This is the second post in my series on Roger Scruton’s The Return of Religion, in which the philosopher goes after “evangelical atheists” such as Richard Dawkins and Chrisopher Hitchens. In my first post, I argued that Scruton set up his argument by undermining the credibility of his interlocutors, accusing them of irresponsible, bestial shrillness - Scruton smartly turns their passion for their perspective into evidence of its fallaciousness. This argumentative strategy is probably not very helpful for an audience of philosophers familiar with this debate, unless it is intended as an act of provocation, in which case Scruton has accomplished his initial aims.

But now we need to talk substance. Scruton gets to the beef in the third paragraph, where he begins to lay out the case that he will dismantle:

Dawkins and Hitchens are adamant that the scientific worldview has entirely undermined the premises of religion and that only ignorance can explain the persistence of faith.

In this post, I’ll look at how Scruton takes apart the atheist perspective by transforming the issues that it raises. The key to this strategy is how he dislodges the intellectual problem of ignorance from the science v. religion debate. Scruton’s line of attack is to not only argue that the atheist perspective is weak - although this is surely part of the allegation - but also that it is misconceptualized. From a rhetorical point of view, the latter aim offers a set of cracking good possibilities. Let’s see if Scruton can make the most of them.

To begin with, Scruton synthesizes the viewpoint held in Dawkins The Selfish Gene with a few common scientific claims about the beginning of life, the universe and everything. We hear about genetic “survival machines,” primordial soups, elemental atoms and the Big Bang. The problem isn’t that the theories of biological creation and the formation of the universe are incomplete, just the way that the atheists lay claim to all the answers, arguing that it is science that will answer all questions about how life occurred:

Astrophysics has raised as many questions as it has answered. But they are scientific questions, to be solved by discovering the laws of motion that govern the observable changes at every level of the physical world, from galaxy to supernova, and from black hole to quark.

Of course, we know full well that Scruton thinks that the scientific claim to the origin of life is poppycock. Indeed, in the two paragraphs it takes to lay out the atheist case, he is careful to line each sentence with little cues that remind us of this poppycockery:

We are, so to speak, by-products of a process that is entirely indifferent to our well-being …

As for the existence of a planet in which the elements abound in the quantities observed on planet earth, such a thing is again to be explained by science …

Cues like these make the information that their sentences convey appear to be erroneous, no better than mere conventional wisdom. Toward the end of a passage festooned with such language, we get a clearer picture of the attack that is to come:

The mystery that confronts us as we gaze upwards at the Milky Way, knowing that the myriad stars responsible for that smear of light are merely stars of a single galaxy, the galaxy that contains us, and that beyond its boundaries a myriad other galaxies slowly turn in space, some dying, some emerging, all forever inaccessible to us – this mystery does not call for a religious response. For it is a mystery that results from our partial knowledge and which can be solved only by further knowledge of the same kind – the knowledge that we call science.

Only ignorance would cause us to deny that general picture, and the evangelical atheists assume that religion must deny that picture and therefore must, at some level, commit itself to the propagation of ignorance or at any rate the prevention of knowledge.

Notice that the manifest fact of the Milky Way is its “mystery,” and we have no call to think otherwise – mystery “confronts us,” we don’t just feel it. Also notice how “mystery” replaces “ignorance” in these passages. The atheists look to their account of the world and its many strengths, then wonder why it is not convincing. This leads them to ponder ignorance. Scruton looks to the atheist account of the world and finds it moderately convincing, but concentrates on its weaknesses, which leads him to ponder mystery.

But what about the [selfish] gene itself: how did that come to be? What about the primordial soup? All these questions are answered, of course, by going one step further down the chain of causation. But at each step we encounter a world with a singular quality: namely that it is a world which, left to itself, will produce conscious beings, able to look for the reason and the meaning of things, and not just for the cause. The astonishing thing about our universe, that it contains consciousness, judgment, the knowledge of right and wrong, and all the other things that make the human condition so singular, is not rendered less astonishing by the hypothesis that this state of affairs emerged over time from other conditions. If true, that merely shows us how astonishing those other conditions were. The gene and the soup cannot be less astonishing than their product.

Ah. Astonishment. The atheists turn the science v. religion debate into an intellectual problem that’s all about truth, knowledge, education, information and ignorance. But Scruton has a different approach. For him, the science v. religion debate is an emotional problem, all about mystery, inspiration, astonishment. These things are endangered by the way scientists commandeer the big questions. If we give the atheists the run of this town,

Things would cease to astonish us – or rather, they would fall within the ambit of the comprehensible – if we could find a way to purge them of contingency. That is what religion promises: not a purpose, necessarily, but something that removes the paradox of an entirely law-governed world, open to consciousness, that is nevertheless without an explanation: that just is, for no reason at all.

In a sense, Scruton’s article isn’t about atheism at all. It is a defense of the marvelous from the forces of order, intelligence and “the comprehensible.” Despite his fancy talk, all Scruton really wants is a sense of the fantastic in everyday life. Who could begrudge him such a thing?  Still, this alone does not a strong argument make, particularly to scientists and philosophers who may enjoy the aesthetic experience of astonishing incomprehensibility (who doesn’t?), but whose profession is to manhandle mysteries, and whose research projects exist to increase the sphere of the comprehensible.

If you’re in the business of knowing, the unknowable is not nearly as welcome as the unknown.  That’s why astonishment feels nice, but ignorance is bliss.

Next time: Scruton takes on consciousness, unconscionably.

Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton attacks “evangelical” atheists, arguing that writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are fools to claim that ignorance alone has prevented the triumph of scientific explanations over religious ones. This debate flares up in one form or another on a quarterly basis, and has animated these particular writers for some time, so don’t expect any miraculous display of wit or even a sound argumentative thumping.

But let’s not yawn too soon.

In the next few posts, I’ll look at a few rhetorical dimensions of Scruton’s essay, pointing out how he employs useful slights-of-hand. In this first post, I’ll highlight how the first three paragraphs launch a covert attack on the personal credibility of the evangelical atheists prior to laying out their actual case explicitly in the text. It is the sort of rhetorical move that often works really well, but only if the reader does not notice it, in which case it can seem crass and small-minded. This being the rhetorical precipice over which the prose is most liable to fall, let’s see how Scruton dances along it.

Scruton starts out by citing a tradition of antipathy toward organized religion, a sentiment that runs from Martin Luther and Voltaire to Dawkins and Hitchens. Maybe it made sense back in the eighteenth century, Scruton grants, but come on,

The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently? Surely, those who oppose religion in the name of gentleness have a duty to be gentle, even with – especially with – their foes?

Right or wrong, this stuff is pretty outrageous. After Scruton himself promulgates an unbroken line from Luther to Dawkins, he then complains about Dawkins existing in an unbroken line from Luther. Moreover, he has substituted the atheistic point of view - a coherent set of arguments - for the tendency of atheists to be shrill about them. And so a debate about ideas is replaced by a debate about whether it is good or bad to argue too loudly. This way, in order to be victorious on the level of ideas, all Scruton has to do is prove that his opposition is not comporting themselves kindly as they express their perspective. So long as he shows that atheists indulge in too much amplitude, it will seem as if the substance behind their point of view is also daft.

Fine sport. What’s next? A long paragraph, telling us how the world works, of course:

There are two reasons why people start shouting at their opponents: one is that they think the opponent is so strong that every weapon must be used against him; the other is that they think their own case so weak that it has to be fortified by noise. Both these motives can be observed in the evangelical atheists. They seriously believe that religion is a danger, leading people into excesses of enthusiasm which, precisely because they are inspired by irrational beliefs, cannot be countered by rational argument. We have had plenty of proof of this from the Islamists; but that proof, the atheists tell us, is only the latest in a long history of massacres and torments, which – in the scientific perspective – might reasonably be called the pre-history of mankind. The Enlightenment promised to inaugurate another era, in which reason would be sovereign, providing an instrument of peace that all could employ. In the eyes of the evangelical atheists, however, this promise was not fulfilled. In their view of things, neither Judaism nor Christianity absorbed the Enlightenment even if, in a certain measure, they inspired it. All faiths, to the atheists, have remained in the condition of Islam today: rooted in dogmas that cannot be safely questioned. Believing this, they work themselves into a lather of vituperation against ordinary believers, including those believers who have come to religion in search of an instrument of peace, and who regard their faith as an exhortation to love their neighbour, even their belligerent atheist neighbour, as themselves.

There’s a lot going on in this paragraph. Let’s look at few pieces.

1) “There are two reasons … “ This is just not true. People shout at their opponents for a million different reasons: because they are passionate, because they are promoting a book, because they are sick of repeating themselves, because their opponents are very stubborn, or just because they are irremediably French. Scruton is wise to place this at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a paragraph, a juncture at which many readers are unlikely to pause and think things over.

2) “… They think the opponent is so strong … they think their own case is weak …” Notice that both of these “reasons” impute that atheists are faking their beliefs. According to this portrayal, the atheists are cool, calculating minds that soberly assess their case and choose a plan of obfuscation after gaming out other strategies. Public intellectuals generally don’t think that way. I mean, really: Chris Hitchens dispassionately realizing that his own beliefs are weakly supported and in need of obfuscatory camouflage? The man simply loves himself too much to entertain the possibility that his ideas are weak, let alone in need of over-fortification. Nevertheless, by construing their argument as essentially strategic, Scruton diminishes the sense that the atheist point of view could be conscientiously held. According to the language, evangelical atheists are frauds - they know full well that they are wrong, and are refusing to admit it for some ulterior reason.

3) “… they seriously believe … the atheists tell us … they work themselves into a lather … their belligerent atheist neighbor …” Scruton continues to build on the image of the unreasonable, browbeating, animalistic atheist. Again, the problem (so far) isn’t with the atheist point of view, the problem is with the atheists.

Only after exorbitantly laying this groundwork does Scruton actually tell us the substance of the athiest case

Dawkins and Hitchens are adamant that the scientific worldview has entirely undermined the premises of religion and that only ignorance can explain the persistence of faith.

Coming at this juncture in the prose, this idea is already undermined by the adamance of the haughty, out of touch, animalistic frauds who hold it. Had Scruton provided this sentence nearer to the beginning of the essay, readers may have allied closely with the atheist position, and Scruton would have a much harder time breaking this allegiance. However, since these words appear on the page only after a flood of disparaging remarks about their authors, many readers have been encouraged to consider the atheist position as inherently weak. In this way, the first two paragraphs of the essay do little more than devalue the honesty and trustworthiness of Scruton’s interlocutors, rather than making a positive case of their own.

As I mentioned at the outset, this plan only works for readers who don’t notice it. Scruton plays with fire on this because so many of his main subject nouns and clauses (”they think .. they believe”) make it seem like this is a story “about” damnable atheists and not their impoverished ideas. If this were intended as an essay of philosophy for readers of same, then this is probably a poor choice. But if this is intended as sheer provocation - which is, by the way, a perfectly legitimate and necessary argumentative activity - then Scruton has surely ruffled the right feathers and at the right moment. If this is the case, however, Scruton will have to explain why he starts out an essay against vituperation by getting up his own lather of it.

Next time: Scruton sets out to astonish us with his ability to exterminate paradoxes like godless little roaches.

At the London Review of Books, Thomas Jones makes fun of a help-wanted ad from Britain’s MI6, which explains ‘We can’t overstate the importance of a sense of personal integrity.’ Jones juxtaposes this apparent high standard with Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel written by Sebastian Faulks, “writing as Ian Fleming.”

Wait a second, “writing as Fleming?” Information, please:

‘Picking up where Fleming left off’ when he died in 1964, Faulks transports his readers back to a time when men were men (or at least Bond was), women could escape from prison by flashing their breasts at a jailer, SIS was still a state secret, the enemies of that state were safely on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and the only looming global disaster anyone had to worry about was all-out nuclear war between the superpowers.

While MI6 evidently wants men and women of substance, Jones notes that Fleming’s novel is but a pretext to indulge political incorrectness. Let’s look at the offending descriptives:

The first character to be introduced is an Algerian drug dealer in Paris: ‘His face was a greyish brown, pocked and wary, with a large, curved nose jutting out between black brows.’ In Afghanistan, Bond encounters ‘dark-skinned tribesmen with Afghan headdresses and unkempt black beards’. There’s a treacherous gay American spy with a ‘wet’ handshake. The villain is a power-crazed, congenitally deformed Lithuanian – one of his hands is covered in hair and has an unopposable thumb, like a monkey’s, supposedly, though in fact all primates have opposable thumbs – with an irrational hatred of the British Empire: he’s forever banging on about the Irish Famine or the suppression of the Kikuyu. His sidekick is from Vietnam: ‘He had yellowish skin, narrow eyes with the epicanthic lids of the Orient, and flat, inert features.’

Sure, it’s racist. And overwritten? Don’t even get me started. But this sort of stuff is also de rigueur. At least, Faulks wouldn’t be showing much integrity to the genre - or to 1964 - were he to sanitize the spy novel of the buffoonish political incorrectness with which authors (including Fleming) invented it, and with which other writers (including Fleming) satirize it. The case illuminates how an act of emulation often contains a degeneracy that necessarily reflects poorly on the literary emulator.

That’s okay.  As qualifications go, personal integrity can be overstated.

The DaD series on handwriting continues with a big brassy love letter from anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman to her longtime lover, the physician Ben Reitman, the “Hobo Doctor” known for treating venereal diseases among the poor in the early decades of the 20th century.

Written August 15, 1909, the letter is archived in the Reitman papers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This image of it comes from an online exhibit about Goldman at Berkeley.

Three years after receiving this letter, Reitman would be beaten, tarred and feathered for his support of worker’s rights and freedom of speech, and he would face charges along with Goldman under the infamous Comstock Laws for his support of contraceptives. Goldman and Reitman split in 1917, as their “free love” policy became strained. Three years later, after decades of outspoken agitation, Goldman would be deported from the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Greater Americans than their accusers, today both Goldman and Reitman are buried - separately - in Waldheim Cemetery here in Chicago, where you’ll also find the graves of the men executed for Haymarket.

Happy Independence Day.

At The New Republic, Josh Patashnik criticizes the way that Senator Ben Cardin talks about public transit to the environmental website Grist. Here’s the quote from Cardin:

I’m a big, big supporter of dramatic change in public transportation. It includes more than just the bus and rail systems in our urban areas. It includes a commuter rail and inner-city rail–the whole gamut of services that get people out of their personal vehicles. I don’t want people driving their personal vehicles the way they are today.

Patashnik criticizes Cardin for talking like he is dictating to people, and suggests that a better idea “both rhetorically and philosophically,” would be to replace the sentence

“I don’t want people driving their personal vehicles the way they are today”

with the sentence,

“Current policy incentives produce an amount of driving that’s greater than the social optimum; we should eliminate these distortionary policies.”

My apologies to any readers who fell asleep in the middle of reading that sentence. Now, I can’t speak to whether or not this second version is “philosophically” better than the first. But I think that I can say without fear of contradiction that when it comes to rhetorical value, Patashnik is flat wrong. To explain why, let’s look at what led him to make this poor recommendation.

At the outset of the post, after citing Cardin’s offending sentence, Patashnik explains,

My reaction to this is what I suspect most people’s reaction would be: Who the hell is Ben Cardin to tell me he doesn’t want me driving? What does it matter to him? Now, look, obviously the problem here is that under current policy automobile travel is subsidized in all kinds of ways, and that eliminating these distortionary subsidies–or, if we’re going to keep subsidizing transportation, finding a more neutral balance between cars and other forms of transportation–would cause some unspecified number of people to switch to public transit, or biking, or whatever. So it’s literally true that under the course of action I favor, people would not be “driving their personal vehicles the way they are today.”

[However] It’s not the government’s job to tell you how to travel–it’s the government’s job to make sure the choices available to you reflect the externalities and social costs associated with them (and carbon emissions are part of the equation here, obviously). But beyond that, government ought to stay out of the way–and I think liberals would have more success if they framed the conversation this way, rather than in terms of “We want you to drive less.”

The problem with this approach to conversation is that it treats the speaking situation as if it is so broad as to be practically hypothetical, but this is not the case. Patashnik faults Cardin for making a statement in a way that is not ideal for liberals talking to “most people.” Now, maybe Patashnik has his finger on the pulse of most people and maybe he doesn’t; either way it doesn’t matter because Sen. Cardin was not speaking to most people. He was speaking to Grist, a green advocacy site (It’s mission statement is pretty spunky, promising to “throw brickbats when they’re needed”). This is not a liberal speaking to all the readers in the whole wide world who might possibly be paying attention; it is a Senator talking to a reporter from a real website that has real readers, who have a shared point of view about which we can make educated guesses. From here on in, if we don’t use these guesses to make language choices, then we just aren’t thinking rhetorically at all.

Now let’s imagine a spunky green public transit lover (with or without brickbat), as liberal as the day is long, reading the sentence that Patashnik thinks is “rhetorically” superior to Cardin’s original statement.

“Current policy incentives produce an amount of driving that’s greater than the social optimum; we should eliminate these distortionary policies.”

I’m not smart enough to tell you whether or not the public will be persuaded by this stuffy, technical, evasive and bloodless statement. However, I am not a dummy, and I can at least surmise that this phrase will sound like a bunch of codswallop to a reader of Grist. In fact, it will sound like exactly the kind of overly-cautious jargon that the site itself studiously avoids in its quest for verve and pluckiness. Thus, had Cardin followed Patashnik’s advice, he would have been misunderstanding the purpose of speaking to the Grist reporter in the first place.

Sure, the Grist context is not hermetically sealed off from the world. In the course of its modest life, Cardin’s statement may be extracted from its intended context and wander off somewhere that it will do the aim of public transportation irreparable harm. In the age of the internet, it is increasingly difficult to make writing decisions based on hard and fast contexts, venues or audiences. But if we aren’t making decisions based on real readers that are definitely involved in the writing situation, then it’s not clear to me what we should be making decisions based on. Indeed, if we agree that walking-on-eggshell prose is right for this issue and its situation doesn’t matter, then I can’t tell why such evasiveness wouldn’t be right for all issues and all situations everywhere. The next thing you know we’d all be talking like … well … Senators.

The real trouble here is that Patashnik’s objection does not rest on a useful concept of persuasive language, because it treats discourse only as a way of framing an issue and not as something that is already framed by a context and a readership. I don’t think that this view is stupid, just far too cautious as a way of thinking about prose and patently impractical as a policy for actually writing it.

I’ve been wondering about a post by blogger Nigel Beale, who wonders whether there’s anything to a problem that Somerset Maugham wondered about many years ago.

Maugham:

I wonder that people who are concerned for the survival of democracy are not anxious at the inordinate power it gives oratory. A man may be possessed of a disinterested desire to serve his country, he may have wisdom and prudence, courage and a knowledge of affairs, he will never achieve a political position in which he can exercise his powers unless he has also the gift of the gab. I was listening to some people the other day discussing the chances L. had of becoming prime minister and their opinion was unanimous that he had none because he was a poor speaker. I suppose they were right, but is it not frightening that the indispensible qualification a politician needs to conduct the complicated business of a modern nation is a voice that sounds well over the air or the knack of inventing striking phrases? It is only a happy accident if he combines these gifts with common-sense, integrity and foresight…

We are all familiar with this scene. Round men huddle over brandy snifters and measure the qualities of one candidate or another in an upcoming contest, all agreeing that despite the fine characteristics whose manifest import is praised repeatedly between clouds of cigar smoke, everything is outweighed by the horrible indispensability of oratory. Presumably, this horror is bad for democracy because oratory is not only the aptitude of the toastmaster, the village pastor or the Honorable Member from Notwickenhamcastershire - it is also the talent of the despot.

Beale sympathizes with the question, but is skeptical about the conclusion:

I wonder if Somerset has it right here. I have never witnessed a greater thrashing in debate than the one Al Gore put on George Bush in the 2000 election campaign. I recall the huge disappointment I felt when the American people voted Bush in, despite his very obvious oratorical, and I thought, intellectual inferiority.

The problem here isn’t that these authors have different ideas about what fine oratory is, just that each writer has a slightly different sense of what fine oratory means . Clearly, Maugham does not think that there is much to the gift of the gab. Notice how he contrasts this gift with intrinsic qualities (desire to serve, prudence, courage, common-sense, integrity) and virtues that are earned over time (wisdom, knowledge of affairs), any one of which Maugham probably believes would be a shrewd criterion to rely upon to pick leaders of modern nations. Real statecraft is “complicated business” while oratory is just a “knack.” For Maugham, oratory is an accidental quality to be found in men and women whose internal excellence is an entirely separate question. But for Beale, fine oratory is a symptom of deeper character traits - “obvious oratorical inferiority” is not just a missing knack, but is coupled with “intellectual inferiority.” That Beale associates bad oratory with stupidity certainly rings true, and if this is the case, then oratory must be more than just smoke and mirrors.

The difference between the two positions is really one of semantics. Beale seems to believe that oratory means something more than itself, while for Maugham oratory merely masks truly meritorious qualities. Beale and Maugham actually agree on what political virtues are, they just disagree on whether or not to use oratory as a way of figuring out whose got those virtues. If we accept the idea that oratory is itself a skill that indicates relative intelligence, it is but a small step to say that oratory may also be a source to exhibit wisdom, knowledge of affairs, courage, prudence, common-sense et cetera.

So there isn’t much of a dispute here, but there are two mutually exclusive paradigms - one in which talk is “just talk” and another in which talk is a badge that marks anything from outright stupidity to a particular skill or general inner worthiness.

Which paradigm is better for the survival of democracy?

Maugham’s question still hovers in the smoke, undissipated.

Historian and reporter Rick Shenkman writes a book and starts a blog to tackle the “paradox” of the dumb voter. What paradox? Well, according to the author, political speeches used to be written to meet a “12th grade level” fifty years ago, but current debates are pitched as if they were directed to kids in middle school, despite the fact that our population has a far better education nowadays.

Hence the paradox:

Decade by decade Americans are getting smarter and smarter, and decade by decade our politics is getting dumber and dumber. How can we explain it?

I’m more interested in Shenkman’s approach to relating this question than in the conclusions that he reaches. Specifically, it seems to me that this question lends itself to two different argumentative points of view. A writer might theorize “smarts” and then proceed to show how and why those smarts have gone down the tubes, or the writer can theorize “dumb,” and show how dumb behavior is making short work of our cherished democracy. Of course, any sustained engagement with this question is bound to make use of both of these points of view, but my sense is that Shenkman spends a lot more effort on the latter. Rather than giving us an abundant sense of what “intelligence” is or ought to be, Shenkman has chosen to do the opposite, and account for, define and conceptualize stupidity. This represents an unusual strategy that bears unique powers and cautions.

The post on the paradox is a case in point. Although it is clear that the author measures the intelligence of Americans based on their knowledge of civics, policy and current events, he does not bother to justify this relatively narrow sense of what it means to be smart. The problem isn’t that Shenkman has an idiosyncratic or ad hoc understanding of smarts; it’s just that the prose does not offer us this understanding in a well-flagged location.

Meanwhile, the blog uses the word “stupid” excessively, almost reveling in its sheer simplicity. In fact, Shenkman offers a series of great quotes about stupidity (Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter”), and even provides a scale with which he proposes to rate stupidity in public debates. The scale has five levels, signified by a number of (what else?) dunce-caps.

A writer or politician earns such caps in proscribed ways,

First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who’s in charge.

Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events.

Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts.

Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually exclusive, or contrary to the country’s long-term interests.

Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

It’s remarkable that in the context of this blog’s prose, stupidity is really a pretty robust phenomenon, whose content is much easier to identify than the content of intelligence. I mean, we could imagine an alternative scale that awards gold stars to smart research, but this is not the calculus that Shenkman has chosen to foreground. The blog is devised to identify and pillory those who err rather reward those who don’t. As an argumentative point of view, the plan is to accentuate the negative.

The ramifications of this choice are mixed. On the one hand, the negative scale makes the endeavor more useful to historians - Shenkman’s readers at HNN - who are professionally adept at finding “ignorance of critical facts” and “disinclination to seek reliable sources” in public disputes. On the other hand, because the focus is on finding stupidities, this analysis is not ideal for developing new strategies to make Americans smarter about their politics. In fact, by robustly theorizing stupidity, the danger is that intelligence may seem to be no more than the absence of stupidity, rather than vice versa. It’s hard to imagine how educators - another key constituency for this analysis - will find such a point of view helpful.

In the face of a whole lot of stupid out there, Shenkman’s approach seems pretty canny, but when it comes to figuring out smarts, he may still need to help his readers get wise.

(Sorry.)

Another illustrated letter from the Smithsonian’s archive of same for the continuing DaD series on handwriting. This time, a note from sculptor Alexander Calder to Agnes Rindge Claflin, director of the Vassar Art Gallery, June 6, 1939. That year, Claflin was completing the catalog for art collection at Vassar and hiring German refugees, while Calder unsuccessfully attempted to join the Marines.

Nice to have a little colo(u)r around here.

People are reading G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and coming up with complicated things to say about it. (Hey, there’s even an Orson Welles radio play)

Others are getting hip to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery again, on its anniversary. (Sometimes reading it aloud)

Meanwhile, read a few recollections of Emerson written by journalist Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and unearthed and excerpted just for you by Wyatt Mason at Harper’s.

But beware. On this day in 1284, disaster struck in Hamelin.

Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think.

In The New Yorker this week, an article about itching from the excellent Atul Gawande. Gawande begins with a literary image that would equally befit Franz Kafka or Freddy Kruger:

One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.

Surely, this gory stuff came special delivery from the department of apt metaphors. Just as M.’s itch is quite literally more than skin deep, the broader phenomenon of itch is much deeper too. Even for New Yorker readers, the sheer horror of the analogy effectively disguises its heavy-handedness, a maneuver that Gawande pulls off marvelously as he uses the story of this woman’s diagnosis as an imprimatur to look more closely at models of human perception.

To begin with, he outlines problems with a common theory that “perception is reception,” the notion that nerve receptors react to bright, hard, strong stimuli out there in the world. It is on the basis of this theory that many physicians often craft treatments when they confront patients with persistent itches, phantom limbs or similar nervous problems. According to Gawande, however, this theory is both intellectually suspect and ineffective as a practice, belying both the experimental research and ordinary experience. He writes,

The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture.

Thus, persistent itch isn’t always something that the bright hard world “does to” nerve endings in the skin, but itch is also something endogenous to the brain - not merely a disorder of nerves, but also one of perception. M.’s digging finger (sorry) pointed toward the truth, after all. Gawande finds further evidence for this view in new therapies for phantom limb, techniques that use mirrors to confuse the brain with the illusion that the sufferer actually has two appendages where there is only one. Such “perceptual therapy” has apparently been achieving results. Gawande takes these results to substantiate a new model of perception that is being developed among researchers.

The account of perception that’s starting to emerge is what we might call the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception: perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard-wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning. We see a friendly yellow Labrador bounding behind a picket fence not because that is the transmission we receive but because this is the perception our weaver-brain assembles as its best hypothesis of what is out there from the slivers of information we get. Perception is inference.

This made a lot of sense to me as I was buzzing through the article. But I also had a nagging feeling. I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to M., the woman with the hole in her head. Surely there must be more to the tale; doubtless Gawande wouldn’t use such a harrowing opening gambit without letting us know how it all turned out. As I kept reading the article, other things started to pester me. Gawande started talking about someone named Dr. Oaklander (who’s she?), and mentioned something about how surgeons cut the sensory nerve in M.’s brain that deadened her forehead (whoa, when did that happen?). This stuff really left me scratching my head, you might say.

At length I discovered the problem. My copy of The New Yorker had a bindery error and was missing a page, jumping right from page 60 to page 63. So here’s the paragraph that I saw bridging one page to the next:

[from p60] Unlike, say, the nerve fibres for pain, each of which covers a millimetre-size territory, a single itch fibre can pick up an itchy sensation more than three inches away. The fibres also turned out to have [from p63] whole, an intact entity travelling through space. Put two dogs together behind the fence and you don’t think they’ve morphed into one. Your mind now configures the slices as two independent creatures.

Two dogs behind a fence, indeed. Apparently, my eye just cruised right past this jump, my brain presumably relying on its best hypothesis of what was there, based on the slivers of information that it got. Thus, by partially omitting the content of Gawande’s argument, a bindery error underscored it.

Delicious, isn’t it?

My recent experience with Brain’s Best Guess also serendipitously suggests a detail that must somehow form part of the theory if it is to be successful: not all parts are equally qualified to serve as aids to infer intactness. For instance, if the missing page of the article had contained a digression on the history of itch studies, then maybe this reader would not be bothered by its omission, and “Brain” would have been all set to best-guess its way to a pretty good concept of the whole. But since the missing page contained a narrative about a woman with an oozing hole in her head (an image put there to hook the reader into the article in the first place), guesswork alone did little to satisfy the itching need for more information before Brain was willing to go ahead and fill in the picture, story or head.

Luckily, I found pages 61 and 62 tucked in unbound a few pages later, as if some fantastically witty printer’s apprentice had just conceived and executed the driest of all tricks on me, but didn’t want things to get out of hand.

Just to let you know, it turns out that there are people who can read the stars and thereby date some of the events of “The Odyssey” to the year 1178 B.C. We also have folks who can introduce ten new chapters to James Agee’s “A Death in the Family” so that it doesn’t actually have to start out with a death in the family anymore.

Me, I’m building a better mousetrap.

Clark Hoyt, Public Editor at The New York Times, discusses the Clinton-lost-because-of-sexism hypothesis that I blogged about last week. His investigation is relatively successful because he treated the matter in a limited and focused way - defining sexism as types of words expressed in the coverage, and using Times material as his dataset, also asking some really smart external researchers to look into it for added objectivity.

There are many ways to find fault with Hoyt’s methods in this investigation, particularly the cavalier way that he matter-of-factly ascribes sexism to some usages of vocabulary and not others. It would take more work to prove that these ascriptions are unambiguous. Nevertheless, Hoyt has come up with these methods in a cool-headed manner that may lead to better practices in the future by avoiding some of the sloppy thinking into which so many writers on this subject easily sink.

All the same, no good deed goes unpunished, so I am sure that this reasonable approach to the question will be savaged. In fact, since Hoyt arrived at a similar conclusion to that of Katie Couric, here’s hoping that he will get to be “Worst Person in the World” too. If not, then we’ll know that Keith Olbermann is a sexist, and then - thank heaven! - the zaniness can go on for at least another week.

Columnist Joel Stein complains about wine critics in the Los Angeles Times. Let’s give Stein a round of applause for his opening salvo:

When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass.

The complaint is that “the language of sommeliers, winemakers, sellers and writers has devolved into nothing besides a long list of obscure smells that tells me nothing.” The key term here isn’t “language,” but “me” - it’s not that the words are inherently obnoxious, or that they are meaningless to everyone, just that they are meaningless to a particular category of people who read such prose. As wine critic Gary Vaynerchuk explains later on in the essay, “the reason there’s a problem is that there’s a lot of [critics] who suck at communicating.” The more that a writer disrespects or misunderstands the expectations and reading habits of casual wine drinkers, who make up most of their readers, the more that the writer will tend toward jackass.

But that’s not the only problem. Stein isn’t happy about it, but the fact is that wine critics actually have two audiences for their prose, and this fact leads them to face a nearly intractable rhetorical situation. One audience is the reading public, who like wine but have little patience for the endless detection of its subtler notes. It’s hardly surprising that Stein likes Vaynerchuk, who often compares wines to movies (this reminds me of “Platoon”) or famous people (this pinot noir reminds me of Roger Clemens), because these descriptives are drawn from the types of writing that most L.A. Times readers normally encounter on a day-to-day basis. Vaynerchuk reaches into the language-world of the casual wine drinker in order to craft successfully meaningful prose.

But there is another language-world to worry about, because there is also a professional audience for this type of writing, including the very sommeliers and winemakers who perform cunning feats of nasal detection. For the second audience, the stuffy language is most appropriate, because it is both trade jargon and also a way to perform professionalism and affirm the standards of the language-world. In this sense, professional sommeliers are not different from any other sort of professional group - literary critics, tax lawyers, underwater basket-weavers - inasmuch as the way that they talk to each other is like a secret handshake that proves that they are part of the club, which makes their ideas meaningful. It is totally normal and perfectly appropriate for language to serve this function. What makes wine critics different is that they also write for the public, and so they have the unhappy task of having to do their secret handshakes outside of the lodge hall for all to see, which inevitably makes them look like asses.

Here in Chicago, The Smart Museum is exhibiting “John Sloan’s New York.” The show inspired me to fish around online for some of Sloan’s handwriting. Pickings were pretty slim, but I did find some examples at this online archive of illustrated letters at the Smithsonian.

Here’s a letter from Sloan to the art critic and promoter Walter Pach, dated August 4, 1922, in which Sloan brags about his brand new first car, with a sketch of Sloan driving up a bajada in it:

Here’s another: a letter dated July 29, 1945, with Sloan’s instructions to the art dealer Antoinette Kraushaar, in which he asks her to ship a painting from his Chelsea apartment to Philadelphia, providing a map to the location of the right painting.

Sloan would die of cancer within six years of writing this letter. Kraushaar would continue managing her family’s gallery until her death in 1992, by which time it was one of the oldest galleries in New York City.

Lately, there has been caustic argument over the hypothesis that sexism played a role in the outcome of the recent Democratic contest. The acrimony went from bad to worse last week. Alone among mainstream broadcast news personalities, CBS anchor Katie Couric lent credence to the sexism idea, then was pilloried for doing so by commentator Keith Olbermann, who named her the “Worst Person in the World,” a title that his program regularly confers on some people who are by any standard far crummier than Couric.

My own views on this question are of course neither smart nor important, but in this post I would like to highlight something that might be: a couple of features of this dispute that render it unlikely to lead to deeper understanding of the election, sexism or anything else. According to my reading, the issue is structured in such a way that it frustrates its own potential to tell us something useful about America today. However, I’ll also try to suggest that useful insights might be teased out of this disagreement, if and when cooler heads begin to prevail.

To begin with, in such a long campaign, it is obviously preposterous to pick out one (or even a dozen) factors that lead to a disappointing outcome. But the preponderance of detailed “autopsy reports” also has its own problem. By asking whether or not sexism is one among the many reasons, we make it seem like this reason is “like” other reasons on the list, such as Clinton’s failure to successfully target caucus states or the gas tax holiday. This way of framing the question shows a lack of understanding about the complex and sometimes hidden quality of sexist ideas, instincts and behavior. Sexism is just as real as anything else, but the nature of its reality is not conveniently reducible to an individual, plan or policy, unlike all of the other reasons that Senator Clinton lost. In this way, the question mischaracterizes sexism before instances of it are even cited.

This discussion faces an additional set of difficulties because it naturally invites comparative thinking that is both politically impolite and unanswerable. That is, many writers take this as an opportunity to measure sexism against racism. It’s not clear to me what benefit we gain from this, besides some muddy sense of who overcame harder odds. Still, the instinct to make this comparison is powerful, even though it is both indecorous - Hendrick Herzberg has observed, “competitions among grievances do not ennoble” - and also intellectually impoverished, since such a measurement relies upon (but does not provide) the metrics with which it might be ascertained. Historian Gil Troy puts this more clearly than I:

It is hard to quantify prejudice when both racism and sexism have been delegitimized. Our favorite tools, surveys, require honesty, while many racists and sexists know to camouflage their ugly feelings.

So the sexism-yes-or-no-debate is bad because it fills the problem with sexism vs. racism questions that it can’t answer. In other words, the issue is a qualitative question masquerading as a quantitative question, and we will lack a thoughtful answer so long as this masquerade continues.

At the end of the day, the real problem is that this whole discussion is no more than a sort of ruse, a way to lure people into an overly-polarized fight, when these same people could use the campaign as an aid to earnestly study events and assess practices. Think about it - this contest involved so many issues that to argue that sexism had no place in it whatever you would have to believe that sexism does not exist at all, which is a pretty extreme position. This tends to polarize the debate as a whole, making us choose between two Manichaean positions, one world that is inescapably defined by gender politics, another in which there is no such thing. By reducing this discussion to such a stark choice, I fear that most writers end up mischaracterizing not only their opponent’s position, but also their own. The sheer rigidity of this way of thinking prevents us from really identifying sexist comments, instincts and social structures and then finding ways to reduce them, something that ought to appeal to everyone.

Finally, by allowing themselves to stall at the “whether or not crossroads” writers diminish their ability to celebrate the degree to which Clinton overcame sexism. They also abnegate their responsibility to behave like adults, and at least entertain the proposition that they may have faults such as sexist instincts. And writers also fail to ask more precise questions about who behaved in a sexist fashion, where and why. Surely there must be a host of finely-tuned questions along these lines that would allow us to devise strategies that improve equality in coverage, set standards in advertisements and so on. But so long as we obsess over the under-answerable yes-or-no about the very existence of sexism, these simpler and clearer questions cannot be addressed and our debate remains unelevated by a campaign process that really promised to do so.

In short, by insisting that a yes-or-no answer inheres in this situation, the debate becomes stalled and self-incapacitating, leaving us too intellectually slovenly to either bury the campaign or to praise it.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, author and professor John L. Jackson Jr. takes on the recent brouhaha between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee. To summarize the controversy: some time ago, Lee took exception to the dearth of African-American servicemen in Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima,” then Eastwood took exception to Lee’s taking of an exception (”shut your face”), after which Lee took exception to Eastwood’s taking of an exception to Lee’s taking of an exception (”we’re not on a plantation”), and so forth.

Neither party has acquitted himself very well: the vertiginous quality of the debate is matched only by the egotism that it seethes. At this point the debate is really about Lee and Eastwood rather than about soldiers, race, history - or about movies, which is after all the only subject on which either of these men can speak with any professional authority at all. To his great credit, Jackson manages to slow the whirligig down enough to find something in it that reflects how brutally intractable disputes over racial politics can be. Here’s how Jackson explains what’s going on:

Eastwood feels like he has depicted two important stories in American history that just so happened not to entail any substantive African-American involvement. That’s the history, he says. Not racism. Lee sees two canonical and award-winning filmic representations of a watershed moment in American history, and voices anger at the fact that Hollywood conveniently tells a version of things that doesn’t include a more diverse group of American fighters.

Notice that Jackson is not taking sides, just trying to summarize each position and to accord to each director some of the justice underlying his point of view. Jackson does this because he is less interested in who’s right, and more interested in the dynamics of the dispute itself, especially in whether or not these dynamics preclude the very chance of a positive result:

This is a quintessential example of our collective impasse vis-a-vis racial politics in contemporary America. The sides are starkly drawn. Both sets of heels are deeply dug in. It is the perfect example of what our “conversations about race” tend to look like. But what manner of dialogue is it when nobody can concede any portion of the other side’s point? Why talk this kind of talk at all? Could there possibly be any upside?

It’s a pretty fine point, one that is immediately ignored by most of Jackson’s respondents in the blog, many of whom take it upon themselves to volley insults, illuminate the real history, or to write the spat off as pure trickery. Some examples:

… why does Hollywood and its television counterparts have racial blinders on when it comes to portraying historical events? …

… On this battle I’m siding with Clint Eastwood, Spike see [sic] racism in the clouds …

… Lee is a professional exploiter of racialist controversy, and frankly, a racist …

Yikes. I feel bad for the few writers in the response section who made really earnest efforts to understand the acrimony rather than just perpetuate it. Oddly, however, Jackson’s point is only made stronger by the fact that so many missed it, because these replies exemplify the very sort of speech whose proliferation Jackson highlights. In other words, Jackson asks why people can’t resist digging in their heels for combat whenever presented with the opportunity, and many readers cheerfully take this statement as the opportunity to do exactly what Jackson predicts that they reflexively do.

Still, Jackson’s exceptional question deserves a more thorough reply, so let’s look at it again:

What manner of dialogue is it when nobody can concede any portion of the other side’s point? Why talk this kind of talk at all? Could there possibly be any upside?

The trouble with the first question is that it implies that there exist sorts of debate - perhaps when it’s not about race, perhaps in some distant past - in which people really do concede portions their adversary’s points in good faith. This notion seems like a fantasy, or at best a heuristic device. It reminds me a little of Jurgen Habermas’ Ideal Speech Situation, the concept of a context in which people can dialogue without coercion of any kind, a situation that does not and cannot exist, but whose possibility can be useful to help work out theoretical problems. The trouble comes when we expect such fantastic mechanisms to serve us in real life. Getting back to Jackson: look to your own experience, and ask yourself how often you have conceded a really substantive point or a whole argument in public. In debates and disputes, people usually only make concessions for rhetorical purposes, in order to seem likable or to extract a commensurately minor concession from an opponent as a means to craftily enfeeble other aspects of that opponent’s case. This is not to say that compromise is impossible in real life dialogues, just that debates are not the context in which these concessions usually occur.

So the problem is that so long as its content is taken up by argumentative debates alone, the “conversation about race” can expect many pitched battles and few compromises or concessions. Happily, however, there is a whole repertoire of other sorts of talk - negotiation, deliberation, explanation, inquiry, reflection - that can be part of a more capacious definition of “conversation.” We should accord these more reciprocal forms of dialogue at least as much worth as we do acrimony, challenge and riposte, which certainly have their purposes, but can also be overvalued to the point that they obscure the utility of other sorts of dialogue and thereby impede productive results.

Another trouble with Jackson’s point lies in the second two questions, which imply that “talk” only becomes valuable when it features an “upside,” which Lee v. Eastwood seems not to have. But this is only the case if we adopt a very limited definition of what a benefit is. Sure, as I have argued above, concession and compromise are not commensurate with the activity of argumentative debate, so we must exclude these two potential positive results from the inventory of upsides that we can expect such a debate to produce. But the hope of resolution is not the only positive quality to airing disputes in public. In fact, hasn’t the dispute between Lee and Eastwood made it easier for Jackson to detect and elegantly expose the underlying motivations behind each filmmaker’s position? This strikes me as a modest upside, and it is precisely the aptitude that makes debate attractive in the first place.

So here’s my two cents on Jackson’s exceptionally interesting question. According to my reading, spats like the one between Lee and Eastwood can offer the minimal benefit of helping us to figure out on what grounds people believe that their positions on difficult issues are justified. However, if we want to make progress in such difficult domains as racial politics, then we cannot be satisfied with framing the content of our conversation about race to include only a series of disputes and their justifications. Instead, we will need to foreground types of reciprocal dialogue that are more supple than mere antagonism, forms of talk that cast off gratuitous swagger and reward the capacity to generate timely and substantive resolutions to the issues that debates are adept at naming but not at solving.

Joseph Kugelmass continues an ongoing discussion at The Valve about how bloggers are replacing film, book and music critics, particularly those based in what have until recently been august print venues. As yours truly did in an earlier post, Kugelmass roots his analysis in some remarks by film professor David Bordwell on the subject of the future of blogs. In my view (and Churm’s), Bordwell’s ideas are ambitious because they forgo the bludgeon of disdain and exhibit a pragmatic instinct for the prosodic opportunity at hand. Bordwell approaches the ascent of blog criticism by calling on writers to innovate better practices, including a “slow” kind of blog writing that is inspired by the long critical essay and might profitably challenge writers, readers, and the medium itself. If Bordwell is being bold, then this is what he is being bold about.

Of course, this boldness exhausts neither the content of Bordwell’s post nor the issue that occasioned it. For his part, Kugelmass draws on Bordwell’s adjacent discussion on taste in order to confront a ramification of the blog revolution: there is a change in our ability to “canonize” cultural works, a task that has classically and quintessentially fallen to the critic, but which now seems unnecessary if not impossible.

Kugelmass believes that we today witness the end of the puny tyranny of the canon:

Now that the blogosphere (in conjunction with social networking sites) has decentered and diversified our knowledge of what’s out there (aesthetically speaking) to such an extreme degree, the idea of a consistent and well-policed canon has become ridiculous.

Personally, I’m not sure whether or not the canon is ridiculous, or if this ridiculousness is newfound. But let’s congratulate Kugelmass on his imagery and enjoy contemplating the idea of “canon police” prowling the streets, ferreting out underground cabals of Robert Ludlum fans and clandestine covens of Harlequin romance readers. To protect and serve, you betcha.

Okay, now back to work.

A letter from ten year-old Orville Wright to his father Milton Wright, April 1st, 1881. Available online as part of the Library of Congress Exhibit “Dreams of Flight.”

Like his brother Wilbur, Orville never finished high school.

Celebrating its ten year anniversary, The Philosophers’ Magazine publishes a post drawn from a larger piece in which the editors posed the following question to a panel of highly accomplished and celebrated philosophers:

Has philosophy responded adequately to the big events and debates of the last decade, such as climate change and the post-9/11 world?

It behooves scholars to ask themselves this sort of question regularly, even though - like all behoovery - it seems labored. In this instance, most of TPM’s philosophers predictably reply in the negative, and many of them further conform to expectations by interrogating the question itself. Colin McGinn has a pithy quip along these lines:

No, but it hasn’t responded inadequately either - which would be worse. What would an adequate response look like?

Good question. Although he alights briefly on the concept of adequacy, McGinn soon follows his colleagues to dwell upon the verb “responded” rather than on the adverb that conspicuously pressures it in the phrasing of the question. As a result of this choice, McGinn and the other writers skew their comments to the issue of action - what philosophers do; whether or not they should do it (or could do it) in a way that is informed by (or in response to) “big events and debates.” In their focus on the verb, none of these writers make clear to us how they have engineered the standard of adequacy that necessarily structures their replies.

In the absence of deliberate thinking on adequacy, many of these philosophers reveal intuitive perceptions of this quality, which makes TPM’s question much more interesting than it was probably set up to be. In this post, I want to look at the adequacy threshholds in which these writers seem to work, in the hope that this exercise will show that there is little consensus among these extraordinary minds as to the means by which they ought to tally the merit of intellectual responses to world events. Without consensus on how we can know responsiveness to be commensurate with the situation - or at least more transparency about the variegated quality of adequacy - it is really quite difficult to answer questions such as the one above to common satisfation.

Let’s look a little deeper into what these philosophers say, to pick out a few clues about the sort of adequacy that would need to exist in order for each of these writers to answer TPM in the affirmative. Roughly, the TPM philosophers can be divided into four groups based on what they think constitutes an adequate response.

For one group of writers - including McGinn and Jerry Fodor - philosophy simply does not have a plausible responsibility to respond to events or debates at all. Fodor is snarky: “Has Art History responded adequately to the post-9/11 world? Why should philosophy be different?,” While McGinn puts it a little more charitably: “Philosophers should respond, but it’s not clear to me that philosophy should.” We might call these writers adequacy agnostics. For both of them, the ambit of philosophy is not sufficiently capacious to include climate change or 9/11. Sure, these things should matter to people, even in the unlikely event that these people happen to be philosophers; it’s just that these big events aren’t philosophical subjects, so philosophy can be neither adequate nor inadequate in addressing them. Philosophers can have opinions about torture, sea ice or what to do about the price of eggs, but these opinions don’t count as professionally informed.

A second group of writers consider adequacy from a pedagogical point of view, recommending that in light of the big events, educators ought to revive dormant curricular material. To address climate change, for instance, Simon Blackburn suggests a return to the stoics, while Alisdair MacIntyre recommends Marx. Martha Nussbaum has the most developed post on this sort of pedagogical adequacy. She believes that philosophers are responding adequately when “good work” appears, when issues receive “the attention they deserve,” and when paradigms “have begun to be challenged.” As if advising a plucky student or reviewer, she says that “philosophy advances by argument and contestation, and we need more powerful worked-out theories of different types.” As an example, Nussbaum notes that good work is being done on animal privileges, because “the menu [!] of theoretical options” on this subject is expanding. She even gets specific about what “good work” would look like in the cases of global warming and post 9/11 society: “extensive empirical knowledge, and therefore partnerships with other disciplines such as economics, law, and history.” You can tell from their responses that Blackburn, MacIntyre and Nussbaum see events in the news and think about their conference papers, edited volumes, students’ doctoral projects, course offerings and syllabi. It’s all so shockingly educational.

In the TPM post, a third group is made up of what we might call the lecturers, philosophers who measure adequacy based on how much meaningful discourse is taking place in the public sphere concerning the big events of the day. A.C. Grayling, for one, thinks that the response of philosophy has been inadequate because issues such as 9/11 have been lacking in contestation

These are quintessentially matters that require exploration and debate, clarification, vigorous challenges to our too-ready reactions and our fears, and constantly renewed perspectives on how to think about them and how our world might best be managed in response to them.

For Grayling, this is a job for the philosopher’s argumentative aptitudes. Peter Singer likewise pegs adequacy to the “amount” of focus and attention that philosophers train upon these issues, lamenting “We didn’t focus enough on climate change in the early days, before it hit the headlines.” Meanwhile, the philosopher’s response to 9/11 should take the form of “discussion” about “the ethics of war, of torture, and of responses to terrorism.”

Grayling’s “debate” and Singer’s “discussion” become a kind of performance for Slavoj Zizek, who evaluates the adequacy of philosophy based on its capacity to

Tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, of racism, of religious conflicts … how the way we perceive a problem can be part of the problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions.

Zizek the great communicator. Just as the agnostics seem like theorizers and the pedagogues seem like teachers, these three seem like big-hall lecturers, and so do the last category of write