Is that the only way to justify what we do?

For now, just in case, I’ll limit my impressive powers of imaginative projection to a hunch that another stirring new essay on the enduring value of the humanities has already appeared somewhere in the time it took me to assess this one.

Application

At Inside Higher Ed, Chad Aldeman explains that academic institutions just don’t have the resources to identify the most worthy student applications from within the colossal  piles that they receive.

“The myth of a meritocracy, on which the selective admissions system is built,” Aldeman confesses  “is substantially a lie.”

So how about a lottery?  Here’s how it might work,

Institutions would set a threshold based on high school grades and SAT score and then open the lottery to anyone meeting those levels. A public university might have one lottery for state residents, after determining how many slots they should receive, and fill remaining spots with another lottery for out-of-state students. Everyone would have an equal chance of gaining admission, and the process wouldn’t be subject to influences from money, alumni, or human error. Students who submit scores would be eligible for admission to institutions without going through the tedious and expensive process of writing essays, asking for recommendations, and paying separate application fees to each institution. They’d pay one fee to be a part of the lottery. Institutions would save on the cost of operating admissions offices that would be better invested in scholarships or teaching.

If you believe that savings from the admissions office would really be reinvested in teaching, chum, then let me tell you about this amazing bridge in Brooklyn that I’m going to sell you.

Also, I submit that some of this tedious essay-writing and recommendation-requesting, along with research to find the right school, actually has bona fide pedagogical value, requiring the strategic thinking that will help make high school seniors into college students.  Sure the application process has been reduced to something of an empty ritual, but that would be a peculiar complaint coming from educators who have in many cases taught the same survey courses for decades.

Finally, the logic here is just faulty.  It would be one thing if the proposal was to abandon meritocracy as a matter of principle.  But that’s not Aldeman’s position.  Instead, he both laments the injuries being done to the ethic of meritocracy and also suggests that we ought to murder it.   What kind of an argument is that?  Hey: meritocracy hasn’t been working so great at Wall Street firms, either, so why not introduce hiring lotteries there?

If that sounds preposterous it’s because life isn’t a game, and neither is higher education.  Too many students treat it that way already, and the lottery idea would only signal to them that there is little need to apply themselves seriously where it matters most – in the classroom.

Claptrap

You!  Drop what you’re doing and read Chris Mooney’s critique of George Will’s hissy little column on “global cooling.”  Mooney’s article is everything that op-ed writing ought to be: polite, well-reasoned, utterly devastating.  I wish that all writers cared so much about explaining the problems of reliable knowledge that subtend superficial and overheated policy disputes.

Cleopatra had her sister Arsinoe murdered on the steps of the temple of Diana in 41 BC.  Have we found her skeleton?  Mary Beard is skeptical. Rogue Classicist is waiting for the mitochondrial DNA, obviously.

“Repudiate the literary judgment of Aunt Hepsy?” Natalia Cecire on Ezra Pound and his notion to model the history of poetry on the history of science.

“The trouble with living on two dollars a day is that you don’t actually get two dollars a day:” Tim Hartford explains fascinating new findings on microcredit and the actual lives of the people who use it.

Basic (8 letters) = Alkaline. Get it? Watch Tyler Hinman win the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

“Thinking outside of the box – Why use at all?”  In Britain, the Local Government Association publishes a list of fancy words that do not successfully communicate.  Also see John McIntyre’s comments on the futility of such efforts.

And: where does aesthetic taste really come from, Denis Dutton?  The Pleistocene.

Duh.

The Silence of the Boo

Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout observes:

I can’t recall ever hearing a single boo at a Broadway show, a classical concert, a dance performance or a nightclub gig.

Teachout’s onto something about the way we live now – the silence of the Boo speaks volumes because it contradicts the value that we otherwise place on immediate user responses.  Digital culture boasts an array of ways to evaluate products or perspectives on Amazon, Yelp or CNN through Twitter, Facebook, phone or email.  This practice supports the notion that reactions are most valuable when they are made lickety-split, that opinions are best when they are most copious.

When we post our comments about an item or “weigh in” on an issue online we subscribe to the vainglorious fantasy that our opinion is thoroughly reasoned at its very inception, and it will be surely taken into consideration by the powers that be, who no doubt breathlessly await our scintillating ideas.

Not so in the contemporary theater, where the good old-fashioned catcall has gone entirely extinct, despite the fact that it represents just the acute, unfiltered judgment that is supposedly prized nowadays.  After all, as Teachout explains, a booing audience at least makes it clear that it’s paying attention.  The true devil of the wired age isn’t dislike of a product, but indifference towards it – in such a calculus even a jeer is surely on the side of the angels.

And the silence of the Boo isn’t the only change Teachout sees happening on our end of the footlights.  Consider the Standing O:

Time was when audiences reserved that special gesture for a performance of equally special merit, but in recent years it has become a near-reflexive response to anything short of a crash-and-burn disaster. The most popular explanation for this phenomenon is the increasingly high cost of theater tickets, the assumption being that playgoers stand up to help persuade themselves that the show they just saw was worth what they paid to see it. Whatever the reason, though, standing ovations are now the rule, not the exception.

While one audience gesture perishes, another loses its significance, suggesting that a whole language of interaction between audience and player is short-circuiting.

So can we revitalize these brassy audience responses, recapturing the gestures and the significance that is attached to them?  How should we symbolically express our disdain for an overlong monologue, our irritation at a sour soprano?

Teachout has a suggestion:

I came up with a substitute that I call “The Silent Boo.” Since many theater companies now encourage playgoers to recycle their programs, why not place two transparent recycling containers in the lobby after the show, one marked CHEERS and the other JEERS? That strikes me as a neat and practical method of reaping the benefits of booing while simultaneously minimizing its incivility.

Oh, for crying out loud.  Being uncivil is the whole point!

Instead of reviving the spirit of the Boo, Teachout’s idea strips the gesture of all of its aspects that are not useful to somebody’s damn marketing plan.  Better to have no Boo at all than this bloodless, anodyne version.

So I say boo to you, Terry Teachout!  BOO!  Shame on you for proposing a “silent boo” as anything more than a contradiction in terms.

Cursive

Michelle, myself and I: some advice for Barack Obama from the much-neglected Department of Pronouns.

The Atlantic’s Barbara Wallraff and Joe Pickett of the American Heritage Dictionary are having a polite conversation about polite conversation.

“It’s not about unrequited tragic love,” observes Sancho Panza of Engelbert Humperdinck’s operatic version of Hansel and Gretel, “it’s about eating …”

“I still have a callused knobby excrescence on the third finger of my right hand:” Michael Dirda reviews a new history of handwriting by Kitty Burns Florey.

“The danger of being overwhelmed by the forces of nature is like a certificate of authenticity:” Peter Campbell has a series of thoughts on Wordsworth, Coleridge, the hanging of Turner’s The Goddess of Discord at the Tate, and the will to recreate understanding with urgent force and vivacity in our age of diverging disciplines and impenetrable art.

And won’t you believe it, it’s just my luck: recess, yes.

Not Fade Away

“He stops in the middle and just strums the rhythm…” Daniel Arizona remembers Buddy Holly.

Christopher Guerin lists 46 authors who can be relied upon to produce a novel regularly every couple of years.  There’s only one problem: “the list is pretty much the same as it was ten years ago.”  And they’re all getting old …

Sexing up the Major?  Literary scholars and other friends, Kathleen Fitzpatrick has an idea for you.

“Publishers love an anniversary:” Clive Cookson has read seven of the many recent books on Darwin.

Ever realize that you’ve been misusing a word for years, or even decades?  You’re not alone (neither am I).

“You don’t have to be Jean Baudrillard to detect in all this another coup by the forces of unreality:” James Parker on Guitar Hero and the future of rock and roll.

“All that really matters is: I’m A Great Writer and Don’t Mess With My Copy!”  In our age of no money, David Sullivan valiantly takes on fire-breathing writers.

Im-portant

More handwriting,  this time from the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

A 1930 letter from American realist painter George Luks to Samuel Ross Ballin, the “dean” of New York bakruptcy lawyers.   At the time, Ballin was helping to assemble property to create Rockefeller Center, one of the largest privately-financed building projects of the 20th century.   A heavy drinker and one-time amateur boxer, the 66-year-old Luks would be beaten to death in a bar fight in 1933.

Find Out What it Means to Me

In a recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University has taken up the ancient and honorable practice of suggesting how academics may earn social prestige, particularly now that the nation seems to have embraced a President that columnist Nicholas D. Kristof calls “an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.”
The perception is that the incoming administration will now heed types of expertise that had been scorned over the last eight years, even if that expertise is rooted in the humanities, a field that considers itself to have been roundly neglected if not soundly drubbed in recent decades. Exhilaration seems timely.

Delbanco’s objective is to give this giddiness some needed historical context. However, the true curiosity of his undertaking is not its argument, but its emotional center. Sure, intellectuals are a kind of human resource that society ought to deploy more sensibly, but the reason that we hope for this deployment does not arise from any command inherent to our training or from some systematic mechanism out there for ferreting out talent. Rather, most intellectuals yearn to be consulted out of an inner drive to be deemed estimable and impressive in the eyes of others.

There’s something justifiably touching about the desire to be included and considered useful. To be a public intellectual is to transfer aptitudes and ideas forged in a special area of knowledge into the wider field of the public good; it is also to seek acknowledgment and admiration in the eyes of others, often following half a lifetime of obscure, unappreciated and downright lonely toil. We are fooling ourselves if we deny that it is desire for appreciation that motivates the attempt to become a public intellectual.

It is on the latter issue that Delbanco’s article has something interesting to say.

To begin with, he reminds readers of the well-known observations of historian Richard Hofstadter, who famously argued that Americans have long harbored suspicions of those claiming to represent “the life of the mind.” Delbanco rehearses the argument:

Hofstadter regarded anti-intellectualism as a kind of antibody in the national bloodstream — sometimes dormant, sometimes active — that reacts to “high” culture with an inflammatory response. He traced this attitude to multiple sources: including, in particular, the religious evangelicalism that flares up periodically throughout American history in reaction to the perceived decline of piety and morals and, more generally, public resentment toward those who, claiming expertise and “excellence,” seem to condescend toward unlettered or uncredentialed people as somehow inferior or unworthy of respect.

Hofstadter used a cyclical model of anti-intellectualism, which waxes under Republicans and wanes under Democrats. But Delbanco shows that rude partisanship is an obfuscation: Republicans have intellectuals, too, from Eisenhower’s John Foster Dulles to Bush’s Condoleezza Rice – both of whom are indubitably “open, out-of-the-closet intellectuals,” no matter the merit of the core philosophies that qualify them as such. Besides, in reality, most people have awfully complicated views on the life of the mind, both distrusting intellectuals and yearning for enlightenment all at once.

So Hofstadter’s critique is of limited help, as it points out a complication of public attitudes without providing a means to assuage distrust of eggheads or to generate curiosity about their work. We get the sense of an insuperable polarity whose oscillations are beyond all hopes of coordination.  No matter their efforts, intellectuals are at the whim of a capricious and immoderate public idea about who they are and what they do.

But Delbanco has a plan:

Rather than telling ourselves a back-and-forth tale of virtue versus vigilantism, academics concerned with the life of the mind generally, and the academic humanities in particular, might be better served by looking inward and asking what we can do to earn public trust.

The characteristics of the argument are intriguing. In order to move out of the ivory tower, scholars ironically have to “look inward.”  By doing so they can see how  literature, history and philosophy have “demonstrable utility”  by “deepening and enriching” inner experience and inculcating “moral and aesthetic sensitivity.”  And the question that we ought to be asking is whether or not intellectuals are living up to their values of social justice, self-doubt and “curatorship” of history. It is only by practicing what we preach about these activities that we will earn the respect needed to “secure the public faith” that we seem to crave.

This idea certainly feels good.  Rather than remaining timidly supine during oscillating cycles of sympathy, intellectuals can do something proactive.  Delbanco also makes qualities that are commonly considered to be fuzzy (“inner experience,” “aesthetic sensitivity”) seem obdurate and calculable.  The whole essay has a satisfying “self help” feel, in that it proposes that respect is the direct result of one’s willingness to live up to one’s own deepest beliefs.  Delbanco gives intellectuals something that has so seldom been offered to them: a clear and direct way to earn esteem in a way that other professionals do.

Yet something seems awry. The trouble is that the argument is not very thoughtful about the very entitlement that it promises to help us finally achieve: respect.

Do lawyers and entrepreneurs who already command respect really meet the moral test that Delbanco proposes, and does our respect actually originate in an exhibit of moral code? Is it fitting – is it even feasible – that we evaluate a public intellectual by the trust, faith and respect that he or she commands?  Is being well-esteemed commensurate with the rudimentary quest of the humanities for new, deeper and more honest knowledge?

Though concocted to enhance moral behavior, this argument might be a recipe for charlatanism.  Intellectuals can start out earnestly, but end up slovenly and over-flattered so long as their most important metric is public esteem, rather than public good as an end unto itself. The pursuit of self-consistency can be  hubristic when it is only made so as to solicit aggrandizement in the eyes of others: as Shakespeare’s King Henry has it, respect is a title that “the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud,” which is hardly a condition for forthright introspection.

Don’t get me wrong.  There’s certainly nothing unworthy about living up to your own standards.  But this argument still needs a more coherent idea of the “public” part of “public intellectual;” it needs to explain how earning prestige from the people jives with serving them; it needs to square the pursuit of esteem from the people with the identification of their cozy assumptions and underlying problems – the stuff that humanists are needed for and good at. There’s just nothing risky about being a public intellectual according to this model, and that shouldn’t be all right.

I don’t think that Delbanco’s recommendations are false or dishonorable, just that they are a little unbalanced, weighted to satiate the emotional needs of intellectuals rather than a larger purpose that may be frequently at odds with such satiation. And this problem is inevitable. After all, if introspection isn’t a little morally questionable, then you’re probably doing it wrong.

Yet if we are to take anything from President Obama’s example, it ought to be that we should pursue the public good without unduly yoking this endeavor to personal, individualized victory. According to idea, we should cultivate and nurture respect for the humanities rather than respect for humanists, from whom we can request – but not expect – any more impressive an exhibit of self-consistency than can be boasted by members of any other profession, be they respectable or otherwise.

Repast

“Would I write on my blog if I’d been rejected in some way?”  Petrona wonders.

“If it’s a massive overwhelming storm of adrenaline, calcium keeps pouring into the cells and the muscle just can’t relax.”  Yes, folks, you can die of fright …

Wowee.  Thanks to Frank Wilson for the hot tip on George Tooker exhibited at the Pa. Academy of the Fine Arts.

Where would we be without NPR listeners?  But don’t take my word for it.  Check out this list of mnemonics to help you memorize the correct sequence of geological eras: “Campbell’s Ordinary  Soup Develops Miss Pennsylvanian Perfectly …”

“Blank, and unrepentantly blank:” five writers discuss Britney Spears, on this the tenth (!) year of her fame.

Are robots more ethical than humans?  Maybe so.  Let’s talk about it …

Stephen Crane, sampled by MyLifeinBooks:  “Was I brought here merely to have my nose dragged away as I was about to nibble the sacred cheese of life?”

Nibble away, if you can.

The Squared Circle

“I have never heard directly from a librarian who has found bacon in a book:” Jennifer Scheussler is hot on the trail of a salty sweet urban legend.

“It’s like the mesmeric spell of Time Code, ticking away the movie’s life, and yours:” David Bordwell on the ancient and mysterious prehistory of bugs.

“My wife and I even named our first-born son Parker:” Duane Swierczynski celebrates the brilliant work of Donald E. Westlake, who passed away recently.

When it comes to lexical prowess, search engines are heavies and word processors are bantamweight.  At Slate, Chris Wilson explains why.

“Sexual slander against accused heretics was so common that we might conclude that the friar-inquisitors protested too much:” The Tribune’s Michael Esposito is reading up on the Inquisition, that most modern of all premodern institutions.

Meanwhile, Kathy Schenck is reading Christian Dior circa 1950: “It is the fitting that helps to emphasize the loveliness of yourself.”

“He was a terrible wrestler [...]  He just had three moves:” Stephanie McMahon describes Hulk Hogan in congressional testimony, saying what you always secretly knew but dared not utter aloud.

Eminence Grise

I attended three large scholarly conferences this past season: The American Studies Association meeting in Albuquerque (by invitation), The Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco (by accident), and the American Historical Society’s meeting in New York (by misadventure).

There were extraordinary insights and nervous candidates, “spirited disputes” and nodding heads, plenary sessions a-plenty and ill-considered invitees.  There was even a ball.  But  in my peregrinations I uncovered just one authentic phenomenon, a phrase that was used to excess in more than half of the 15 or so panels that I attended on subjects ranging from ‘zine culture to holocaust memory: “The elephant in the room.”

Of course, I myself never did see an actual elephant inside a room (I did see a mouse in the East Ballroom of the Sheridan New York), which is a pity, as several of these otherwise excellent events may have been profitably enlarged by the presence of truly weighty intellect.

But it occurs to be that there may be a deeper psychological reason for what we might call the “pachyderm turn” in scholarly oratory.  Perhaps the elephant inside the room is that there are so few elephants outside the room – or that there are practically no elephants at all, anywhere.

Now, why do you suppose that academia is troubled by thoughts of extinction?

Ornaments

“I felt when we were fighting that she was kicking my ass …”  Just one of the memorable quotes to be found among Sandy Nicholson’s photos of second-place winners.

It’s “an advanced course in drowning:” Scott McLemee has read all four (!) books that Antonio Negri published this year.

“That conservative, classicisizing, slightly self-satisfied, mono-cultural image that Greece has of itself must compound, if not cause, its present travails …” Mary Beard reacts to the unrest in Athens.

Which leads me to Frank Wilson’s stimulating thoughts on Santayana: “The past is no mere prologue. It is the warp upon which our identity is woven …”

Disfranchised vs. disenfranchised?: John McIntyre and Michael Covarrubias are having a very civil discussion about morphology, slavery and word usage. McIntyre / Covarrubias / McIntyre

And I’m off to the MLA, where nothing of any importance ever happens. Frankly, I’m tired of the easy mockery that the conference perennially solicits, usually from its own erstwhile participants.  Sure, the MLA is a little inane and embarrassing, but it’s also totally harmless.

In times of collossal trouble there’s something perfectly righteous about that.

This is What Science is About

Churm directs us to this wonderful science blog, where I scroll down to find that Benjamin Cohen has been reading Steven Shapin’s new book about modern scientists.  Cohen writes:

One common thread in most of [Shapin's] work is the role of virtue and character in the history of science. In The Scientific Life, the first few chapters deal with the changing character of “the scientist.” From the gentlemanly men of science who saw their work as a calling, to the twentieth century’s professional paid scientist, who see scientific work as a job, a way to earn their daily bread, the identity of the scientist has changed as the content, meaning, and social position of science itself has shifted.

What’s your question, Mr. Cohen?

Are scientists morally superior to non-scientists?
Or are scientists just like everyone else (morally equivalent)?

Hm.  Most of Cohen’s respondents so far have been turning over how scientists have a certain “system of work” and “code of ethics” that probably lead to a moral life.  One typical response:

Anyone who has been rigorously trained in [scientific] ethical codes is likely to have them spill over into other areas of their life, besides science.

This is very poor reasoning.   First of all, remember that the question was comparative (“superior to others”).   I observe that scientists hardly have a monopoly on rigor or code.   According to the spillover principle, we might expect equal or better morals from clergy, soldiers, police officers, physicians, safety officers, athletes and others – anyone who by virtue of a vocation must obey a set of ethical proscriptions and standards that is at least as methodical and serious as average science.

Worse, I think that the very principle of spillover is itself unsound.  If you believe that anyone whose activities are measured by rigor and code is likely to be moral then you’ve never met a lawyer.

But Cohen has surely given us good food for thought, because there’s a deeper problem behind the initial question.  And I find this deeper problem in yet another comment on the post, one that’s a little more inflammatory:

If we assume that scientists are morally equivalent to other people but then factor in the assumption that scientists have a better grasp of reality on average (this is what science is about) then scientists are more effectively moral on average (the opposite point might be that an immoral scientist is more effectively immoral then the average person). It is difficult to be really moral if one is an idiot.

Hot dog!  I hasten to point out that our writer may find it difficult to be  truly moral while casting such aspersions.

But let’s excuse the the rudeness of the last sentence, as it just caps off a stunningly weird line of reasoning that rests on a set of presuppositions that would madden any empiricist interested in data and substantiation.  If we want to prove the statement above, we have to ask a ton of questions:

Does scientific reasoning really lead to a “better” grasp of reality?

Does a better grasp of reality lead to a better understanding of morality, and why?

Does a better understanding of morality lead to more “effective” practice of it?

Finally, does one measure the depth of one’s morality as a person by the “effectiveness” of that morality?

I submit that we will need answers to these questions in order to evaluate the claim that scientists are more moral than others.  The trouble is that none of these questions are actually scientific questions.  They are all philosophical questions, which suggests that even if scientists are indeed more moral than others, then it is beyond their vocational domain to prove that they are so.  The scientist is only moral while cognizant that he or she resides within a penumbra of ignorance about the nature of that morality, and it would be professionally immoral of the scientist to claim otherwise.

So here’s my answer to Cohen’s excellent question:  the more responsible the scientist, the less he or she ought to be willing to claim superior morality, because he or she will consider that morality to be unknowable from a scientific point of view.  Paradoxically, we will know the moral scientist – the scientist who knows what science is about, and what it’s not about -  by his or her agnosticism to the very question of his or her own relative moral equivalence.

Treasures

“I hear an army charging upon the land;”  at MIT, a group of students have put Ezra Pound’s Des Imagistes project online, including James Joyce’s remarkable poem.

“What pure motives, and purely carried out:”  My Life in Books has been reading Willkie Collins’ The Moonstone.  You should read it, too.

Remember my itty bitty jab at Mark Bauerline’s “Dumbest Generation” argument?  Good times.  Well, Lauren Yingling has taken the man right down to the mat: “Bauerlein says we shouldn’t trust anyone under 30. More accurately, we shouldn’t trust anyone over 30 …”

“Nature in its varied forms arrived punctually and dramatically to inform the human state of things, to allow the literal to resonate unto the metaphorical:”  Wyatt Mason on disasters in fiction and disastrous fiction.

Roger Ebert has a true love, and it is the Studebaker ‘57 Golden Hawk “In profile, the graceful fenders curving down to the headlights, The windshield raked back in harmonious counterbalance. Then the slant of the roof, leading down to the uprising of the bold fins. Musical. You could sing it.”

And he does.

Doggerel

Elizabeth Alexander has been selected to write and recite a poem to mark the occasion of President-elect Obama’s inauguration.  Sounds nice, right?  Particularly in light of a certain other much more boneheaded inauguration choice?  How much controversy could there be about a little timely turn of phrase?

Plenty, if you ask George Packer, who is hoping for a reconsideration of the whole idea of an occasional poem:

Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

Packer argues that American poetry has become a “private activity.”   By virtue of the fact that it is written by and for a few people, poetry lacks “the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings.”

Packer goes on to cite the relative paucity of successful occasional poetry in American history, calling Robert Frost’s 1961 effort “a piece of triumphalist doggerel” and Maya Angelou’s 1993 recitation “an overly long ode to multiculturalism whose elevated tone turned out to be badly out of sync with the early months of the Presidency it heralded.”

It strikes me that Packer’s objections here are surprisingly undisciplined.  After all, where is the heart of his worry?  All at once he seems to be saying:

1) That grandeur does not need poetry

2) That poetry has become too elite (as opposed to some preceeding moment when, I guess, it was as popular as US Weekly)

3) That the “privacy” of poetry has resulted in a prevailing aesthetic that is not amenable to readings at large public gatherings, because it is not “moving” enough.

4) That it’s hard to write occasional poems and even pretty impressive poets have  totally blown it.

5) That a poem needs to be “in sync” with the spirit of the era that it inaugurates, but rarely is.

I’m amazed by the sheer weakness of these objections, both singly and as a collection.    Consider the notion that poetry has become “unmoving” because it is written by and for only a few select readers.  Even if we concede this point – and its novelty – wouldn’t it be a good thing to remedy this elitist trend through something like, oh I don’t know … a public reading of poetry to mark some major national occasion?  Then there’s the idea that a poem needs to proleptically herald a period of time soon to come.  That just sounds wrong to me, particularly in this instance, which is not just a “beginning” of a new period but also the end of a long climb to King’s mountaintop.  Why can’t the occasional poem look back to MLK, rather than try to divine the essential spirit of the next act in American cultural life, which one we can’t possibly prefigure?

After throwing all of this argumentative spaghetti against the wall, Packer’s next move is even more annoying: objecting to the choice of Alexander.

A forty-six-year-old professor of African-American studies at Yale named Elizabeth Alexander has been chosen to write a poem for Obama’s swearing-in. She is a friend and former neighbor of Obama’s in Chicago, and her brother worked on the campaign and the transition. These alone seem like the kind of qualifications that entitle Caroline Kennedy to a Senate seat. Judging from the work posted on her Web site, Alexander writes with a fine, angry irony, in vividly concrete images, but her poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry—a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions.

Now these are some good, biting objections. I actually agree with Packer that Alexander’s poems have more spirit than excellence, and that they seem contrived to ease into an academic ear most readily.  But as a matter of rhetoric it seems foolish to attack the idea of the recitation prior to attacking the poet selected to make it.  If poetry itself is unnecessary, elitist, difficult and out of sync, then it is hardly a meaningful objection to accuse Alexander of being personally implicated in each of these deficits.

The basic trouble is that Packer’s objection is unwilling to choose between the specific target of the poet and the general target of the inclusion of poetry in the inauguration.  He has calculated that by blending these two tasks he can bolster each side of his case, using two weak complaints to ground one another.  On my reading, this calculation is erroneous.

Hell,what are we really arguing about?  There’s no harm in televising a few stanzas, whatever their mediocrity, once or twice in a decade.

New and Fireproof

I’ve been neglecting my series on handwriting – along with this whole blog, really – as I’ve just been finishing my Ph.D. dissertation.

It’s done now, so here’s something special:

It’s a set of notes about vacuum-tube radio technology by Lee De Forest, whose earlier invention of the audion made it possible to build radio sets that can receive music and the human voice. The sketch was made on stationary of the “New and Fireproof” Navarre Hotel in New York City, probably in 1915.  The image is part of the American Memory section at the Library of Congress.

Many of De Forest’s innovations were also made by the engineer and scientist Edwin Armstrong at Columbia, and the two claimants had a long patent fight in the courts throughout the 1910’s and 20’s, although in retrospect it seems reasonably clear that Armstrong understood the science behind radio reception much better than his rival did.  Actually, in practice the patent fight was really just a proxy war between two corporate backers – Westinghouse (Armstrong) and AT&T (De Forest).  Had De Forest not won and AT&T successfully taken up a major role in American broadcasting, it is unlikely that the radio plays on which my dissertation is based would have come into existence, at least not in the commercialized form that they did.

A graduate of Yale, De Forest also produced the first American doctoral dissertation on radio waves.

Heavy

Three articles for your consideration.

1.  At Liberal Education, Ethan Kleinberg proposes a few ways to save interdisciplinary scholarship from itself:

We should work to usher in an era when interdisciplinary departments, programs, and centers do not supplant or replace the traditional disciplines but serve instead to create pathways and intersections, bringing faculty and students together for the common endeavor of intellectual exchange. The benefits will include the production of knowledge through innovative scholarship, the creation of working networks across the disciplines and departments throughout the university, and most important, the fostering of an informed and critical public. When no one discipline or method is privileged over another and all the disciplines are connected, students learn to be critical, syncretic, original thinkers who interrogate authority to find the best and most viable answers regardless of the question.

Sounds good.  Especially to scholars like me, who are professionally invested in this approach.  But let’s dump the buzz words: “pathways and intersections,”  “working networks,”  “informed and critical public,”  “critical, syncretic.”  These terms have too little meaning to outsiders, and too much meaning to insiders.  I’m sympathetic to the promise of interdisciplinarity, but for Pete’s sake, can’t we devise a language to describe it that doesn’t sound like mumbo jumbo?

2.  At TNR, Adam Kirsch accuses Slavoj Zizek of going too far -

Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse.

Whoa.  And that’s not even the worst of it – this article is such a total drubbing that I got embarrassed just reading it.  Maybe Zizek isn’t the only one going too far.

And by the way: when did everything get so heavy around here?

3.  The credit crisis has hit publishing:  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has banned new acquisitions, and the odds are that other big houses will follow.  Sara Nelson at Publisher’s Weekly thinks that this might be a good thing on the short term, as too many unworthy and nonviable books are being published nowadays.  But …

On the other hand, a ban like this is most worrisome to me for what it says about publishing’s bet on the market 18-24 months from now: Will the market just be smaller – or nonexistent?

That’s cheery.

Quick, somebody tell a joke or something.

Hecuba to Him, He to Hecuba

Bad things are happening today, and I’m chewing on this: at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Jean Kazez has been considering a few chapters of Saul Smilansky’s book 10 Moral Paradoxes.  This week, she looks at Smilansky’s idea that sometimes you should not feel sorry when bad things happen.

As Kazez notes, the ethical ramifications of this idea are a little counterintuitive, but there are also some curious rhetorical properties to the argument that make the whole notion difficult to isolate, and even tougher to test for intellectual merit.  I don’t mean to castigate Smilansky (or rather, Kazez’s account of him), only to show how a few unaddressed uncertainties make the argument possible, and that these uncertainties have their own interesting fecundity.

To show you what I mean, let’s follow Kazez’s fine discussion of the paradox:

Suppose you wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for some bad past event, B. The bad thing could be that your infant sister died; if it weren’t for that, you wouldn’t have been conceived (an example from Smilansky’s own life). A similar example that comes to my mind: B might be the fact that your mother was raped by your father. On a larger scale: B could be the Holocaust, without which your parents wouldn’t have met in a concentration camp. Similarly, B could be the 18^th century slave-trade, without which your great-great-great-grandparents wouldn’t have met.

Morally, do you have to be sorry that B occurred? It seems so, since B is so bad. On the other hand, if you are not sorry that you exist, then how can you be sorry that B occurred?

Notice how there is no limit whatsoever to the scale of B.  A single death, a genocide and a century of slave-trading are all equally “causes” of a birth.  Isn’t this sense of causality pitifully conceptualized?  If we take genealogy seriously, virtually everyone who has roots in the United States for more than three generations has some amount of slave-trade blood both in their veins and on their hands.  In a sense, without slavery, none of our common ancestors would ever have met – does this mean that nobody should feel sorry about the slave trade?  If that seems crazy that’s because it is crazy.  We are each of us children of all historical events in this formula, and using Smilansky’s moral logic we may feel sorry for none of these events, from the Fall of Troy to the Black Death.

The trouble here is that this argument has no idea to offer about how one event leads to the next, but it really needs one: it is only in the absence of this idea that the paradox works as a paradox.

Let’s continue with Kazez:

Smilanksy distinguishes between being sorry for and being sorry that. Of course we must be sorry for the victims in all these cases. But, within limits, we can be not sorry that B occurred. He admits he is not sorry that his sister died–and can’t be, since he is not sorry that he exists. That, he claims, is morally tolerable. It’s different when B is something vast, as in the Holocaust example. But then, I assume he would say, if you are sorry that the Holocaust occurred, and your existence depended upon it, then you must also be sorry you exist.

Here is a second important ambiguity.  Just as the sense of causality in this argument is blurry, so too is the definition of the “bad thing.”  In reality, “bad things” have all kinds of components: victims, perpetrators, excacerbations, ramifications.  Is a victim of the holocaust a member of the “badness” in the same way as an executioner?  Of course not.  In fact, Smilansky’s language betrays this problem: if we can feel sorry for a person but not sorry for an event, then there is a cleavage between these two components that make them effectively separate issues of moral evaluation, and this cleavage puts a lot of stress on the initial framing of the question.

So there are big problems with this argument as a matter of rhetoric.  I’m no moral philosopher, but there are problems on this score, too.  Kazez senses it:

I find the paradox strange “at both ends,” so to speak. It seems altogether strange not to be sorry that your mother was raped or your sister died. It seems altogether strange to be sorry that you exist, just because you are sorry about some vast tragedy that was the precondition of your existence.

[...] I have the feeling there’s something ill conceived here. Morally, it doesn’t seem good to be sorry you exist, except for reasons intrinsic to your own life. It doesn’t seem good not to be sorry about horrible things that happened to innocent people. How can logic really force us into these attitudes?

Maybe there’s something deep down mistaken about aiming our “sorriness” at events based on their links to other events. Maybe there’s too much that’s fortuitous about such links, and sorriness shouldn’t “go there.” But maybe I’m pretty much grasping at straws.

No you’re not.  After all, what is “sorriness” in the context of this argument?  Is it regret that an event occurred?  Is it an expression of desire that a bad event should have been avoided, along with all its ensuing effects?  Why can’t it be empathy for victimhood, something that nobody would call immoral, whether or not the victimhood resulted in our own existence?

The fact that Kazez uses “sorriness” instead of “sorrow” here suggests that Smilansky has his arms around a concept that is just not compatible with our ordinary understanding of this feeling.  Personally, I am not convinced that sorrow is compatible with the rigors of moral philosophy, as it seems to be a state of being rather than the result of choices that can be matched with a set of ethical proscriptions.  I feel sorrow for events in Mumbai today, but this feeling of sorrow is not as articulate as a moral act needs to be in order to really count as a moral act.  In fact, I would argue that this capacity to overwhelm the purchase of ethical proscription is precisely the source of the power and importance of sorrow in our emotional lives.

At any rate, in this argument “sorriness” is yet another uncertainty that makes Smilansky’s paradox more intractable than it needs to be, which unfortunately calls into question the value of the whole intellectual exercise.

Good Writing

… is an act of discovery: Nigel Beale and Frank Wilson on Michel de Montaigne.

… is a way of dealing with change, of internalizing it: Stephen Baxter (and many others) on the uncertain future of fiction about the future.

… is an immediate voicing from deep in the brain; a portable art; a way to investigate the world: Churm interviews Brian Turner, who is eager to pee on a few shrubs.

… is a vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure that is a unique route to self-knowledge: just like a hangover, according to Kingsley Amis’ recently reissued essay on this timely subject.

… is stretched taut by fine command of syntax, even when it is discomforted by the artful distortion: William Deresiewicz has come to praise James Wood and to blame him.

… is transforming from a slightly contentious historical hypothesis into a bona fide political axiom: what to make of the vogue of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln book?  They’re reading it on the subways!  

The SUBWAYS!

Pleasure Cruise

It’s a scandal!: “into our fallen world the Gods of Great Events have finally come down from on high to intervene …”

“A uniquely affordable indulgence:” Walter Kirn on the hard times that are a-coming, and how we’ll talk our way through them, like citizens, like families.

Oxford compiles a list of the top ten cliches. (“Top Ten” didn’t make the list)

“A prose seance, a stirring of dead waters,” Go read UD’s new series on Norman Maclean.  Yes, there will be a test.

For extra credit, check out Michael Wood on Kafka and his conundrums.

“The path to glory is built by the bodies of our foes:”  It’s the national anthem of Vietnam …

“How stupid is Sir Gawain?”  Jeff Sypeck publishes a list of search terms that lead to his blog.

And a cracking good piece by Andrew Seal on the privacy of small audiences and the unreproducible processes through which we (sometimes) make sense of things.

Election, Part III

So the election’s over and we’re in the age of post-partisan politics.  What’s that, you say?  I’m glad that you asked.

For many people, the measure of postpartisanship will be the number of Republicans in the cabinet or the degree to which the minority party will be consulted on policy issues.  If one does these things, one will be said to govern “from the center.”  This measure is not very meaningful.  Worse, it misunderstands the proposition at the heart of the political dialogue: the new politics is not about centrism, but about a new definition of what a “political issue” really is.  It’s about a new rhetoric of pragmatism, not an old practice of pragmatism.

To explain, let’s consider the 2008 candidates.

This year, the major candidates were defined by their professions.  Underneath it all, McCain is a soldier, which is perhaps why he had strong tactics but weak strategy.  McCain was undone by smallness.  Underneath it all, Hillary Clinton is a policy-wonk, and remains the best-informed person to run for the office; it is in fact this depth of political understanding that prevented her from recognizing the new dynamics shaping the race until it was too late.  Clinton was undone by habit.  Finally, underneath it all, Barack Obama is a community organizer – a let’s-have-a-meeting-in-the-church-basement guy – who is used to setting up voter registrations, getting asbestos stripped out of old projects, and setting up job programs.  His background is in attempts to solve concrete problems, not in the large philosophical disputes through which his opponents built their expertise.

Big deal.  We have seen this before.  Hence the question: why did this background provide the right training to succeed in this particular election season?  The answer has to do with the fact that we are undergoing a transition from a “position-based” political rhetoric to a “problem-based” political rhetoric, and this transition is at the very center of the new pragmatism.

By “position-based” rhetoric I mean the predominant form of politics over recent history.  According to this form, the world is made up of issues – labor rights, abortion, big government, regulation, war, nation-building, taxes – and to be a politician one has to “take a position” on these issues, then dig in one’s heels and fight to pull the world toward your position.  Those who waver on their position are called “flip-floppers.”   Those whose positions differ from those of their party are called “mavericks.”  In this idiom, to “bring people together” is a euphemism for persuading opposing sides that it is to everyone’s benefit to take a step away from the perfect in order to stand with the good.

This kind of politics was necessary for most of the 20th century, when the paramount problem was to repair gaping fissures in equality, opportunity and democracy.  If your cause is civil rights, you must take a stand.  If you believe that “government is the problem” then you must drag government down kicking and screaming.  Position-based politics gave us a way to understand these ideas and activities.  The trouble is that there is also a host of problems that cannot be solved by this way of doing politics.  Hence all of the stalemates left over from the culture wars: stalemate on health care; stalemate on gay marriage; stalemate on abortion; stalemate on energy.

What’s worse, this process has made the left and the right misunderstand one another profoundly.  In 2004, the Democrats nominated a warrior because they thought he would appeal to Republicans; in 2008 Republicans nominated a maverick because they thought he would appeal to Democrats.  Both choices reveal that neither side has any deep understanding of their opponents, and this ignorance fosters antagonisms that put undue stress on policy as a whole.  If we cannot even adequately imagine our opponent’s point of view, we are unlikely to persuade them to moderate it.  Now, I don’t mean to indict “position-based” politics altogether, only to say that no rhetorical matrix is perfect.  This one has reached a limit, and today it seems incapable of making one side intelligible to the other and thereby to bring about the resolutions that give people faith in their government.

And position-based politics also fails to powerfully explain our situation today.  People who think about the world in terms of positions see Obama as a lurch to the center, where “people come together.”   But this is only true if we accept the enduring and unalterable applicability of the model to begin with.  I have an alternative view.  My sense is that what is developing is a rejection of “position-based” understanding of issues and the adoption of a “problem-based” understanding of issues.  According to this second conception, the world is full of problems that need solutions, not positions that need reconciliations.  The difference between these two models is profound.

Take climate change.  If we think about climate change as an issue-on-which-people-have-positions, it will be much harder to come to a solution because the issue becomes cluttered with arcane questions: ANWR?  clean coal?  cellulose-based ethanol? cap-and-trade? CAFE standards?  If every participant in the conversation has a “position” on each of these components, then it will be very hard to devise large policies that resolve all of them.  Worse, we will spend so much time achieving reconciliation between groups that consensus itself becomes a fetish.  Of course, compromise is a very fine thing, but if our primary goal is to make everybody satisfied, then that satisfaction may obscure the issue upon which the consensus is to be achieved in the first place.  More time and energy will be spent on massaging egos than on mitigating the problem on which we disagree.

On the other hand, let’s say that climate change is a “problem” that needs a “solution.”  In this model, the measure of our success is not whether or not we achieve a “middle” consensus.  Instead, the measure of success is whether or not we achieve a solution.  In the end, that’s exactly why we chose a church-basement kind of pragmatism.  The position-based politician would see asbestos in the building, craft a position on how it ought to be dealt with, then spend months negotiating with other interest groups with their own positions on how to deal with it, and eventually come to a compromise plan about what to do.  The problem-based politician would see asbestos in the building, create a plan as to how to deal with it, then recruit enough interest groups to make the plan viable and consensual.

From a rhetorical point of view, a world of positions is a world of conflict and their eventual reconciliation, while a world of problems is a world of solutions and the coalition that bring them about.  Problem politics is attractive these days because the public is weary of the old positions and has grown agnostic about large philosophies.  When the market crashes, all of the position-based politicians have the old argument: liberals say there was too little regulation; conservatives say there was too much.  One feels that this would be the response no matter what the specifics of the situation.  Problem-based politics has no patience with these routinized responses, and it is in this impatience that the pragmatism of the model manifests itself.

Of course, these observations are based entirely on rhetoric, not performance.  Problem-based language is only a partial account for the political mood, and it has no more reality to it than people’s willingness to believe that it does.  Besides, in the end, position-based politics has not been totally dispensed with, merely occluded – however temporarily – while a different set of argumentative underpinnings attempt to become intelligible as they rationalize decisions.

As in all ecosystems, position and problem must find a balance if it either is to survive, and the degree to which this balance is achieved will at least provide a more sophisticated understanding of the content of postpartisan spirit than will the mere appointment of party hacks to cabinet fiefdoms.

Election, Part II

Now that we’ve made a short work of the McCain campaign’s ineffective decision to promote the candidate’s service, here’s rhetoric lesson number two: one of the pressing issues facing us today is that we need to find a new language to describe politicians such as Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, both of whom represent a newly prominent figure in the pantheon of American politics – the prodigy.

The Populist.  The Statesman.  The Tax-and-Spend Liberal.  The Civil Rights Leader.  The Maverick.  The Centrist.  The Fighter.  Each of these stereotyped political myths has thrived because each corresponds to a legible constellation of antecedents, images, adjectives, critiques and narratives that attach to one politician or another.  We know this zodiac well.  But something funny happened this year.  One of the reasons that Obama and Palin have both risen to national prominence is that each candidate refuses to conform to any of these well-mapped rhetorical constellations.  Instead, both politicians primarily exhibit an inborn talent that it is difficult to rationalize into our normal set of ascriptions and arguments.  Both candidates just have “it.”

Of course, this quality itself is not unusual – JFK was a political prodigy, so was TR – the problem is that our language has not attached firm understandings to the idea of the prodigy, and so they are free to define themselves, for good or ill.  But as a rhetorical matter, what definitive features shall we use to mark them?  How can we open their choices up to the reasonable degree of critique that we will need on hand irrespective of who wins?  The fact that this election has suddenly highlighted these questions is far more interesting than my own meager answers.  But here goes.

I have two principle points to offer.

First off, everybody loves prodigies.  I’ve been blessed to spend much of my life around really brilliant and talented men and women.  And I’ve always been struck by how folks just bend over backwards to help these prodigies succeed.  You’d think that, in a democracy, it should be axiomatic that those with special talents deserve no easier path than anyone else.  But this is seldom the case.  Be they rich or poor, white or black, male or female, people with inborn talents often find an easier time getting a leg up than people without these talents.  Indeed, whole communities form to help stars shine brighter, and this fact accounts for a great deal of behavior in this election cycle.  In any casino, the crowd doesn’t gather around the one with the most money, it surrounds the gambler who’s on a roll, because people envy talent and luck more than they value toil.

When I met Barack Obama several years ago, I felt the same way about him as most people do.  Whatever he attempts to accomplish, I just want to see him succeed, in the same way that people want to see their high school valedictorian succeed.  This desire needs to be considered more deeply, because it is precisely this feeling that makes the prodigy viable as a political entity; it is this same force that dispelled legitimate worries about Obama’s lack of experience.  My hunch is that when prodigies succeed, the communities that made them succeed feel like they are members of that success, irrespective of the nature of the contest that has been won.  For this reason, although we may support populists, war heroes, mavericks or statesmen, the achievements of these conventional figures simply do not give their supporters the same jolt of fulfillment as is enjoyed by the follower of the prodigy.  The toiling Clinton and the tireless McCain failed to recognize the fact that the triumph of a Mozart is always more gripping than the triumph of a Salieri.

I don’t know if this effect is good or bad; I do know that it is undertheorized.

A second point.  The way that we recognize the American political prodigy is largely through their effective public speaking, which is peculiar for a nation that is not accustomed to attending public speaking events.  The speechmaking this season has been pretty damn impressive, particularly on the left.  No matter who wins on Tuesday, the history of American political rhetoric is already an anthology that begins with John Winthrop and ends with Barack Obama.  Still, the reasons for Obama’s success have little to do with his writing, which draws on a very long and distinguished tradition of conventional American rhetorical structures.  Actually, with Obama, it’s all in the delivery – the voice, the way he moves his hands, the facial expressions, the brilliant sense of pace and ability to rise to an occasion.  Sure, Obama is a very talented writer, but it is in his capacities as a performer of prose that his genius truly lies.

The Palin case is even more illustrative.  Let’s face it: her syntax is atrocious.  But it’s the performance that matters, not the dialogue, and we are fools to ignore how profoundly she connects with her audiences.  The scholar reading Palin’s speeches will see only the spectacular brutalization of language; but just watch those rallies and you will see communication happening in spite of the grammar.  Just as we know Obama to be a prodigy through his peerless delivery, we know Palin to be a prodigy because of the way that she has turned Joe the Plumber into the most interesting rhetorical figurine of the campaign.  Maybe it’s a dog-and-pony show, but it’s a bloody good one.

I’m not sure that these two observations are spot-on, but I think that they at least confront the prodigy on its own terms, rather than trying to fit Obama or Palin into the old zodiac.  My basic point is that our current interpretive vocabulary has not been very good at characterizing either of these politicians, and this has resulted in confusions.  For instance, much time has been wasted in this election debating whether or not Obama is inauthentic or Palin is frivolous based on their records.  But these questions fail because they do not recognize these two as prodigies: because we have an irrational desire to see prodigies succeed, and because they come into their own in the context of a great rallies rather than legislative records, prodigies never seem frivolous or inauthentic.  Actually, it is by virtue of the fact that these two politicians are prodigies that questions about political depth have had such feeble critical purchase.

So it’s obvious that the old categories don’t work.   What are the new ones?  That’s not so obvious yet.

Next time: the new rhetoric of “pragmatism.”

Election, Part I

It’s the only game in town this week: here is the first post in a short series of rhetorical lessons that I have learned from this year’s exciting election cycle.

First off, let’s talk about heroes.

One of the shibboleths of this election cycle has been the belief that it was shrewd of the McCain campaign to emphasize the candidate’s military service in Vietnam.  This idea is nonsense.  To understand why, we first of all need to recognize that not all war records are the same.  McCain’s experience has about as much in common with that of Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower as it does with that of Achilles.  While all are heroes, from a rhetorical point of view, the nature of their heroism could hardly be more different.

Let’s consider the actual content of heroism in terms of how it works on the imagination.  When we think of Ike on D-Day, we imagine him adroitly coordinating vast armies across the globe.  We feel awed by the feat and envious of the audacity behind it.  We imagine Ike to be a leader of the armed forces before we imagine him to be a member of them.  Moreover, because Ike is just about the only military leader who got out of World War II without doing something totally despicable, there is nothing to stop us from imagining ourselves in his shoes.  In other words, our relationship to Ike’s heroism is mimetic: we not only like Ike, but we want to be like him, and the thrust of our understanding of his war service leads us toward something like admiration.

But when we think of McCain in Hanoi, we surely do not envy him.  And although we are humbled by learning about what he endured, the thrust of our understanding does not lead us first to admiration – it leads us first to pity.  Pity is among the most powerful emotions, but with this power comes many complexities.  On the one hand, pity reminds us of our shared humanity, because it seems to create a personal bond between us and the one for whom we feel it, even if the latter is a stranger to us.  On the other hand, as any ancient Greek dramatist could tell you, people may also have a very negative reaction to this process.  Many people feel ashamed by beholding the piteous – that’s why it is often associated with the grotesque – and this shame can be so acute that it turns into hate directed at the very person who inspired pity in the first place.  In this case, the likelihood of this undesirable result is doubled by the fact that the war in question is Vietnam, a conflict that already makes many Americans feel ashamed about their country, their leadership, some of their fellow citizens, and even themselves.

Don’t get me wrong.  Pity and shame are invaluable components of our moral lives – just ask those Greek dramatists.  But the fact remains that pity has no damn place in an election because it is just too volatile an emotion to control with the precision necessary for effective messaging.  That’s why no propaganda organ has ever employed this emotion successfully.   Hate, love, fear – all of these are great for persuading people to pay, vote or fight.  But pity?  Forget it.  It is simply too cumbersome a rhetorical weapon to wield effectively.  Rapturous crowds spill into the streets for the warriors that they admire, not for the warriors that they feel sorry for.

Frankly, I’m surprised that no one in McCain’s campaign had the quantum of literary sensibility necessary to notice this problem.  And politics aside, let’s not let this idea pass by without noting that its implications are pretty troubling.  If nowadays we cannot effectively celebrate that which we also pity, then there is surely something deeply unrighteous about human character that deserves greater reflection.

Next time: prodigies, and why we’re so crazy about them.

Every Once in a While …

I remember why God gave Maureen Dowd her overdeveloped tendency for literary indulgence.

Syntax serves a good and useful purpose.

I can’t come up with the punchline for the life of me.

Somebody who nobody really knows wins a Nobel Prize.

A discoverer needs to be rediscovered, and is.

You’ve just got to take hat in hand, suck it up, and apologize (sort of).