Acilius

The Rodney King Era

2012-02-10T09:51:00.000-08:00

Originally posted on Los Thunderlads, 10 February 2012. Comment there:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgiR04ey7-M]The February 2012 issue of The American Conservative includes several pieces that reflect, directly or indirectly, on the presidential campaign currently underway in the USA, and a couple that have a broader interest.

The American Conservative started in 2002 as a forum for right-wingers who did not want the US to invade Iraq. It continues to give voice to conservative anti-militarism. Several items in this issue further develop right-wing arguments against warfare, among them: Doug Bandow's "Attack of the Pork Hawks" (subtitle: "Loving the Pentagon turns conservatives into big-spending liberals"); William S. Lind's "Clearing the Air Force," which argues that the only useful functions of the United States Air Force are those that support operations led by the Army and Navy, and therefore that those functions should be transferred to those services while the independent Air Force is dissolved; and Kelly Beaucar Vlahos' "Gitmo's Prying Eyes," about the Defense Department's attempt to erase attorney-client privilege for the "unlawful combatants" it holds at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Noah Millman's review of Gershom Gorenberg's The Unmaking of Israel identifies Mr Gorenberg not by his usual sobriquet of "left-wing Zionist," but as a "Jewish nationalist" who accepts a deeply conservative conception of nationhood as the maturity of a people, and who opposes Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories because that occupation reduces Israel from achieved nation-state to insurgent revolutionary movement.

The cover story, Scott McConnell's "Ron Paul and his Enemies," notes that Dr Paul's campaign has inspired levels of alarm and anger from various elite groups in official Washington far out of proportion to the modest levels of support the good doctor has attracted. Mr McConnell's explanation of this is that those bêtes-noires of The American Conservative, the "neocons," fear that Dr Paul will trigger a movement that will threaten the prestige they enjoy in policy-making circles in the American government. The neocons are the neo-conservatives, adherents of an intellectual movement that traces its origins to the anti-Stalinist Left of the 1930s and 1940s and its rise to political salience in the work of a group of activists, academics, and functionaries who attached themselves to the Senator Henry M. Jackson in the 1960s and 1970s. Like the late Senator Jackson, the neo-conservatives are generally sanguine about the ability of the US government to do good by means of large scale programs intervening in the domestic affairs of both of the United States itself and of other countries. The group around The American Conservative consists of old-fashioned conservatives and libertarians who are deeply skeptical of Washington's potential as a doer of good in any sphere. Mr McConnell's argument, summed up in his piece's subtitle-- "An effective antiwar candidate is what the neocons fear most"-- is that, even though neoconservatives now hold such a stranglehold on respectability in foreign policy discussions in official Washington that the manifest failure of their signature project, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, could not weaken it, they know that it is in fact very tenuous. The mobilization of a powerful antiwar constituency within the Republican Party could send the neocons to the sidelines very quickly, he believes. Therefore, they must move quickly to silence Dr Paul, lest the 29% of Republicans who tell pollsters that they share his antiwar views should crystallize into a force that could shift the national discussion away from the presuppositions of militarism.

One stick with which neoconservative spokesmen and others have beaten Dr Paul is a series of racially charged columns that appeared in newsletters he edited in the early 1990s. Mr McConnell discusses the controversy over these columns thus:

Here the reprise of the story of the newsletters published under Ron Paul’s name 20 years ago proved critical. The New Republic had made a national story of them early in the 2008 campaign. James Kirchick reported that numerous issues of the “Ron Paul Political Report” and the “Ron Paul Survival Report” contained passages that could be fairly characterized as race-baiting or paranoid conspiracy-mongering. (Few in Texas had cared very much when one of Paul’s congressional opponents tried to make an issue of the newsletters in 1996.). With Paul rising in the polls, the Weekly Standard essentially republished Kirchick’s 2008 piece.

I’ve seen no serious challenge to the reporting done four years ago by David Weigel and Julian Sanchez for Reason: the newsletters were the project of the late Murray Rothbard and Paul’s longtime aide Lew Rockwell, who has denied authorship.* Rothbard, who died in 1995, was a brilliant libertarian author and activist, William F. Buckley’s tutor for the economics passages of Up From Liberalism, and a man who pursued a lifelong mission to spread libertarian ideas beyond a quirky quadrant of the intelligentsia. He had led libertarian overtures to the New Left in the 1960s. In 1990, he argued for outreach to the redneck right, and the Ron Paul newsletters became the chosen vehicle. For his part, Rockwell has moved on from this kind of thing.

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that much of the racism in the newsletters would have appeared less over the top in mainstream conservative circles at the time than it does now. No one at the New York Post editorial page (where I worked) would have been offended by the newsletters’ use of welfare stereotypes to mock the Los Angeles rioters, or by their taking note that a gang of black teenagers were sticking white women with needles or pins in the streets of Manhattan. (Contrary to the fears of the time, the pins used in these assaults were not HIV-infected.) But racial tensions and fissures in the early 1990s were far more raw than today. The Rockwell-Rothbard team were, in effect, trying to play Lee Atwater for the libertarians. A generation later, their efforts look pretty ugly.

The resurfacing of the newsletter story in December froze Paul’s upward movement in the polls. For the critical week before the Iowa caucuses, no Ron Paul national TV interview was complete without newsletter questions, deemed more important than the candidate’s opposition to indefinite detention, the Fed, or a new war in Iran. On stage in the New Hampshire debate, Paul forcefully disavowed writing the newsletters or agreeing with their sentiments, as he had on dozens of prior occasions, and changed the subject to a spirited denunciation of the drug laws for their implicit racism. This of course did not explain the newsletters, but the response rang true on an emotional level, if only because no one who had observed Ron Paul in public life over the past 15 years could perceive him as any kind of racist.

If the Weekly Standard editors hoped the flap would stir an anti-Paul storm in the black community, they were sorely disappointed. In one telling Bloggingheads.tv dialogue, two important black intellectuals, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, showed far more interest in Paul’s foreign-policy ideas, and the attempts to stamp them out, than they did in the old documents. Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates likened Paul to Louis Farrakhan. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but the portrait fell well short of total scorn. It was difficult to ignore that the main promoters of the newsletters story, The New Republic and the Weekly Standard, had historically devoted exponentially more energy to promoting neoconservative policies in the Middle East than they had to chastising politicians for racism.

In 2008, Mr McConnell, then The American Conservative's editor, had responded to Mr Kirchick's original piece with stern reproof for Dr Paul. The magazine then endorsed Dr Paul for president anyway, though Mr McConnell himself would later express his preference for Barack Obama. In the paragraphs above, Mr McConnell seems to be rather straining to downplay the newsletter matter. For one thing, while Glenn Loury and John McWhorter are by anyone's standards "important black intellectuals," each of them is rather conservative and neither of them could be accused of having a low tolerance for white-guy B.S.- rather the opposite, in fact. It is true that the early 1990s were a time of unusually raw tension between whites and African Americans; indeed, the late 1980s and early 1990s were an extremely strange period in American history, as Dr Paul's 1988 appearance on The Morton Downey, Jr Show should suffice to demonstrate. But this does not excuse Dr Paul's pandering to the racialist right in those years. Rather, it makes it all the more culpable. In 1991, many parts of the USA, from Crown Heights in New York City to South Central Los Angeles, were teetering on the brink of race riots. In that year, a majority of white voters in Louisiana pulled the lever in support of the gubernatorial campaign of Neo-Nazi David Duke. To peddle racially charged rhetoric at that time was, if anything, more irresponsible, because more dangerous, than it would be today.

An editorial in the same issue discusses Dr Paul from a slightly different perspective. In a single page, it dismisses the newsletters twice, once as "artifacts of a time- the Andrew Dice Clay era in American politics, when the populist right reacted to political correctness-- then a new phenomenon-- by sinning in the opposite direction"; then with this line: "The Rodney King era is a distant memory; the wars and economic outrages of our bipartisan establishment are still very much with us." If these dismissals leave you unsatisfied, there is still a refuge for you on The American Conservative's webpage, where blogger Rod Dreher has repeatedly expressed his objections to Dr Paul's newsletters in very strong terms (see here for one of the strongest of these objections.)

No discussion of "the Rodney King era" would be complete without a reference to The Bell Curve, in which psychologist Richard Herrnstein and historian Charles Murray argued that American society was becoming more stratified by cognitive ability, that cognitive ability is largely inherited, and therefore that America's class system will likely become more unequal and less fluid as the highly intelligent pull ever further away from the rest of us. Four chapters of the book dealt with race, analyzing the average IQ scores of various ethnic groups and concluding that African Americans as a group are likely to be among the hardest hit by the adverse consequences of this trend. Professor Herrnstein and Mr Murray offered chillingly few suggestions as to how this grim scenario could be prevented or ameliorated; Mr Murray's right-of-center libertarianism led him always to emphasize out the ways in which social programs intended to broaden opportunity sometimes redound to the disadvantage of their intended beneficiaries, an emphasis which, in conjunction with the book's overall argument, seemed to suggest that there is no escape from the most dystopian version of its predictions. Published in 1994, The Bell Curve rose to the top of the bestseller lists and garnered enormous attention; today, it would be difficult to imagine a major publisher agreeing to release it. The nativist theory of IQ which is at its heart, and particularly the explicit development of that theory's implications in the four chapters on race, makes it such an easy target for anti-racist spokesmen that a publisher who released it nowadays would be risking public infamy. Yet in those days, The Bell Curve hardly represented the far edge even of acceptable public discourse. So the far more aggressively anti-black Paved With Good Intentions, by Jared Taylor (a self-styled "white nationalist",) found a major publisher and considerable sales when it was published in 1992; his recent followups to that book have been self-published.

Mr Murray has returned to the scene with a new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. By focusing exclusively on whites, Mr Murray need not dwell explicitly on racial differences in average IQ score or any theory as to what causes these differences; by setting 2010 as an ending date, he need not dwell on its grimmest implications for the future. Reviewer Steve Sailer, himself a tireless advocate of the nativist theory of IQ, reviews this new book and finds some interesting nuggets in it. For example, Mr Sailer refers to figures, evidently included in the book, which indicate that while 40 percent of affluent American whites are now unaffiliated with any religion (as compared with 27% of their counterparts in the early 1970s,) 59% of less well-off whites are now religiously unaffiliated (as compared with 35% of the same group in the earlier period.) That leads me to wonder if the very conservative, rather militant forms of Evangelical Christianity that are so popular among the white working class, as well as the right-wing political views that so often accompany that form of Christianity, are a sign that the individuals who profess them identify themselves as cadet members of the professional classes. Their militancy, even when presented as a challenge to some relatively liberal subset of the upper middle class such as elite academics or Democratic Party politicians or leaders of mainline Protestant churches, advertises to all that they are church-goers, and thus strivers, not to be confused with the defeated mass who have lost interest in such institutions and faith in the promises they represent.

Timothy Stanley's "Buchanan's Revolution" looks back at the last antiwar rightist to make a splash as a US presidential candidate, Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr Buchanan was one of the founders of The American Conservative, and the magazine still runs his column (including a recent one lauding Ron Paul.) So it is no surprise that the treatment of him here is respectful. However, in light of what was going on with race relations in the USA in 1992, it is sobering to see these passages:

Of all Pat’s buddies, the one most excited by his campaigns was columnist Samuel Francis, who had worked for North Carolina senator John East before landing a job with the Washington Times. Physically, he was a fearsome toad. The journalist John Judis observed that “he was so fat he had trouble getting through doors.” He ate and drank the wrong things and the only sport he indulged in was chess. The mercurial, funny, curious Francis was an unlikely populist. But he was ahead of the curve when it came to Pat’s insurgency.

Back in the 1980s, Francis had predicted an uprising against the liberal elite that governed America. The only people who would break their stranglehold were the ordinary folks who made up the ranks of the “Middle American Radicals,” or MARs. Mr. MARs was Mr. Average. He was either from the South or a European ethnic family in the Midwest, earned an unsatisfactory salary doing skilled or semi-skilled blue-collar work, and probably hadn’t been to college. He was neither wealthy nor poor, living on the thin line between comfort and poverty. All it took to ruin him was a broken limb or an IRS audit.

But Francis argued that the Middle American Radicals were defined less by income than by attitude. They saw “the government as favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously… MARs are distinct in the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected. If there is one single summation of the MAR perspective, it is reflected in a statement … The rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.”

Preferring self-reliance to welfare feudalism, the MARs felt that the U.S. government had been taken captive by a band of rich liberals who used their taxes to bankroll the indolent poor and finance the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The MARs were a social force rather than an ideological movement, an attitude shaped by the joys and humiliations of middle-class life in postwar America. Any politician that could appeal to that social force could remake politics.

Two things made the MARs different from mainstream conservatives (and libertarians). First, not being rich, they were skeptical of wealthy lobbies. They hated big business as much as they hated big government. They opposed bailing out firms like Chrysler, or letting multinational companies export jobs overseas. They were especially critical of businesses that profited from smut, gambling, and alcohol. Although free market in instinct, they did appreciate government intervention on their behalf. They would never turn down benefits like Social Security or Medicare.

Second, the MARs were more revolutionary than previous generations of conservatives. Conservatives ordinarily try to defend power that they already control. But the MARs were out of power, so they had to seize it back. This was why conservatives like Buchanan behaved like Bolsheviks. “We must understand,” wrote Francis,

that the dominant authorities in… the major foundations, the media, the schools, the universities, and most of the system of organized culture, including the arts and entertainment—not only do nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional way of life, but actually seek its destruction or are indifferent to its survival. If our culture is going to be conserved, then we need to dethrone the dominant authorities that threaten it.

Buchanan agreed. He wrote, reflecting on Francis’s words, “We traditionalists who love the culture and country we grew up in are going to have to deal with this question: Do we simply conserve the remnant, or do we try to take the culture back? Are we conservatives, or must we also become counter-revolutionaries and overthrow the dominant culture?”

The populist counter-revolution that Francis proposed was not explicitly racial. In theory, Hispanic or black industrial workers were just as threatened by economic change and high taxes as their white co-workers. And the cultural values of Hispanic Catholics and black Pentecostals were just as challenged by liberalism as those of their white brethren. But in Francis’s view, these ethnic groups had become clients of the liberal state. Only political correctness—argued Francis_prevented whites from admitting this and organizing themselves into their own ethnic interest group. In this worldview, the Democrats gave handouts to African-Americans in exchange for votes. Hispanics were brought in from Mexico to lower wages and break unions, providing cheap domestic labor for the ruling class and maximizing corporate profits. The only people without friends in high places were the middle-class white majority.

Buchanan and Francis disagreed over this point. Pat was concerned about the decline of Western civilization. But he never saw Western society in explicitly racial terms. He opposed both welfare and mass immigration, but he thought they hurt blacks and Hispanics as much as whites. Francis believed that human characteristics—including intelligence—were shaped by race.

And:

During the primary, (economist Harry) Veryser arranged a meeting between himself, Pat, Francis, and (scholar Russell) Kirk. Buchanan and Francis behaved as if no one else was there, and Pat sat in rapt silence listening to his friend expand upon the coming revolution. It was an intellectual romance, said Veryser. Harry was embarrassed, Kirk was furious that he wasn’t paid the attention he deserved. Both concluded that Buchanan was in love with Francis’s mind, that he truly believed that the two men could remake the world. Francis was a true believer, and his zeal infected Pat. He gave to Buchanan’s peculiar rebellion the theoretical structure of a popular revolution.

I used to read Samuel T. Francis' column in Chronicles magazine. It was a microcosm of Chronicles itself; full of one fascinating bit after another, often making the most interesting sort of points, and then, by the way, dropped in the middle someplace, a bizarre remark that could only be attributed to racism. In one of the last to appear before his death in 2005, he was going on about the things that American children ought to, but don't, learn in public schools. He was developing a powerful vision of public education as a vehicle for cultural continuity and the formation of a common national heritage. It was thrilling stuff, if not entirely convincing, until the middle of the fifth or sixth paragraph when he listed among the things that all Americans should learn in school "why slavery was right, and why the South was right to maintain it as long as it did." Then he went back to being interesting, but really, it was hard to focus after that. And really, all of his columns were like that, brilliant, fascinating, and marred beyond saving by such outlandish remarks. When The American Conservative started in 2002, Dr Francis wasan occasional contributor, writing three articles for the magazine (one each in 2002, 2003, and 2004.) The editorial team there evidently took more of an interest than did their counterparts at Chronicles in toning the racialist content of his columns to a minimum, so that there were no true lightning bolts of lunacy.

Dr Francis, to the embarrassment of his more respectable friends, called himself a white nationalist and socialized with David Duke. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Dr Francis was a figure of some influence. The "job with the Washington Times" that Mr Stanley mentions was that of editorial page director. That a man of his views could attain such a position is another marker of how raw the racial resentments of whites were in the Rodney King era. In his obituary of Dr Francis for The American Conservative, Scott McConnell wrote that at Dr Francis' funeral he found himself talking with none other than Jared Taylor. Mr Taylor said that the cab driver who took him from the airport to the funeral had asked who Dr Francis was. In response, Mr Taylor proclaimed "He stood up for white people!" The cab driver, a white workingman in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was visibly shocked and uncomfortable. I very much doubt that many like him would have been upset by such a remark 14 years before.

One of Ron Paul's rivals for the Republican nomination, former Massachusetts governor Willard Milton Romney (known familiarly as "Mitt,") is mentioned by name in a review of economist Bruce Bartlett's book, The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform, Why We Need It, and What It will Take. Mr Bartlett was a staffer for Dr Paul in the 1970s, but has not been associated with him in recent years. Reviewer Tom Pauken quotes Bartlett as saying that the USA's corporate income tax exempts money spent on interest payments, but does not give such favorable treatment to money returned to shareholders in dividends. It is unsurprising, then, that US businesses raise vastly more money by borrowing than by selling equity. Mr Pauken says that this situation "has been great for private-equity moguls and leveraged buy-out operators like Mitt Romney and Stephen Schwarzman, who have made fortunes gaming the system. But it has been destructive to the long-term health of many US companies and to American workers who have lost jobs as a consequence of tax incentives that encourage companies to pile up debt." Mr Bartlett calls for the repeal of the corporate income tax and of several other taxes, and their replacement by a border-adjusted value added tax. I've endorsed similar proposals here, often under Mr Bartlett's influence, and am glad to see that he is still working the old stand. As for the connection to Mr Romney, I would mention a link I posted on our tumblr page to a recent column by Paul Rosenberg called "Mitt Romney, 'Welfare Queen.'" The caption I gave that link was "In the USA, corporations can write interest payments off their income taxes, while they have to pay taxes on dividends they pay shareholders. So, shareholders collect almost nothing in dividends, while banks and private equity firms collect trillions of dollars in interest payments. Those interest payments are an alternative form of taxation, and people like Willard M. Romney are tax recipients, not taxpayers." I think is a reasonably fair summary of Mr Rosenberg's argument, though Mr Bartlett's views are somewhat more complex.

A few months ago, I noted here a column about the Revised Common Lectionary that Philip Jenkins had contributed to Chronicles magazine. Professor Jenkins argued that the committees that produced that selection of Bible readings had left out all of the passages in which God is shown commanding or praising violence, thus creating a false impression of the scriptures. Professor Jenkins has presented that argument at book length, in a volume called Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can't Ignore the Bible's Violent Verses. Patrick Allitt's review of Professor Jenkins' book in this issue draws out some interesting points. For example, the books of Joshua and Judges, which include many of the Bible's most bloodthirsty passages, describe events that supposedly occurred in the late Bronze Age, but in fact were written at least 600 years after that period. That not only means that the massacres they celebrate are not only unlikely to have taken place (archaeologists have found no residue of such conflicts,) but also that they were written at about the same time as, and very likely as part of a dialogue with the authors of, the passages about social justice and universal benevolence that warm the hearts of those who read the books of Ezekiel, Amos, and Isaiah. The thorny passages in Deuteronomy also date from this relatively late period. So to suppress the Mr Angry Guy passages from the Heptateuch is to misrepresent the Mr Nice Guy passages from the prophets. I should mention that elsewhere on the magazine's website, blogger Noah Millman appends a nifty bit of rabbinical logic to the review.

Intellectuals in the traditionalist right often mention the name of philosopher Eric Voegelin. The late Professor Voegelin's works are too deep for the likes of me, but an essay by Gene Callahan about his ideas in this issue of the magazine had me thinking of making another attempt at reading one of Professor Voegelin's book, most likely The New Science of Politics (simply because it's the one I've made the most progress with in my previous attempts.) Of the many extremely interesting bits in Professor Callahan's essay, the most interesting to me was his summary of a notion Professor Voegelin labeled the "hieroglyph." By this word, Professor Voegelin evidently meant "superficial invocations of a preexisting concept that failed to embody its essence because those invoking it had not experienced the reality behind the original concept. As hieroglyphs, the terms were adopted because of the perceived authority they embodied. But as they were being employed without the context from which their original authority arose, none of these efforts created a genuine basis for a stable and humane order."

I think this notion might explain a great deal. Take for example a term like "national security." In such a place as the USA in the early nineteenth century, a poor country with a tiny population, a vast border, a radically decentralized political system, and every empire of Europe occupying territory in the immediate neighborhood, a patriot might very well advocate an aggressive program of territorial expansion, political consolidation, and a military buildup. Such steps might well have been necessary for the infant USA to maintain its independence. Today, however, such policies only weaken the United States. Our international commitments empower our enemies, our national government threatens our liberties, our military expenditures divert capital from productive uses and weigh heavily on the economy as a whole. To secure the blessings that make the United States of America worth living in and dying for, we must be prepared to revise or discontinue all of the policies customarily justified under the rubric of "national security."

Likewise with the term "free market." As someone like Mr Bartlett has done so much to demonstrate, our current financial and corporate elites by no means owe their preeminence to success in unfettered competition. Rather, they are the figures who have been most successful at manipulating a system that is defined and sustained by the continual involvement of government in every phase of economic life. And yet even those among the rich who are most blatantly tax-recipients find defenders who speak of them as if they were so many Robinson Crusoes, in possession of nothing but that which they themselves had wrested single-handed from nature. Virtually all conservatives and most libertarians are guilty of this form of hieroglyphic use of the term "free market" and its accompanying imagery at least occasionally. Some libertarians, like the aforementioned Murray Rothbard, acknowledge the fact that the existing economic system is not a free market in any meaningful sense, and so speak not of a "free market" that is to be defended, but of a "freed market" that is to be created when our currently existing economic system is abolished. The late Professor Rothbard and his followers frankly call the existing system, the one which they find unacceptable, "capitalism." For my part, I am perfectly willing to accept and defend the system Rothbardians call capitalism, though I would also call for a recognition that where there is subsidy, there must also be regulation. And of course I would hope that we would have a lively democratic political culture that would guide our regime of subsidy and regulation to aim at socially desirable ends, rather than simply functioning as a means by which the power elite can entrench its position at the top of the economic and political order.

*I don't actually agree with Mr McConnell that Llewellyn Rockwell is the likeliest author of the articles in question. The most obnoxious piece, which in fact contains all of the tropes that drew fire in the other pieces, appeared under the byline "James B. Powell." A man by that name did in fact write for the Ron Paul newsletters, and is today a member of the board of directors of the Forbes Corporation.

The way out of philosophy runs through philosophy

2011-10-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 30 September 2011. Comment there.

There’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about for years, ever since I read it somewhere or other in Freud: “the moderate misery required for productive work.” It struck me as plausible; someone who isn’t miserable at all is unlikely to settle willingly into the tedious, repetitive tasks that productive work often involves, while someone who is deeply miserable is unlikely to tolerate such tasks long enough to complete them. If blogging counts as productive work, I myself may recently have represented a case in point. Throughout the summer and into the autumn, I wasn’t miserable at all, and I barely posted a thing. Then I caught a cold, and I posted daily for a week or so. If I’m typical of bloggers in this respect, maybe I could also claim to have something in common with a philosopher. Samuel Johnson once quipped that he had intended to become a philosopher, but couldn’t manage it. The cause of his failure? “Cheerfulness kept breaking in.”

One item I kept meaning to post notes on when cheerfulness was distracting me from the blog was a magazine article about Johnson’s contemporary, David Hume. Hume, of course, was a philosopher; indeed, many would argue that he was “the most important philosopher ever to write in English.” Contrary to what Johnson’s remark suggests, however, Hume was suspected of cheerfulness on many occasions. The article I’ve kept meaning to note is by Hume scholar and anti-nationalist Donald W. Livingston; despite the radicalism of Livingston’s politics (his avowed goal is to dissolve the United States of America in order to replace it with communities built on a “human scale”) in this article he praises Hume as “The First Conservative.” Hume’s conservatism, in Livingston’s view, comes not only from his recognition of the fact that oversized political units such as nation-states and continental empires are inherently degrading to individuals and destructive of life-giving traditions, but also from his wariness towards the philosophical enterprise. Hume saw philosophy as a necessary endeavor, not because it was the road to any particular truths, but because philosophical practice alone could cure the social and psychological maladies that the influence of philosophy had engendered in the West.

This is the sort of view that we sometimes associate with Ludwig Wittgenstein; so, it’s easy to find books and articles with titles like “The End of Philosophy” and “Is Philosophy Dead?” that focus on Wittgenstein. But Livingston demonstrates that Hume, writing more than a century and a half before Wittgenstein, had made just such an argument. Livingston’s discussion of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (first published in 1739-1740) is worth quoting at length:

Hume forged a distinction in his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), between “true” and “false” philosophy. The philosophical act of thought has three constituents. First, it is inquiry that seeks an unconditioned grasp of the nature of reality. The philosophical question takes the form: “What ultimately is X?” Second, in answering such questions the philosopher is only guided by his autonomous reason. He cannot begin by assuming the truth of what the poets, priests, or founders of states have said. To do so would be to make philosophy the handmaiden of religion, politics, or tradition. Third, philosophical inquiry, aiming to grasp the ultimate nature of things and guided by autonomous reason, has a title to dominion. As Plato famously said, philosophers should be kings.

Yet Hume discovered that the principles of ultimacy, autonomy, and dominion, though essential to the philosophical act, are incoherent with human nature and cannot constitute an inquiry of any kind. If consistently pursued, they entail total skepticism and nihilism. Philosophers do not end in total skepticism, but only because they unknowingly smuggle in their favorite beliefs from the prejudices of custom, passing them off as the work of a pure, neutral reason. Hume calls this “false philosophy” because the end of philosophy is self-knowledge, not self-deception.

The “true philosopher” is one who consistently follows the traditional conception of philosophy to the bitter end and experiences the dark night of utter nihilism. In this condition all argument and theory is reduced to silence. Through this existential silence and despair the philosopher can notice for the first time that radiant world of pre-reflectively received common life which he had known all along through participation, but which was willfully ignored by the hubris of philosophical reflection.

It is to this formerly disowned part of experience that he now seeks to return. Yet he also recognizes that it was the philosophic act that brought him to this awareness, so he cannot abandon inquiry into ultimate reality, as the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics and their postmodern progeny try to do. Rather he reforms it in the light of this painfully acquired new knowledge.

What must be given up is the autonomy principle. Whereas the false philosopher had considered the totality of pre-reflectively received common life to be false unless certified by the philosopher’s autonomous reason, the true philosopher now presumes the totality of common life to be true. Inquiry thus takes on a different task. Any belief within the inherited order of common life can be criticized in the light of other more deeply established beliefs. These in turn can be criticized in the same way. And so Hume defines “true philosophy” as “reflections on common life methodized and corrected.”

By common life Hume does not mean what Thomas Paine or Thomas Reid meant by “common sense,” namely a privileged access to knowledge independent of critical reflection; this would be just another form of “false philosophy.” “Common life” refers to the totality of beliefs and practices acquired not by self-conscious reflection, propositions, argument, or theories but through pre-reflective participation in custom and tradition. We learn to speak English by simply speaking it under the guidance of social authorities. After acquiring sufficient skill, we can abstract and reflect on the rules of syntax, semantics, and grammar that are internal to it and form judgments as to excellence in spoken and written English. But we do not first learn these rules and then apply them as a condition of speaking the language. Knowledge by participation, custom, tradition, habit, and prejudice is primordial and is presupposed by knowledge gained from reflection.

The error of philosophy, as traditionally conceived—and especially modern philosophy—is to think that abstract rules or ideals gained from reflection are by themselves sufficient to guide conduct and belief. This is not to say abstract rules and ideals are not needed in critical thinking—they are—but only that they cannot stand on their own. They are abstractions or stylizations from common life; and, as abstractions, are indeterminate unless interpreted by the background prejudices of custom and tradition. Hume follows Cicero in saying that “custom is the great guide of life.” But custom understood as “methodized and corrected” by loyal and skillful participants.

The distinction between true and false philosophy is like the distinction between valid and invalid inferences in logic or between scientific and unscientific thinking. A piece of thinking can be “scientific”—i.e., arrived at in the right way—but contain a false conclusion. Likewise, an argument can be valid, in that the conclusion logically follows from the premises on pain of contradiction, even if all propositions in the argument are false. Neither logically valid nor scientific thinking can guarantee truth; nor can “true philosophy.” It cannot tell us whether God exists, or whether morals are objective or what time is. These must be settled, if at all, by arguments within common life.

True philosophy is merely the right way for the philosophical impulse to operate when exploring these questions. The alternative is either utter nihilism (and the end of philosophical inquiry) or the corruptions of false philosophy. True philosophy merely guarantees that we will be free from those corruptions.

This is rather like one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s parables, from Also Sprach Zarathustra (1883-1885). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra preaches that the superman must become a camel, so as to bear the heaviest of all weights, which is the humiliation that comes when one discovers the extent of one’s ignorance, and the commitment to enlighten that ignorance; that he must then put the camel aside and become a lion, so that he may slay the dragon of “Thou-Shalt” and undertake to discover his own morality; and that at the last he must become a child, so that he may put that struggle behind him and be ready to meet new challenges, not as reenactments of his past triumphs, but on their own terms. According to Livingston, Hume, like Nietzsche, sees the uneducated European as a half-formed philosopher, and believes that with a complete philosophical education s/he can become something entirely different from a philosopher:

Philosophy was not a problem for ancient Greek and Roman society because few were literate and could take an interest in it and because the pagan authorities confined it to private sects. By the 18th century, however, philosophy had become a mass phenomenon shaping all aspects of culture. As Diderot said, “Let us hasten to make philosophy popular … let us approach the people where the philosophers are.” Contrast this with Hume, who contemptuously described his own time as “this philosophic age.” It was and is an age in which the world inversions of false philosophy would generate mass enthusiasms, especially in politics. King Midas would become a political leader transmuting everything he touched into a favorite philosophic superstition.

How did this happen? Hume’s answer is unexpected and turns on his understanding of the relation of philosophy to religion. Both have distinct origins in human nature. Religion springs from fear and humility, philosophy from curiosity and pride. False philosophy, said Hume, is “the Voice of Pride not Nature,” and he observes that the countless sects of philosophy in the classical world were more fanatical than ancient religious cults. The reason was that ancient religion was polytheistic and rooted in sacred traditions; as such it moved easily within the sphere of common life. Each religion could be different without being contrary.

Christianity was also rooted in sacred tradition, but unlike paganism it is universalist and cannot tolerate other religions. In this it resembles philosophy, which is also universalist and cannot tolerate the world inversions of other philosophies. When Christianity appeared, philosophy was widespread in the learned world, and so Christian sacred tradition had to defend itself with philosophical arguments. The result was theology, a merger of sacred tradition with Greek philosophy.

This was a dangerous compound because it combined the hubris of philosophy with a jealous theistic religion motivated by fear. What caused Christendom to become the scene of implacable conflict and persecution was not its content as sacred tradition but its false philosophical content sublimated in theology.

So in Christendom philosophy became the handmaiden of theology. In time it grew weary of this secondary role and by the late 17th century had freed itself from sacred tradition and appeared on the scene as the pure unmoderated philosophic act, just as it had first appeared in the ancient world. But modern social circumstances were different. In the ancient world philosophy never reached the masses. But in Christendom everyone was a theologian of sorts, and a theologian is a philosopher constrained only by sacred tradition. Unlike the ancient Greeks, all in Christendom had an ear for the philosophic idiom.

As the authority of sacred tradition waned, secular philosophical movements would take their place and battle each other for control of the state—an instrument of centralized control that was itself a creation of modern philosophy. Hume wrote: “no party, in the present age, can well support itself without a philosophical or speculative system of principles annexed to its political or practical one.”

For Livingston, philosophy is a deadly menace in the Christian and post-Christian world. Philosophers like John Locke tried to derive theories of liberty from abstract principles, while Hume studied the history of people who had enjoyed liberty. Livingston follows the a trail that runs from Edmund Burke to Irving Babbitt to conservative thinkers in our own day in attributing civil wars and revolutionary despotisms to Locke’s style of thought:

Locke explains individual liberty in terms of timeless abstract natural rights possessed by all individuals in an ahistoric state of nature. And public liberty (government) is explained as an institution made by a contract between these individuals to protect their natural rights. In the philosopher’s “vacuum,” Locke has taken a part of common life (making contracts) and transmuted it into the whole of political experience. To this Hume replied that government cannot originate from a contract because the concept of a contract presupposes government for its enforcement.

Further, the notion of “consent” framed in the “vacuum” of the state of nature is abstract and indeterminate, and so there is no non-arbitrary way to apply it. If consent is taken in its ordinary sense, then no government in history has been based on consent, but it would be nihilistic to say that no government in history has been legitimate. On the other hand, if consent is relaxed to include “tacit consent,” as Hobbes does, then any government that is obeyed, however tyrannical it might be, is based on consent. The famous contact theory, from Hobbes to Rawls, is not a searching insight into our political condition but a philosophic superstition that hides that condition from us and perverts critical judgments about it.

In contrast to Locke, Hume does not seek to understand liberty as an instantiation of abstract principles. Indeed, Hume offers no theory of liberty at all. Rather, he thinks of liberty as a historic practice, like a natural language or like the convention of money, that has evolved over time—the practical work of many hands, acting in ignorance of each other and planned by no one. So Hume could speak of “the wisdom of the British constitution, or rather the concurrence of accidents.” This notion of an objective social order created by individual intentions but intended by no one was developed by the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek, who acknowledged Hume’s influence.

To understand the practice of liberty requires a connoisseur’s knowledge of its history, its current condition, and—since it is still evolving—a critical exploration of its potentialities. And that is what Hume undertook in his History of England and in many of the Essays Moral, Literary and Political. Hume hoped that a concrete understanding of the practice of liberty and its potentialities would free political discourse from Lockean and other Whiggish superstitions. These had distorted understanding of the past and present and created a paranoid style of politics.

And so:

Hume distinguished between parties of interest (for example, agricultural versus commercial), affection (loyalty to one’s people or a ruling family), and those of philosophical theory. The last were a uniquely modern phenomenon: “Parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon, that has appeared in human affairs.” Here was the first identification of that cacophony of ideologies and “isms” that would disorder modern political discourse.

Hume viewed the English Civil War as the event where the philosophic act began to break free from sacred tradition. This was possible because the authority of sacred tradition had eroded to the point that modern religion had become “nothing more than a species of philosophy.” Of Puritanism he said, “being chiefly spiritual [it] resembles more a system of metaphsyics” than a religion. Puritanism was false philosophy in a religious idiom. The Puritans, and the even more radical sects in orbit around them, did not seek reform but total transformation. And “every successive revolution became a precedent for that which followed it.”

Hume’s account of the Puritan revolution was a textbook case of false philosophy in politics—what Oakeshott would later call “rationalism in politics,” Voegelin “Gnosticism,” and Camus “metaphysical rebellion.” His History of England was popular in France and had been read for some 30 years before the Revolution. When the storm broke, both left and right viewed what was happening in France as a reenactment of the English Civil War and took Hume as a prophetic guide. The Jacobins were the Puritans, Louis XVI was Charles I, Napoleon would be Cromwell. The Catholic right held up Hume as the “Scottish Bousset.” Louis XVI, who as a boy met Hume at court, became obsessed with parallels between himself and Charles I. Upon receiving the death sentence, he asked for Hume’s volume on Charles I to read in the last days of his life.

Hume’s account of the English Civil War as an act of false philosophy in politics was a foundational text for conservatism in France. So close was the identity of Hume’s account of the Puritan revolution with the French that Joseph de Maistre, a founder of French conservatism, could title the last chapter of his popular Considerations sur la France (1796), “Fragments of a History of the French Revolution by David Hume.” Burke’s Reflections were written just as the Revolution was getting underway. The account was prophetic in part because when Burke looked at what was happening in France he saw what Hume had prepared him to see in his history of the Puritan revolution.

What does Hume’s dialectic of true and false philosophy have to do with conservatism? The term “conservatism” itself provides a clue. Other ideologies wear something of their meaning on their face. The term “liberalism” is somehow about liberty; “feminism” about the rights of women; “communism” about community; and so forth. But “conservatism” provides no indication of what is to be conserved. This vacuity, I suggest, is due to its philosophic character.

The term first appears in Chateaubriand’s counterrevolutionary Le Conservateur (1818). As a self-conscious movement, “conservatism” begins as resistance to the world-inverting ideologies of the French Revolution. It has no particular content because, as a philosophical position, what the conservative is trying to conserve is not this or that particular policy or institution but the pre-reflectively established world of common life itself against the world inversions of false philosophy.

We might call this “ontological conservatism.” The conservative tradition is true to itself only insofar as it has this ontological character. Whether this or that policy or institution should be preserved, eliminated, or reformed, is a question to be settled by Hume’s “true philosophy” within the world of common life.

For all that he follows and cites conservative thinkers in his critique of ideology, and for all that the article appeared in a magazine called The American Conservative, Livingston is as wary of self-described “conservatives” as of any other political group:

Although conservatism originated in a critique of false philosophy in politics, it is as much disposed to that pathology as other political systems. And use of the word “conservative” makes the pathology more difficult to detect. De Maistre went to Russia after the French Revolution hoping, he said, to find a country not “scribbled on by philosophy.” What he found instead was a Russian intelligentsia eagerly embracing the philosophic superstitions of the French Enlightenment. Hume recognized—much earlier than de Maistre—that we live in the first “philosophic age.” There is no longer a country not scribbled on by philosophy. The only question is whether it will be written on by a true or corrupt form of the philosophical act.

Livingston’s opposition to the continued existence of the USA makes a good deal of sense if one accepts the idea that what is needed to build and sustain a humane community is liberation from ideology. Aristotle thought that the right size for a sovereign state was the space a person could walk around in a single day; unity, in a place that size, could grow out of shared experiences and a realistic expectation that fellow citizens would come to one another’s aid in times of need. But what common experiences can bind more than 300,000,000 inhabitants of a continental empire, if not the experience of sharing an ideology? What can the members of such a multitude expect of one another, except that they will cheer the same, highly abstract, slogans and hate the same, comfortably distant, enemies? The half-formed philosopher may be driven to create a political unit at least on the scale of a nation-state; the resident of such a political unit will certainly be driven to become a half-formed philosopher.

Mr O's "anti-nuclear imperialism"

2011-10-01T07:39:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 29 September 2011. Comment there.

Let me tell you about a better way, a way that protects the purity of our precious bodily fluids.

The late September issue of Counterpunch (available to subscribers here; the newsletter’s website is here) includes a fine article by Darwin Bond-Graham titled “The Obama Administration’s Nuclear Weapons Surge.” While Mr O has made many remarks declaring that nuclear weapons are bad and the world would be better off without them, he has in fact “worked vigorously to commit the nation to a multi-hundred-billion-dollar reinvestment in nuclear weapons, mapped out over the next three decades.” Bond-Graham analyzes the New START agreement between the USA and Russia. Though the publicity surrounding New START presented it as an arms-reduction treaty, Bond-Graham contends that it is nothing of the kind. “On balance, the nominal reductions in nuclear weapons required by New START are insignificant when compared to the multibillion-dollar nuclear (and strategic non-nuclear) weapons programs committed to in the treaty’s text.” Indeed, Bond-Graham classifies New START as an “arms-affirmation treaty.” Mr O and his allies in the upper echelons of the congressional Democratic leadership were able to market New START as a disarmament agreement and to enlist the support of Americans who usually oppose nuclear weapons, even though “the treaty does not actually require the destruction of a single nuclear warhead.” Bond-Graham also goes into depth on various other programs through which Mr O has managed to increase spending on nuclear weapons, to reorient the USA’s nuclear weapons programs towards potential use in conflict, and to strip away inhibitions against nuclear first strikes by the USA.

For Bond-Graham, Mr O’s anti-nuclear public statements not only represent a rhetorical device to “neutralize” the “anti-nuclear and antiwar groups that so effectively exposed [George W.] Bush’s plans” to pursue policies similar to those of the current administration, but also constitute the foundation of a strategic orientation that Bond-Graham dubs “anti-nuclear imperialism.” This orientation, ostensibly based on abhorrence of nuclear weapons, in fact promotes the development, maintenance, and deployment of such weapons. Remember the claims that the Bush-Cheney administration made about Saddam Hussein’s alleged “Weapons of Mass Destruction” programs in 2002-2003, and the meaning of the phrase “anti-nuclear imperialism” becomes all too clear.

The contextualization fairy

2011-10-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 23 September 2011. Comment there.

Recently, John Holbo posted two items (here and here) on Crooked Timber about something odd in American politics. Right-wing politicians in the USA quite often make public statements that would, if taken at face value, suggest that they are far more extreme in their views than they in fact are. So, Professor Holbo finds remarks from Texas governor Rick Perry which, taken literally, would imply that Mr Perry thought that Texas should secede from the USA, that all federal programs established since 1900 should be abolished, indeed that there should be no government at all. Mr Perry obviously does not believe any of those things, so obviously that only his committed opponents try to take him to task for making such extreme remarks. This is not unique to Mr Perry, but is a usual pattern for right-wing US politicians.

What makes this so odd is that, while it is common for right-wing American politicians to exaggerate the radicalism of their views and for the public to realize that this is what they are doing, Professor Holbo can find no examples of their left-leaning counterparts doing the same thing. A Democratic or leftist candidate who makes a radical-sounding statement likely means that statement to be taken at face value, and it certainly will be taken at face value by most observers.

Many commentators on American politics explain the right-wingers’ habit of making extreme sounding statements for which they do not expect to be held responsible as an effort to move the “Overton Window.” The Overton Window, named for the late Joseph P. Overton, is the range of ideas that the people who hold sway in a given political culture hold to be acceptable at a particular time. Only ideas within the window are likely to be put into effect. The window shifts back and forth, as some ideas that had once seemed outlandish begin to seem mainstream, while other ideas that had once seemed mainstream begin to seem outlandish.

Key to the Overton Window is the idea of contextualization. The idea of devolving Medicare, the program that ensures that most Americans over the age of 65 will be able to pay for health care, to the states may seem outlandish to many in the USA, but compared to the idea of large states seceding from the Union it is quite moderate. The idea of shifting the revenues of Social Security, the program that provides a guaranteed income to most Americans over the age of 65, from current benefits to private savings accounts may seem outlandish to many in the USA, but compared with the idea of abolishing the entire welfare state it is quite moderate. Other policies favored by powerful interests on the right end of the political spectrum may also seem outlandish, but compared with anarchism they too are quite moderate. So, within the context of the extreme remarks for which they are not called to account, rightists can gain a hearing for policies which they do seriously advocate.

Contextualization has also been on the mind of cartoonist Zach Weiner lately. Here’s a recent installment of his strip, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Both Professor Holbo and Mr Weiner brought one of my daily reads to mind. Blogger Steve Sailer made a very interesting observation about contextualization the other day, in a post called “White Triumphalism in Gentrifying DC“:

Ethnic change in Washington D.C. has gone so far that white hipsters are getting cocky about rubbing the noses of poor blacks in the new white dominance. The Washington Post reports:

While I sat for the better part of an hour — okay, perhaps longer than that — outside H Street Country Club on Saturday enjoying a few libations as the Northeast corridor’s fabulous festival unfolded around me, I watched club owner and impresario extraordinaire Joe Englert [a white guy] and his compatriots do a rather brisk business in a repurposed piece of D.C. political memorabilia.

His navy-blue T-shirts bearing the legend “Mayor Barry: Making a great city even greater” were going gangbusters.

That would be the official logo of Marion Barry’s 1986 re-election campaign. An original sign, incidentally, hangs above the stairs down into the basement of Englert’s Capitol Lounge on Pennsylvania Avenue SE.

Most of the folks I watched buy the tees were, shall we say, not in Barry’s base demographic.

While Englert acknowledged the shirts’ appeal to master ironists, he insisted he printed up the shirts out of appreciation for Barry, not to mock him.

”I think people, even newcomers, sort have a fond view of him,” he said. “He’s a folk hero. He’s as close to Johnny Appleseed as you’re going to get here.”

This doesn’t strike me as polite or prudent. Considering what happened to Matthew Yglesias in May just for being a white man walking down the street in D.C. at night, being a white man walking down the street wearing an intentionally racially insulting T-shirt, apparently thinking that poor blacks are too stupid to realize you are mocking their demographic defeat, sounds like a really bad idea.On the second thought, a lot of these hipsters might not even get that they are racially gloating over the upcoming economic cleansing to Baltimore of the remainder of D.C.’s poor blacks. They possess elaborate conceptual vocabularies for thinking well of themselves, so they might even believe that they believe that “folk hero” nonsense.

People who weren’t living in the USA in the early 1990s may not see why a Marion Barry T-Shirt is an insult to African American residents of the District of Columbia. Mr Barry was elected to a third term as Washington, DC’s mayor in 1986, then in January 1990 videotaped in a hotel room with an ex-girlfriend smoking crack cocaine. When the police burst in to the room and arrested him, the mayor muttered “Bitch set me up!” After his release from prison in 1992, Mr Barry was elected to the DC city council, and in 1994 he was once more elected mayor. Many people were appalled by that 1994 reelection; I for one suggested that if the District of Columbia were ever to become a state, its Latin motto should be “Illa Canis Me Implicavit.” In 1997, the US Congress stripped the mayor of his powers, leaving Mr Barry little choice but to stand down in the 1998 election. Despite a 2002 incident in which police found traces of cocaine and marijuana in Mr Barry’s car, he was in 2004 again elected to the DC city council; despite his 2005 guilty plea in a tax evasion case, he was reelected to the council in 2008, and he still sits there. Mr Barry is a paradox. At one and the same time, he is a popular figure among African American voters in the District of Columbia, and an embarrassment to them.

Mr Sailer is well positioned to understand this paradox. He spends a great deal of time trying to promote a definition of “race” as “a partly inbred extended family.” How many people do not have family members whom they love, support, and find embarrassing? And how many would support the police if they saw a relative being arrested, however justly? One night when I was a little kid, the police came to our house and hauled my brother away in handcuffs because of unpaid traffic fines. My mother, a deeply conservative, pro-authority sort of person, found herself screaming at the arresting officers that they were no better than the Gestapo. Fortunately my father had the presence of mind to hold her back, or she would likely have gone to jail as well. If my brother had subsequently run for office on an anti-police platform, we would have been sorely tempted to vote for him, for all that we knew that the whole thing really was his fault for not having paid those fines. Within the context of a family under assault, whether by police dragging its members off to jail or by relatively wealthy, privileged people taking possession of territory that once was theirs, it is easy to understand why the “ironic” T-Shirts could only be read as a deliberate provocation.

Mr Sailer speculates that the “hipsters” may have made use of their “elaborate conceptual vocabularies for thinking well of themselves” to tell themselves that they are doing something other than taunting the people who used to live in the neighborhoods where they now predominate. That makes a great deal of sense to me. One of the great films of the 1990s was Crumb, Terry Zwigoff’s documentary about underground cartoonist R. Crumb. Watching that film, I laughed out loud when a commentator, pointing to some cartoons of Mr Crumb’s in which crudely drawn black characters gorged themselves on watermelons and were treated as potential meals for cannibals, said “This is actually an attack on black people.” What made me laugh was that word “actually,” implying as it did a contrast with something else that it apparently was. Obviously it was an attack on black people, only Mr Crumb’s “hipster” fans putting their “elaborate conceptual vocabularies for thinking well of themselves” into overdrive could have seen it as anything else.

The last paragraph of Mr Sailer’s post puts an unexpected spin on what went before. He writes:

By the way, in 25 years, will the next generation of white hipsters ironically wear vintage 2008 “Obama: Hope and Change” t-shirts? They might not be worth much right now, but you should stock up on them because they could be an ironic gold mine someday.

Mr O doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow who would be caught in a hotel room smoking crack and muttering “Bitch set me up,” so bracketing him with Mr Barry strikes me as rather odd. In fact, just about the only things I can think of that the president has in common with Mr Barry are party affiliation and skin color.

This brings us to Mr Sailer’s own self-presentation, and his rhetorical project. I value his blog greatly; he seems to have a very fertile imagination, and almost every day he posts some or other interesting, novel-sounding idea for consideration. It’s the sort of thing that sometimes goes on in the common areas of a well-functioning graduate program. Lots of the ideas are less novel than they sound, lots of others are wrong, and all of them are shot through with the author’s biases, but that’s all right- the common purpose of research, debate, and the scientific method is to sift through proposals, eliminate the dead ends, and refine the promising ones. I wish there were many bloggers as creative and as uninhibited as Mr Sailer, and that they all had commenters who would bring real knowledge to bear in helping to move from the “interesting idea” stage to the “might be worth looking into” stage. When Mr Sailer started allowing comments, he did have some commenters who would respond to his posts with citations of academic journal articles and other publications that had already explored his ideas, and some who weren’t afraid to write “I call bullshit on all of this.” As time has passed, though, those commenters have disappeared. Most of those who remain seem committed to the idea that they have joined Mr Sailer as part of a plucky band of truth-tellers who have innocently made observations of the plain facts before them, only to be set upon by an unreasoning horde enforcing an absurd orthodoxy.

Making matters much worse is the particular nature of the preconceptions this crowd is so eager to reinforce. Mr Sailer is interested in the differences among groups of people, most definitely including differences that can be accounted for by genetic inheritance. So, some of the biases that a well-worked out scholarly version of one of his ideas would drain away, but that the first proposal stage includes very prominently, are biases that bear on questions of race and ethnicity. It is not unusual for Mr Sailer to write posts in which he expresses sympathy for beleaguered African American communities, as he does in the post quoted above. However, he very often seems to court the charge of racism.

For example, in a recent post he discussed a table comparing the fifty United States to each other by the percentage of each state’s African American population that was dependent on public benefit. There are any number of public policy discussions in which such a table would be of vital importance, and Mr Sailer’s discussion includes some interesting speculation about the differences among the states and some useful criticism of the statistical methods used in the compilation. Indeed, when the author of the table revised it in accord with Mr Sailer’s criticism, his attempt to explain why Texas was at one extreme collapsed as the corrected table showed that Texas actually belonged in the middle. In his updated version of the post, Mr Sailer leaves in the discredited speculation, then adds “Now, Texas blacks falls out of the better reaches and right into the middle of the pack. Oh, well … My explanation above sounded highly persuasive while I wrote it.” So, he makes legitimate contributions on an important topic, and promptly acknowledges an error with good humor. What’s wrong with that? Well, for one thing, the title of the post is “Which state has the best blacks?” And he labels partial tables showing the states with the biggest and those with the smallest racial disparity in rates of dependency as “Best blacks relative to local whites” and “Worst blacks relative to local whites.” So he’s contextualizing his discussion as a verdict on the African American populations of the various states. In view of the awareness he showed in the Marion Barry T-Shirt post, it’s hard to believe that Mr Sailer did not know that he would give offense by posing as the judge of black America.

I suspect that Mr Sailer’s habit of framing his writing in a way that is likely to provoke charges of racism goes back to the idea of the plucky band of truth-tellers who have innocently made observations of the plain facts before them, only to be set upon by an unreasoning horde enforcing an absurd orthodoxy. This idea is, I suspect, Mr Sailer’s business model. To leverage it into an income adequate to support himself and his family in Los Angeles, Mr Sailer must strike his readers as a reasonable person, behaving innocently, and he must have opponents who accuse him of being a sinister person, propagating hate.

It’s entirely up to him to seem reasonable, and he promotes that impression not only by saying reasonable things at regular intervals but also by describing his own innocent, harmless nature. In one recent post, he describes himself thus: “I’m very good at verbal logic, and have a certain gift for insights that other people wouldn’t come up with, but I’m not a meticulous thinker. I make lots of mistakes. I’m more of a let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes thinker. In contrast, say, Charles Murray’s brain works like a BMW V-12: powerful and precise. Mine’s a jalopy that might surprise you and win the race or might break down on the starting line and go nowhere.” The self-deprecating tone of this helps to make Mr Sailer seem harmless, while the nod to racial theorist Charles Murray invites suspicion. In another recent post, he characterized himself even more modestly, as one who is “the perpetual extremely nice eighth grader” in person, though his writing often rubs people the wrong way.

As for the second half of Mr Sailer’s plan, one can’t actually count on one’s opponents to accuse one of being a sinister, hateful person. It’s true that groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center need to brand people as racist in order to raise funds, and so they lend him a helping hand from time to time. And there’s nothing to stop someone from setting up a blog devoted to denunciation of Mr Sailer; I’m not entirely sure that the site I’ve linked to there is not maintained by Mr Sailer himself, in an effort to keep his fans thinking that they are under siege. But to attract the sort of hostile attention that he needs, Mr Sailer must bait his potential adversaries regularly. It’s frustrating for those of us who find value in his substantive contributions.

Brian Barder is a nice guy

2011-10-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 22 September 2011. Comment there.

Political blogging is not generally regarded as an activity that brings courtesy to the fore, but retired UK diplomat Brian Barder never fails to show good manners. Though most of the topics he discusses are outside my usual circle of interests, I read him regularly, since it is such a pleasure to see politeness at work.

For example, the other day Brian Barder* posted a proposal about reforming the UK constitution. Brian Barder has considerable expertise on this subject, and his proposal is sufficiently close to his heart that he has been working to promote it for some years. My knowledge of the UK constitution is limited to what I picked up during the years I took The Economist, and as someone who does not live in the UK my stake in its reform is close to nil. Yet I took the liberty of posting comments (here and here) in which I expressed skepticism about the practical aspects of his plan. Brian Barder would have been perfectly within his rights to ignore my uninformed remarks, or even to dismiss them icily, yet in fact he took the time to provide detailed responses to each of them. In fact, he even emailed me to make sure that I knew he had done so. Such generosity is not to be forgotten.

*I’d call him “Mr Barder,” but that isn’t actually his name. He holds a knighthood, and so the proper courtesy title for him is “Sir Brian.” I cannot bring myself to refer to any living person in that fashion; to me, it suggests only Monty Python. So the only respectful way I can name him is as “Brian Barder.” This is a shame, since Brian Barder is himself so scrupulous a user of courtesy titles that he titled his condemnation of the Oslo massacre “There are no lessons to learn from Mr Breivik.” If Brian Barder can bring himself to give the correct title even to the murderer of dozens of helpless innocents, it seems churlish of me to withhold his title from him, yet I must, I must.

Some interesting remarks by Michael Peachin on a new book about the emperor Claudius

2011-10-01T07:32:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 21 September 2011. Comment there.

Proclaiming Claudius Emperor, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

As a subscriber to Classical Journal, I regularly receive emailed reviews of new scholarly books concerning ancient Greece and Rome. The other day, for example, they sent me Michael Peachin‘s review of Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire, by Josiah Osgood (Cambridge University Press, 2010). The only other notice I’d seen of the book was a drearily dutiful one in The Bryn Mawr Classical Review, so I was surprised that Peachin found some exciting points in the book. I’ll quote two of these points:

Several recent accounts of Roman emperors have sailed off on a new tack. Instead of attempting a traditional biographical interpretationof the man, and thereby also a chronicle of his reign, each of thesehas sought to present an emperor on his own terms, and/or to view himas he was perceived by certain groups of contemporaries (other than theelite authors, who usually monopolize discussion). Thus, Caligula was notout of his mind; he simply had no taste for playing republic, when thereality was despotism; and so, he fashioned himself overtly as a tyrant,regardless of the consequences – or perhaps precisely to elicit certainones of those (A. Winterling, Caligula: A Biography [Berkeley, 2011]).

When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar on Roman history in which the professor horrified about half the class by spending a day arguing that Caligula was probably not a lunatic. A few of my classmates were committed to the view of the third emperor presented in the ancient historical texts, and were appalled to hear a revision of that view; the others were committed to the idea that the only sort of history worth doing was social history that focused on the most numerous groups in a society, and so were appalled that we were spending so much time on the question of one man’s mental health. I was not in either of those groups, but loved the day and have been defending Caligula ever since. By the way, there’s a fine review of Winterling’s book in September’s New Criterion. I recommend it to the the general reader.

Peachin makes a point that I found especially fascinating:

Augustus, in fine, had played his part well; but as Osgood aptly demonstrates, he fated all the various players in the sequel to write their own scripts as they went. In any case, Osgood argues that Claudius quite actively tried to shape his own time as emperor, and that in doing so, he contributed materially to the development of the imperial ‘system.’ As we observe this particular emperor at work, we are also being nudged slightly away from Fergus Millar’s picture of a more passive, and perhaps generic, sort of monarch (The Emperor in the Roman World [Ithaca, 1977]): “…who the emperor was mattered” [136]). Still, Osgood sees quite clearly that Claudius (or any emperor) was indeed only one person; and hence, the princeps’ direct involvement with his subjects was perforce limited. Thus, when an emperor did choose to intervene, the event was so momentous as to carry an aura of the divine. That said, Claudius was no lone actor. We are reminded, throughout, that “…much of this emperor’s image, like any other’s, was constructed in dialogue with his subjects” (317.)

So, it was precisely because the emperor’s position was inherently weak that he inspired awe in his subjects. This is just the sort of paradox I can never resist.

Many readers will be familiar with the theory that historian Arnaldo Momigliano developed and that Robert Graves popularized in his novels about Claudius. Under this theory, Claudius wanted to phase out the principate and restore the old Republic. Peachin explains Osgood’s view of this theory with admirable concision:

Following Momigliano’s observations (Claudius: the Emperor and His Achievement [Oxford, 1934]), Osgood stresses the fact that Augustus’ uneasy amalgam of republic and empire remained a befuddling puzzle for Claudius (indeed, for every emperor). In particular, the quasi-retention of a republican state meant that a new imperial system of government could not be crafted with anything even approaching clarity, or in any detail. Thus, to start at the start, when Gaius [a.k.a. Caligula] was murdered, and had not indicated a successor, a conclusively ‘proper’ or ‘constitutional’ way forward was nowhere to be discovered. That notwithstanding, Claudius was quickly on the throne; but then, the awkward facts of his accession, not to mention the earlier vituperation of him by members of the Augustan house (and others), seriously undercut his authority. Attempting to counter such hindrances, and just generally in his zeal to rule as he found appropriate, Claudius was too fastidious. The result was a nasty paradox: “The loftier the goals the emperor set for his administration, the more likely he was to fail, and to open himself to allegations of incompetency, or even corruption. Yet precisely to try to win loyalty and increase his prestige, Claudius had to set loftier goals than those of Tiberius, even those of Caligula” (189).

Considering that the written law in Rome in 41 BC was predicated on the idea that the Republic was still functioning, and that Claudius owed the principate to the very group of men who had just violently murdered his predecessor, it would have been quite a challenge for him to find a way to present his accession as legitimate without appealing to the idea of a restored Republic. In no position to prosecute the assassins of Caligula, Claudius could only appeal to the right of tyrannicide, and thus evoke the two Brutuses, one who according to legend struck against the Tarquins in order to end the monarchy and establish the Republic, and the other who struck against Julius Caesar the Dictator in an attempt to prevent a new monarchy from ending the Republic. If there were people who took this forced imposture at face value, one can hardly blame Claudius.

Did astrology originate in cities?

2011-10-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 20 September 2011. Comment there.

I wonder if the first astrologers were city-dwellers. True, archeologists have found evidence that people who lived before the rise of cities paid close attention to the orbit of the Moon and identified constellations, and have argued that the orientations of temples and other religious structures from those days suggest that they attached a religious significance to the movements of heavenly bodies. Those activities are hardly surprising; farmers need a calendar to plan their year, as hunter-gatherers also need to plan their expeditions for times when game will be relatively plentiful and fruit ripe for the picking. Still, it might not be too much of a stretch to look at a society that invests heavily in maintaining and publicizing its calendar and to see a suggestion of something like what the western branch of organized Christianity used to call “natural astrology,” a set of ideas about ways in which heavenly bodies might influence the earth’s weather and various medical phenomena related to the transmission of disease.

Quite distinct from natural astrology are the various studies to which the Western Church used to refer as “judicial astrology.” That’s the part that includes horoscopes, sun signs, and the like. The difference matters when considering the origins of astrology; we have very ancient documents relating to the movements of heavenly bodies that seem to have some special significance and that predate the earliest references to judicial astronomy by centuries. So, I’ll use the terms.

It is sometimes said that our earliest evidence of judicial astronomy comes from Mesopotamia, but that is misleading. The nation state didn’t exist in those days; Ur and Lagash and Akkad and Babylon and the other urban centers that rose and fell in that region interacted with the political and economic systems of the countryside around them in a variety of ways, but in other ways they remained quite distinct. It is in such cities that we find the first documents describing judicial astrology.

If astrology did arise in cities, it arose in a social environment where markets were familiar. Its entire history would have taken place amid money, contracts, and production for exchange. That calls into question the assumptions that we discussed last year when this xkcd appeared:

Some people fall into the assumption that, because markets promote something called “rationality,” they must therefore favor every form of reason and disfavor every form of unreason. However, the rationality which comes from markets is in fact something of a very narrow sort. A month after our discussion, we noted that Shikha Dalmia had put it very well: “Markets don’t reward merit, they reward value.” Dalmia summarizes the views of economist Friedrich Hayek:

In a functioning market, Hayek insisted, financial compensation depends not on someone’s innate gifts or moral character. Nor even on the originality or technological brilliance of their products. Nor, for that matter, on the effort that goes into producing them. The sole and only issue is a product’s value to others. Compare an innovation as incredibly mundane as a new plastic lid for paint cans with a whiz-bang, new computer chip. The painter could become just as rich as the computer whiz so long as the savings from spills that the lid offers are as great as the productivity gains from the chip. It matters not a whit that the lid maker is a drunk, wife-beating, out-of-work painter who stumbled upon this idea through pure serendipity when he tripped over a can of paint. Or that the computer whiz is a morally stellar Ph.D. who spent years perfecting his chip.

As markets are neutral as to the virtue or vice of economic actors, so too are they neutral as to the truth or falsity of the ideas that those actors bring as products for sale. If falsehoods are in demand, falsehoods will sell; if truths are not in demand, their bearers will go begging. The mouseover text for the xkcd represents a nod to this fact, and an attempt to wriggle out of its implications: “Not to be confused with ‘selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works,’ which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.” That won’t do, since it assumes that we can assign a fixed meaning to the expression “works.” An investment advisor who believes in astrology may not be any likelier than other advisors to beat the market, but s/he may very well use that belief to “make a killing,” if s/he attracts clients who strongly value such a belief. In that case, astrology would not “work” in the sense that quantitative analysts officially recognize, but it would make the advisor every bit as rich as it would if it did meet their definitions of success. As for whether it makes the clients rich, well, Fred Schwed answered that one in 1940:

Once in the dear dead days beyond recall, an out of town visitor was being shown the wonders of the New York financial district. When the party arrived at the Battery, one of his guides indicated some handsome ships riding at anchor. He said, “Look, these are the bankers’ and brokers’ yachts.” “Where are the customers’ yachts?,” asked the naive visitor.

Clearly, markets have not dissolved belief in astrology, any more than the continued non-existence of the customers’ yachts has discouraged people going to brokers and bankers. If the practice of judicial astrology first arose in cities, it may in fact be a by-product of market society. Perhaps we might find that judicial astrology began, not simply as a more elaborate version of a natural astrology that had long been a feature of rural life, but as an attempt to understand market interactions and the power of the market. In that case, it would qualify as a school of economics. One may wonder whether judicial astrology would be the most absurd such school in practice today.

The Atlantic, October 2011

2011-10-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 19 September 2011. Comment there.

The current issue of The Atlantic contains four pieces on which I took notes. All four of them had to do with masculinity in one way or another.

Historian Taylor Branch contributes an article about college sports in the USA. Non-USA types may not be aware that colleges and universities in the United States operate sports franchises, some of which have a mass following and an extremely lucrative financial aspect. The athletes are not paid for their participation in this multibillion dollar industry; they are not even compensated for injuries they receive in the course of them. Branch outlines the story of how this preposterously unfair system came to exist, and considers several recent developments that may bring it to an end. Athletes are symbols of masculinity in the USA, as elsewhere; the amateur ideal may once have been part of a concept of masculinity that some upper-class Americans cherished, but nowadays even volunteerism is often justified in terms of its resume-building potential. Moneymaking has become the masculine activity par excellence. So the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA’s) model of the unpaid “student-athlete” is a bit of an anachronism.

A piece called “Sex and the Married Politician” includes several references to the fall of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. Mr Weiner resigned his seat in the US House of Representatives shortly after it emerged that he had posted a picture of his genitalia on Twitter. It strikes me as misleading to call this story a “sex scandal.” Since everything on Twitter is public, Mr Weiner’s offense was not illicit sexual relations, but indecent exposure. As such, he is in a league with longtime Friendsville, Maryland mayor Spencer Schlosnagle, who in the mid-1990s pled guilty to charges stemming from several incidents when he exposed himself to passersby on the highway. Mr Schlosnagle paid a fine, went to a psychiatrist, and was reelected. He continues in office today. I think that the case of Mr Schlosnagle shows a community and a political system with a rational attitude towards mental illness. Mr Schlosnagle initially tried to deny the charges against him; when the prosecution made such denials impossible, he accepted punishment and sought counseling, thus reducing the likelihood that he will reoffend. Since his behavior was a real nuisance, the prosecution was rational. On the other hand, it was only a nuisance, not a serious threat to anyone in particular; therefore, the voters’ decision to reelect him once he had shown that he was addressing his mental health problems was also rational. Schlosnagle disclosed that he had suffered sexual abuse as a child, thus disowning any model of masculinity that would require him to project an image of himself as invulnerable or invincible. The description of Weiner as the main figure in a “sex scandal,” by contrast, both obscures the fact that he doesn’t seem to have had any sexual contact with anyone and presents him as a menacingly potent figure. I suppose it makes sense that he would have an easier time playing along with that image of himself that with presenting himself as a sick man compelled to behave in a somewhat annoying fashion.

The Library of America has finally devoted a volume to Ambrose Bierce, and this issue includes an admiring review of Bierce’s work and of the Library’s edition. I liked this sentence: “Bierce, after all, has always been best known for being undeservedly unknown.” Reviewer Benjamin Schwarz also makes some good points about Bierce’s lapidary style, such as this:

Bierce’s seminal contribution to American letters is that “sharp-edged and flexible style, like the ribbon of a wound-up steel tape-measure,” as Edmund Wilson perfectly defined it. But that style emerged from Bierce’s compulsion to reveal a truth that remains unacceptable—or only selectively acceptable—today. It’s all very nice to decry the horror of war, but to Bierce its obscenity and its meaninglessness were merely integral to those of life. Bierce’s friend the editor Bailey Millard explained why all the leading publishers of the day rejected Bierce’s war fiction: they “admitted the purity of his diction and the magic of his haunting power, but the stories were regarded as revolting.” Understandably so, given what Bierce knew to be our delusional and self-serving tendencies.

Schwarz approves of Bierce’s flatly declarative style, especially as regards the US Civil War in which Bierce fought with distinction. He quotes Walt Whitman’s remark that “The real war will never get into the books,” then says: “And in fact, excepting Bierce’s work, it didn’t.” That’s high praise indeed; Bierce, alone among the tens of thousands of authors who have published books on that conflict, succeeded in putting “the real war” into his books. I’ve posted previously about Bierce’s characteristic pose as The Man Without Illusions; evidently this is a pose Schwarz accepts at face value, and a form of masculinity he values highly.

B. R. Myers contributes a brief review essay on Australian crime fiction. He quotes this exchange from one such novel:

“I hear someone punched out that cunt Derry Callahan,” he said. “Stole a can of dog food too. You blokes investigatin that?”

Cashin frowned. “That right? No complaint that I know of. When it happens, we’ll pull out all the stops. Door-to-door. Manhunt.”

“Let’s see your hand.”

“Let’s see your dick.”

“C’mon. Hiding somethin?”

“Fuck off.”

Bern laughed, delighted, punched Cashin’s upper arm. “You fuckin violent bastard.”

Upon which Myers comments “I grinned right along with that, as if I hadn’t left high school hoping never to have to hear such exchanges again.” Indeed, talk like that is common among males of many ages and nationalities, and I can sympathize with Myers’ wish to escape from it. As with his admiration for that rather well-crafted specimen of it.

Friends Journal, September 2011

2011-10-01T07:25:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 17 September 2011. Comment there.

The September 2011 issue of Friends Journal includes a couple of brief pieces I wanted to note.

Geoffrey Kaiser writes of “Three Kinds of Singing in Meeting.” Kaiser tells of an old document he found when he was visiting Quaker meetings in New England in 1980. This document was an official statement that a monthly meeting* issued in 1675. It classified singing in meeting for worship** into three categories: “Serious Sighing,” “Sensible Groaning,” and “Reverent Singing.”

Erik Lehtinen, at the time of writing an Episcopalian deacon, explains in “True Confessions of a Closet Quaker” that he has for some time been sneaking out of his church to attend a Friends*** meeting, and that he has decided to leave the Episcopal church and to join the Quakers. Lehtinen writes that “Many seekers probably start by reading and being inspired by The Journal of George Fox.****” Seekers who are graduates of an Anglican seminary may start that way, but I very much doubt that Fox’s journals, written as they were in haste, in the seventeenth century, and by a man whose ideas are challenging to moderns in many ways, are in fact very attractive to a significant percentage of any other population. Still, it is useful to read Lehtinen’s description of Fox as “a fellow Anglican.” Fox spent his youth in the Church of England, and never quite admitted that he had left that communion.

*”Monthly meeting” is a Quakerese expression that other Christian traditions might translate as “parish” or “local church”

**”Meeting for worship” is also Quakerese; one might say, “worship service”

***”Friends” is Quakerese for “Quakers.” It’s a term that Quakers themselves find confusing, or claim to find confusing; they sometimes make a show of saying “friends- big ‘F’ and little ‘f,’” to highlight the fact that Friends can have friends who aren’t Friends.

****George Fox was the founder of Quakerism. There are people who think that lines like “Friends can have friends who aren’t Friends” are hilarious; such people have also been known to look for opportunities to make puns about foxes. So if you are thinking of joining with the Quakers, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

"We do not believe in appointing Deputies to do what we think it wrong for ourselves to do"

2011-10-01T07:19:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 16 September 2011. Comment there.

This summer Mrs Acilius and I read Ryan P. Jordan‘s Slavery and the Meetinghouse, a study of the great difficulty American Quakers had in the years 1821-1861 trying to decide on an approach to take to the issue of slavery. Last night I was reminded of this passage, from pages 114 through 115 of Jordan’s book:

The editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Sydney Howard Gay, wrote that the Anti-Slavery Society disagreed “with the philosophy of the Quaker[s]” who when appointed to political positions would not hang a man themselves but “would appoint a Deputy that would.” “We do not believe,” continued Gay, “in appointing Deputies to do what we think to be wrong for ourselves to do.”

Gay wrote these words in October of 1848, when many American Quakers were rallying to support the presidential campaign of slaveholder Zachary Taylor. In the willingness of the ostensibly antislavery Quakers of the day to support a slaveholding president, Gay saw cowardice. He equated the cowardice he believed he saw in this matter with the cowardice he saw in the same Quakers in regard to the death penalty. In the seventeenth century, the founders of Quakerism opposed the death penalty, and in many parts of the world that opposition continues even today in an unbroken line of tradition. The Quakers Gay saw in the antebellum USA paid lip service to that tradition, but many of them merely hid behind others while they became complicit in executions.

What brought this to my mind last night was this tweet from author Michael Brendan Dougherty:

I don’t like Rick Perry. And I think he failed in his answer on this. But it is wrong to say that “Rick Perry has executed” people.

To which I responded:

@michaelbd “it is wrong to say that “Rick Perry has executed” people.” Better Grover Cleveland, who did the job personally, than to delegate

Only someone with a lively interest in nineteenth century US history would be likely to know what I was talking about there, so permit me to explain. In 1872, Stephen Grover Cleveland was sheriff of Erie County, New York. The law of the state of New York in those days declared it to be the responsibility of the sheriff of each county to hang the prisoners condemned to death for crimes committed in that county. As this 1912 New York Times article (pdf) put it, “In the office of Sheriff of Erie County there had for many years been a Deputy Sheriff named Jacob Emerick. Mr Cleveland’s predecessors had from time immemorial followed the custom of turning over to Emerick all the details of public executions. So often had this veteran Deputy Sheriff officiated at hangings that he came to be publicly known as ‘Hangman Emerick.’” Evidently Emerick didn’t enjoy this sobriquet, and Cleveland noticed that the law explicitly named the High Sheriff as the officer responsible for hangings. So when Patrick Morrisey was scheduled to be hanged on 6 September 1872, Cleveland resolved to execute Morrisey himself. To return to the Times article, “Cleveland surprised the community and his friends by announcing that he personally would perform the act of Executioner. To the remonstrances of his friends he refused to listen, pointing to the letter of the law requiring the Sheriff to ‘hang by the neck,’ &c. He furthermore insisted that he had no moral right to impose upon a subordinate the obnoxious and degrading tasks that attached to his office. He considered it an important duty on his part to relieve Emerick as far as possible from the growing onus of his title of ‘Hangman.’” The following year, Cleveland again acted as hangman, putting one John Gaffney to death. Cleveland was subsequently elected mayor of Buffalo, then governor of New York. He was the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States in 1884, 1888, and 1892, winning the popular vote on all three occasions and winning the electoral vote in 1884 and 1892. He remains the only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms in office and one of only four candidates to win the popular vote three times. He is also the only former sheriff to go on to become US president.

It is because of Cleveland’s willingness to look Morrisey and Gaffney in their faces and pull the lever that dropped the platform from beneath their feet that I have more respect for him than I do for Rick Perry. In his years as governor of Texas, Mr Perry has signed death warrants that have consigned the 234 people to death. So far from performing these executions himself, Mr Perry seems never even to have attended an execution. And while Cleveland could acknowledge that performing an execution was one of the “obnoxious and degrading tasks attached to his office,” Mr Perry claims to regard signing death warrants as a carefree exercise. This difference alone shows that Grover Cleveland lived in a different moral universe than does Rick Perry. People whose imaginations are shaped by television and video games may think of indifference to human life as a form of strength, and of personal encounters with the object of one’s violent behavior as unimportant. Such views would likely have struck a man of Cleveland’s sort as a sign of profound moral and spiritual immaturity. Granted, executions were far more routine in America in the nineteenth century than they are today, even in a death-penalty happy state like Texas. But does the fact that we execute fewer people today mean that we take the matter of life and death more seriously than the Americans of Cleveland’s day took it? Or does it simply mean that other features of our society have interfered with the smooth functioning of the “machinery of death“?

"Among the loneliest creatures in the universe"

2011-10-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 16 September 2011. Comment there.

The other day, Eve Tushnet posted a link to this post by Mark P. Shea. Shea is responding to remarks by Watergate figure Charles Colson, who was in turn discussing the question of whether puppets Bert and Ernie, of Sesame Street fame, should marry each other. Colson approvingly quotes the official statement from the producers of Sesame Street to the effect that as puppets, Bert and Ernie “do not have a sexual orientation.” He sees a deeper significance in the idea that Bert and Ernie’s close friendship suggests a homosexual relationship, and quotes blogger Alyssa Rosenberg’s remarks about it. Colson’s quote from Rosenberg included the beginning and middle of this paragraph:

And more to the point, I think it’s actively unhelpful to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple. Having close, affectionate friendships with another man doesn’t mean that you two are sleeping together, just as liking fashion doesn’t automatically flip a switch on your sexual orientation and make you only interested in dudes. Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way. As much as I write about how narrow depictions of women can be in pop culture, depictions of men may end up being more positive, but that doesn’t mean they’re less limiting.

To this, Shea adds that the idea that friendship between people of the same sex must somehow represent “sublimated homosexuality” is:

just a lie and the incredible poverty that is foisted on our culture (and on men in particular, who are starving to death for lack of male friendships) is one of the great famines of our time. Some of the most nourishing relationships I have ever known have been friendships–with both men and women. American men are among the loneliest creatures in the universe, not for lack of women, but for lack of friends.

Shea’s blog is called “Catholic and Enjoying It!” Like Shea, Tushnet is a tradition-minded Roman Catholic; the tagline of her blog is “Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood.” Unlike Shea, she is an uncloseted (though celibate) lesbian. Colson is neither a Roman Catholic nor a lesbian, but his ardent Baptist faith comes with quite an old-fashioned view of sexual morality. So Shea’s comment puts them in an awkward spot. If the label “gay” holds such terror for American men that they would rather take a place “among the loneliest creatures in the universe” than risk being identified with it, surely it is an urgent matter to drain that label of its terror. To be sure, this is no easy matter. For decades now, legions of people have been laboring mightily to destigmatize homosexuality, and the work isn’t half done yet. But it is the obvious answer. Indeed, the only conclusion I can draw from Shea’s remark is that heterosexual men have a vital stake in the movement to gain full social equality for sexual minorities. This conclusion, however, is not one that Christian conservatives such as Shea, Colson, and Tushnet can accept, and so they are left facing a vastly complex, perhaps hopelessly complex, problem. I believe their hearts are in the right place, and so I feel sorry for them.

Deja vu all over again?

2011-10-01T07:14:00.001-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 14 September 2011. Comment there.

In recent weeks, the presidential campaign of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman has received a tremendous amount of publicity in the USA, out of all proportion to the tiny levels of support that the governor has shown in opinion polls. This has puzzled many people; a Google search for “Why does Jon Huntsman get so much press?” brings up, as of the moment I write this, 441,ooo results. I have an idea as to the solution of this puzzle.

Perhaps the current Republican presidential contest reminds reporters of the last contest to choose a challenger for an incumbent president, which is to say the Democratic Party’s race eight years ago. At this point in that race, three Democratic candidates seemed to be leading the pack: Governor Howard Dean, Senator Joseph Lieberman, and General Wesley Clark. Governor Dean topped most polls, but was unacceptable to key Democratic constituencies and did not play well on television. Most of Senator Lieberman’s support came from a small group that is disproportionately influential in the political process, namely pro-war Democrats. Unable to broaden his appeal beyond that group, he was fading fast by September 2003. General Clark had stirred considerable excitement when he entered the race late, but he lacked staying power and by the time the voting started he had fallen far behind several other candidates. The eventual nominee was Senator John Kerry, who in September of 2003 was polling in the neighborhood of 1% of likely Democratic voters, but who had one of the most impressive resumés of any candidate and who, due to the fact that he had married an extremely rich widow, could finance his own campaign.

Compare that with the Republicans this time out. The three candidates who appear to be the strongest at the moment are Governor Willard “Mitt” Romney, Representative Michele Bachmann, and Governor Rick Perry. Of these, Governor Romney has long topped most polls, but is unacceptable to key Republican constituencies and does not play well on television. Most of Representative Bachmann’s support comes from a small group that is disproportionately influential in the political process, namely ultra-right Evangelicals. So far unable to broaden her appeal beyond that group, she is fading fast at this point. Governor Perry stirred considerable excitement when he entered the race late, but it is unclear whether he will have staying power enough to remain in the top tier by the time the voting starts. Governor Huntsman is, as of September 2011, polling in the neighborhood of 1% of likely Republican voters, but he has one of the most impressive resumés of any candidate and, due to the fact that he is the son of the man who invented the packaging for McDonald’s Big Mac, he can finance his own campaign.

One might be forgiven for thinking that the history of this month’s Republican presidential race is a repeat of the history of the September 2003 Democratic presidential race. Of course, that does not imply that the events of October 2011 through November 2012 will in any particular way resemble the events of October 2003 through November 2004. But the similarity of the two contests up to this point, and the resemblance between Governor Huntsman’s position now and Senator Kerry’s then, might explain why he receives so much more media attention than do other candidates with equal or lesser levels of popular support.

Overheard on my lunch break

2011-10-01T07:12:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 14 September 2011. Comment there.

This afternoon, I stopped at a theater box office to buy tickets for a show Mrs Acilius and I want to attend later this month. I overheard a snippet of conversation between the box office clerk and the customer ahead of me. I didn’t hear the part leading up to it, so I don’t know what information the clerk was trying to find:

CLERK: Have you bought tickets here before?

CUSTOMER: Yes.

(CLERK types on computer, looks puzzled): Could it be under your spouse’s name?

(CUSTOMER thinks long and hard, then answers in a doubtful tone): I’m not sure… probably not.

CLERK: Do you have a spouse?

CUSTOMER: No.

From the box office, I went to Subway to eat lunch. While I was eating, I overheard another brief cross-counter conversation:

(CUSTOMERS enter.)

SANDWICH ARTIST,* smiling brightly: Welcome to Subway!

CUSTOMER: Hi. You seem happy.

SANDWICH ARTIST, smiling just as brightly as before: It’s fake!

*Hey, that’s their official title.

The Nice Creed

2011-10-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 13 September 2011. Comment there.

In the June issue of Chronicles magazine, Philip Jenkins wrote a very interesting piece about the Revised Common Lectionary. A lectionary is a table of holy writings that are prescribed to be read in church or temple on particular days; the Revised Common Lectionary is the product of a collaboration among many of the largest Christian denominations in the United States and Canada. Throughout the English-speaking world, Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants hear the readings appointed by the Revised Common Lectionary in their services.

Jenkins asks us to imagine a new Christian denomination, one founded with a close eye to market research. This denomination might find a stumbling block in the Bible. How might they clear such a hurdle? “Our focus groups tell us that many modern people do not like or do not understand large portions of the Bible, about half the book in fact, and we want to serve their needs. The God we preach is, above all, Nice, and the scripture must focus on that paramount reality. So our church has produced a new version of the Bible, carefully selected for Niceness, and edited to remove the half of the material that modern readers find difficult, unpleasant, or thorny. That is our belief- or as we call it, our Nice Creed.”

While this imaginary Nice Creed might be very different from the series of statements known in various times and places as the Nicene Creed, it would have a distinguished historical lineage. Marcion of Pontus, a major figure in the early development of Christian thought, was so troubled by the many passages of the Jewish scriptures that depict a vengeful God Who takes a particular interest in one chosen people that he decided those scriptures were describing a different God from the world-redeeming, grace-giving God of Jesus and Paul. Marcion did not deny the truth of Judaism, but claimed that while the Jewish God created the universe and the Messiah would come and establish a millennial kingdom for the Jews, the God of Jesus was quite another fellow, and Jesus Himself, though He were Savior of all humanity, was no Messiah. No church today claims Marcion as an inspiration; all that express an opinion about him call him a heretic. But the Revised Common Lectionary elides, in Jenkins’ words, “exactly those Old Testament elements that most repelled that ancient heretic. What remains in the text is an acceptable Bible Lite.”

For example, 94% of the Book of Esther is missing from the Revised Common Lectionary. While the lectionary leaves in the story of the hanging of the wicked Haman, it leaves out the revenge the Jews took on his people, a revenge that left 75,000 dead. This is the foundation story of the feast of Purim, and is important enough to Jews today that worshipers ritually make noise in temple when Haman’s name is mentioned. But it certainly isn’t Nice. So out it goes.

Jenkins puts it thus: “In terms of the ordinary experience of Christian Church life, the Book of Esther has ceased to exist. So has the Book of Ezra (not quoted at all in the lectionary); so have Judges, Leviticus, Nehemiah (each represented by one meager passage.)” Even worse is the selective editing within passages. “A passage will be cited as (for instance) ‘Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18′ without any explanation of what has vanished from that chapter. Just what was in verses three through eight?” Jenkins gives some examples of passages which are seriously misrepresented by selective editing of this sort. For example, this lesson gives us the first verse and a half of chapter 24 of Joshua, then jumps to verses 14-18. What’s wrong with verses 3-13? Jenkins explains that “these omitted verses recount the conquest and destruction of the Amorite and Moabite peoples, the annihilation of Jericho, and the ethnic cleansing of the seven peoples of Canaan. Leaving out that section, we imagine the rival peoples listed in this chapter as armed enemies in battle, not as civilian targets for genocide.” Definitely not Nice!

Jenkins two closing paragraphs make his point very forcefully, I think, so I’ll quote them in full:

Why should we worry about this radical purging of the biblical text? After all, Christians are not forbidden to read the troubling texts on their own, either in a private context or in a common study group. Yet having said this, many such groups like to use the lectionary as a guide for such activity, either using the texts for the coming Sunday, r else linking the study to a sermon. Ordinary readers are free to pursue Joshua, Ezra, and Deuteronomy, but how many do? If you are a faithful church attendee- a Catholic or Presbyterian, Methodist or Episcopalian, Lutheran or Mennonite- the odds are that you will simply never encounter some of the Bible’s most challenging passages, texts that must be understood if we are to see that work holistically. Jesus, after all, was really Yeshua, and He shared His name with the ancient warlord we call Joshua, the book of whose deeds has virtually disappeared from church usage.

The worst feature of this far-reaching excision of troubling texts is what it suggests about the churches’ attitude toward their ordinary believers, who must be protected from anything that might call them to question the orthodoxies of the day. God forbid they might hear these texts: They might be induced to think.

I am one of those who would be glad if there were nothing in the Bible encouraging war, or genocide, or slavery; if it spoke out consistently and clearly in favor of equality between men and women, of a mindful relationship with the natural world, of the rights and dignity of sexual minorities; if it fit easily into a scientific worldview and a liberal democratic political system. These are some of the values Jenkins would classify among the “orthodoxies of the day,” and of course they are that. I don’t mind being called orthodox. But it is simply false to pretend that the Bible really is that way, and Jenkins deserves commendation for speaking out against the infantilization of “ordinary believers” implied in the Nice version of the scriptures presented in the Revised Common Lectionary.

In the same issue, Aaron D. Wolf marks the 400th anniversary of the “King James Bible.” Wolf has fond memories of his fundamentalist boyhood and of the 1611 Bible as a presence in that boyhood, but now that he has left fundamentalism behind and become a more traditional sort of Christian he is constrained to point out some of the limitations in that translation. I hadn’t known just how dependent the 1611 translation was on William Tyndale’s earlier translation. Evidently 83% of the New Testament and 76% of the Old Testament in the 1611 translation comes verbatim from Tyndale, and the rest was shaped by the influence of Tyndale’s approach. As a Lutheran in an England whose established church was still subordinate to Rome, Tyndale was put to death for heresy in 1536, but it would seem he managed to get the last word.

Thomas Fleming isn’t a particularly humorous author, at least not intentionally, but his column did make me chuckle this time around with this story. He meets a man. “‘Been to church’? he asked. Dressed in a suit at 10:30 on Sunday morning, I was forced to admit the fact.”

Chilton Williamson writes about industrialization. He grants that the industrial revolution was in a sense inevitable, so that “the question of whether men should have created industrialism is a meaningless one, the kind of modern question-putting Chesterton deplored.” Still, t’s clear that he wishes he could answer the question in the negative. “Industrialism has two ultimate tendencies. One is to subdue nature and to exhaust it, while ruining it as a home for man, as well as for the thousands upon thousands of other species that industrial activity has driven to extinction, not least through the explosive growth of the human species that industrialization has made possible. The other is to subdue and exploit man, while progressively marginalizing him in the workplace and in society as a whole by mechanization, and finally replacing him altogether with robotic labor.” Williamson doesn’t mention Eric Gill, but Gill’s critique of industrialization seems to be behind this remark and his suspicion that “industrialism, in both human and natural terms, is patently unsustainable, and that its eventual collapse is therefore guaranteed.”

The Loeb Classical Library

2011-09-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

Originally posted by Acilius on Los Thunderlads, 13 September 2011. Comment there.

A logo Harvard commissioned to celebrate the publication of the 500th volume in the Loeb series

In honor of this year’s 100th anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, the Barnes & Noble Review posts a piece by Adam Kirsch on the books in that series that describe Socrates. These include not only the dialogues of Plato, but also Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Aristophanes’ Clouds.

If I were given Kirsch’s assignment, I would not have chosen these as examples of the strengths of the Loeb Library. Most of the 518 volumes in the Loeb series have the same format: a brief introduction, combining remarks about an ancient Greek or Roman author with remarks about the manuscripts in which that author’s works have come down to us; then one of those works, presented in the original on the left hand page and an English translation on the facing page. A few years after the Loebs began to appear in the USA, the Collection Budé began to appear in France. The Budés are rather like the Loebs, only with French translation on the left and the original on the right.

When the Loeb series began in 1911, the texts and translations were of wildly uneven quality. The great problem the series faced was that each volume was entrusted to one person, who might be an accomplished textual critic or an accomplished translator, but who was not especially likely to excel in both of those fields. Very poor translations were produced when, as some critics put it, men who had never before tried their hand at English verse were required to translate Greek verse into it; A. S. Way’s translation of Euripides was long famous as an example of this. The translations by David Kovacs that replaced Way’s version are certainly readable, though, perhaps in reaction to Way’s ludicrously purple versifying, they are so resolutely unpoetic as to obscure the fact that Euripides was writing verse drama.

Even some of the prose translations were unreadable; at times I’ve picked up A. D. Godley’s Loeb of Herodotus to sort out some thorny passage in the Greek, only to find that I was using the Greek as a crib to decipher Godley’s English. The Loeb translations of the Socratic writings aren’t as badly rendered as that, but none is among the best translations of its original available in English. Other volumes were feature readable translations, but unreliable texts. Again, the Socratic volumes aren’t the worst offenders, but neither would their Greek texts be useful to a scholar.

If I had to choose a single volume to praise the Loeb series, I would pick A. W. Mair’s edition of Oppian, Colluthus, and Tryphiodorus. Not only are the texts exemplary, but the translations are sufficiently sensitive that even a Greekless reader might be able to understand why the two poems attributed to Oppian are unlikely to have been produced by the same person. (Granted, it helps that the author of each poem starts by telling us where he was born, and it isn’t the same place, but still, the style is important.) And the footnotes represent a fine commentary on these three neglected authors.

Scientists need media advisors

2011-09-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

Originally published by Acilius on Los Thunderlads, 12 September 2011. Go to that post for comments.

The other day I read an article in Popular Science magazine profiling Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the NASA-sponsored scientist who made headlines in December with a paper claiming that a particular strain of bacteria throve in environments high in arsenic and low on phosphorous. Wolfe-Simon hopes to find a life form that uses arsenic in its DNA in the way that all other known organisms use phosphorous, and NASA foregrounded that hope in its publicity for the paper. While Wolfe-Simon did not claim that she had proven that the bacteria were using arsenic in this way, so much press discussion centered on that idea that when subsequent findings suggested that they probably weren’t, she was subjected to a kind of disgrace. In the Popular Science piece, Wolfe-Simon says that her career may very well be over now.

After I’d read this sad tale, I turned on the TV. The History Channel was showing a program they’d produced in 2008 about Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political scientist who has used game theory to devise an algorithm for use in analyzing high-level decision-making. To be precise, about a third of the show concerned Professor Bueno de Mesquita. This third included many excerpts of the professor and his associates talking to the camera about his research. The other two thirds were about Nostradamus. Neither Professor Bueno de Mesquita nor any of his associates ever mentions Nostradamus, and only one of the many Nostradamus fans who appear mentions Professor Bueno de Mesquita. I strongly suspect that the professor did not know that he was going to be presented as “The Next Nostradamus.”

Two opinion surveys I have not conducted

2011-09-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 12 September 2011:

1. I teach in a state university deep in the interior of the USA. It is likely that most of my students plan to settle in urban areas after they graduate, but a significant minority would strongly prefer to live in rural areas. And it is definitely the case that most of them are looking for a person with whom to live, in whichever setting they prefer.

The students seem to spend more time than one might expect arguing about what restrictions, if any, the law should place on private gun ownership. I wonder if they raise this topic as a way of signaling to potential mates whether they plan to settle in the city or in the countryside. I’m not an opinion researcher, but perhaps someone who is might like to see if support for lax gun laws is a strong indicator of a preference for a rural life and support for restrictive gun laws is a strong indicator of a preference for city life. If it should turn out that these opinions are strong indicators of these preferences, it would be interesting to see under just what sort of circumstances people volunteer opinions about gun control and strive to be identified with those opinions.

2. My wife has cerebral palsy. Many of her friends, like her, grew up with major disabilities. The university where I teach prides itself on accessibility to the disabled, so both through my marriage and through my work I have come to know a substantial number of articulate, highly educated people who have been visibly disabled throughout their lives.

It seems to me that the people I know who meet this description show the same range of opinions as do Americans generally about public policy regarding abortion. Some think that abortion should always be legal, some think it should always be illegal, some support each of a variety of restrictions. What none of them accepts is the label “pro-choice.” I’ve heard people who would not vote for a policy that would bar or discourage any abortion anywhere hotly deny that they are “pro-choice.” I don’t know if my acquaintances are in any way representative of Americans with disabilities. If a survey showed that American adults who grew up as disabled children are in fact much more likely to want to keep abortion legal than they are to call themselves “pro-choice,” and that they are in this way different from American adults who grew up without visible disabilities, I wonder what we might find about the label “pro-choice” and the rhetoric associated with it that they find repellent.

The Nation, 26 September 2011

2011-09-12T08:58:00.001-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 9 September 2011:

James Longenbach contributes a surprisingly sympathetic review of a collection of letters by the young T. S. Eliot. Longenbach argues that Eliot’s Unitarian family made a fetish of doubt and complexity, and that the aspects of Eliot’s life and thought that puzzled them came from a rebellion against this fetish, against “the Eliot Way.” Eliot rebelled against what he called “the Way of Doubt” by time and again taking actions that entailed an irrevocable commitment. As Longenbach puts it:

In retrospect, all of the momentous events in Eliot’s life were determined by a moment of awful daring. In 1933 he left Vivien as abruptly as he had married her, and his decisions to enter the Church of England and, many years later, to marry his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, were similarly nurtured in complete secrecy and subsequently revealed to a world in which even close friends were baffled by Eliot’s behavior, left feeling as if they had never known him. To Eliot’s Unitarian family, a conversion to Anglo-Catholicism seemed as explicable as an initiation into a cult.

Considering this disposition of Eliot’s, and in view of his time and place, it is nothing short of amazing that he did not join the Blackshirts. When Longenbach provides this excerpt from an unpublished essay of Eliot’s, it becomes amazing that he didn’t murder anyone:

In Gopsum Street a man murders his mistress. The important fact is that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from ours. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact that something is done which cannot be undone—a possibility which none of us realize until we face it ourselves. For the man’s neighbors the important fact is what the man killed her with? And at precisely what time? And who found the body?… But the medieval world, insisting on the eternity of punishment, expressed something nearer the truth.

The man’s neighbors, in their fascination with the details of the crime, might easily fall into a psychological or other scientific explanation of the killer’s motivation, which would in turn reduce the crime itself to the ordinary level of everyday life. The medieval view insists that murder, like other sin, is not ordinary, that it is a thing set apart from the created world around us. Eliot may not have craved murder, but he did crave that sort of setting apart. For him, it was a lie to say that the whole world is one thing and that it can be reduced to one set of laws. Eliot’s onetime teacher Irving Babbitt was fond of quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lines, “There are two laws discrete,/ not reconciled–/ Law for man and law for thing;/ The last builds town and fleet,/ But it runs wild,/ And doth the man unking… Let man serve law for man,/ Live for friendship, live for love,/ For truth’s and harmony’s behoof;/ The state may follow how it can,/ As Olympus follows Jove.” These lines come from a poem Emerson dedicated to W. H. Channing. W. H. Channing was the nephew of Unitarian theologian William Ellery Channing, and like Emerson was himself a Unitarian preacher. The Channings, Eliots, and Emersons were all related to each other, so Eliot likely perked up when he heard Babbitt quote these lines.

While Emerson may have concluded that the “Law for Man” is best observed by general friendliness, Babbitt drew a more sobering conclusion. In his first book, Literature and the American College (which takes the lines from Emerson as its epigraph,) Babbitt explained that he called himself a “humanist” rather than a “humanitarian” because the former word suggests a more selective sympathy than does the latter. One can see the humanitarian impulse, in Babbitt’s sense of the word, in the neighbors’ insistent focus on the practical details of the murder, in the implication that the act of murder can be reduced to those details, that it can therefore be put on a level with other acts a person might perform. The humanitarian impulse thus reduces even murder to one form of behavior among many. In an age dominated by humanitarianism, murder loses its terror. The word “mystery” comes to mean, not that of which one may not speak because it lies outside the ordinary realm of our experience, but that of which one must inquire until it can be reduced to the ordinary realm of our experience. The “murder mystery,” a story in which investigation reveals that a murder was of a piece with the ordinary life around it, thus emerges as the signature genre of the humanitarian age.

Longenbach doesn’t mention Babbitt, through the study of whom I first became seriously interested in Eliot. Nor does he mention Eliot’s Royalist politics, one of the aspects of Eliot’s thought that kept Babbitt from taking his former student seriously. However, I was thinking of Eliot the Royalist earlier today, when I offered a comment on the website Secular Right. A post there complained about a speech Prince Charles had made about global warming. As rightists, the authors of the site aren’t much interested in speeches about global warming; as secularists, when they hear such a speech from the heir apparent to a throne which sits at the center of the established Church of England, they are quick to attribute it to a yearning for the apocalyptic. For good measure, the post threw in an identification of the prince as an “aristocratic idler.” I suggested in reply that this yearning might be a sign that the House of Windsor is an unsatisfactory sort of monarchy:

It might be better if Prince Charles truly were an “aristocratic idler.” As it is, his handlers set myriad tasks for him each day, among them the delivery of public statements that reassure various groups that their concerns are being taken seriously at the highest levels of the state. This frees the people who actually exercise power at the highest levels of the state to ignore those concerns. If the prince and his immediate family were relieved of this chore and their other public functions, they would have an opportunity to withdraw into seclusion, appearing only on those occasions when they might strike awe into the natives. Then the UK might have a proper monarchy, distant, godlike, surrounded by an aura of high majesty and cold terror. Then there would be no need for the heir apparent to repeat warnings about the end of the world; the sound of his name would suffice to fill the people who find such warnings emotionally satisfying with the dread they crave. Failing that, you might as well have a republic.

Walter Bagehot said that there can be arguments for having a splendid court and arguments for having no court, but that there can be no arguments for having a shabby court. I’d say that there can be arguments for having a terrifying king and arguments for having no king, but that there can be no arguments for having an unrelentingly ordinary sort of person as king.

I call Charles “an unrelentingly ordinary sort of person,” not only because his statement is a pack of cliches, but also because of his busy-ness and because he is so familiar a figure. Irving Babbitt criticized the cult of busy-ness in his own time as something that robbed life of depth; today, the same cult has gone to such extremes that it has reduced people to interchangeability. By the end of the day, virtually anyone who had completed Prince Charles’ schedule would be indistinguishable from Prince Charles. And his constant presence in the public eye makes it impossible to accept the prince as a figure embodying any kind of mystique. As humanitarianism has made murder an ordinary act, albeit a costly one, and murderers ordinary folk, so too it has made kingship an ordinary job and kings ordinary fellows. I don’t disagree with the Secular Right crowd that there is an unwholesome yearning for the apocalyptic afoot in our time; though perhaps that yearning is in fact simply a yearning for an event that will cast ordinariness aside once and for all.

Babbitt also came to my mind when I read a post on the Nation‘s blog, “The Notion,” about the end of the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I should explain that every year since the early 1960s, comedian Jerry Lewis has occupied a bloc of several hours of television time, ending on the morning of the first Monday in September (Labor Day in the USA.) During that time, a variety of entertainment acts would perform; in between acts, Lewis and others would solicit funds for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Lewis made his name as a comedian by mocking people with spastic conditions, so one would think that he was doing penance by raising money for research into Muscular Dystrophy, though he never seems to have made the connection. What he did do was present people with Muscular Dystrophy as helpless objects of pity; the archetypal moment of the telethon came in 1973 when he held up a child with Muscular Dystrophy and said “God goofed, it’s up to us to correct his mistakes.” Not everyone with Muscular Dystrophy was happy to be declared one of God’s mistakes, nor did all of them enjoy wearing the label “Jerry’s Kids.” For more than 20 years, the pitying, patronizing tone of the telethon has inspired people with Muscular Dystrophy to protest outside the theater and around the country. While the Muscular Dystrophy Association, funded largely by the telethon, does a great deal of good, many of its best programs have taken their direction from people who object most strongly to Lewis and his maudlin display. The post expresses relief that the telethon is finally ending.

Again, I would say that what made the telethon so hard to take was its denial of mystery, of mystery in the sense of a realm apart from the ordinary. People with Muscular Dystrophy suffer and die, and in their physical aspects those experiences are a brutally ordinary affair of deterioration and destruction. But when people show respect to each other, they agree to look at each other not only in terms of the biological processes that are inexorably carrying all of them to death and decomposition, but also in terms of the stories they tell about themselves, of the roles they play in the groups that matter to them, and of the effects they hope to have on the world. The idea of a “law for man,” of a realm apart from the ordinary processes of matter and energy, can give such stories and roles and hopes an urgency that the worldview which Babbitt would call humanitarian cannot. That isn’t to say that every materialist is doomed to be as big a jerk as Jerry Lewis, or that every dualist will as a matter of course keep a humane perspective when meeting someone who has a visible disability, of course. But it may help to explain why Lewis and his apologists were sincerely unable to understand what he was doing wrong.

Babbitt cared enormously about Socrates, often listing him alongside the Buddha and Jesus as the three greatest men who ever lived. So if this issue of The Nation were to have fallen into his hands, Babbitt would likely have turned directly to Emily Wilson’s review of Bettany Hughes’ The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life. Bettany Hughes has become a bit of an industry; an Oxford-trained classicist, she has presented many television popularizations of classical scholarship and written books tied in with them. Partly this may be a consequence of her marriage to television producer Adrian Evans, partly to her looks (YouTube’s suggestion, when you begin typing in “Bettany Hughes,” is “Bettany Hughes hot.”) Still, I don’t doubt that Michael Grant and Rex Warner and Gilbert Murray and Edith Hamilton and Erasmus and all the other popularizers of the classical tradition over the years had their own ways of gaining position, and I’ve found some of her videos useful. So I don’t begrudge her the fame and fortune she has reaped.

Wilson is bemused by the Bettany Hughes industry. And she has some harsh words for this book:

The Hemlock Cup is not a biography of Socrates. Nor is it a book for a specialist, or one that any reader, specialist or not, will want to take slowly. Hughes has nothing to say about Socrates that is not pure cliché: Socrates was “a maverick,” “individual to his core,” “very human,” somebody with a “radical” and “refreshing” “take on the issues of life,” and who “decided to pursue not just the what, but the why.” In general the prose limps along from dangling modifiers to dramatic, verbless sentences to one-sentence paragraphs. Socrates, inspired by his daimonion, was “Rapt. Lost in his own mind.” Vivid. Also annoying. The first sentence of the introduction—“We think the way we do because Socrates thought the way he did”—is, as it stands, clearly false, though you can roughly understand its meaning. There are lots of sentences like that, which one can easily imagine Socrates himself, on a mean day, tearing to shreds.

Readers of Plato may be surprised to learn from Hughes that “Socrates did not believe in or deal with abstracts.” In dialogues such as Laches, Lysis and Euthyphro, Socrates is ostensibly concerned with nothing but the attempt to define the “abstracts” of courage, friendship and holiness. This Socrates may not be a historical character, but Hughes gives no indication of whether, or why or how, she mistrusts Plato as a source. Her use of textual evidence is also sketchy. No sources are given for the injunction “Understand yourself by loving those around you”; one might well doubt that either the historical or the Platonic Socrates held any such belief. Readers may puzzle over what it means to say that “Socrates believed humanity was society”—unless it’s just a rhetorical way of saying that Socrates, like everybody else, knew that people are social. Surely it doesn’t take the wisest man in the world to figure that out.

Treating an academic book, Wilson might stop there. However, she realizes that Hughes is aiming to introduce Socrates to a general audience, and so praises Hughes’ “television-presenter’s eye for visual detail” that may not offer much to a professor of Greek, but that does make the Athens of Socrates seem more real to a reader with no special background in the subject.

Babbitt’s best friend was Paul Elmer More, who edited The Nation from 1909 to 1914. After his retirement from journalism, More devoted himself to literary criticism and the history of philosophy. More coined the phrase “the Inner Check” based on his conversations with Babbitt and his reading of Plato’s Apology. This phrase expresses an idea which many have regarded as the central metaphysical proposition of the school associated with Babbitt and More. The idea is that the ancients, including Socrates, the Buddha, and most other sages of pre-Christian Europe and Asia, believed in free will, but that they believed that will to be solely a capacity for negation. Babbitt, responding to Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital, preferred the term frein vital to More’s “Inner Check,” but meant the same thing by it. Since so many wise men in such a wide variety of societies had arrived at this conclusion, Babbitt and More reasoned, it would be unreasonable to reject it.

So, it should be clear what Babbitt and More would have thought of a scholar who interpreted Socrates’ message as “Understand yourself by loving those around you,” and even clearer what they would have thought of one who said that the daimonion, which as More pointed out is Socrates’ term for the sensation that he ought not to do a particular thing, would lead him to be “lost in his own mind.” On the contrary, More argued that it was precisely this sensation that kept Socrates focused when others around him were losing their way in the confusions of his time.

New post on Los Thunderlads

2011-09-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

The site you are now reading consists almost entirely of reposts from the blog where I do most of my posting, Los Thunderlads. I maintain this site as a backup in case something happens to that one. Occasionally people leave comments here; I feel sorry for them, since I am the only person who is at all likely to read those comments, and even I sometimes go for weeks on end without looking at them. On the other hand, comments posted on Los Thunderlads will usually get looks from a few people, so today, I put up a post there giving exposure to some of these comments.

Chronicles, December 2010

2011-09-05T19:45:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads:

Lawrence Dennis and his foster mother circa 1908, when he toured England as "the boy evangelist"

I never quite finished my notes on the December 2010 issue of far-right Chronicles magazine, but it includes several notable pieces. So I’ll mention them now, months late though I may be.

Justin Raimondo brings up one of his favorite writers, Lawrence Dennis. Dennis is also one of my favorites, though I think it is rather stretching matters for Raimondo to call Dennis an “African-American intellectual.” Certainly Dennis’ background was African-American; when the 12 year old Dennis toured England as “the boy evangelist” in 1908, his ethnicity gave him an exotic appeal. And he was undoubtedly an intellectual. When he was on trial for sedition in 1944, government witness Hermann Rauschning startled the prosecutor by testifying that Dennis was not a tool of the Nazis, but was a thinker fit to be compared with Oswald Spengler. Dennis was conducting his own defense; when time came for him to cross-examine Rauschning, he rose and thanked him. Yet Dennis was hardly the spokesman for the African American experience that we’ve come to expect when we hear the phrase “African American intellectual.” He said little about the African American experience, and never presented himself as a representative of African Americans. Indeed, the only book-length study of Dennis is titled The Color of Fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Racial Passing, and the Rise of Right Wing Extremism in the United States, and interprets Dennis’ writings and political behavior as symptoms of a life spent passing for white. As Robert Nedelkoff put it in a sympathetic piece about Dennis that he contributed to issue #13 of The Baffler (published in October 1999,) “when he spoke of race relations he made no reference to his being of a particular race” (page 99.) Nedelkoff’s piece, covering pages 93-100 in that issue of The Baffler, was the second place I’d read of Dennis; the first was the chapter on Dennis in Ronald Radosh’s 1975 book Prophets on the Right. Between them, these pieces convinced me that Dennis was more interesting than his onetime embrace of the label “fascist” would indicate. In a series of books published between 1933 and 1941, Dennis predicted that the USA would eventually adopt an economic system similar to those prevailing in Italy and Germany at that time; that this new system would be promoted as a triumph of America’s traditional system; and that he himself would be prosecuted for sedition for saying that free speech was obsolete. Looking back in his final book, Operational Thinking for Survival (1969,) Dennis concluded that all of his predictions had been vindicated.

Chilton Williamson shares fond memories of the time when he and the late Joseph Sobran worked together at National Review. I always looked forward to Sobran’s columns because of the witty remarks that so often appeared there, though I can’t say I ever found a well-constructed argument in any of them. I must mention a grievance I have against Sobran. One of the statements he made that got him fired from National Review and driven to the fringes of society was praise for the magazine Instauration. Because I found much to admire in Sobran’s work, I looked for Instauration. When the magazine became available online, I read several issues. I’d expected an intellectual magazine marked by a hard-headed conservatism, with some pieces that crossed the line into racial prejudice. In other words, I was braced for something rather like Chronicles, only more extreme. Imagine my disappointment when instead I found a racist tract containing article after article dismissing the Holocaust as a hoax (in the first issue the editors express great satisfaction in putting the word “Holohoax” into print.)

George McCartney reviews the movie The Social Network, by Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin’s grand project seems to be showing groups of aggressive, self-indulgent people clashing with each other in the course of work that creates a benign product. The difficulty with such works as The Social Network and The West Wing is that the real-life counterparts of Sorkin’s characters seem to be far more quietly efficient and their products far more problematic than he allows. So Mark Zuckerberg is rumored to be rather a pleasant sort of chap; Facebook has unnerving features that lead me to call its administrators “the Zuckforce.” Actual staffers in the White House probably spend less time dashing about the corridors and snarling at each other than they do showing friendliness and good manners; but the US presidency, as they help to constitute it, may well be the single most destructive institution in the world today. Someone like Lawrence Dennis, were he to see a society with a surveillance network like Facebook and a political leader who starts a war every year or two, would likely show little interest in whether the people administering that network and staffing that leader observed the social graces. In the popularity of Facebook, he might see a people who had become so thoroughly inured to surveillance that they can enjoy themselves only in an environment structured to record their every move; in The West Wing, a people so inured to war that they expect to enjoy a cozy relationship with the chief warlord.

"Great Universities" and "Great Cities"

2011-09-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 25 March 2011:

The other day, I made a long comment on a post at the blog commonly known as “Gelman.” The original post is by the blog’s namesake, Professor Andrew Gelman. Gelman referred to a newspaper piece by Professor Edward Glaeser on the idea of developing an applied sciences center in New York City. Glaeser makes some rather strong claims for the power of universities to promote economic development in the cities to which they are attached. Blogger Joseph Delaney had put something up in which he expressed doubts about Glaeser’s general claims, challenging those who would defend them to explain why New Haven, Connecticut, home of Yale University, is such a dump.

Gelman is impressed by Delaney’s post. He also picks up on a paragraph in Glaeser’s piece that includes a quote from New York’s late US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York is often credited with saying that the way to create a great city is to “create a great university and wait 200 years,” and the body of evidence on the role that universities play in generating urban growth continues to grow.

Gelman doesn’t dwell on Moynihan’s words; he makes it clear in the comments (here and here) that what really interests him is the question of the economic impact of universities on their urban environments in the (moderately) long run. Many other commenters (for example, this person) expressed doubt as to whether any answer to the question could be tested quantitatively, considering how few “great universities” and “great cities” there are at any point in time. In my comment, I suggest that if we take Moynihan’s words literally (admittedly, a rather silly thing to do) we might be able to develop a quantitative test of his hypothesis:

Well, if we take Moynihan’s claim literally, what we need are two lists: a list of “the great universities” as of year n, and a list of “the great cities” as of year n + 200. Of course we wouldn’t want to top-of-the-head either of those lists, so as to avoid some kind of Clever Hans effect.

I haven’t looked for any list that anyone has put forward of “the great universities” as of any particular year, but it sounds like the sort of thing many historians would be fond of producing. And lots of people like to make lists of “the great cities.” Once we have a list, however subjectively it was generated, we can look over the items, try to find quantifiable characteristics that most or all items on it share, and having found such characteristics we can refine the list by adding other items that share them or deleting items that don’t share them. So we can try to work backward to foundations.

As for Yale, I doubt very much that you could find any reasonable criterion by which it either was or had been a “great university” in 1811. Nowadays, sure, but in its first centuries it was a backwater. Would any American university have qualified as “great” in 1811? The faculty of the College of New Jersey, later renamed Princeton University, had been home to quite a few distinguished scholars from Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century, and Columbia had produced a lot of impressive alumni by 1811. Still, it would seem a bit much to call either of them a “great university” at that early date.

Other commenters, such as universally beloved public figure Steve Sailer, have brought up the idea that it isn’t great universities that make the cities attached to them great, but great cities that make the universities attached to them great. Here again, I’d ask to see two lists: the world’s “great cities” as of year n, and the world’s “great universities” as of year n + whatever number you like. New Haven continues to be a counterexample; while Yale may never have been on any list of the world’s “great universities” until the middle of the twentieth century, it undeniably has a place on any such list today. Yet New Haven has never been anyone’s idea of a “great city.” How many seats of the “great universities” have been?

Of course, one challenge in analyzing such lists would be deciding which universities are attached to which cities. It may not be controversial to say that Cambridge, Massachusetts is part of Boston, and so to give Harvard as an example of a (currently) great university located in (what I’d call) a great city; but what about San Francisco and the two great universities in the Bay Area? Is Berkeley really part of San Francisco? You go through Oakland to get from one to the other, and Oakland is most definitely not part of San Francisco. Is Palo Alto part of San Francisco? The relationship between Stanford University and San Francisco is often cited as one of the things that makes that city great, but Palo Alto is in fact 35 miles from San Francisco at their closest points, and Stanford’s campus is further than that. San Jose, a very different city, is only half as far, and it’s southward to and beyond San Jose that Stanford-based tech entrepreneurs have usually gone.

When is it ethical to accept a prize?

2011-09-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 7 April 2011:

In a post here a few months ago, I described some views expressed by my namesake, Roman historian Gaius Acilius. Acilius, who was in his prime in the year 155 BC, apparently had some concerns about the conditions under which it was appropriate to accept praise. In particular, Acilius seems to have wondered if it could be right to accept praise offered on a particular basis if one were not prepared to accept blame offered on that same basis.

I was reminded of this a few moments ago, reading the news. Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, has accepted the Templeton Prize. This exchange from an interview Rees gave to Ian Sample of The Guardian made me wonder what Acilius would have said:

IS: What do you think the Templeton prize achieves? What is the value of it?

MR: That’s not for me to say to be honest.

IS: You must have a view?

MR: No.

IS: But you think it achieves something?

MR: Well, I mean as much as other prizes, certainly, but I wouldn’t want to be more specific than that.

IS: That’s a shame. Might you at some time in the future?

MR: They are very nice people who are doing things which are within their agenda, but their agenda is really very broad. I should say that I was reassured by the rather good piece in Nature a few weeks ago, which talked about the Foundation and I found that reassuring. Certainly Cambridge University, I know, has received grants from Templeton for editing Darwin’s correspondence, which is a big Cambridge project, and also for some mathematical conferences. They support a range of purely scientific issues.

Imagine if the judges who grant the Templeton Prize had sent Rees a letter, not offering to give him £1,000,000 and add his name to a list of distinguished thinkers as a reward for his achievements, but demanding that he pay them £1,000,000 and allow his name to be added to a list of ill-doers as a punishment for his delinquencies. Would he accept that demand so blithely?

Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?

2011-09-03T18:04:00.001-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 21 April 2011:

A couple of days ago, I found a mass mailing from the libertarian Independent Institute in my inbox. It included these paragraphs:

The 150th Anniversary of the Outbreak of the U.S. Civil War

April 12 marked the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War, when Confederates fired on U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter, in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Although people routinely succumb to the temptation to reduce the cause of the war to a single factor (e.g., to the slavery issue or to “states’ rights”), the cause was more complex. Independent Institute Research Fellow Joseph R. Stromberg discusses one causal factor that often gets short shrift in public discourse (although he cites many historians who support his analysis): interest groups with material, rather than ideological, stakes in promoting the war.

Antislavery, Stromberg writes, “was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes.” The Republican Party Platform of 1860, for example, focused less on antislavery grievances than on proposals designed to benefit northeastern financial and manufacturing interests and Midwestern and western farmers–policies that would have become harder to implement if southern states were allowed to secede. Lest he overgeneralize, Stromberg hastens to add that northern trading and manufacturing interests that bought from the suppliers of southern cotton–”the petroleum of the mid-nineteenth century,” as he puts it–were aware that they would face severe disruptions if war broke out.

In a post on The Beacon, Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory argues that April 12, 1861, also marks the date of the federal government’s repudiation of the Founders’ vision of the American republic and the birth of Big Government. “The war ushered in federal conscription, income taxes, new departments and agencies, and the final victory of the Hamiltonians over the Jeffersonians…. Slavery could have been ended peacefully, to be sure, but ending slavery was not Lincoln’s motivation in waging the war–throughout which this purely evil institution was protected by the federal government in the Union states that practiced it, and during which slaves liberated from captivity by U.S. generals were sent back to their Southern ‘masters.’”

“Civil War and the American Political Economy,” by Joseph R. Stromberg (The Freeman, April 2011)

“The Regime’s 150th Birthday,” by Anthony Gregory (The Beacon, 4/12/11)

“The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate,” an Independent Policy Forum featuring Harry V. Jaffa and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (5/7/02)

“The Civil War: Liberty and American Leviathan,” an Independent Policy Forum featuring Henry E. Mayer and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (11/14/99)

“The Bloody Hinge of American History,” by Robert Higgs (Liberty, May 1997)

It’s true enough that “people routinely succumb to the temptation to reduce the cause of the war to a single factor… the cause was more complex.” Though I would not disagree with this statement, I would go on to say something subtly different as well. Much public discussion of the US Civil War turns on a rather odd question. This question is, “Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?”

As the press release above suggests, libertarians tend to say that the war was a chapter in a narrative titled “The Growing Power of the Nation-State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Anthony Gregory’s description of the powers which the federal government first exercised during the war, and never renounced, gives an idea of the structure of this narrative. Right-wing libertarians like Gregory focus on the conflict between the growing power of the nation-state and the unregulated operations of the free market, while left-wing libertarians like Joseph Stromberg point out that no unregulated free market has ever existed and focus instead on the role of the nation-state in forming the economic elites that actually have wielded power throughout history.

Most other Americans tend to say that the US Civil War was a chapter in a narrative titled “The Rise and Fall of Human Slavery.” In this narrative, the United States figures as the champion of Emancipation and the Confederate States figure as the champions of Enslavement. This story elides the facts that Gregory and others point out, that six slave states remained in the Union, that federal forces enforced slavery in the South throughout 1862, and that President Lincoln took office vowing to leave slavery alone. However, it is undoubtedly true that all the Confederate states were slave states and that its leaders bound themselves time and again to defend and promote slavery, while the United States did eventually move to abolish the institution.

It should be obvious that the question, “Of what narrative is the US Civil War a chapter?,” is a meaningless one. Of course the Civil War is a chapter of “The Growing Power of the Nation-State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” of course it is a chapter of “The Rise and Fall of Human Slavery,” of course it is a chapter of any number of other narratives. Why, then, is this nonsensical question agitated so intensely?

I blame the schools. More precisely, I blame the tradition of presenting history to students as a grand narrative. It’s natural for people who have spent a decade or so of their early life hearing history presented as a single grand narrative to go on assuming that every story is part of one, and only one, larger story. Perhaps schools must present history this way; if so, I would say that it is a point in favor of a proposal left-libertarian thinker Albert Jay Nock made early in the last century. Nock recommended that schools should teach mathematics “up to the quadratic equation,” Greek and Latin, and a course in formal logic. Equipped with this training, students would be able to educate themselves in everything else, with some here and there finding it possible to benefit from association with some advanced scholar.

Be that as it may, in US schools, the grand narrative of history is usually packaged under some label like “The Story of Freedom.” The word “freedom” in these labels raises the question “freedom from what”? For libertarians, the freedom most urgently needed today is freedom from state bureaucracy. In the story of that freedom, the US Civil War cannot but figure as a vast reverse. For others, the freedom most urgently needed today is freedom from white supremacy. In the story of that freedom, the war may appear as an advance, albeit a rather problematic one. For still others, the freedom most urgently needed today is the individual’s freedom from domination by irresponsible private interests, whether employers, families, or other groups in civil society. In the story of that freedom, the war stands as a moment of triumph, perhaps the supreme moment in American history.

Few would say that the freedom most urgently needed by the United States today is freedom from foreign domination, but I would point out that if the war had ended differently this need might very well be felt very keenly indeed. When the war broke out, Southern leaders claimed that their cause was the defense of slavery, while Lincoln disavowed any plan to interfere with slavery. By the end of the war, Southern leaders were discoursing earnestly about the theory of state sovereignty, while Lincoln declared that “if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another, drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” What remained constant through all this flip-flopping was the Northern intention to protect the domestic US market with a high tariff, while the South wanted to trade on equal terms with the industrial centers of the North and those of Britain. The world economy being what it was in the mid-nineteenth century, a nominally independent Confederate States of America would likely have been drawn into Britain’s economic sphere, and thus into the orbit of the British Empire. We should therefore add “US Resistance to the British Empire” to the list of narratives in which the US Civil War figures as a chapter.

Intimacy and Humanity

2011-09-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 3 September 2011:

A doodle by Franz Kafka, with a comment by Acilius*

Part I. Some remarks about Franz Kafka

In the Autumn of 1921, Franz Kafka wrote a letter to his sister Elli Herrmann in which he discussed, among other things, Jonathan’s Swift’s educational ideas. This letter, published in an English translation in The Chicago Review in 1977,** contains these passages:

This, then, is what Swift thinks***:

Every typical family represents merely an animal connection, as it were, a a single organism, a single bloodstream. Cast back on itself, it cannot get beyond itself. From itself it cannot create a new individual and to try to do so through the education within the family is a kind of intellectual incest. (page 49)

Kafka enlarges on this statement through two very interesting paragraphs, in the first of which he describes the family as “an organism, but an extremely complex and unbalanced one”; in the second, he attributes the unbalanced character of the family to “the monstrous superiority in power of the parents vis-á-vis the children for so many years.” He then comes to the heart of the matter:

The essential difference between true education and family education is that the first is a human affair, the second a family affair. In humanity every individual has its place or at least the possibility of being destroyed in its own fashion. In the family, clutched in the tight embrace of the parents, there is room only for certain people who conform to certain requirements and moreover have to meet the deadlines dictated by the parents. If they do not conform, they are not expelled- that would be very fine, but it is impossible, for we are dealing with an organism here- but accursed or consumed or both. The consuming does not take place on the physical plane, as in the archetype of Greek mythology (Kronos, the most honest of fathers, who devoured his sons; but perhaps Kronos preferred this to the usual methods out of pity for his children.)

The selfishness of parents- the authentic parental emotion- knows no bounds. Even the greatest parental love is, as far as education is concerned, more selfish than the smallest love of the paid educator. It cannot be otherwise. For parents do not stand in a free relationship with their children, as an adult stands to a child- after all, they are his own blood, with this added grave complication: the blood of both the parents. When the father “educates” the child (it is the same for the mother) he will, of course, find things in the child that he already hates in himself and could not overcome and which he now hopes to overcome, since the weak child seems to be more in his power than he himself. And so in a blind fury, without waiting for the child’s own development, he reaches into the depths of the growing human being to pluck out the offending element… Or he finds things in the child that he loves in himself or longs to have and considers necessary for the family. Then he is indifferent to the child’s other qualities. He sees in the child only the thing he loves, he clings to that, he makes himself its slave, he consumes it out of love. (page 50)

After this description, Kafka finds it necessary to clarify. “I repeat: Swift does not wish to disparage parental love; on the contrary, he considers it so strong a force that under certain circumstances children should be shielded from this parental love” (page 51.) He concludes:

What then must be done? According to Swift, children should be taken from their parents. That is to say, the equilibrium the family animal needs should be postponed to a time when children, independent of their parents, should become equal to them in physical and mental powers, and then the time is come for the true and loving equilibrium to take place, the very thing that you call “being saved” and that others call “the gratitude of children” and which they find so rarely.

[snip]

Of course Swift does not deny that parents under certain circumstances can be an excellent unit for educating children, but only strangers’ children. That, then, is how I read the Swiftian passage.

If Kafka shared the view that “parents under certain circumstances can be an excellent unit for educating children, but only strangers’ children,” one may wonder what those circumstances would be. What always comes to my mind when I read that line is the passage in The Castle when K. is told that he and Frieda are to make their home in a classroom:

You have, Land-Surveyor, to clean and heat both classrooms daily, to make any small repairs in the house, further to look after the class and gymnastic apparatus personally, to keep the garden path free of snow, run messages for me and the woman teacher, and look after all the work in the garden in the warmer seasons of the year. In return for that you have the right to live in whichever one of the classrooms you like; but when both rooms are not being used at the same time for teaching, and you are in the room that is needed, you must of course move to the other room. You mustn’t do any cooking in the school; in return you and your dependents will be given your meals here in the inn at the cost of the Village Council. That you must behave in a manner consonant with the dignity of the school, and in particular that the children during school hours must never be allowed to witness any unedifying matrimonial scenes, I mention only in passing, for as an educated man you must of course know that. In connection with that I want to say further that we must insist on your relations with Fräulein Frieda being legitimized at the earliest possible moment. About all this and a few other trifling matters an agreement will be made out, which as soon as you move over to the school must be signed by you.” To K. all this seemed of no importance, as if it did not concern him, or at any rate did not bind him; but the self importance of the teacher irritated him, and he said carelessly: “I know, they’re the usual duties.” ****

In this passage I suppose we see the obverse of the point Kafka finds in Swift. As the family is an impossible setting for the education that raises a person above the animal level, so a schoolroom is an impossible setting for the animal connection that grounds the intimacies of family life.

The overall impression is of a horror of intimacy. Kafka, or Jonathan Swift as Kafka interprets him, recoiled from the intimacy of the bond between parent and child and dreamed of replacing that bond with the professional relationship between teacher and pupil. Throughout his diaries, Kafka mirrors the desire to replace an urgently intimate relationship with a coolly professional one as he confesses that he is holding Felice Bauer and her successors at a distance while developing an ominous fascination with prostitutes. Take for example this passage, which he wrote on 19 November 1913:

I intentionally walk through the streets where there are whores. Walking past them excites me, the remote but nevertheless existent possibility of going with one. Is that grossness? But I know no better, and doing this seems basically innocent to me and causes me almost no regret. I want only the stout, older ones, with outmoded clothes that have, however, a certain luxuriousness because of various adornments. One woman probably knows me by now. I met her this afternoon, she was not yet in her working clothes, her hair was still flat against her head, she was wearing no hat, a work blouse like a cook’s, and was carrying a bundle of some sort, perhaps to the laundress. No one would have found anything exciting in her, only me. We looked at each other fleetingly. Now, in the evening, it had meanwhile grown cold, I saw her, wearing a tight-fitting, yellowish-brown coat, on the other side of the narrow street that branches off from the Zeltnerstrasse, where she has her beat. I looked back at her twice, she caught the glance, but then I really ran away from her.

This uncertainty is surely the result of thinking about F. *****

Self-critical as he was, Kafka analyzed his behavior towards his fiancee as a series of attempts to avoid intimacy, and he felt terrible about it. It’s with another image of streets and alleys that Kafka confesses that he has willfully kept Felice at a distance, and done her harm thereby:

Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together. Live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only possible way to endure marriage. But she?

And despite all this, if we, I and F., had equal rights, if we had the same prospects and possibilities, I would not marry. But this blind alley into which I have slowly pushed her life makes it an unavoidable duty for me, although its consequences are by no means unpredictable. Some secret law of human relationship is at work here.******

In his letter to Elli, Kafka had spoken of the relationship between parents and children as monstrously deformed by the imbalance of power between the parties, and had speculated about a way to introduce a balance between them. Here again he is concerned about inequality in an intimate relationship, seeing his relationship with Felice as one in which he has been cast as her oppressor by the different standards to which society held men and women. From a certain perspective we can say that Kafka speaks as a feminist in these passages; but it would be far more accurate to say that he speaks as a liberal. To the extent that liberalism can be defined as the doctrine that society should be based on reason, the views Kafka attributes to Swift might almost be called liberalism’s reductio ad absurdum. Perhaps this thoroughgoing liberalism reflects a side of Kafka’s sincere belief. It is not difficult to imagine the author of the famous “Letter to His Father” speaking in this vein, and his diary entry dated 19 June 1914 suggests that Elli might have heard sentiments like those her brother here attributes to Jonathan Swift from another sibling as well: “How the two of us, Ottla and I, explode in rage against every kind of human relationship.”******* Perhaps, too, his willingness to believe that Swift is speaking straightforwardly when he praises the Lilliputians is in part a response to the fact that Swift, as a British subject who wrote in English, symbolized a world power that was in 1921, under the banner of liberalism, enforcing policies in Central Europe that did in fact break up families and push people into the care of impersonal institutions.

If Kafka saw families as single organisms which deformed the individuals in them, it can hardly be surprising that he was desperate to avoid forming one. But what of other institutions that promise intimate experiences, but involve unequal power relationships that might overwhelm their individual members? What of religion, for example?

Several times in his diaries, Kafka reflects on the intimacy of shared religious experience, often in such a way as to connect that intimacy with the sort of raw animality that he finds in the parent-child bond. Note this account of a bris:

This morning my nephew’s circumcision. A short, bow-legged man, Austerlitz, who already has 2800 circumcisions behind him, carried the thing out very skillfully. It is an operation made more difficult by the fact that the boy, instead of lying on a table, lies on his grandfather’s lap, and by the fact that the person performing the operation, instead of paying close attention, must whisper prayers. First the boy is prevented from moving by wrappings which leave only his member free, then the surface to be operated on is defined precisely by putting on a perforated metal disc, then the operation is performed with what is almost an ordinary knife, a sort of fish knife. One sees blood and raw flesh, the moule bustles about briefly with his long-nailed, trembling fingers and pulls skin from some place or other over the wound like the finger of a glove. At once everything is all right, the child has scarcely cried. Now there remains only a short prayer during which the moule drinks some wine and with his fingers, not yet entirely unbloody, carries some wine to the child’s lips. Those present pray: “As he has now achieved the covenant, so may he achieve knowledge of the Torah, a happy marriage, and the performance of good deeds.”

Today when I heard the moule‘s assistant say the grace after meals and those present, aside from the two grandfathers, spent the time in dreams or boredom with a complete lack of understanding of the prayer, I saw Western European Judaism before me in a transition whose end is clearly unpredictable and about which those most closely affected are not concerned, but, like all people truly in transition, bear what is imposed upon them. It is so indisputable that these religious forms which have reached their final end have merely a historical character, even as they are practiced today, that only a short time was needed this very morning to interest the people present in the obsolete custom of circumcision and its half-sung prayers by describing it to them as something out of history.********

These paragraphs sit oddly together. The opening remark that the “operation” is impeded by the traditional circumstances of its performance is belied by the lovingly detailed description of those circumstances and their profound peacefulness. Obviously it would be missing the point entirely to turn this most intimate of rituals into an antiseptic operating room procedure. Without the grandfather’s lap, the prayers, the wine, the hushed relatives, and the picturesque rabbi with his unassuming double-edged knife, it’s simply a medical procedure, to be recommended perhaps in rare cases. The “operation” itself is the least defensible part of the whole thing, from the strictly rational point of view a modernizer might have been expected to adopt in 1911. With “obsolete” in the last sentence, however, we return to the conceit that the narrator is unaware of this absurdity, that he sincerely wants to create an up-to-date circumcision, a sterilized scientific bris for the age of progress.

Undoubtedly Kafka’s irony is at work here, an irony which perhaps might have borne richer fruit in a more polished composition. Indeed, he seems to have been dissatisfied with the entry; the next day, he wrote an account of the highly unsanitary circumcision practices allegedly prevalent among Russian Jews, which is so remarkably ugly that it reads like an antisemite’s fever dream. I’ll quote only the last four sentences of this nauseating passage:

The circumciser, who performs his office without payment, is usually a drinker- busy as he is, he has no time for the various holiday foods and so simply pours down some brandy. Thus they all have red noses and reeking breaths. It is therefore not very pleasant when, after the operation has been performed, they suck the bloody member with this mouth, in the prescribed manner. The member is then sprinkled with sawdust and heals in about three days. *********

The next paragraph is more palatable, if not exactly convincing:

A close-knit family life does not seem to be so very common among and characteristic of the Jews, especially those in Russia. Family life is also found among Christians, after all, and the fact that women are excluded from the study of the Talmud is really destructive of Jewish family life; when the man wants to discuss learned talmudic matters- the very core of his life- with guests, the women withdraw to the next room even if they need not do so- so it is even more characteristic of the Jews that they come together at every possible opportunity, whether to pray or to study or to discuss divine matters or to eat holiday meals whose basis is usually a religious one and at which alcohol is drunk only moderately. They flee to one another, so to speak.**********

In both of these passages, we see a similar movement from the first paragraph to the second. The first paragraph describes in considerable detail a ritual in which people share what appear to be bonds of great intimacy, the second explains that this intimacy is mediated through something that keeps those same people from becoming too close to each other. At his nephew’s circumcision, the ritual is lovely and tranquil; among the Russian Jews of Kafka’s Prague imagination, the ritual is an obscene Bacchanal (believe me, the passage I quoted is the printable part.) The Prague Jews in attendance at his nephew’s circumcision only appear to be sharing a moment of the closest intimacy; in fact, their attention is focused on the distant history behind the ceremony, and only incidentally do they relate to each other at all. The Russian Jews of Kafka’s imagination also seem to be sharing something very personal, but when we follow them home from their loathsome debauch we find that they are deeply intellectual and only too mindful of the proprieties.

Not only does Kafka see religion as a sphere in which people only appear to achieve intimacy with each other. He also imagines the supernatural realm as a set of equally diffident relationships. Take this diary entry, for example:

The invention of the devil. If we are possessed by the devil, it cannot be by one, for then we should live, at least here on earth, quietly, as with God, in unity, without contradiction, without reflection, always sure of the man behind us. His face would not frighten us, for as diabolical beings we would, if somewhat sensitive to the sight, be clever enough to prefer to sacrifice a hand in order to keep his face covered with it. If we were possessed by only a single devil, one who had a calm, untroubled view of our whole nature, and freedom to dispose of us at any moment, then that devil would also have the power to hold us for the length of a human life high above the spirit of God in us, and even to swing us to and fro, so that we should never get to see a glimmer of it and therefore should not be troubled from that quarter. Only a crowd of devils could account for our earthly misfortunes. Why don’t they exterminate each other until only a single one is left, or why don’t they subordinate themselves to one great devil? Either way would be in accord with the diabolical principle of deceiving us as completely as possible. With unity lacking, of what use is the scrupulous attention all the devils pay us? It simply goes without saying that the falling of a human hair must matter more to the devil than to God, since the devil really loses that hair and God does not. But we still do not arrive at any state of well-being so long as the many devils are within us. ************

I’ve never understood the appeal of the distant, indifferent gods of Epicurus and the deists; evidently Kafka does.

Part II. Three pieces in the May 2011 issue of The Atlantic

Kafka’s letter to Elli may also have shed some light on another English author, one born the year after he wrote it: Philip Larkin. Larkin’s most famous lines are undoubtedly the opening of his “This Be the Verse“:

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had,

And add some extra, just for you.

The May 2011 issue of the Atlantic includes a review of a new collection of Philip Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones, with whom the poet had a relationship that not even Kafka’s famously frustrated girlfriends could have envied. The reviewer, Peter Hitchens’ less interesting brother Christopher, notes that Larkin and Jones “did not cohabit until very near the end, finally forced into mutual dependence by decrepitude on his part and dementia on hers: perhaps the least romantic story ever told.” He supports this description with numerous quotations from letters in which Larkin apologizes for the rarity and unpleasantness of their sexual encounters.

Where Kafka retreated into a fascination with prostitutes as a way of avoiding intimacy with Felice, Larkin kept his relationship with Monica arid in part by becoming “a heroic consumer of pornography and an amateur composer of sadomasochistic reveries” and amassing “the vast library of a hectically devoted masturbator.” Larkin’s interest in sadomasochism may have helped him develop this idea:

I think—though of course I am all for free love, advanced schools, & so on—someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex—its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what’s more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn’t.

People often accuse feminist thinkers Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon of holding the view to which Larkin gives voice here; I don’t actually believe they do, but perhaps some of the reason people are so fond of caricaturing their views in this way is that they suspect it is the truth and they wish someone would say it.

In the same issue, Benjamin Schwarz writes an essay about novelist James M. Cain, Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce, and a TV adaptation of the novel that was due to air when the magazine was on the stands.************* This paragraph caught my attention:

[I]n Mildred Pierce, Cain wrote the greatest work of American fiction about small business. He made compelling the intricacies of real-estate deals and cash flow, of business planning and bank loans, and of relations with suppliers and customers. (“She had a talent for quiet flirtation,” as Cain explained Mildred’s technique, “but found that this didn’t pay. Serving a man food, apparently, was in itself an ancient intimacy; going beyond it made him uncomfortable, and sounded a trivial note in what was essentially a solemn relationship.”) He rendered the plodding method and the fundamental gamble of small-time commerce—the foundation of Los Angeles’s service-oriented economy—not just absorbing but romantic.

The quote from Cain might have intrigued both Kafka and Larkin. Each of those men managed to conduct his sex life in a way that had more of solemnity than of intimacy about it, and in each case it was through “small-time commerce” (with prostitutes in Kafka’s case and with magazine vendors in Larkin’s) that a barrier was put around sexuality to keep it from becoming too intimate.

Ta-Nehisi Coates compares Barack Obama with Malcolm X. Here’s an important paragraph from Coates’ piece:

For all of Malcolm’s prodigious intellect, he was ultimately more an expression of black America’s heart than of its brain. Malcolm was the voice of a black America whose parents had borne the slights of second-class citizenship, who had seen protesters beaten by cops and bitten by dogs, and children bombed in churches, and could only sit at home and stew. He preferred to illuminate the bitter calculus of oppression, one in which a people had been forced to hand over their right to self-defense, a right enshrined in Western law and morality and taken as essential to American citizenship, in return for the civil rights that they had been promised a century earlier. The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute—the civil-rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. “I committed to nonviolence,” Marable quotes him as saying. “But I’m sort of embarrassed by it.”

Again, this reminds me of Kafka, in particular of his ideas about education. Parents may hand over their right to educate their children to teachers whose relationship to students is impersonal, and it may be beyond dispute that this is called for. But it is sort of embarrassing to admit that the passionate relationships within the family must sometimes be reined in, that children have needs that are not simply outside the scope of what parents can provide, but needs that cannot be met in the presence of the parents. That applies as well to the need for defense against physical violence as to the need for education.

Coates finds two similarities between Mr X and Mr O. First is their common emphasis on the theme of self-invention, second their symbolic roles as powerful African American men:

For all of Malcolm’s invective, his most seductive notion was that of collective self-creation: the idea that black people could, through force of will, remake themselves… For black people who were never given much of an opportunity to create themselves apart from a mass image of shufflers and mammies, that vision had compelling appeal.

What gave it added valence was Malcolm’s own story, his incandescent transformation from an amoral wanderer to a hyper-moral zealot. “He had a brilliant mind. He was disciplined,” Louis Farrakhan said in a speech in 1990, and went on:

I never saw Malcolm smoke. I never saw Malcolm take a drink … He ate one meal a day. He got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to say his prayers … I never heard Malcolm cuss. I never saw Malcolm wink at a woman Malcolm was like a clock.Farrakhan’s sentiments are echoed by an FBI informant, one of many who, by the late 1950s, had infiltrated the Nation of Islam at the highest levels:

Brother Malcolm … is an expert organizer and an untiring worker … He is fearless and cannot be intimidated … He has most of the answers at his fingertips and should be carefully dealt with. He is not likely to violate any ordinances or laws. He neither smokes nor drinks and is of high moral character.In fact, Marable details how Malcolm was, by the end of his life, perhaps evolving away from his hyper-moral persona. He drinks a rum and Coke and allows himself a second meal a day. Marable suspects he carried out an affair or two, one with an 18-year-old convert to the Nation. But in the public mind, Malcolm rebirthed himself as a paragon of righteousness, and even in Marable’s retelling he is obsessed with the pursuit of self-creation. That pursuit ended when Malcolm was killed by the very Muslims from whom he once demanded fealty.

And:

Among organic black conservatives, this moral leadership still gives Malcolm sway. It’s his abiding advocacy for blackness, not as a reason for failure, but as a mandate for personal, and ultimately collective, improvement that makes him compelling. Always lurking among Malcolm’s condemnations of white racism was a subtler, and more inspiring, notion—“You’re better than you think you are,” he seemed to say to us. “Now act like it.”

Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as “our living, black manhood” and “our own black shining prince.” Only one man today could bear those twin honorifics: Barack Obama. Progressives who always enjoyed Malcolm’s thundering denunciations more than his moral appeals are unimpressed by that message. But among blacks, Obama’s moral appeals are warmly received, not because the listeners believe racism has been defeated, but because cutting off your son’s PlayStation speaks to something deep and American in black people—a belief that, by their own hand, they can be made better, they can be made anew.

Like Malcolm, Obama was a wanderer who found himself in the politics of the black community, who was rooted in a nationalist church that he ultimately outgrew. Like Malcolm’s, his speeches to black audiences are filled with exhortations to self-creation, and draw deeply from his own biography. In his memoir, Barack Obama cites Malcolm’s influence on his own life:

His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided, religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life.

Kafka was no prophet of self-invention, collective or otherwise, and charismatic leaders never attracted his attention. However, the one political cause that sometimes did inspire him was Zionism. He even seems to have toyed with the idea of moving to Palestine himself. He occasionally made harsh remarks about Jews as a people, such as the Russian circumcision story quoted above. Those remarks appear in the context of an explicit longing for a new social order in which Jews will no longer be everywhere in the minority, everywhere under pressure to assimilate, everywhere humiliated and relegated either to the squalor of poverty or to the shadow world of the metropolitan bureaucracy. So I’m sure he would have understood the appeal of the Nation of Islam quite well. Perhaps what Kafka hoped to find in the kibbutz he dreamed of joining, and what Malcolm X hoped for during his Black Muslim period, was a new world where family relations were untroubled by the stigmas imposed on the family from without.

Coates seems to favor such an interpretation of Malcolm X. He begins his piece by talking about his mother’s childhood, spent largely in the absorption of homemade hair-straightening product. He commits a pun when he says that at 12, his mother was relaxed for the first time in her life. It turns out that she had undergone a hair-straightening treatment called a “relaxer.” He goes on to describe his own childhood, passed in the 1970s, in an atmosphere where the legacy of Malcolm X was everywhere. He suggests that he enjoyed an easy intimacy with his parents that his grandparents had never had a chance to share with them, in part because his grandparents had felt an obligation to press the standards of white America onto their children.*************

When Kafka talks about the unreasoning animality at the heart of the relationship between parent and child, and the imbalance of power that inevitably deforms that relationship, I wonder if he might imagine a world where those qualities would be tempered. Perhaps in a family that is not pervaded by the sense of being a guest, and not a welcome guest, in the only home available to it the parents might have emotional and intellectual resources available within themselves, and social support available from their neighbors, sufficient to reinvent the parent-child relationship in such a way that its animal character is sublimated into something as humanizing as any school. And perhaps in such a society the family’s bonds with its neighbors would include the children in a complex enough social order that the parents’ power would be moderated. One wishes Kafka had lived to see the establishment of the state of Israel; I wonder whether he would have advised Israeli Jewish parents to send their children to boarding schools.

*A sketch by Franz Kafka, published on page 354 of Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1923 (Schocken Classics, 1976); edited by Max Brod, translated by Joseph Kresh

**”Two Letters by Franz Kafka,” edited and translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston; Chicago Review, volume 29, number 1 (Summer 1977,) pages 49-55

***Kafka is referring to chapter six of Gulliver’s Travels. In his previous letter to Elli, he had written thus:

For myself I have (among many others) one great witness, whom I quote here, simply because he is great and because I have read this passage only yesterday, not because I presume to have the same opinion. In describing Gulliver’s travels in Lilliput (whose institutions he praises highly), Swift says: “Their notions relating to the duties of parents and children differ extremely from ours. For, since the conjunction of male and female is founded upon the great law of nature, in order to propagate and continue the species, the Lilliputians will needs have it that that men and women are joined together like other animals by the motives of concupiscence, and that their tenderness toward their young proceedeth from the like natural principle. For which reason they will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him or to his mother for bringing him into the world, which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit on itself nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts in their love-encounters were otherwise employed. Upon these and the like reasonings, their opinion is that the parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children.” He obviously means by that, altogether in keeping with your distinction between “person” and “son,” that if a child is to become a person, he must be removed as soon as possible from the brutishness, for so he expresses it, the mere animal conjunction from which he has his being. (from Franz Kafka, Letters to Family, Friends, and Editors, translated by Richard and Clara Winston; Schocken Books, 1977, page 293.)

It may prevent misunderstanding if I mention that in his original letter, Kafka quoted Swift in German translation, not in the original text the Winstons provide above (see pages 342-343 in Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902-1924, edited by Max Brod; Schocken Books, 1958.)

****Kafka, The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (Schocken Books, 1982) page 123

*****Kafka, Diaries, page 238 (19 November 1913)

******Kafka, Diaries, page 228 (14 August 1913)

*******Kafka, Diaries, page 290 (19 June 1914)

********Kafka, Diaries, pages 147-148 (24 December 1911)

*********Kafka, Diaries, pages 151-152 (25 December 1911)

**********Kafka, Diaries, page 152 (25 December 1911)

***********Kafka, Diaries, pages 204-205 (9 July 1912)

************Yes, I know that was several months ago. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy.

*************And yes, I know that “press the standards of white America onto their children” is, in the context of a story about hair straightening, also a pun. It’s catching, I’m afraid.

In the flesh?

2011-09-03T17:52:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 September 2011:
Most Sundays, Mrs Acilius and I can be found in a Quaker meeting down the street from our home. She is a member of that meeting and a convinced adherent of the brand of Christianity associated with Quakerism; I’m not a member of any religious group, nor am I convinced of the truth of any religious doctrine. The Friends are a likeable bunch, though, and I always feel that my time among them is well spent.

In many ways, the Quakers are a group apart from other Protestants. Not in all ways, however. For example, like many mainline Protestant denominations the US branches of Quakerdom are currently rumbling with disputes about the status of homosexuality. In some areas of the country, these disputes have gone very far. The venerable Indiana Yearly Meeting, which has been going since 1821, is apparently considering a proposal to dissolve itself so that the local meetings affiliated with it can sort themselves into pro- and anti-gay groups. Other yearly meetings may be approaching a similar point. That means that Quaker denominations that have already made their minds up about the issue are facing the prospect of reorganizing to accommodate refugees from the divided groups.

Because I hear about this controversy quite often, I took a keen interest in Eve Tushnet’s notes on a talk that Christopher Roberts gave at Villanova University a few years back. This bit especially piqued my interest: “* CR: Progressive theology of marriage separates creation and redemption–for progressive, pro-gay-marriage theologians, sex difference is about creation/procreation and is private, while redemption (linked to marriage?) is ecclesial but unisex. “
Roberts’ view of “Progressive theology,” as Tushnet relays it here, reminds me of a problem at the heart of the sacramental theology of Quakerism. The Quakers have traditionally held that the sacraments of baptism and communion are entirely “inward”; that is to say, what makes them holy is nothing to do with the physical elements of a ritual, and everything to do with supernatural events involving the soul and the Holy Spirit. So, most Quakers do not practice an initiation ritual involving water, nor do they take wine and bread together in meetings for worship.

I haven’t read deeply on these topics. If I were to study the arguments that have been made for and against Quakerism over the 350 years that the Friends movement has been underway, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some old writer who thought he had reduced Quaker sacramental theology to absurdity in this manner: 1. Quakers hold that the sacraments of baptism and communion are entirely supernatural, and that no particular physical act or material form is necessary to complete them. 2. Quakers do not deny that marriage is a sacrament. 3. Quakers do not provide any reason to regard the sacrament of marriage as radically different from other sacraments. 4. To be consistent, Quakers must therefore hold that no particular physical act or material form is necessary to complete the sacrament of marriage. 5. The difference between male and female is known to us through particular physical acts and material forms, and in no other way. 6. Therefore, Quakers have no grounds for insisting that a marriage requires a male and female body for its consummation.

Nowadays, many Quakers might accept this line of argument, and might proclaim that they are following in the tradition of the weighty Friends of the past when they endorse same-sex marriage. Many others continue to resist it. I’m not at all knowledgeable about Quaker theology, but it might be interesting to learn what sorts of arguments are exchanged in this matter. If you happen to have knowledge I lack, I invite you to comment.

Two items of interest to Classics types

2011-09-03T17:49:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 31 August 2011:

When the world was young and I was in grad school, many of my classmates went to Rome to hang out with Father Reginald Foster. Reggie, as they all called him, is an American priest who at that time was in charge of translating official Vatican documents into Latin. His schedule was light in the summer, so Reggie ran a summer institute in conversational Latin. Granted, there aren’t any native speakers of Latin around to converse with, but there is a substantial body of permanently interesting Latin literature, and it is easier to read the language if you can also speak it.

Reggie moved back to Milwaukee after Pope John Paul II died. He teaches conversational Latin there from time to time. No future generations of graduate students will be studying under him in Rome, but two current graduate students have revived the Rome summer program They call it the Paideia Institute. Slate magazine ran a piece about it recently.

David Graeber

Also of keen interest to classicists is this recent interview that economic anthropologist David Graeber granted to the website Naked Capitalism. Graeber summarizes Adam Smith’s hypothesis that money originated as an advancement on barter systems that had prevailed before its adoption. He then points out that in the 235 years since Smith published that hypothesis in The Wealth of Nations, observers have examined thousands of cultures in search of examples of pre-monetary barter economies, and that they have yet to find one. Graeber concludes that Smith’s hypothesis is thereby defeated. Societies which have not invented money do not organize markets around barter; they do not organize markets at all. Money and markets arise together, and barter becomes widespread only when currency systems collapse. Non-monetary societies distribute goods and services, not through markets, but through hierarchies in which obligations are based on force. The king or chief or whatever he is has what he has because everyone else is indebted to him for protection and status, and they have what they have because of their relations with him. When multiple authorities lay claim to the same person, they need a way of sorting out whose claim comes first and which authority is entitled to demand what deference or service. Sometimes they develop a way of sorting those claims that involves quantifying them and making them transferable. Once claims on a person’s deference or service can be quantified and transferred, there is a need for tokens to signify the quantification and contracts to enforce the transfer. That is to say, there is money, and with it the dawn of market society.

Graeber makes some remarks that are similar to points that come up in some classes I teach. For example:

Since antiquity the worst-case scenario that everyone felt would lead to total social breakdown was a major debt crisis; ordinary people would become so indebted to the top one or two percent of the population that they would start selling family members into slavery, or eventually, even themselves.

Well, what happened this time around? Instead of creating some sort of overarching institution to protect debtors, they create these grandiose, world-scale institutions like the IMF or S&P to protect creditors. They essentially declare (in defiance of all traditional economic logic) that no debtor should ever be allowed to default. Needless to say the result is catastrophic. We are experiencing something that to me, at least, looks exactly like what the ancients were most afraid of: a population of debtors skating at the edge of disaster.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

When I’m talking to a class, I’m rather more emphatic than Graeber in saying that in this conclusion Aristotle was a man of his time, and that our view of wage labor as a form of freedom may be as legitimate in its own way as was the Greek view of wage labor as a form of slavery. Partly that difference in views stems from the fact that so many slaves in ancient Greek cities were paid wages, and that those who labored side by side with free people in big workshops were paid exactly the same wages as those (nominally) free people, while American slaves were generally denied access to money. Still, I do have a lecture that unnerves them when it ends with my remark that Aristotle would not have thought that we moderns have abolished slavery, but that we have abolished freedom.

I can’t resist quoting another bit of the Graeber’s interview. After he derides the idea of money as a development subsequent to a barter economy, we have this exchange:

PP: You’d be forgiven for thinking this was all very Nietzschean. In his ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that all morality was founded upon the extraction of debt under the threat of violence. The sense of obligation instilled in the debtor was, for Nietzsche, the origin of civilisation itself. You’ve been studying how morality and debt intertwine in great detail. How does Nietzsche’s argument look after over 100 years? And which do you see as primal: morality or debt?

DG: Well, to be honest, I’ve never been sure if Nietzsche was really serious in that passage or whether the whole argument is a way of annoying his bourgeois audience; a way of pointing out that if you start from existing bourgeois premises about human nature you logically end up in just the place that would make most of that audience most uncomfortable.
In fact, Nietzsche begins his argument from exactly the same place as Adam Smith: human beings are rational. But rational here means calculation, exchange and hence, trucking and bartering; buying and selling is then the first expression of human thought and is prior to any sort of social relations.

But then he reveals exactly why Adam Smith had to pretend that Neolithic villagers would be making transactions through the spot trade. Because if we have no prior moral relations with each other, and morality just emerges from exchange, then ongoing social relations between two people will only exist if the exchange is incomplete – if someone hasn’t paid up.

But in that case, one of the parties is a criminal, a deadbeat and justice would have to begin with the vindictive punishment of such deadbeats. Thus he says all those law codes where it says ‘twenty heifers for a gouged-out eye’ – really, originally, it was the other way around. If you owe someone twenty heifers and don’t pay they gouge out your eye. Morality begins with Shylock’s pound of flesh.
Needless to say there’s zero evidence for any of this – Nietzsche just completely made it up. The question is whether even he believed it. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I prefer to think he didn’t.

Anyway it only makes sense if you assume those premises; that all human interaction is exchange, and therefore, all ongoing relations are debts. This flies in the face of everything we actually know or experience of human life. But once you start thinking that the market is the model for all human behavior, that’s where you end up with.

If however you ditch the whole myth of barter, and start with a community where people do have prior moral relations, and then ask, how do those moral relations come to be framed as ‘debts’ – that is, as something precisely quantified, impersonal, and therefore, transferrable – well, that’s an entirely different question. In that case, yes, you do have to start with the role of violence.

Nietzsche may once have been overrated as a political thinker, but I believe that he is now seriously underrated in that wise. So the bit above made me happy.

Charitable Speech

2011-09-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 31 August 2011:

Today’s xkcd:

The late philosopher H. Paul Grice tried to make some of these rules explicit; his most famous attempt to do this can be found in his essay “Logic and Conversation,” published in his book Studies in the Way of Words (Harvard U.P., 1989 and 1991, pages 22-40.) Grice there lays down a set of rules in the form of a series of maxims. Grice begins with an overarching maxim that he calls the “cooperative principle”: “Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” He breaks the requirements of the cooperative principle down into several maxims. So, one ought to be truthful, one ought to provide the listener with enough information to make it easy for the listener gather one’s meaning, one ought not to provide the listener with so much information that it is difficult to gather one’s meaning, one ought to provide information that is relevant to the conversation, one ought to express oneself clearly.

As Carole J Lee points out in her article “Gricean Charity: The Gricean Turn in Psychology” (Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2006; 36(2), 193-218,) what Grice has given us in these maxims are not “universal norms of conversation” (203.) Still less, despite their phrasing, are Grice’s maxims commands that he would have insisted we follow. Rather, they are a sketch of the expectations that listeners tend to bring to a conversation. One tends to expect that a speaker will behave according to the maxims. When a listener finds that a speaker is systematically violating one or more of the maxims, that listener might react with laughter. That laughter shows that the listener, relying on the maxims, had constructed a different meaning than the one the speaker intended. Or, the listener might react with distrust or frustration, if reliance on the maxims has led him or her to a dead end. A charitable listener will bring these expectations to a conversation, assuming that each speaker is displaying the competence the maxims outline. To refuse to give a speaker credit for following Grice’s maxims is to fail to show that speaker the charity that makes cooperative communication possible.

In the strip, the hairless stick figure is frustrated by the hairy figure’s decision to “interpret an obviously sympathetic ‘I’m sorry’ as an apology.” Hairless seems to be frustrated that Hairy is not giving him* credit for following Grice’s maxims. The maxim of quantity requires that each speaker provide just that information the listener needs; the “Why?” in “Why? It’s not your fault” suggests that he is leaving out something essential, something which his sarcastic reply might supply. The maxim of relevance requires that each contribution to the conversation bear on the topic at hand; that Hairy would react to a conventional expression of sympathy as she does would suggest that she does not regard Hairless’ sympathies as relevant to a the topic of her mother’s misfortune. This rejection of Hairless’ expression of sympathy might well strike anyone as rather harsh.

Grice acknowledges that all of the properties that his maxims enjoin are complex. For example, he says of the maxim of relevance: “Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversations are legitimately changed, and so on.” Of course, different cultures conceive of relevance in vastly different ways, a fact that serves as the starting point for many studies which question the usefulness of Grice’s maxims as a guide to the analysis of conversational behavior around the world.**

To the extent that Grice’s maxims are an attempt to outline the expectations listeners have of speakers, it is unsurprising that they do not lay injunctions upon listeners. If we were to complement them with a set of maxims that outline what speakers might reasonably expect from listeners, perhaps the first maxim would call for charity. That charity would be as multidimensional, and no doubt as culturally specific, as the properties Grice’s listeners expect from speakers. We might break our maxim of charity into several sub-maxims to give an idea of what the dimensions of this charity might be. First, assume that the speaker is performing his or her communicative project competently unless s/he provides evidence to the contrary. One might refer to Grice’s maxims in defining competent communicative performance. Second, assume that if the speaker has failed to perform his or her communicative project competently, any failures are as small as possible. So, if a speaker provides a logically invalid argument, a charitable listener might look for the simplest available premise that can be added to make the argument valid. Third, assume that the speaker is a person of goodwill. Under this assumption, one should try to find the least obnoxious possible interpretation for any unclear passages.

In the strip, Hairy has been uncharitable to Hairless, albeit in a rather subtle way. Hairless’ sarcastic response is of course a grossly uncharitable one. Grice was interested in sarcasm, which he saw as something that happens when when “the maxims are flouted.” What Hairy flouts in a subtle way is what Hairless responds by flouting in a massive way, the requirements of charity as I have tried to formulate them in the paragraph above. When speakers think that their listeners are refusing to follow these requirements, they often do respond with anger.

Two examples come to mind. Recently, I took part in a discussion thread on one of my favorite websites, the mighty Language Log. One of the mighty Log’s most distinguished authors, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, posted a little piece about a newspaper columnby a writer named Kathleen Parker. Parker opens with a story about a brief encounter among a group of about ten strangers sharing an elevator at Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Parker was among this group; apparently she had not seen any of the other riders before. Two riders did know each other, a woman and a man. The woman spent the moments of the elevator ride shouting at the man. In the course of her diatribe, the woman called the man a “motherfucker” several times. By the time this pair left the elevator, the woman had made it clear that the man was her son. Parker describes the discomfort that she and the other riders displayed while in the sharing the elevator with the shouting woman. She goes on to allow that coarse words are not in themselves particularly dangerous to the moral health of society, giving as an example of her willingness to tolerate them her relaxed response to a fellow guest at a very proper tea party who called sometime golf champion Tiger Woods an “asshole” in an incongruously “refined accent.” Still, Parker claims, “Lack of civility in words bleeds into a lack of decency in behavior… An “MF” here or an “FU” there might not constitute the unraveling of society, but each one uttered in another’s involuntary presence is a tiny act of violence against kindness, of which we surely could use more.”

There are any number of things one might say about this column. It’s interesting that the word “motherfucker” has come to be so frequently used as a symbol of obscenity without any evocation of the meaning of its root words that a mother could unselfconsciously apply it to her son. It’s puzzling what Parker means by a “refined accent”; she does say that the tea party guest was British, and evidently she was using what we used to called Received Pronunciation. But obscenity is now so common a feature of the speech of Britons of all classes that I cannot imagine any vulgar word being incongruous when spoken in any British accent.

What Professor Nunberg in fact chooses to do with the column is to accuse Parker of veiled bigotry. Noting that Parker’s response to the woman at the tea party had been to say that it would be all right for the woman to curse so long as she used her plummy accent while doing it, Nunberg says: “Now I can come up with at least five contexutal parameters that explain why the public harangues of the elevator expletiviste were obnoxious and offensive in a way that the English (one assumes) woman’s wasn’t. But the posteriority of the initial vowel of the epithet isn’t one of them.” This is a failure of charity on Professor Nunberg’s part; Parker’s use of the story to show her own relaxed attitude towards a non-threatening use of taboo words makes it clear that she was joking with the woman at the tea party. Lest we think that Professor Nunberg is himself joking, and merely pretending that he doesn’t see Parker’s joke, he goes on:

Why should it be? Would the incivility of the first woman’s rants have been tempered if she had called her son an asshole in an accent like Emma Thompson’s? Would the tea party lady’s reference to Tiger Woods be more offensive if the woman had sounded like Wanda Sykes? While we’re on the subject of vulgarity — and insolence — can we linger for a moment on the smug suburban gentility of that word refined? You’re left with the unsettling implication that the acceptability of allowing a naughty word to cross one’s lips depends, in part, on how thick they are.

Where does Professor Nunberg find this remarkably ugly implication? He seems to find it in Parker’s telling of the story of the elevator ride. Quoting key bits of the story, he comments:

The race and class of the woman and her companion weren’t specified, but readers might have been able to divine those attributes from the particular word Parker chose to report (or was that the only vulgarity the woman used?), helped along by the setting at Broadway and 168th Street and the mentions of the separated father and in particular of the young man’s “baggy drawers,” which presumably were intended to convey some relevant information. (If it had been an upper-middle-class white woman screaming “motherfucker” at a phat-pantsed white preppie, communicative cooperativeness would have obliged Parker to mention that fact lest the reader draw the wrong conclusions.)

None of the markers Professor Nunberg mentions in this paragraph is at all strongly correlated with race and class in New York City in 2011, as commenters on the post pointed out. Your humble correspondent mentioned a couple of items showing that, while “Motherfucker” may have originated among African Americans in the early twentieth century, it has been in general use among whites and others for decades. Professor Nunberg himself added to this list, strengthening my point (perhaps inadvertently.) Another commenter pointed out that Broadway and 168th is in the middle of Spanish Harlem, so that if that location tells us anything about the woman’s ethnicity it would suggest either Puerto Rican or Dominican heritage. Still others have pointed out that New York Presbyterian has more than one Manhattan location. One might also mention that Manhattan is rather a compact place, so a wide variety of ethnicities may be found in any of its hospitals. In the column, it is quite clear that “the “[mention] of the separated father” was “intended convey some relevant information,” and it is also clear what that information is. It is when the woman in the elevator mentions the man’s father that it becomes clear that she is his mother, and so it is when Parker quotes that line that she provides the punchline about the woman’s use of “motherfucker.” “Baggy drawers” or “phat pants,” like the use of “motherfucker” as an all-purpose obscenity, likely originated among African Americans and doubtless once was seen almost exclusively in African American communities, but one needn’t spend much time among young American whites to see that those days are long gone.

I appended many comments to this thread. Here are links to all of them, in the admittedly unlikely case that you are interested: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. I’ll copy the last one, because in it I finally got around to saying what I’d been trying to say all along:

@Daniel: 1. “This post doesn’t really need any more comments, but”- Yes, I sympathize. It’s as hard to stop as it is to stop eating a salty snack. An angry, angry salty snack.

2. “”drawers,” which I definitely associate with AAVE.” The structure of this debate seems to be, S1: Parker reports (item.) I associate (item) with African Americans. Therefore, Parker wants her readers to associate the people she is denouncing with African Americans.” In reply, S2: “I don’t associate (item) with African Americans.”

The least involved premises we can add to S1′s assertions to make them into a logically valid argument would surely be “I am the sort of reader Parker had in mind when she wrote her column, and she should have known that I would associate (item) with African Americans.” In the absence of any data about what Parker’s readers think of when they think of these various items or about what she has reason to expect from her readers, we have no reason to suppose that these premises are true.

3. “Rhetorically, that is clearly implying that the British lady did not have context or delivery issues.” Let’s remember the context and delivery Parker describes in her opening vignette. She was on an elevator, which is to say, in a confined space. A person entirely unknown to her joined her and several others in that confined space. For a few moments, this unknown person shouted obscenities. Anyone might feel uncomfortable in that situation.

By contrast, Parker met the British lady (if British and lady she in fact was***) in a situation where she was free to move about. Parker and this second person were introduced and participated in a conversation. In the course of that conversation, the second person used a word that often classified as objectionable. Parker did not object to it. In fact, she made a little joke to forestall objections.

What, then, is the simplest explanation of the difference between Parker’s response to the two situations? Is it that person 1 was of a different ethnicity than person 2, and that Parker is hostile to the ethnic group person 1 represents and friendly towards the ethnic group person 2 represents? Or is it that she would rather engage in a conversation at a social event with someone who clearly poses no threat to her than be trapped in an elevator with an angry stranger?

Granted, Professor Nunberg does make a nod in the original post to “at least five contexutal parameters that explain why the public harangues of the elevator expletiviste were obnoxious and offensive in a way that the English (one assumes) woman’s wasn’t.” His remarks before and after that, accusing Parker of “nudge-nudge allusions to race and ethnicity… the way people intimate someone’s Jewishness by saying they’re ‘very New York’” and of implying “that the acceptability of allowing a naughty word to cross one’s lips depends, in part, on how thick they are” does not leave much opportunity to put serious weight on these contextual parameters.

I’ll quote a bit from my second-to-last comment as well, since in it I brought up the points I’m making here about charity. In particular, I mention that a listener who is charitable to a speaker in one way may have to think ill of that speaker in another way:

@Peggy: “Keith M Ellis: “The whole point of dog-whistle racism is its deniability.” The whole point of accusations of dog-whistle racism is their unfalsifiability.” That’s going a bit far, surely. One ought to be charitable to people with whom one disagrees; one form of charity is to assume that when a logically defective argument can be made valid by the addition of an unspoken premise, the speaker has omitted the simplest possible premise that can achieve that result. So, suppose I ask you “Are the sidewalks wet?” and you reply, “They must be- it’s raining.” You’ve then made an argument that could be presented thus: (Premise) It’s raining. (Conclusion) The sidewalks are wet. By itself, this argument is invalid. The simplest way to make it valid is to add, as a second premise, “If it’s raining, the sidewalks are wet.” It would be an uncharitable listener who refused to make so small a cognitive leap in the course of a conversation.

Likewise, if one were to encounter an invalid argument that could most readily be made logically valid by the addition of a racist idea as an additional premise, it would be charitable to consider the possibility that the person making the argument has simply omitted that premise. I could mention some newspaper columnists who in fact do precisely that on a regular basis.

I’d extend that maxim of charity beyond the logical structure of arguments to the emotional response people exhibit to various stimuli. If, for example, Parker were usually happy when she was required to share a confined space with white people repeatedly shouting obscenities, but unhappy when an African American did the same thing, and she spoke as if no explanation was necessary for this difference in reaction, then charity to Parker would warrant the assumption that she was right, that the reason for the difference was in fact so simple that anyone could find it without an explanation. Charity to such a speaker might lead us to suspect the speaker of race prejudice.

Again, the column under consideration obviously does not meet this description. However, it is far from rare for people to exhibit emotional reactions to stories about misbehavior among African Americans that are not only grossly disproportional to the reactions the same people exhibit when they have heard similar stories about people of other ethnic backgrounds, but which also kick in long before any evidence is presented showing that the stories are even true. When that happens, it is neither irresponsible nor unfalsifiable to claim that racism is at work.

The more I thought about this exchange, the stranger it seemed to me that someone as learned as Professor Nunberg could take Parker to task for seeing a threat in a situation where she was confined in an elevator with a stranger. Granted, the idea that this represented a threat to civility in general is a bit underargued, but once one describes the situation it is hard to see what need there is to attribute Parker’s anger to racial prejudice. Yet shortly after, I noticed a news item describing an equally distinguished academic replicating Professor Nunberg’s behavior with some precision.

Evidently there is a woman named Rebeca Watson who writes a blog that is popular among atheists and other irreligious folk. In June, Watson attended a conference at which her fans were well represented. Very late on one of the nights of this conference, Watson found herself alone in an elevator with one of these fans, a man who made an awkward pass at her. Watson declined the man’s offer, and said on her blog that it made her uncomfortable. She gave it as an example of the wrong way for a man to approach a woman.

That, one would think, would be that. Were one to think so, one would be reckoning without Richard Dawkins. Professor Dawkins took it upon himself to post the following, as comment #75 in a thread on P. Z. Myers’ blog:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

First, I would point out that Professor Dawkins has far more demands on his time than I do, so the fact that he would enter such a discussion shows that he uses his time even more foolishly than I do. In fact, even before the rise of the internet, Dawkins used to send unsolicited mail to people containing precisely these sorts of gratuitous insults. Some years ago, I read a magazine profile of a Harvard graduate who became a spokesman for Creationism. One day he opened his mail to find a letter from Richard Dawkins, whom he had never met, telling him that he was either an idiot or a villain, more likely a villain. I can’t recall the man’s name, since I’d never heard of him before or since. But for some reason Richard Dawkins wanted to send him hate mail.

Second, if Dawkins were as obscure a figure as am I, his remark would have been forgotten the moment comment #83 appeared in the same thread, from “Forbidden Snowflake”:

Dear Richard,

What right have you to bemoan the teaching of creationism in your country while people are dying of malaria in West Africa?
Seriously, this “you have no right to complain about your problems as long as there are bigger problems somewhere in the Universe” is nothing but a silencing tactic.

But of course Professor Dawkins is world-famous. And he tried to defend his remark, making it much worse, and again, making it still worse. So, there’s been a great deal of controversy.

Professor Dawkins’ invocation of Muslim women who live in countries where genital mutilation is practiced and severe form of Islamic law obtain might be expected to trigger anger from readers who identify with Rebecca Watson and assume that the professor is sharing information which he assumes to be relevant. If one were charitable to him, assuming that he was so competent a communicator that the relevance of the information to Watson’s post is likely easy to find, the premise one might supply would be that Watson is self-centered and unconcerned with the sufferings of such women.

Unsurprisingly, Watson’s defenders have responded in kind. Gawker quotes blogger Jen McCreight:

[It] makes me want to cry a little when you live up to the stereotype of a well-off, 70 year old, white, British, ivory tower academic. But let me spell it out for you instead of just getting mad (though I’ll do that too):

Words matter. You don’t get that because you’ve never been called a cunt, a faggot, a nigger, a kike. You don’t have people constantly explaining that you’re subhuman, or have the intellect of an animal. You don’t have people saying you shouldn’t have rights. You don’t have people constantly sexually harassing you. You don’t live in fear of rape, knowing that one wrong misinterpretation of a couple words could lead down that road.

Gawker quotes Watson’s expansion on McCreight’s remarks, then asking: “Can it really be that Dawkins has never been exposed to insults as odious as the ones mentioned by Ms. McCreight? As a jump-starter of the modern atheist revival, doesn’t Dawkins probably get a lot more threatening hate mail than all of his critics combined?” Considering that he’s a man who lives in the UK, I’d be willing to stake any amount of money on the proposition that Professor Dawkins has been called a “cunt” quite a few times in his life, and considering the amount of hate mail he gets I suspect that he’s been on the receiving end of the other words and claims frequently as well. Of course, words that have an association with a specific group wouldn’t have the same force when applied to someone outside that group, so Professor Dawkins is no contender for the title of Most Aggrieved. McCreight’s choice of words is still unfortunate, however.

At any rate, surely this whole matter calls for charitable reading. Only by dint of a most uncharitable reading of Watson’s original remarks could Professor Dawkins have thought it was appropriate to come at her in the way he did. A charitable reading of Dawkins’ words would not leave him looking at all good, but might have kept his critics from responding in anger when pity would have been not only more suited to the quality of his thought in this matter, but also more likely to inspire in him some feeling of embarrassment.

*Hairless stick figures in xkcd often turn out to be male, hairless ones female. Also, author Randall Munroe uses the first person singular to refer to Hairless in this strip, so I’m assuming it represents him.

**Some early examples of these studies are mentioned in Mary Louise Pratt, “Ideology and Speech Act Theory,” Poetics Today, vol. 7 no 1 (1986,) pages 64-65.

***She in fact was. I’d forgotten the relevant bit of Parker’s original column and was distracted by a side discussion in the thread about other properties of the tea party guest.

Before Babel?

2011-09-03T17:43:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 August 2011:

: The Tower of Babel, by M. C. Esher

Fotb Maggie Jochild has reminded us of a study that was published in Science in April and publicized in The New York Times. Biologist Quentin D. Atkinson applied mass comparison methods familiar in genetic research to the analysis of phonemes, the sounds that languages use to distinguish one word from another. If a geneticist found the same pattens in a set of single-nucleotide polymorphisms that Atkinson found in the phonemes of the world's languages, that geneticist would likely conclude that the set represented descent from a single common ancestor. So, Atkinson suggests that all languages known to us, both those currently spoken as mother tongues and ancient languages known to us only through writings, descend from a language spoken in Africa tens of thousands of years ago.

When Atkinson's paper appeared, it attracted strong criticism from some of our favorite writers. To mention only the two posts about it that appeared on the incomparable Language Log, Mark Liberman analyzed Atkinson's methodology, and Sarah Thomason reproduced a letter that anthropologists Ives Goddard and Bruno Frohlich sent to Science, but which that journal refused to publish. Professor Liberman is lightly skeptical of Atkinson's methods, but optimistic that his conclusions might prove true, while Professors Goddard, Frohlich, and Thomason express more severe reservations.

For my part, I've often wondered how many languages were spoken when language was first spoken. For various reasons, it would be interesting if the idea of "a language" were familiar to the first generations of language speakers. The New York Times article says that Atkinson's work "implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists."

I don't think it does imply that, actually. Even if it were proven that all languages available to us for study shared a common ancestor, it would not thereby be proven that "language originated only once." That language may well have been one of many languages spoken at the time, and may well have been descended from other languages spoken many millennia earlier. Consider the languages of ancient Italy. Latin is the ancestor of many languages spoken around the world today; the dozens of other languages that flourished on the peninsula before the rise of Rome have left no descendants. If it weren't for the written evidence that has come down to us from antiquity, we might be tempted to conclude that language originated in Italy only once, and in Latium. Extending the processes that singled Latin out as the only Italian language of the mid-first millennium BC to leave descendants back another 50,000 years to a time when all of our ancestors may still have lived in Africa, we can see that they may well have left only one language spoken at that period with descendants, even if at the time it had thousands of contemporaries.

Indeed, that might have happened even if that hypothetical mother tongue had not stood out among its contemporaries. To resume for a moment the parallel with Latin, before the late fifth century BC it would have been a rare observer who would have guessed that varieties of that language would grow into languages that would continue to be spoken for thousands of years after the language of the far wealthier and more powerful Etruscans had died without issue. Going back further, the people who spoke the language that was the common ancestor of the Anatolian and Indo-European language families probably lived sometime around the year 4000 BC. They were likely a rather scruffy group of nomads who lived in some of the less desirable corners of the Black Sea coast, what Moe the Bartender would no doubt call "one of them loser countries." * Even the early Romans would have seemed impressive set against them. Yet something like half the people in the world now speak one or another of the hundreds of languages that descend from theirs. If such an undistinguished group can launch a language that crowds out so many of its contemporaries over a period of 6,000 years, surely there is little we can say about the career in the world of a language that is likely 1o times that old.

*For an excellent introduction to what we know of the early Indo-Europeans and their predecessors, see David W. Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (Princeton UP, 2007.) The author of the New York Times piece would have benefited greatly from reading Anthony's book; he cites a 2003 study by Atkinson which argued that "Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists. " Anthony treats of the theory that Indo-European came out of southwest Asia with agriculture in pages 75-82 of his book, and his analysis is devastating. While the languages we have available for study in historical time change ceaselessly and are as a rule considerably more diverse than the material cultures of the peoples who speak them, this theory requires proto-Indo-European to have entered Europe sometime shortly after 7000 BC, to have spread over that continent, and to have remained unchanged for 3000 years while an extremely wide variety of material cultures flourished there. This scenario is so remote from any attested elsewhere that it would qualify as a miracle. Moreover, all branches of the Indo-European family of languages include vocabulary descended from a rather large group of words related to wagons. The archaeological record makes it clear that wagons cannot have existed in Indo-European speaking areas much before 3500BC; the early entry hypothesis therefore requires that the Indo-Europeans, at a time when they had been separated from each other for three and a half millennia, simultaneously adopted the same vocabulary for this new invention. Again, if Atkinson's method compels this conclusion, Atkinson's method is reduced to absurdity.

As for the "military invasion" hypothesis, it is not "the idea favored by most historical linguists," as Anthony makes clear at several points. On pages 117-120, he introduces the first of a series of models of language diffusion developed by anthropologists working in contemporary African and Asian societies that have once and for all displaced the nineteenth century vision of the warlike Aryans, the "blond beasts" whose image has caused so much more harm than good. These models are a major theme of Anthony's book, and in fact allow far less significance to military invasions than does the early entry hypothesis.

Paradox of Humanism

2011-09-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 23 April 2011:

The oldest of Irving Babbitt’s published writings is an essay called “The Rational Study of the Classics,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1897 (in volume 79, issue 473, pages 355-365.) Babbitt, then in his early 30s, ends this piece with this paragraph:

There was never a greater need of the Hellenic spirit than there is today, and especially in this country, if that charge of lack of measure and sense of proportion that foreigners bring against Americans is founded in fact. As Matthew Arnold has admirably said, it is the Greek writers who best show the modern mind the path that it needs to take; for modern man cannot, like the man of the Middle Ages, live by the imagination and the religious faculty alone; on the other hand, he cannot live solely by the exercise of his reason and understanding. It is only by the fusion of these two elements that of his nature that he can hope to attain a balanced growth, and this fusion of the reason and the imagination is found realized more perfectly than elsewhere in the Greek classics of the great Age. Those who can receive the higher initiation into the Hellenic spirit will doubtless remain few in number, but those few will wield a potent force for good, each in his own circle, if only from the ability they will thereby have acquired to escape from contemporary illusions. For of him who has caught the profounder teachings of Greek literature we may say, in the words of the Imitation, that he is released from a multitude of opinions. (Quoted from pages 57-58 of Irving Babbitt: Representative Writings, edited by George A. Panichas; University of Nebraska Press, 1981.)

I find the paraphrase of Thomas á Kempis strangely telling. Babbitt continually asserted the unity of human experience, arguing that the similarities between a properly lived human life in any one time or place and a properly lived life in any other time and place will prove to be more important than the differences between them. To sustain this idea, it is necessary to do two apparently contradictory things at the same time. On the one hand, one must hold as few opinions as possible and set as low a value as possible on opinions, since opinions are plainly among the things that set one person apart from another. On the other hand, one must have an opinion ready to account for each of the differences that sort people into groups.

Babbitt himself abounded with opinions. Sometimes the number of his opinions, the range of topics about which he had opinions, and the vehemence with which he expressed his opinions drove Babbitt to the point of self-parody. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is chapter six of his magnum opus, Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), titled “Romantic Love.” In this piece, Babbitt analyzes the love lives of various leading Romantic poets and novelists, arguing that the instability and eccentricity of some of their intimate attachments was the consequence of their theory of the will, and denouncing them ferociously for it. Babbitt hands down his verdicts on Novalis, Shelley, Chateaubriand, and any number of other figures in such dizzyingly rapid succession that one cannot but smile at his gusto. I’ve often suspected that Vladimir Nabokov had at some point read Babbitt’s withering attack on Novalis’ infatuation with the pubescent Sophie von Kühn and used it as the basis of Lolita.

I bring this up, not to beat old Babbitt when he’s down (he’s been dead since 1933, you can’t get much further down than that,) but to point out that I have fallen into the same dilemma. In December 2009, I reviewed the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain’s performance at the Albert Hall on this blog; in that review, I wrote the following sentences about Hester Goodman’s rendition of “Teenage Dirtbag”:

When I talked about Hester’s “Teenage Dirtbag” in my review of Live in London #1, I summarized it as a “ballad of adolescent lesbian angst”; it’s sobering to see how many visitors still come to this site having googled “hester goodman lesbian.” At the risk of drawing more of that traffic, I’ll say that the human race would be the poorer if some among us did not go through adolescent lesbian angst. I’d go so far as to label adolescent sexual angst in all its forms as an indispensable part of the human experience. Hester has produced a powerful testament to that form of adolescent angst, and my hat’s off to her for it.

In that “indispensable part of the human experience” and the proclamations that surround it, we have a humanistic opinion eliding the differences of sexual identity and sexual response that often sort people into groups. More recently, I asked here “Why do people have opinions about homosexuality?” In that post, I wondered whether there was any need for anyone to hold an opinion about that topic. Clearly those two posts don’t sit very comfortably together. Perhaps their apparent contradiction, like Babbitt’s apparent self-contradiction, points up a paradox that humanists in general are hard put to escape.

Libertarians and marriage

2011-03-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

I've fallen far behind my usual pace in sharing my "Periodicals Notes"; that pesky offline part of the world keeps distracting me with things like work, family, etc etc. There's a great deal of work I ought to be doing right now, as a matter of fact, but I can't resist taking time to note a couple of pieces in the latest issue of The American Conservative. As you can see from the cover illustration, the magazine's contributors generally oppose official recognition of homosexual unions, holding that marriage is an institution that must be reserved for one elephant and one statue, and solemnized by a self-certified ophthalmologist.

I've long been puzzled by the low quality of arguments offered against same-sex marriage. Opponents have had a great deal of time to come up with reasons why only opposite sex couples should be allowed to marry. Their position is broadly popular, and they have at their disposal the resources of major religious organizations, conservative think-tanks, and much of the press. You'd think that with all that on their side, they would be able to produce an argument that would be at least superficially plausible. Yet, when asked to defend their position, supporters of the status quo trot out arguments that are so feeble they inspire, not even laughter, but sheer pity. At the outset of his article in this issue, "Stonewalling Marriage,*" Justin Raimondo describes the situation with admirable clarity:

Opponents of same-sex marriage have marshaled all sorts of arguments to make their case, from the rather alarmist view that it would de-sanctify and ultimately destroy heterosexual marriage to the assertion that it would logically lead to polygamy and the downfall of Western civilization. None of these arguments—to my mind, at least—make the least amount of sense, and they have all been singularly ineffective in beating back the rising tide of sentiment in favor of allowing same-sex couples the “right” to marry.

Raimondo goes on to offer what the cover advertises as "A Libertarian Case Against Gay Marriage." Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a statement more typical of libertarianism than these paragraphs:

Of course, we already have gay marriages. Just as heterosexual marriage, as an institution, preceded the invention of the state, so the homosexual version existed long before anyone thought to give it legal sanction. Extending the authority of the state into territory previously untouched by its tender ministrations, legalizing relationships that had developed and been found rewarding entirely without this imprimatur, would wreak havoc where harmony once prevailed. Imagine a relationship of some duration in which one partner, the breadwinner, had supported his or her partner without much thought about the economics of the matter: one had stayed home and tended the house, while the other had been in the workforce, bringing home the bacon. This division of labor had prevailed for many years, not requiring any written contract or threat of legal action to enforce its provisions.

Then, suddenly, they are legally married— or, in certain states, considered married under the common law. This changes the relationship, and not for the better. For now the property of the breadwinner is not his or her own: half of it belongs to the stay-at-home. Before when they argued, money was never an issue: now, when the going gets rough, the threat of divorce—and the specter of alimony—hangs over the relationship, and the mere possibility casts its dark shadow over what had once been a sunlit field.

Who finds libertarianism appealing? This passage might suggest two groups. First, there are people who have known many couples who lived together for a long time, then married, only to go through a calamitous divorce shortly afterward. I suppose most Americans under the age of 60 could name at least a dozen such couples among their personal acquaintances. When I've seen the sequence long cohabitation/ brief marriage/ bitter divorce, I've always tended to explain the marriage as a desperate attempt to put some life back into a failing relationship. But some might look at the sequence differently, and wonder whether the relationships would have continued had the partners not ventured into the dread precincts of matrimony. Elsewhere in the issue, a piece* is built around the observation that young Americans tend to take many Libertarian ideas for granted; perhaps the changes in family structure that have shaped the lives of so many in recent generations have been part of the reason for this intellectual climate. Second, there are people who hold power in their relationships with others because they control economic resources on which those others depend. Some such people acknowledge the responsibilities that come with such power. Others not only refuse to accept those responsibilities, but do not like even to admit that they are in a position of power at all. For them, "money was never an issue," when the other parties in their relationships simply submitted to their will as regards it. Once those parties gain a share in the control of those resources as a matter of right, suddenly the terms of the relationship must be negotiated, not decreed by the "breadwinner." From the viewpoint of the deposed "breadwinner," this development might very well look like a departure from a "sunlit field" of liberty to the "dark shadow" of conflict, but the newly empowered "stay-at-home" may see matters quite differently.

Of course, it isn't only in the relationship between income-earners and their non-employed partners that one holding economic power may deny the existence of that power and see only the prospect of conflict when a subordinate acquires an independent standing. Employers often pretend that they are on an equal footing with their employees, and denounce trades unions as monstrous powers which bring disharmony into what would otherwise be an idyll of brotherhood. A fine example of this sort of thing can be found in this issue, in Peter Brimelow's "Less Perfect Unions," which denounces American schoolteachers for organizing their profession. When Raimondo reaches the heart of his argument against same-sex marriage, he presents a case that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the arguments gay liberationists have made over the years. Same-sexers, he argues, simply do not need "to entangle themselves in a regulatory web and risk getting into legal disputes over divorce, alimony, and the division of property." Opposite sex couples may believe that their shared interest in any children they may produce justifies such "entanglement"; Raimondo doesn't agree with them, but in deference to their assessment of their needs he stops short of the gay liberationist cry of "Smash the Family! Smash the State!," and does not call for the end of official recognition of opposite sex unions. He does take a page from the gay liberationist handbook, though, when he argues that same-sex marriage threatens to "take the gayness out of homosexuality." "By superimposing the legal and social constraints of heterosexual marriage on gay relationships, we will succeed only in de-eroticizing them." Raimondo extols the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s for its anti-state focus, and insists that the lack of official sanction and the formalization that goes with it have made homosexuality itself a force to resist the modern state. Same-sex marriage, Raimondo argues, would rob homosexual relations of their anarchic character, and reconstitute them as a pillar of the established order. Why, then, has the demand for gender-neutral marriage become central to the role of same-sexers in US politics? Raimondo has a theory:

The homosexual agenda of today has little relevance to the way gay people actually live their lives.

But the legislative agenda of the modern gay-rights movement is not meant to be useful to the gay person in the street: it is meant to garner support from heterosexual liberals and others with access to power. It is meant to assure the careers of aspiring gay politicos and boost the fortunes of the left wing of the Democratic Party. The gay marriage campaign is the culmination of this distancing trend, the reductio ad absurdum of the civil rights paradigm.

The modern gay-rights movement is all about securing the symbols of societal acceptance. It is a defensive strategy, one that attempts to define homosexuals as an officially sanctioned victim group afflicted with an inherent disability, a disadvantage that must be compensated for legislatively. But if “gay pride” means anything, it means not wanting, needing, or seeking any sort of acceptance but self acceptance. Marriage is a social institution designed by heterosexuals for heterosexuals: why should gay people settle for their cast-off hand-me-downs?

It seems a bit indecent to quibble with the content of so impassioned a peroration, especially considering that the issue is a more personal one for a same-sexer like Raimondo than it is for me. However, I would point out that he is shifting his ground here. Earlier, he had claimed that marriage evolved spontaneously among heterosexuals, who improvised various means of ensuring their interest in their children would be recognized. To the extent that the institution was "designed," that design came after the state intervened in this evolution and hijacked it to serve its own purposes. Now, he implies that marriage is suitable for heterosexuals after all, but not for homosexuals. This shift is important, because it shows him backing away from liberationism and its implication that people should discard the labels they wear, band together, and create a world free of the old restrictions. It leaves him all too much at home under the banner of "American Conservative."

*Sorry, subscribers only

An unexpected visitor

2011-03-11T16:55:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 25 August 2009:

Yesterday was the first day of school. I taught in the morning, Mrs Acilius had her classes in the afternoon. We went in together on the 7:14 AM bus. We have a little bath mat that Mrs Acilius’ assistance dog P—— uses to keep from sliding in the aisle of the bus. When we take the bus to school, I keep the mat in my office so that Mrs Acilius doesn’t have to carry it with her everywhere she goes.

At about 1 pm, I was doing paperwork at my desk. A student appeared in the doorway of my office. “Excuse me, sir, this cat was running around in the hallway.” She was holding a little kitten. “He’s bleeding rather badly. I have to go to class. Can you do something for him?” I stood up and reached for the kitten. She looked relieved and held him out to me. Of course he scratched my hand. I handed the kitten back to the student, then picked up P——’s mat. I held the mat out, the student set the kitten down in it. As I wrapped him up, she rushed off to her class.

So there I stood with an injured kitten. What next? I decided to take him to the nearest office and appeal for help. My office is about equidistant from the Dean’s office and the Psychological Science department office. I decided to take him to the Psychological Science office.

That turned out to be a very good decision. Their office assistant took the mat and set it on her desk. Also in the room were the department’s administrative coordinator, a couple of undergrads, and the department chair. They all gathered around the kitten in a circle. The office assistant got a little jar, filled it with water, and offered it to the kitten. The chair got a little cardboard box and put the jar and the kitten in it. The administrative coordinator had some dog food in her office for some reason; she put a couple of pieces of that in the box. The chair then went to his office and retrieved some tuna left over from his lunch.

The kitten was very badly hurt. He sniffed the water and the tuna, but didn’t take any of either. The student hadn’t been exaggerating when she said he was bleeding rather badly. The end of his tail was missing and blood was streaming out of it; there were deep scratches on the front of his chest. Someone I told about it this morning thought the kitten might have tangled with the hawk who circles the Quad; I’m sure that’s exactly what happened.

Seeing how much attention he was getting in the Psych office, I decided it was time to get back to work. So I excused myself and returned to my office. A half hour later, a psychology professor whose first initial is H came to my office. H—— told me that she had made a 4 PM vet appointment for the kitten. She swore up and down that she wouldn’t be able to keep him. “We already have two cats, and our place is so small- we can not have another cat.” Oh, she said, she would keep him for a while after he was released from the vet, but he’d have to live in the bathroom to keep him away from her two rambunctious older cats.

A few hours later, I was meeting with a student when Mrs Acilius came by my office. As Mrs Acilius waited for the end of my meeting, H—— saw her. H——- went up to Mrs Acilius and told her the whole story. She’d already taken the kitten to the vet. The vet had said the kitten was in shock from loss of blood and would need surgery to repair some mangled bones. H—— had agreed to pay for the surgery and was going to take the kitten in afterward, but she repeated that she could not have another cat. Apparently she went on and on about the sheer impossibility of taking another cat into her home.

When Mrs Acilius and I were leaving for the day at 4:30 or so, she reported what H—— had told her. I remarked that in my experience, swearing that you will not take in another cat is one of the stages in the process of adopting a cat. She said she suspected that it would prove to be the case here.

UPDATED, 16 October 2009:

After H—— paid for the cat’s surgery and kept him at home for a week or so, she gave him to the Psychological Science department secretary, M——-. I suspect H—— would have broken down and kept the cat herself, but the two cats she already has were so hostile to him that it was impossible. M——- has shown me several pictures and videos of the cat at home; he looks very happy and healthy. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to upload any of those pictures.

Since the cat’s new life started when he was taken to a psychologists’ office, Mrs Acilius and I thought he should be named him for a great psychologist. Mrs Acilius favored Watson, both for John Broadus Watson and also because it suggests Sherlock Holmes sidekick Dr Watson, a model whom a pet might emulate. I leaned toward Skinner, both for Burrhus Frederic Skinner and also because it suggests skinning, a hobby a cat might take up. When the cat was still with H——, we suggested these names to her. She said that the psychology faculty had also thought he should be named for a psychologist. Their chair had suggested Skinner, which she disliked, because, she said, “I don’t think behaviorism explains much.” So Watson was out, too. She and others favored Tedeschi, for Richard G. Tedeschi, who is known for a theory about how people who have suffered traumatic misfortunes can be transformed and grow stronger afterward. Since we knew that the cat had suffered a grave misfortune and hoped that he would have a bright future, that seemed appropriate.

M——- rejected all of those names. She named the cat Saint Ray, spelled StRay. Also appropriate.

The other day, M——- was showing me some pictures of the cat. She said she used to have a cat whose appearance and behavior were remarkably similar to StRay’s. A few years ago that cat had died, after 17 years with M——-. As she told me how much StRay reminded her of her late cat, she misted up and said that she almost thought that her late cat had sent StRay to her.

Weighty matters

2011-03-11T16:54:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 27 August 2009:

An artist's conception of the field pack ancient Roman soldiers wore

About seven years ago, I read G. R. Watson’s The Roman Soldier (originally published by Cornell University in 1969; I read a copy of the 1985 paperback reissue), a handbook summarizing what scholars in 1969 knew about life in the ancient Roman army. One point Watson made that I’ve been thinking about ever since I read the book had to do with the field packs Roman soldiers wore. Some scholars in Germany had tended to give very high estimates of the amount of weight that Roman soldiers had to carry, in some cases solemnly asserting that a legionary would march about all day with over a hundred pounds of equipment on his back. Dismissing these estimates as a self-evident absurdity, Watson tries to figure out just how heavy the pack might have been (in the 1985 reissue, that discussion is on pages 62-66, continued in note 140 on pages 175-176.) The best estimate he can come up with puts the average weight of the Roman soldier’s pack at 30 kilograms (66 pounds,)which happens to be identical to the standard for most modern armies.

Watson’s evidence suggests that throughout history armies have tended to increase the amount of weight soldiers have to carry, until the kit becomes so heavy that the high command has no choice but to cut it down to something weighing about 30 kilograms. I suppose that the obvious reason for this tendency is that many people are involved in deciding what it is essential that a soldier should carry in the field. Each of those people has ideas about items that should be on that list, and each sees the addition of his or her favorite item as a victory. When no one involved in decision-making at that level has to wear a full field pack on a regular basis, the decision makers have no immediate incentive to deny each other their little victories.

I wonder if there might not be a second, less obvious reason for this tendency. Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science reports on a psychological experiment which indicates that people who are holding heavy objects tend to take matters more seriously than the same people do when they are not holding heavy objects. If this tendency is and has long been general among all humans everywhere, then we would expect that people who are interested in human behavior would have noticed it. Military commanders are interested in human behavior. Perhaps, noticing the overlap between the category “people holding heavy objects” and the category “people showing seriousness,” commanders have formed the idea that they could induce ever greater seriousness in their subordinates by weighing them down with ever more heavily loaded field packs.

If there’s anything to this speculation of mine, perhaps it is also part of the reason why there is so little protest against the spine-damagingly heavy backpacks that so many American children are forced to lug to and from school every day. Of course, many people are involved in deciding what a student should learn and do in school, and that is an obvious reason why the collection of textbooks and other materials students must transport on their persons tend to grow so heavy.

But perhaps a belief that the weight of the physical burden one carries correlates directly with the seriousness of one’s attitude is also part of it. We want children to take school seriously. We have observed that people holding heavy objects tend to be serious. If holding heavy objects translates into seriousness, maybe holding even heavier objects will translate into even more seriousness! It will definitely translate into more back injuries, but isn’t that a small price to pay for keeping the wee ones doubled over for much of the day?

The American Conservative, September 2009

2011-03-11T16:50:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 31 July 2009:

One of the traits of this magazine is a tendency to grandiose theoretical explanations. That’s one of the things I like about it; I’m into grandiose theoretial explanations myself. It isn’t scholarly publication, and few of its authors have academic reputations to defend, so that tendency is not always restrained by the standards that keep theorizing under control in academic journals. Sometimes that means that the magazine runs a provocative, bold idea that might not have survived heavier editing; sometimes it means that it runs something that’s just plain cheesy quality. Again, I’m a pretty cheesy guy, so that’s okay with me.

For example, this month Ted Galen Carpenter points out that Americans by and large are quick to view political disputes in foreign countries in a romantic light, seeing the ghost of Thomas Jefferson in all sorts of unlikely figures. The next piece, by John Laughland, picks up on this same theme, explaining this American tendency as a sign of the influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Laughland writes that “the key to understanding the West’s love of revolutions” is Westerners’ characteristic desire to believe that “politics can and should be a story with a happy ending.” This desire has run rampant in the West ever since the thinkers of the Enlightenment undermined the traditional Christian belief that the cosmos was ordered in a hierarchy, that justice was to be found in that hierarchy, and that the ruler’s power should be limited because the ruler was subordinate to God. Laughland identifies Immanuel Kant as “the greatest of all Enlightenment philosophers,” and summarizes Kant’s theory as a belief that ordinary reality is unknowable, but that the highest reality is “the categorical imperative- an abstract universally valid proposition that becomes real when it is willed.” Proceeding from these rather drastic simplifications, Laughland declares that:

The attraction of Enlightenment liberalism, therefore, is the result of a deep emotional need for a philosophical sytem that enables man to create a reality in a universe he does not understand and thereby to escape from the difficulties of the world by believing that everything will turn out all right in the end. Lacking a real belief in the afterlife, it also holds that the drama of human salvation is played out in this world, in history and politics.

Again, this is a severe oversimplification, but it has a certain plausibility. Where Laughland really goes off the rails is in his closing section, in which he argues that Enlightenment liberalism has an “objective ally” in Islam:

[B]ecause it has no priesthood, Islam, and especially Shi’ism, is fundamentally a “democratic” religion comparable to Puritanism and other forms of Presbyterianism. There is no established hierarchy; the Koran must be read equally by all. Of course Allah is supreme and Islam demands absolute submission to Him; on the face of it, this seems the opposite of the liberal model in which the individual is subjected only to himself. But this very submission is egalitarian, creating a mass of individuals who are equal in their abstractness. Moreover, God’s will is [merely] will, it has no correlation with natural law as in the Christian or Jewish traditions. Islam is therefore a profoundly voluntarist religion. Because Allah is absolutely transcendent and unknowable, he is like the Kantian thing-in-itself: mere command.

Laughland claims that the influence of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers is one of the reasons why Westerners behave as they do when confronted with complex political challenges. So to say that Islam is an “objective ally” of this influence, and to liken it as an intellectual tradition to the theories of Kant (as parodied above,) is to say that Muslims behave as they do in world affairs, at least in part, because Islam, as an intellectual tradition, is “fundamentally” anti-hierarchical. Laughland’s claims strike me as under-argued, to say the least. If Laughland were analyzing the works of particular Muslim thinkers and comparing them, on the one hand, with the works of traditional Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians who had addressed similar questions, and on the other hand with the works of post-Enlightenment Westerners, then one might imagine that he could have formed an hypothesis that traditional forms of Christianity offer certain intellectual resources unavailable to followers of either of the other two traditions. Further study might have tested this hypothesis. What makes this passage cheesy is, first, the lack of any indication that Laughland has conducted such a study; second, his failure to limit the scope of his generalizations to some definite group, such as a particular set of texts, making instead blanket assertions about all of Islam; and third, the absence of any identifiable interlocutor to whom the passage might be addressed. Laughland is not addressing himself to anyone who might contradict him or challenge his views, but is handing down pronouncements that no implicit reader would be in a position to try to disprove.

William S. Lind’s piece about the Predator unmanned fighter aircraft shows a similar tendency to the grand theoretical explanation. At least Lind’s theory is coherent, and germane to the subject at hand. He quotes Colonel John Boyd, United States Air Force, “America’s greatest military theorist,” who points out that a commitment to build a big ticket weapons system puts a contestant in an unconventional war at a disadvantage:

Because complex weapons are expensive, they are usually in service for a long time, sometimes decades. Soon after their introduction, most if not all of their operating characteristics are known, especially in the age of the Internet. Our opponents can invent and deploy generations of simple countermeasures in the lifetime of one high-tech system. They are “outcycling” us, in Boydian terms; they can go through many cycles of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting against our weapons systems while the systems go through only a single cycle. Boyd argued that there are few more certain prescriptions for defeat.

Richard Gamble reviews The American Patriot’s Bible, by Richard G. Lee. Gamble is the author of The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, and defends a very old-fashioned form of Lutheranism against all forms of nationalism. Gamble declares that the book under review “attempts with breathtaking audacity to synthesize Americanism and Christianity,” ignoring the wariness of this-world attachments at the heart of the Christian message. Lee and his staff, Gamble charges, have searched the Scriptures selectively, looking only for what they wanted to find, and have come up with a “Christianity of power, moralism, and worldly success, not one of persecution, cross-bearing, and division.” Lee’s book “combines the things of God and the things of Caesar at the very point where they most need to be kept apart. When the City of Man sets up Americanism as its faith, the City of God is forced to dissent.”

Daniel Larison reviews Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. For a long time, scholars described the events around AD 476 as the ”fall of the Roman Empire.” More recently, the dominant fashion was the “transformationist” approach, which emphasized the change of Europe’s economic and political systems at the ground level in those years, suggesting that the formal dissolution of the western Empire was a less significant event than it might have seemed. Now scholars are reacting against the transformationist approach, arguing that titles like The Rise of the European Economy seriously misrepresent a period which was in fact characterized by violent upheavals and immense social dislocations. Larison says kindly that Goldsworthy, a military historian who shows little or no interest in the economic, religious, and social changes that the scholars engaged in this debate have studied, is “critiquing both sides from a distance.”

The FUnny Times, August 2009

2011-03-11T16:48:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 25 July 2009:

Ray Lesser’s “Your Inner Fish” includes these two memorable paragraphs:

In his book Your Inner Fish, [Professor Neil] Shubin describes many of the recent amazing discoveries in paleontology and genetic research to explain human origins and evolution. We quite literally contain the entire tree of life inside our bodies. He says humans are the fish equivalent of a Volkswagen Beetle souped up to race 150 mph. “Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers — and you have a recipe for problems.”

The difficulty of engineering a fish to walk on two legs has resulted in many a sore knee and sprained ankle, not to mention closets full of poorly fitting shoes. The strange loops and detours our nerves and veins have to take to get around various organs lead to other common annoyances such as hiccups and hernias. Four of the leading causes of death in humans — heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and stroke — are mostly due to having at our core a body that was designed to swim around all day, rather than sit on its keister surfing the Internet, or drive truckloads of sardines from L.A. to Indianapolis. Fish don?t get hemorrhoids, either.

Jon Winokur’s ”Curmudgeon” column collects quotes on boredom. My favorite is from Henry Kissinger, “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault.” Norman Mailer and Bertrand Russell are not as far apart as one might suppose; Russell said, “Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by it.” Mailer said, “”The war between being and nothingness is the underlying illness of the twentieth century. Boredom slays more of existence than war.” These two are not far from an author Winokur leaves out, Blaise Pascal, who famously attributed most of the trouble in the world to people’s inability to sit quietly in their rooms. Frank Moore Colby said, “Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible.” Nancy Astor said, “The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you.” Rochefoucauld said, “We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.”

Harper’s Index reports that in April of this year, 27 percent of the respondents to a poll identified as Republicans, while another poll in the same month reported that 20 percent of respondents agreed the “Socialism is better than capitalism.” So perhaps we should put the GOP on the same footing as socialists.

An extreme case of the etymological fallacy

2011-03-11T16:46:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 17 July 2009:

Yesterday on Language Log, Mark Liberman posted about the a curious claim that in the language of the Pashtun people of Afghanistan, “the word for ‘cousin’ is the same as the word for ‘enemy.’” Professor Liberman cannot find evidence to bear this claim out, and strongly suspects that it is bogus. What sticks in my mind is this quote Liberman gives from an essay by Louis Dupree collected in Islam and Tribal Societies, edited by Akbar Ahmed and David Hart (Routledge, 1984):

Language sometimes reveals unarticulated (or downplayed) conflicts in a society. The term for cousin in Pashto is turbur [and] the word for the worst kind of hatred is turburghanay which could be literally translated ‘cousin-hatred’. But the non-literate, rural Pushtun deny this interpretation. They say: ‘Turbur is turbur and turburghanay is turburghanay. They are separate words. How can they relate? How could I hate my cousin? I would fight to the death with him. I would never leave his body behind in a fight. I would give him my last crust of bread.’

The overwhelming majority of Afghans and Pakistanis cannot read and write, so showing them that the written turbur is a prefix and -ghanay a suffix, which, when combined create a compound word, fails to impress.

It’s hardly surprising that this fails to impress! Even assuming that Dupree’s etymology is correct, and that the turbur he hears in turburghanay is the word for cousin, we would hardly be warranted to assume that the currency of the word turburghanay implies that Pashtuns secretly hate their cousins. As Josh Fruhlinger puts it in a comment on Liberman’s post,

Particularly instructive and hilarious is the quote from the Ahmed and Hart piece, in which the learned outsiders pity the illiterate Pashtuns for not understanding the underlying etymological-psychological implications of the language that they (the Pashtuns) speak. People are determined to believe that language shapes thought even when the acutal speakers of said language don’t recognize the things embedded in the language that are supposed to be shaping their thoughts.

Here’s a little squib about two kinds of mistakes, either of which can be called ”the etymological fallacy.” Dupree seems to have committed both kinds of mistakes. A person who insists on using words as if their meanings had to be implicit in the meanings of their etymological roots commits a mistake in semantics that can be called “the etymological fallacy.” It looks to me as if Dupree approached his Pashtun informants in the spirit of this fallacy. It’s as if he had gone to English speakers and pointed out that the English word nice comes from the Latin word nescius (which meant “unknowing,”) and proceeded to interrogate them about what it is that nice people aren’t supposed to know. The word has simply changed its meaning over the centuries, so that it has lost any connection it may once have had with the meaning of its etymological base.

A person who constructs an argument using one word and then proceeds as if the conclusions of that argument applied to other words derived from it commits a mistake in logic that can be called “the etymological fallacy.” It looks to me as if Dupree approached the writing of his essay in the spirit of this fallacy. Argument 1: The Pashto word turbur means “cousin.” The Pashtun attach great importance to cousinage, modeling other, more distant relationships in their tribal system on it. Therefore, turbur is a key term for understanding the Pashto tribal system. This turns into argument 2: The Pashto word turburghanay is derived from turbur. Turbur is a key term for understanding the Pashtun tribal system. Therefore, turburghanay is a key term for understanding the Pashtun tribal system.

The Economist, 18 July 2009

2011-03-11T16:44:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 16 July 2009:

Three pieces in this issue address the state of economics as an academic discipline. One laments the current state of macroeconomics, characterizing it as a discipline in which too many practitioners have been “seduced by their [theoretical] models” and have lost interest in data that might contradict those models. Another discusses the efficient markets hypothesis, the role that hypothesis has played in shaping the theory and practice of modern finance, and tries to asses the likelihood that the efficient markets hypothesis will retain credibility in light of the world’s current financial crises. A leading article calls on economists to bring about a “reinvention” of their discipline. Evidently the requirements of this reinvention dictate that “Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst.” Economists must recognize that “in the end” they are “social scientists, trying to understand the real world.” I’ve always been rather skeptical of economics, but I suspect that most economists knew that last part already.

There are also two pieces about lunar exploration. One asks whether it makes sense to send more people to the Moon, quoting Buzz Aldrin’s opinion that it would be wiser simply to move on to other destinations. Another reviews two new books on the Apollo 11 landing, in time for the 40th anniversary of that event.

The Nation, 3 August 2009

2011-03-11T16:42:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 16 July 2009:

Jonathan Schell’s remembrance of former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara begins with the story of Schell’s meeting with McNamara in 1967, at which he, then a young reporter for The New Yorker, briefed the secretary on what he had seen American forces doing in Vietnam. Schell would not hear from McNamara after that meeting, but declassified documents would subsequently reveal that the secretary had responded to it by attempting to discredit Schell’s story and block its publication. Schell mentions McNamara’s subsequent contrition for his Vietnam policies, stressing that the remorse he suffered was quite trivial compared with the what the people of Vietnam suffered during the war McNamara did so much to design. Still, Schell points out, McNamara was unique among high-level US policymakers of recent decades in publicly admitting error. The piece ends with Schell’s line “If there is a statue made of McNamara, as there probably will not be, let it show him weeping. It was the best of him.”

McNamara features in another piece on The Nation‘s website as well, an article by Robert Scheer extracted from Truthdig. Scheer denounces McNamara’s Vietnam record far more bitterly than Schell does. And Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn pointed out in his newsletter Counterpunch that McNamara’s record as president of the World Bank, often presented as humanitarianism that redeemed him after his time at the Pentagon, was in fact nothing of the sort. Relying on Bruce Rich’s 1994 history of the World Bank, Mortgaging the Earth, Cockburn lists one dictatorship after another that McNamara’s World Bank lavished with funds as it committed unspeakable atrocities. Cockburn might easily have added substantially to the tally of carnage the World Bank wrought in those years. In 2005, his newsletter argued that it was largely due to World Bank lending policies that the 26 December 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami was so deadly. It may even be possible that McNamara was responsible for more deaths through his activities at the World Bank than through those at the Pentagon.

It’s a bit odd that this issue doesn’t make more of McNamara’s time at the World Bank, since it devotes a great deal of space to another public-sector financial institution, the US Federal Reserve. William Greider calls for reform of the Federal Reserve, warning that the Obama administration’s plans to increase the already vast powers of this body without reform involves the USA in several dangers. Among these: “It would reward failure”; it would encourage the Fed to print money with which to paper over the unsoundness of financial deals it helped to complete in recent years; “The Fed can’t be trusted to defend the public in its private dealmaking with bank executives”; “Instead of disowning the notorious policy of “too big to fail,” the Fed will be bound to embrace the doctrine more explicitly as “systemic risk” regulator”; and, as if that weren’t enough, “This road leads to the corporate state—a fusion of private and public power, a privileged club that dominates everything else from the top down.” Considering that “the corporate state” was a 1930s-era synonym for fascism, you can see that Greider is pretty serious about his opposition to the Obama plan.

As an alternative, Greider proposes “democratizing the Fed,” subjecting it to the same requirements of transparency and accountability that other government agencies must meet. Under his proposal:

A reconstituted central bank might keep the famous name and presidentially appointed governors, confirmed by Congress, but it would forfeit the mystique and submit to the usual stand ards of transparency and public scrutiny. The institution would be directed to concentrate on the Fed’s one great purpose—making monetary policy and controlling credit expansion to produce balanced economic growth and stable money. Most regulatory functions would be located elsewhere, in a new enforcement agency that would oversee regulated commercial banks as well as the “shadow banking” of hedge funds, private equity firms and others.

The Fed would thus be relieved of its conflicted objectives. Bank examiners would be free of the insider pressures that inevitably emanate from the Fed’s cozy relations with major banks. All of the private-public ambiguities concocted in 1913 would be swept away, including bank ownership of the twelve Federal Reserve banks, which could be reorganized as branch offices with a focus on regional economies.

Such reform may sound radical to some, but would in fact represent a return to Constitutional norms:

Altering the central bank would also give Congress an opening to reclaim its primacy in this most important matter. That sounds farfetched to modern sensibilities, and traditionalists will scream that it is a recipe for inflationary disaster. But this is what the Constitution prescribes: “The Congress shall have the power to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof.” It does not grant the president or the treasury secretary this power. Nor does it envision a secretive central bank that interacts murkily with the executive branch.

The prevailing political culture of Washington may be keep us from being optimistic that this plan will be adopted, but Greider claims we needn’t be overly pessimistic:

Given Congress’s weakened condition and its weak grasp of the complexities of monetary policy, these changes cannot take place overnight. But the gradual realignment of power can start with Congress and an internal reorganization aimed at building its expertise and educating members on how to develop a critical perspective. Congress has already created models for how to do this. The Congressional Budget Office is a respected authority on fiscal policy, reliably nonpartisan. The Congress needs to create something similar for monetary policy.

Instead of consigning monetary policy to backwater subcommittees, each chamber should create a major new committee to supervise money and credit, limited in size to members willing to concentrate on becoming responsible stewards for the long run. The monetary committees, working in tandem with the Fed’s board of governors, would occasionally recommend (and some times command) new policy directions at the federal agency and also review its spending.

Jeff Faux’s “So Far from God, So Close to Wall Street” argues that the trade policies enshrined in the North American Free Trade Agreement have hurt working people in Mexico. He quotes a Mexican businessman who told him that while NAFTA was advertised as a way of narrowing the wage gap between the US and Mexico, it has in fact narrowed the wage gap between Mexico and China.

Knlowledge is its own reward

2011-03-11T16:40:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 15 July 2009:

In Consultation, by Joseph Schippers

Dostoevsky sometimes had his intellectual characters ask each other if they would rather be clever and miserable or stupid and happy. If they claimed they would rather be stupid and happy, he had them jeer at each other. “You’d have me believe that you could be like the simplest peasant woman, believe everything she believes, if it meant happiness?” Evidently he thought that clever people needed cleverness more than they needed happiness.

It seems that Dostoevsky would have been at home among rhesus monkeys. Ed Yong reports on an experiment in which rhesus monkeys were offered varying amounts of water and the opportunity to know how much water they were about to be offered. The monkeys showed an interest in knowing how much water they were about to be offered that had no connection with the water itself.

An abuse of power?

2011-03-11T16:38:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 13 July 2009:

He's still getting people worked up

Andreas Willi, professor of Greek at Oxford, takes issue with a letter addressed to the US president that has lately been gathering signatures from American classical scholars. Willi’s article can be seen in pdf form here.

WHOSE IS MACEDONIA, WHOSE IS ALEXANDER?

On 18 May 2009, 200 Classical scholars from around the world sent an open letter to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. This unusual action, and the contents of the letter, raise issues which may not have been considered by all those who have endorsed it, but which deserve consideration. In order to put the discussion that follows into context, it may be useful first to quote the body of the letter itself. [[1]]

***

Dear President Obama,

We, the undersigned scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, respectfully request that you intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration.

On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the “Republic of Macedonia.” This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.

We believe that this silliness has gone too far, and that the U.S.A. has no business in supporting the subversion of history. Let us review facts. (The documentation for these facts can be found attached and at: http://macedonia-evidence.org/documentation.html)

The land in question, with its modern capital at Skopje, was called Paionia in antiquity. Mts. Barnous and Orbelos (which form today the northern limits of Greece) provide a natural barrier that separated, and separates, Macedonia from its northern neighbor. The only real connection is along the Axios/Vardar River and even this valley “does not form a line of communication because it is divided by gorges.”

While it is true that the Paionians were subdued by Philip II, father of Alexander, in 358 B.C. they were not Macedonians and did not live in Macedonia. Likewise, for example, the Egyptians, who were subdued by Alexander, may have been ruled by Macedonians, including the famous Cleopatra, but they were never Macedonians themselves, and Egypt was never called Macedonia.

Rather, Macedonia and Macedonian Greeks have been located for at least 2,500 years just where the modern Greek province of Macedonia is. Exactly this same relationship is true for Attica and Athenian Greeks, Argos and Argive Greeks, Corinth and Corinthian Greeks, etc.

We do not understand how the modern inhabitants of ancient Paionia, who speak Slavic—a language introduced into the Balkans about a millennium after the death of Alexander—can claim him as their national hero. Alexander the Great was thoroughly and indisputably Greek. His great-great-great grandfather, Alexander I, competed in the Olympic Games where participation was limited to Greeks.

Even before Alexander I, the Macedonians traced their ancestry to Argos, and many of their kings used the head of Herakles—the quintessential Greek hero—on their coins.

Euripides—who died and was buried in Macedonia—wrote his play Archelaos in honor of the great-uncle of Alexander, and in Greek. While in Macedonia, Euripides also wrote the Bacchai, again in Greek. Presumably the Macedonian audience could understand what he wrote and what they heard.

Alexander’s father, Philip, won several equestrian victories at Olympia and Delphi, the two most Hellenic of all the sanctuaries in ancient Greece where non-Greeks were not allowed to compete. Even more significantly, Philip was appointed to conduct the Pythian Games at Delphi in 346 B.C. In other words, Alexander the Great’s father and his ancestors were thoroughly Greek. Greek was the language used by Demosthenes and his delegation from Athens when they paid visits to Philip, also in 346 B.C.

Another northern Greek, Aristotle, went off to study for nearly 20 years in the Academy of Plato. Aristotle subsequently returned to Macedonia and became the tutor of Alexander III. They used Greek in their classroom which can still be seen near Naoussa in Macedonia.

Alexander carried with him throughout his conquests Aristotle’s edition of Homer’s Iliad. Alexander also spread Greek language and culture throughout his empire, founding cities and establishing centers of learning. Hence inscriptions concerning such typical Greek institutions as the gymnasium are found as far away as Afghanistan. They are all written in Greek.

The questions follow: Why was Greek the lingua franca all over Alexander’s empire if he was a “Macedonian”? Why was the New Testament, for example, written in Greek?

The answers are clear: Alexander the Great was Greek, not Slavic, and Slavs and their language were nowhere near Alexander or his homeland until 1000 years later. This brings us back to the geographic area known in antiquity as Paionia. Why would the people who live there now call themselves Macedonians and their land Macedonia? Why would they abduct a completely Greek figure and make him their national hero?

The ancient Paionians may or may not have been Greek, but they certainly became Greekish, and they were never Slavs. They were also not Macedonians. Ancient Paionia was a part of the Macedonian Empire. So were Ionia and Syria and Palestine and Egypt and Mesopotamia and Babylonia and Bactria and many more. They may thus have become “Macedonian” temporarily, but none was ever “Macedonia.” The theft of Philip and Alexander by a land that was never Macedonia cannot be justified.

The traditions of ancient Paionia could be adopted by the current residents of that geographical area with considerable justification. But the extension of the geographic term “Macedonia” to cover southern Yugoslavia cannot. Even in the late 19th century, this misuse implied unhealthy territorial aspirations.

The same motivation is to be seen in school maps that show the pseudo-greater Macedonia, stretching from Skopje to Mt. Olympus and labeled in Slavic. The same map and its claims are in calendars, bumper stickers, bank notes, etc., that have been circulating in the new state ever since it declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Why would a poor land-locked new state attempt such historical nonsense? Why would it brazenly mock and provoke its neighbor?

However one might like to characterize such behavior, it is clearly not a force for historical accuracy, nor for stability in the Balkans. It is sad that the United States of America has abetted and encouraged such behavior.

We call upon you, Mr. President, to help—in whatever ways you deem appropriate—the government in Skopje to understand that it cannot build a national identity at the expense of historic truth. Our common international society cannot survive when history is ignored, much less when history is fabricated.

***

Some readers may be amused, as I was myself, when they first read what looks like a—somewhat naïve—undergraduate essay. But the amusement disappears when one realizes that the letter has been signed by countless leading scholars, many of whom teach Classics or Ancient History at renowned institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley, Cambridge or Oxford, to name but a few. The political impact will no doubt be limited despite this fact. But since the opinion of people of this caliber has considerable authority within the academic community, and since their sheer number may make it look to the outside world as if they represent our disciplines in their entirety, a reply is in order; for what is presented as a summary of “historic truth”—a notoriously slippery term—is in reality a crude statement that betrays some fundamental principles of historical scholarship. What follows is thus not to be understood as an endorsement of any real or imaginary expansionist ambitions of the modern Republic of Macedonia, but as a call for greater methodological and factual levelheadedness and caution when attempts are made to instrumentalize the classical world in modern-day politics.

It is true that most of the factual observations in the letter are correct. But it is equally true that (a) the text is one-sided and (b) its argumentative logic is often weak. As for (a), it would have been only fair to state more clearly how much of our knowledge about the ancient Macedonian kings’ “Greekness” we owe to the fact that, at least for propagandistic reasons, it could be subject to doubts in a way that would have been unthinkable in the case of, say, a Spartan king. The internet documentation which is referred to in the letter may be right when it sees nothing but “a personal grudge” behind Demosthenes’ calling Philip II a “barbarian,” but to cite Herodotus 5.22 as conclusive evidence that Alexander the Great was “thoroughly and indisputably Greek” is seriously misleading, since Herodotus’ statement “I happen to know that [the forefathers of Alexander] are Greek” is triggered precisely by the existence of a dispute over the matter, long before the age of Demosthenes. As for (b), the question “Why was Greek the lingua franca all over Alexander’s empire if he was a ‘Macedonian’?” cannot be adequately answered with the words “[Because] Alexander the Great was Greek,” given that we have numerous examples of ancient empires in which the lingua franca was not the language of the ruler. Nor can the presence of Heracles’ head on Macedonian coins or Euripides’ stay at the Macedonian court prove anything more than that the Macedonian kings were ready to embrace Greek traditions and Greek culture.

But all of this is not the real issue at stake. What is at the core of the letter is a mistaken and unhealthy notion of historical identity. “While it is true that the Paionians were subdued by Philip II, father of Alexander, in 358 B.C. they were not Macedonians and did not live in Macedonia”—but is that really so? How many Paionians did we ask about it, and at what point in history? The comparison with Egypt is awkward, for at least after the incorporation of “Paionia” under Antigonos Gonatas (249 BCE) a territorially continuous political unity had come into being which survived as such in the Roman provincial administration. That the case of Egypt is rather different in this respect need hardly be stressed. And even if it could be ascertained that a distinct Paionian identity continued to exist, that alone could never prove that there was not also an overarching Macedonian one; after all, it is perfectly possible to have a Californian and an American identity at the same time. Moreover, to use an ancient but immediately relevant analogy, are we really to think that Thucydides got it all wrong when he wrote that, decades before the conquest of Paionia, the term “Macedonia” also applied to lands not inhabited by “ethnic” Macedonians (Thuc. 2.99)?

Identities are thus shifting, not static, and they can be multiplied if need be. Few signatories of the letter would probably deny this fact when dealing with other areas of the ancient world. But to call Cleopatra a “Macedonian” gives away what constitutes true identity in the eyes of the letter’s authors: to them, identity seems defined by ancestry and blood-lines, by the past more than the present. Are we then to conclude that, for example, John F. Kennedy—or George W. Bush or Barack Obama, for that matter—were never real Americans? And if John F. Kennedy’s ancestors spoke Irish at one point, is it preposterous for all English-speaking Americans to use him today in their construction of a national identity because of that?

One might object that this is different. By coming to America John F. Kennedy’s ancestors chose to become Americans (with Irish roots); but why could the Slavs coming to Macedonia then not become Macedonians (with Slavic roots)? Yet different it remains, for no political body ever encompassed both the entire territory of the modern United States and Ireland at the same time. Hence, a different analogy must be sought. The internet documentation offers one suggestion:

***

An apt analogy is at hand if we imagine a certain large island off the southeast coast of the United States re-naming itself Florida, emblazoning its currency with images of Disney World and distributing maps showing the “Greater Florida.”

***

But this will not do, and here we begin to perceive a categorial error even if we do not wish to subscribe to the “postmodern” possibility of choosing one’s identity freely. By focusing almost exclusively on Alexander the Great, the letter conveniently forgets everything that happened later in the area. Let us leave it open how the Paionians or their descendants thought of themselves by the time Macedonia lost its independence, and whether or not they would have objected to seeing their own region referred to as part of “Macedonia” at that stage. One point is crystal-clear: the territory of the modern Republic of Macedonia does have a shared past with the modern Greek province of Macedonia—and a past, at that, during which the entire area was unquestionably thought of as “Macedonia” by many, if not most, of its inhabitants. [[2]] For “Macedonia” was not only the name of the relevant Roman province—later divided into Macedonia Prima and Macedonia Salutaris (not: *Paionia), both of which became part of the Byzantine Empire—as well as the heartland of Tsar Samuil’s so-called “Bulgarian” Empire in the 10th and 11th centuries CE. It was also, more importantly for the recent history and nomenclature in the Balkans, a distinctly perceived territorial unit within the Ottoman Empire. Essentially this is the “pseudo-greater Macedonia” depicted in the modern Macedonian maps which the letter decries, rightly or wrongly, as politically inflammatory. When this land was divided in 1912/13, ten years after the unsuccessful Ilinden Uprising of 1903, between Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia as a consequence of the Balkan Wars, a “Macedonian” identity of sorts had been in the making for centuries and was now forcefully broken up. To be sure, this early modern “Macedonia” was never politically independent or ethnically homogeneous in any sense, and certainly not exclusively Slavic. But neither must we erroneously believe that those parts of it which form the modern Greek province of Macedonia were ethnically as distinctly Greek as they have become, for better or worse, in recent times. So the “apt analogy” of a “Greater Florida” is in reality a politically biased image that misconstructs the “historic truth” it claims to promote. No matter what its ethnic mix was—and what serious scholar would nowadays want to argue that the only “good” states are ethnically “pure” states, in which everyone must speak the same language?—the tendentiously-labeled “pseudo-greater Macedo¬nia,” far from being a recent invention, did exist as a real identitarian concept well before the 20th century. And in a sense its roots can be traced back to the conquests of Philip II, Alexander the Great and their successors in “Paionia”; for if those conquests had never taken place, the history of the region would have looked different and the territory of “Paionia” might not have shared the fate and fortune of “Aegean” Macedonia for long stretches of its history. Thus, unless one subscribes to a dangerous “blood-and-soil ideology,” there is no reason why the modern Slavic Macedonians should not be allowed to continue to call their country “Macedonia” and to pride themselves in Alexander the Great just as much as the modern Hellenic Greeks do. What does it matter if Alexander “was Greek, not Slavic,” as long as no one claims the opposite?

One final analogy may help us look at the entire issue more soberly. The West Germanic Franks originally lived near the Lower Rhine, in the territory of modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands. During the Migration Period they began to move southwards and eventually established hegemony over most of Roman Gaul. That did not mean that the Romans living in Gaul at the time immediately had to think of themselves as Franks or start to speak the Germanic language of their kings, including Charlemagne. Nevertheless the name of the Franks ultimately imposed itself on the entire territory they ruled, and it survives to this day in the modern name of France. Clearly this does not imply that France “brazenly mocks and provokes its neighbor[s]” Belgium and the Netherlands—where the “real France” must be located according to the ancient sources—by appropriating the name of a people that did not speak the ancestor language of modern French, or by calling schools or streets after Charlemagne. Nor would anyone think of writing a letter to President Obama to protest against this state of affairs. But why should such a letter then be written in the case of modern Macedonia? If one of our foremost academic duties as Classicists and Ancient Historians is to think about the ancient world sine ira et studio, we must do the same when invited to express our views on a contemporary political issue, however much those who invite us try to make it look as if they shared our love for historical understanding. By putting our academic authority behind tendentious political statements like the letter quoted above, we risk not only bringing into disrepute our disciplines and the institutions at which we are allowed to work and teach, but betraying the past whose guardians we ought to be.

ANDREAS WILLI
University of Oxford

WORK CITED

Rossos, Andrew. 2008. Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History. Stanford.

[[1]] The letter (accessed 10 July 2009), together with some additional documentation and a full list of signatories (which at the time this article was accepted for publication included well over 300 names) is freely accessible at http://macedonia-evidence.org/obama-letter.html.
[[2]] For a balanced and accessible survey of Macedonian history and the “Macedonian question” (written by a Greek Macedonian) see now Rossos (2008).

Banana Furniture

2011-03-11T16:36:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 10 July 2009:

Furniture made to look like bananas:

and

Furniture made of bananas (well, banana leaf):

and this lamp:

Furniture made for bananas:

and

x is to y as furniture is to bananas:

and

The USA and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal

2011-03-11T16:34:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 8 July 2009:

Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan

The 16-30 June issue of Counterpunch carries a brief article by Andrew Cockburn about US government backing for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. In view of the concerns top American officials have expressed about the possibility that Pakistani nukes might fall into the hands of Bin Ladenite extremists, and of the fact that Dr. A. Q. Khan sold Pakistani nuclear material on an international black market, it is sobering to learn of the extent to which Washington has been involved in the development of Pakistan’s arsenal. When CIA analyst Richard Barlow tried to blow the whistle on the US government’s complicity in helping Pakistan acquire nuclear weapons in the 1980s, his career was ruined. Even the Khan affair doesn’t seem to have changed the CIA’s attitude; indeed, Khan’s shipping manager was a CIA agent. The article lists an impressive array of malefactors involved in the business of promoting Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions. Some of them, such as an unnamed group of “Israeli arms merchants,” are accustomed to bad press; others, such as the Dalai Lama, usually get friendlier publicity.

An unlikely speculation about Mr O

2011-03-11T16:32:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 7 July 2009:

The BBC’s outgoing North America editor, Justin Webb, writes:

The other fascinating development in recent days has been the end – or not – of the Obamas’ search for a church.

I have suggested it before but let me lay it on the line here in black and white: THE MAN IS A QUAKER. He may not yet know it but that is where his search should end. There is a lovely Meeting House somewhere around Dupont Circle as well so he could get there easily.

I think the meetinghouse Webb is referring to is the one on Florida Avenue, which was originally built so that Herbert Hoover, the first Quaker to occupy the US presidency, would have a grand place to worship.

Elsewhere, Webb identifies himself as “the product of a Quaker school so am incapable of lying.” So I suppose he must be in earnest, though I can’t seem to find why he thinks that Mr O is a Quaker. Perhaps it has something to do with his ethnic background. The country with the largest number of the world’s Quakers is Kenya, B. H. Obama, Senior’s homeland; though virtually all of them are members of the Luhya tribe of western Kenya, not the Luo tribe from which the elder Mr O sprang. Despite the similarity in the names “Luo” and “Luhya,” the two peoples are quite unrelated. So I doubt that would be it.

The Banana Coffin

2011-03-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 6 July 2009:

Banana art in the news:

MONTROSE, Colo.—Casket makers catering to natural burials have offered biodegradable coffins made of such materials as recycled newspapers or cardboard. Montrose-based Ecoffins USA is selling caskets made of banana sheaves.

They take six months to two years to biodegrade.

Marketing director Joanna Passarelli says the company sold $40,000 worth of banana-sheaf or bamboo coffins to funeral homes last year.

At least 14 funeral homes around the country offer them.

Ecoffins USA is the sister company of The SAWD Partnership, which has helped fuel the “green” funeral movement in the United Kingdom.

In natural burials, bodies aren’t embalmed and eventually decompose into the earth.

The Nation, 20 July 2009

2011-03-11T16:28:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 July 2009:

An article by Robert Dreyfuss explores the division among the Iranian political elite that has contributed to the recent mass demonstrations there. Dreyfuss convinces me that the government has a narrow base of support among elite groups in the city of Teheran. Most of the people he talks to regard Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmedinejad as too hard-line and traditionalist, while many others are turning to rightist groups that accuse those men of being too soft. However, I’m skeptical of Dreyfuss’ attempts to suggest that the Teherani elite is in this matter representative of the country as a whole. Dreyfuss cites the Chatham House study which compared voter turnout in Iran’s 2005 presidential election with turnout in this year’s contest, concluding that the number of votes reported had increased by so much that fraud was a likelier explanation than was a rise in actual participation. On Dreyfuss’ own showing, though, the opposition has the support of many key power players. Among them are many men who may be in a position to falsify votes. And the fact remains that the only opinion poll conducted in Iran before this year’s election predicted the same result that the authorities certified. The election may well have been a phony, but Dreyfuss definitely wrong to say that it “seems far-fetched” to think that Ahmedinejad may have won.

A reissue of William Appleman Williams’ The Tragedy of American Diplomacy prompts an appreciation of Williams’ work. Williams work is characterized as a reinterpretation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis about the role of the frontier in American history. For Williams, the frontier was not the boundary between land already claimed by Americans as their property and that claimed only by nomadic tribes who did not regard land as something that could be owned. Nor did the frontier close in 1890. Instead, the frontier was ever present, always manifested in whatever territory American imperialism might turn to next. Williams systematically erased the distinctions historians had made between the westward expansion of Americans into native territory and the imperial expansion of American power into territory controlled by other nation-states. For him, all expansion had as its goal the creation of a “surplus social space” which could be used as a valve to release social pressures that might otherwise threaten the power elite.

Two pieces deal with South Carolina’s lovelorn Governor Mark Sanford, one solemnly accusing him of lacking empathy for the poor folks who might get jobs if various spending programs he has opposed were implemented, another pointing out that the greatest hypocrites in this matter are the reporters who claim that it pains them to publish details of and speculation about the governor’s sex life. Even the accusing piece concedes that Sanford has never been a morality campaigner, and that when he was a congressman he had an actual antiwar record. I’ve been drawn into discussions about Governor Sanford at both Dykes to Watch Out For and Language Log; I’m glad I’m not the only person outside of the Republican Party who sees some good in the guy.

The American Conservative, August 2009

2011-03-11T16:26:00.001-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 July 2009:

With this issue, our favorite “Old Right” read gives up its quixotic biweekly publication schedule and becomes the monthly it should always have been.

In the cover story, Brendan O’Neill casts a gimlet eye on the environmental initiatives now chugging through official Washington. He sees in them little more than a series of raids on the treasury by well-connected businesses. He cites Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economist who found that every job his country’s wind power initiative had created represented a cost of $2,200,000 to the taxpayer. Of course, the jobs don’t pay $2,200,000- most of that money goes to corporate interests. O’Neill argues that the alternative energy plans now under consideration in Washington are at least as bad as is Spain’s wind power initiative.

Former US Army interrogator Matthew Alexander explains what he did in Iraq that his colleagues didn’t. He followed the rules, they didn’t. He treated detainees with respect, they didn’t. He obtained useful intelligence, they didn’t. When information he had elicited led to successful US military operations, they got medals, he didn’t.

David Brown thinks that America missed its chance in the years after the Soviet system collapsed. The former Soviet Union and the countries that had belonged to the Warsaw Pact had post-Communist revolutions. The USA could have benefited from the same. Just as the political and economic systems of the East Bloc states were defined in relation to their dependence on the USSR in those years, so the American political and economic regime were defined by opposition to that same power. As the Warsaw Pact states gained freedom by reorienting themselves away from the USSR, so America too could gain a new freedom by shuffling off the militaristic apparatus that was built in the name of the Cold War. As the author of Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, Brown thinks that Charles A. Beard (of Knightstown, Indiana), William Appleman Williams (of Atlantic, Iowa), and Christopher Lasch (of Omaha, Nebraska) offer a critique of militarism that may help us find our way out of our present dilemmas. Brown particularly praises Williams for his combination of Beard’s economic interpretation of Anerican political history with Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the role of the frontier in American life. Williams’ refusal to acknowledge the moral lines other historians had drawn between the westward expansion of Americans into native lands and the imperialistic expansion of American power into lands claimed by other nation-states also earns an approving mention, deflating as it does the idea that the United States was ever a country isolated from neighbors. With that idea deflated, we can also rid ourselves of the idea that adventures such as the war with Spain or America’s intervention in the First World War represented a break from isolation.

A review of Spies by Haynes, Klehr and Vassiliev and Alger Hiss and the Battle for History by Susan Jacoby of course takes a very different tone than did a review of the same two books in The Nation some weeks ago. The reviewer, Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com, not only affirms the guilt of Alger Hiss and the others whom Joseph McCarthy and his ilk used as hate figures, but argues that liberals have always missed the point of McCarthyism:

If the main danger was at home, then we need not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. Such an ardent McCarthyite and Taft Republican as the novelist Louis Bromfield, in his forgotten classic A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954), referred to the Soviets’ “ramshackle empire,” and characterized the Marxist movement as an “international psychopathic cult,” which could not long survive without infusions of technology and aid from the West. The alleged “threat” posed by the Soviet Union was minor, he declared, compared to the threat to our old Republic represented by militarism, the arms race, and the distortion of our economic and political life by the rise of an American empire.

It was because of views like Bromfield’s, Raimondo writes, that so many survivors of the antiwar America First movement of the 1930s, having been smeared as pro-Nazi by many of the very men whom McCarthy named as Soviet agents, could keep their skepticism of US militarism while joining enthusiastically in the McCarthyite crusade.

A tribute to the light verse of Phyllis McGinley quotes her poem “Thirteen” in full:

Thirteen’s no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.
It is not wit, or powder on the face,
Or Wednesday matinée, or misses’ clothing,
Or intellect, or grace…
Thirteen keeps diaries and tropical fish
(A month, at most); scorns jump-ropes in the spring;
Could not, would fortune grant it, name its wish;
Wants nothing, everything;
Has secrets from itself, friends it despises;
Admits none to the terrors that it feels;
Own half a hundred masks but no disguises;
And walks upon its heels.
Thirteen’s anomalous—not that, not this:
Not folded bud, or wave that laps a shore,
Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.
Is the one age defeats the metaphor.
Is not a town, like childhood, strongly walled
But easily surrounded, in no city.
Nor, quitted once, can it be quite recalled—
Not even with pity.

Alexander Waugh is the grandson of novelist Evelyn Waugh; Chrostopher Buckley is the son of pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. Alexander Waugh reviews Christopher Buckley’s memoir of Mr and Mrs William F. Buckley, Jr. Alexander Waugh includes a quote from his own grandfather about the elder Buckley. Having received letters from Buckley, Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend to ask “Has he been supernally guided to bore me? It would explain him.” Which reminded me of Dwight MacDonald’s defense of Buckley’s columns, in which MacDonald claimed that Buckley’s writing was ”no worse than a bad cold, really.”

Banana Art Today

2011-03-11T16:24:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 2 July 2009:

Click on the image for its source.

These two look happy:

These don’t look too tasty:

The same Russian-language site that presented the banana spectrum above also offers this picture:

And this one:

As well as many others.

Here’s a happy one:

And a problematic one:

As well as a genuinely adult one:

These last three came via our friends at Crooked Brains.

Ukulele and Languages

2011-03-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 1 July 2009:

Ukulele and Languages collects ukulele videos in (you’ll never guess!) various languages.

The latest post includes a couple of videos of Danish songs; this one, by “EvertParkLars,” is particularly likable.

Voodoo Marmalade is apparently Portugal‘s answer to the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. They are off to a good start; considering that UOGB has been at it for 24 years, I hope no one will think I’m being sniffy if I say that Voodoo Marmalade has some way to go before they match them.

This page of eastern European ukuleleists ends with a video in Polish called “Ukulele Kajaki” (“Ukulele Kayak.”) I don’t understand a word of the lyrics, but the guy’s voice sounds like it’s saying something hilarious.

Is there Latin? Of course there’s Latin! Here’s “Love Machine” redone as “Machina Amoris.”

The Atlantic, July/August 2009

2011-03-11T16:20:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 1 July 2009:

We as a species are currently dumping massive amounts of carbon into the upper atmosphere. Average temperatures around the world are rising at an alarming rate, evidently at least in part as a consequence of this dumping. No movement is in prospect that would stop the dumping, or even reduce it substantially. So, what to do? Some scientists and engineers want to remake the rest of the earth’s climate to accommodate our carbon dumping habit. How could this be done? There are several possible methods.

We could shoot sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. That would be remarkably affordable- for as little as a billion dollars, it could end global warming. The drawback is that eventually sulphur would rain down from the sky, and if we stopped shooting new sulphur dioxide up there global temperatures would increase dramatically in a very short period. Also it would cause severe droughts throughout central Africa, a region which has not exactly been among the big winners of industrialization to start with, so that seems unfair.

Also we could dump iron powder in the Antarctic Ocean, causing a huge plankton colony to bloom and suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. We’d have to be a bit careful about that- half a supertanker’s worth of iron powder could feed a big enough plankton bloom to trigger a new Ice Age. And when plankton dies, it releases methane, which is a much more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

There are also people who would like to block sunlight by shooting millions of clay discs at the Lagrange point between the earth and sun. These skeets might well reduce average temperatures on the earth, but they could also stop the formation of ozone in the atmosphere. And without an ozone layer, life as we know it could not exist on the surface of the earth. So that’s a little bit on the risky side too. So it seems like reducing carbon emissions might be worthwhile after all.

Sandra Tsing Loh usually writes very personal accounts of her happy home life. So it’s startling, and sad, to read in this issue of her ongoing divorce.

Some claim that The Economist is the world’s sleaziest magazine. In this issue, we find a claim that it is not a magazine at all, but the world’s oldest blog.

Matthew Yglesias wants to abolish the vice presidency. I got no beef with the vice presidency. Now, abolishing the presidency, there’s an idea I can get behind.

Reihan Salman picks up where Henry George left off and calls for abolishing all taxes, except for taxes on the ownership of land. I’m not at all convinced, but here’s an admirably clear statement: “When you tax income, aren’t you punishing people for working hard? But when you tax an asset like land, you’re simply encouraging the most valuable use of that land.”

The return of Weirdomatic?

2011-03-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 30 June 2009:

Weirdomatic collects interesting pictures from around the web. It was one of my favorite sites for quite a while. It stopped updating last year, but now there’s a new gallery up. I certainly hope it’s a sign of things to come.

Putting the past in its place

2011-03-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

Originally published (as "Some interesting things from this week's issue of The Economist") on Los Thunderlads, 29 June 2009:

I subscribed to The Economist for years and years. I liked its quick notes about little countries that major media outlets ignore completely. After a few years of reading it regularly, it came to seem like a person. In particular, it seemed like a 23 year old bond trader who thinks that he rules the world, or is about to. Obnoxious as that fellow might be in person, in the form of a magazine he was, at his worst, something I could set on a table and forget about. More often his outlandish politics were good for a laugh. I still remember the first number of The Economist I read, a 1983 issue with Nicolae Ceaucescu’s picture on the front, labeled “The Sick Man of Communism.” What sticks out is a leading column about Lebanon, the last paragraph of which began with some phrase like “Though colonialism is unfashionable at the moment,” and went on to suggest that the best thing for that country might be occupation and domination by Syria. Time and again The Economist makes remarks like that, which only a staff as extremely young as that which in fact does produce the magazine could make innocently. And it can be a useful read- if I’d bet against every market prediction they made in the 1990s, I’d be a millionaire today.

This time around, they have a leader and an article about the new Acropolis Museum, each concerned chiefly with the effect this facility will have on the dispute between Britain and Greece over the ownership of the friezes Lord Elgin took from the Parthenon in the period 1801-1805. The British Museum has been taking care of them for over 200 years, the Greek government has been campaigning for their return to the Acropolis for almost 30 years. The Economist is impressed by the new museum on the Acropolis, and wishes the British Museum would lend the friezes to the Greeks. This solution would require the Greeks to renounce their claim of formal ownership of the friezes. Previous Greek governments have seemed willing to make this concession, but the current one is not. The Economist predicts that an uncompromising stand by the Greeks could unravel a great deal of the progress that has been made since December of 2002, when the world’s leading museums issued a statement called “the Munich Declaration”:

The Munich declaration, as it is called, asserts that today’s ethical standards cannot be applied to yesterday’s acquisitions; but in return it acknowledges that encyclopedic museums have a special duty to put world culture on display.

This has led to a new level of co-operation between museums over training, curating, restoration and loans. Thousands of works are now lent each year between museums on every continent.

All this apparently will come crashing down unless the Greeks take the advice of The Economist. Considering that much of the 6 March 1999 issue of that magazine was devoted to dire warnings of the chaos the world would face in the next decade as the price of oil dropped below $5 a barrel and stayed there, I wouldn’t worry overmuch about its predictions.

Also worth a mention is a report on recent studies suggesting that a genetic tendency to clinical depression may have a benefit for the populations in which it occurs. Depressed people, evidently, waste less of their own energy and less of society’s resources pursuing unattainably high goals. That may not be the most exciting scientific finding you’ve read all year, but at least it offers something to think about as we wonder why a syndrome that seems to be so thoroughly maladaptive as depression has managed to take hold so widely.

The Atlantic Monthly, June 2009

2011-03-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 29 June 2009:

It’s hard to make South African president Jacob Zuma seem an attractive figure, and the profile of him here doesn’t try. What intrigued me was its description of an art Zuma has mastered, Zulu stick fighting:

During my November 2007 visit to his homestead, I spoke with one of his brothers, Mike. As we stood by an enclosure where an ox had been slaughtered earlier in the day, Mike told me that his brother was clever, and should never be counted out. He said that from an early age, Zuma had been a masterful practitioner of traditional Zulu stick fighting. His distinctive technique had been to forego the formalities and hold his stick casually, as if he was on a lark. He’d turn away from his opponent, crack a joke, and smile. When it was least expected, he would sweep the other boy off his feet. Stick fighting is essentially a test of balance, not brute strength, in which one turns an adversary’s lunging attacks back on him.

That sounds like a martial art anyone with the makings of a successful politician would be well suited to practice.

An article called “Do CEOs Matter?” describes the classification of corporate leaders into two major categories, “Unconstrained Managers” and Titular Figureheads.” The men who coined these phrases were Professors Donald Hambrick and Sydney Finkelstein. In the article where they introduced the dichotomy, Hambrick and Finkelstein wrote that “If we had to choose as a society between doing away with Figureheads or Unconstrained Managers, clearly it is the Figureheads we would keep.”

Wayne Curtis praises the Kold-Draft ice maker, which can make the right kind of ice for particular cocktails. I myself don’t take ice with any drink, and for that matter I barely touch alcohol. But Curtis certainly does an excellent job of bringing out the Kold-Draft’s good points.

Pamela Paul reports on efforts to train dogs to track bedbugs.

Trevor Corson lived in Japan for a long time. Drawing on that experience, he explains what sushi is really like. It isn’t much like what you get in the USA. Not only is the food not the same, but to Japanese the idea of sushi is largely about a particular social experience. Regular customers gather around a counter, banter with the chef, the chef persuades them to try whatever it is he has prepared. There are no waiters, and there is certainly no such thing as prepackaged sushi you pick up off the supermarket shelf. It pleases Corson that some Americans are trying to bring sushi, the food and the social experience, to this country.

Why are there sixty minutes in an hour?

2011-03-11T15:58:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 27 June 2009:

Thanks to 3quarksdaily for posting about this article that answers the question “How did the Sumerians count to 12 on one hand and to 60 on two?”

The Nation, 13 July 2009

2011-03-11T15:56:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 26 June 2009:

Alex Cockburn rages at the Americans who cheerlead for the protests in Iran while they ignore politics in their own country, giving the Obama administration carte blanche to break every promise Mr O made to help working people and curb the national security state. As for Cockburn’s view of Iran, readers of his newsletter Counterpunch are familiar with his suspicion that the protests are something of a phony put up by advocates of war.

An editorial about the Obama administration’s approach to the righs of sexual minorities begins by pointing out that in Mr O’s first bid for public office, for the Illinois state senate in 1996, he was asked where he stood on same-sex marriage. Unlike other candidates, who either checked “yes” or “no,” Mr O went out of his way to add the sentence ”I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” At that time no state recognized same-sex marriages, and many criminalized same-sex sex. Now, the country has moved on. Even the governor of Utah has endorsed civil unions for same sex couples. And Mr O has moved backward. Now he opposes same-sex marriages, presides over the continuation of “don’t ask- don’t tell,” and hasn’t lifted a finger to support legislation to protect sexual minorities from workplace discrimination, legislation 89% of Americans say they favor. The editorial sums it up: “At this rate, Obama is in danger of being outpaced on gay rights not just by the American people but by the nonsuicidal wing of the Republican Party.”

Lisa Duggan celebrates Salt Lake City’s surprisingly visible, surprisingly politicized sexual minorities. Countering those who have called for a boycott of Utah to protest the role of Mormons in the campaign to end gender-neutral marriage in California, Duggan quotes Salt Lake City residents who’ve called for a “New Queer Pioneer Movement,” one that would emulate the sect trains of the Mormon nineteenth century and flood the state with same-sexers.

Joseph Stiglitz claims that the current global economic crisis presents us with a stark alternative: either we adopt nationalistic policies of subsidy and protection that mean we renounce economic globalization, or we adopt United Nations-based regulatory schemes that mean we embrace political globalization. As Stiglitz is the head of the UN’s Commission of Experts on the crisis, it will not come as a complete surprise that he favors the latter option.

Stuart Klawans reviews a new documentary about Afghan Star, the Kabul-based talent show based on American Idol. Klawans writes: “There is even a message: that the showbiz cheesiness we Americans might deride can be a source of hope for people literally dying to sing.” I try not to deride American Idol too much, even after my wife’s aunt once dragooned me into spending two hours of my life watching the show. But I do hope that the Afghans are dying for something bigger than American Idol.

Katha Pollitt is disappointed that Mr O’s Cairo speech didn’t give more recognition to women’s struggle for equality in the Muslim world. She’s also concerned that too many people use phrases like “the Muslim world” to refer to an extremely large and diverse segment of the human race. And she’s quite sure that Nicolas Sarkozy’s move to ban the burqa and niqab is precisely the wrong way to go about promoting women’s rights:

The current election struggle in Iran came as a big surprise to those who take the simplistic view of Muslim nations as our antagonists in a clash of civilizations. Who knew that our arch-enemy, member in good standing of the Axis of Evil, had all these hip young people, these tech-savvy Tweeters, these ordinary citizens eager to go into the streets day after day and risk beatings, arrests and death at the hands of the feared Basij? Who knew it had so many women who, however devout they may or may not be, don’t want to be denied ordinary human freedoms in the name of religion, thank you very much? The energetic and massive participation of women in the street demonstrations has received much comment in the Western media, but it’s only surprising if you think Muslim women really are as weak and passive as the mullahs imagine.

That impression of Muslim women appears to be shared by Nicolas Sarkozy, who has thrown his support behind a proposal to ban in France the all-enveloping burqa and the niqab, calling it a “question of women’s liberty and dignity.” The most vocal French feminists support the ban, as does the French Muslim women’s group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Doormats), for whom it’s a necessary counterweight to family and community pressures on women. While it may well be true that some of the small number of French women who wear burqas and niqabs are forced into them, it’s hard to see how a ban will help liberate them. Instead, it will permit the French to publicly humiliate them and feel good about it, ratify the Islamists’ claim that the West is out to get Islam and give more proof that Muslims are unwelcome in France.

The web edition includes a note about South Carolina’s Governor Mark Sanford, whose tearful confession of adultery capped a rather strange story this week. I’d say Sanford is the best governor South Carolina could possibly have at this point in its history, and I grant you that isn’t saying much. So I’m disappointed in him.

Ukulele Festivals

2011-03-11T15:54:00.000-08:00

Originally published on Los Thunderlads, 26 June 2009:

If this site were your only source of information about the world of the ukulele, you would never have known about last week’s London Uke Festival, where a world record was set for mass uking. Fortunately, our friend Woodshed keeps the world informed of these things.

Nor would you know that Nashville, Indiana is the home of the Bushman Ukulele Luau, which has already convened twice this summer and will gather again in August.

Still less would you know to mark your calendar for the Paris Ukulele Festival on the 4th of July.

Heck, you wouldn’t even know that the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain was organizing a mass uke-in at the Royal Albert Hall on 18 August. Everyone is supposed to show up, jumping flea in hand, and play Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Here’s a video they’ve made to promote the great event:

When I told Mrs Acilius what tune they were using, she was chagrined. She walked onto the stage at our wedding to the UOGB’s recording of Finlandia, and we exited to some non-ukulele rendition of the Ode to Joy. “If only they’d done this two years ago!” she exclaimed. “Then they might have had a version of it on CD by the time of the wedding.”