106. "Stereotype"

"This year, 569 Asian-Americans qualified [for admission to Stuyvesant High School], along with 179 whites, 13 Hispanics and 12 blacks. Results like that feed the stereotype that Asians are smart, hard-working, repressed and conformist" (David Brooks, NYT 12-19-11).

That sounds bad, feeding a stereotype. I thought we were supposed to starve those things. A stereotype is "a set of inaccurate, simplistic generalizations about a group that allows others to categorize them and treat them accordingly." You don't want anything like that to grow.

Like take this stereotype of Americans, that they don't know foreign languages. Oh how that lets Europeans categorize them and treat them as people beneath them in culture. They've got this joke:

"What are you when you know three languages?"

"Trilingual"

"What are you when you know two languages?"

"Bilingual."

"What are you when you know one language?"

"American."

The word for that joke is "offensive."

But suppose Asians really are smart and Americans really are culturally deficient? What are you feeding then with your statistics and your jokes? Something simplistic, maybe, but certainly not inaccurate. You're saying it's generally true of people in their category."

As for the treatment you give them, what's appropriate for people who are, say, culturally deficient? Education, obviously. But just heavy education? Can you include some razzing, some jokes? I think an embarrassed American who goes home from a party determined to learn another language is an improved American.

But you've improved him at the cost of hurting his feelings. I'll admit that light-hearted teaching, the kind that goes on at parties — and on television and in magazines — is a very effective, sometimes the most effective, way to teach, but it's too dangerous. Politically it can be disastrous.

Even if what you say is the truth about that group?

Hah, the truth. Who knows what it is about any group? And if somebody does know it who's going to trust his announcement of it? Anybody who stands up to do so will belong to the group. Is there a group we trust enough to credit what a member announces?

Yes, the group of scientists. We trust them because they try so hard to eliminate from their work and their announcements the group and personal interest we're worried about. They are, of all groups, the most disinterested.

Are you sure of that, or is it just a stereotype?

105. A Fantasy Starter

Christopher Hitchens finds himself in Heaven.

104. The Stuff about the Stuff about the Stuff

 

Did your English teacher ever tell you what hermeneutics was? Mine did. "Hermeneutics," he said, "is the stuff about the stuff about the stuff." The stuff was the literature we studied every day. The stuff about the stuff was the criticism we studied once in a while. The stuff about the stuff about the stuff was the theory of criticism (dictionary: "the science and methodology of interpretation") we never got around to studying. Poems and stories took up too much time.

I see the move from poems to the theory of the criticism of poems as a move from this world, the world I lived in, to the academic world, a world then beyond me. My professor took us to it reluctantly, I now believe, because he was also a novelist, and probably wanted us to be good readers of the kind of thing he put a great deal of effort into — though he did write criticism, and put a lot of effort into that too. I see him working, professionally, in the academic world but living, imaginatively, in this world. The stuff he dealt with as a novelist, the Ur-Stuff, was life.

And that's what I had to deal with too when I read his novels. I understood them by filling his words with the meaning my experience with life had given me. When a character didn't want his neighbors to think he was "getting uppity," and so concealed the fact that he was "going to the toilet in the house," I well understood because I had lived in a town where you couldn't "get uppity." When I failed to understand his words the reason was usually lack of experience. When a character said, "Goodbye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you," I had to wait until I had known some men who mistreated women, and even then fell short.

In any case I was close to life, a lot closer than I was when I started doing graduate work, and discovered, in the abstract distance, all that the word "hermeneutics" referred to.  Reference was not a problem for those I had left behind, the ones close to life in the novelist's class.  There the word referred simply to the higher stuffiness.

Then came the really high hermeneutics in Literary Theory. "That stuff you're so interested in, that stuff all this other stuff is about? There isn't any. There are only representations of stuff, interpretations of stuff."  That's what it told us.

Talk about a kick in the kidneys. "There is nothing outside the text." Zero, zilch. "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Two boots from Jacques Derrida. Half the people in the English department were doubled over with pain.

Ah, but nobody in a Physics Department was. Over there they ignored Derrida or made fun of him. Like making him the pilot of an airplane approaching an airport. "I've got some stuff in front of me," he tells the tower. "That stuff is a thunderstorm," says the controller. "Steer left." Does Derrida believe there is something outside the controller's text, something "fact" is the right word for? If he doesn't he's not long for this world.

     

Well that's not the world he and his followers live in, according to Harold Bloom. They live in the academic world, where they have to get ahead. Literary Theory, as seen in Cultural Studies at least, is just "a vehicle of careerism."

Sure, when you get serious you'll find that there's a lot more to it than that. But you can't do that, you can't go into this problem, without venturing into an even higher hermeneutics. Who has any energy left?

103. Removed

102. How Should We Speak the Word "Democracy"?

"You don't really believe in democracy, you English-speakers, you believe in it only when the right guys are going to win." Try to answer that and you're hit with the names of the democratically elected wrong guys our guys moved out of office, Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Salvadore Allende in Chile. Or, worse, a quote from Dwight Eisenhower backing Ngo Dinh Diem's cancellation of elections in Viet Nam: "80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh." Hold on, Vietnamese, you're not going to get any support from us for democracy.

So, if we state, "America is a democracy" proudly we're going to get a lot of noise. Can we quiet it down by making the statement doggedly? "We know, we know, but everybody has to compromise their ideals sometimes. In those times that you mention national self-interest trumped the democratic ideal, sure. But we had a good reason for that: serving our interest served the interest of democracy. The nation keeping democracy alive around the world has to keep itself alive, doesn't it? The Soviets used the same argument about communism and their country."

Say that, and then point out that we still have an election every four years, don't we? Peaceful transfer of power, that's our big claim. Democracy gives "power to the people most likely to be troublesome if deprived of it, the majority" (Post 39). We've got the essentials.

Clearly doggedness in that line can buy us some peace and quiet. But will it ever last? Aren't there always going to be some bad guys we want to keep out of power? And aren't there always going to be people of our own, maybe a majority, crying, "Bad! Bad! Keep them out! Keep them out!" Right now we've got Islamists threatening to win elections all over the Middle East. In Egypt there are some generals ready to keep them out. If we say, "Go ahead, generals, deprive them of power," how dogged can we be about those essentials? That's just what the generals will be violating. "Oh no," they'll hear us saying, "those people aren't going to be troublesome. They're just the majority." Yes, and we're the voice of democracy.

We don't know whether we'll talk like that yet but we know that if we do the word "democracy" is going to stick in our throats. And dogged repetition isn't going to help.

So, how will we speak the word? Should we maybe not use it? Find some other word for what we represent? No, we are still doing many things that only the word "democracy" identifies. And some of these are the ones that get us into the deepest trouble. Why do our leaders listen to those voices crying simply, "Bad! Bad!" — over communists in Viet Nam, or tyrants in Mesopotamia, or Islamists in Egypt? They know that the situations in those places are, or were, very complicated, and simple good-bad calls are very dangerous. They must know that. Educated people know that. Ah, but these educated people must, to stay in power, have the votes of the majority, which has never, in any country yet, had time (or inclination) to educate itself. So there you are. Democracy. There's no other word for it.

All right, we just have to find a becoming way of saying the word "democracy." It's tough. Luckily, though, we have some pretty good guides. Winston Churchill, after admitting that democracy was a terrible form of government, once added that it was "just better than all the others." There's our cue. Say it resignedly, or wryly. "Ah me, America is a democracy." In a store full of trash you've got to make the best of a bad bargain.

101. "Hokum" and its Hazards

Wasn't it fun calling lines by W. H. Auden "hokum" (Post #100, below)? There he was in all the anthologies, the whole educated world was cheering, but we weren't fooled, no, we hung in there and nailed him. And best of all, we got his blessing for it! He knew he was off base.

Auden strayed into lofty words, a view of history from too far up. When you asked for details — the support, the goods, the beef — he, unlike the historian, could only wave. Can we say that, in principle, loftiness in poetry is a bad thing?

If we do we've got poets like Yeats to deal with. Here's Yeats in "Two Songs from a Play":

Odor of blood when Christ was slain

Made all Platonic tolerance vain

And vain all Doric discipline.

How's that for lofty? And later he says,

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called.

You can't get any loftier than that. And you with the Midwest accent, are you ready to make your speech to the cheering world? "Got to have some facts naow. Pretentious nonsense. Pretentious nonsense."

Who wants to say anything like that about Yeats's words? I don't. I get a tingle just typing them out. So, should we academics shun these these blunt terms? We've got so many of them — claptrap, bunk, eyewash, bullshit, hogwash, humbuggery, malarkey, moonshine, poppycock, tommyrot — and so few fit a subject this complicated. They may be all right for the street, but literary criticism? Please.

I think the test will come when we're facing a poem for which all our other words seem inadequate. Like Ossian's Fionnghall, the poem the intelligentsia of Europe (including Napoleon and Goethe) called the great primitive epic, and we call...well, let's wait. It's not an epic at all, it's just full of epicky details, exactly the ones the primitivists of the time would lap up — the battles, the speeches, the lifestyle (oh the lifestyle, the noble, savage lifestyle) of the ancient Highland chiefs. We don't have to wait to find out it's all a fake ("Ossian" was a smart contemporary Scotsman named Macpherson) to start calling it names. It's not poetry, it's a lifestyle pitch. Pure, pure...ah yes, hokum! That Macpherson, could he ever sell snake oil.

I would also, with qualifications, nominate Alan Ginsberg's "Howl," the defining poem of the Beat Generation with the famous beginning:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...

Who says those are the best minds of Ginsberg's generation? Ginsberg does. Trust him. Did we trust Auden when he told us the thirties were low and dishonest? If we did we shouldn't have, and in the end he was embarrassed for wanting us to. We, and apparently he, saw hokum in the loftiness.

Ginsberg is lofty (on war and capitalism and the military industrial complex) but memories of Yeats have undermined our easy use of "hokum" for loftiness so we hold back. Then we finish "Howl" and realize that the whole thing is lifestyle. Nothing but one picture after another of the way Ginsberg and his friends lived — sitting up "smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,...investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets," and so on. Cool, but still only lifestyle. And with a pitch. Ginsberg is selling it. Is there any word better than "hokum" for this?

100. The Higher Hokum

Hokum: "something apparently impressive or legitimate but actually untrue or insincere; pretentious nonsense." The word originated, apparently, as a combination of hocus-pocus (magic) and bunkum (nonsense). We see snake-oil salesmen. Just the word you'd invent in the American heartland. Low class.

Watch commercials and listen to political speeches now, though, and you really understand the word. We're swimming in hokum, morning and night. And the more screens technology provides us with the deeper we sink. Oh for some purer air, some higher culture, before we drown.

Higher culture, that's what I came out of the heartland gasping for in 1944, and I thought I had found it in the high poetry my teachers, college teachers, introduced me to — T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden. How great to rise above vulgarity.

But it occurs to me now that to understand "hokum" fully I ought to consider more carefully the kind of reaction I had reading one of those high poems, the famous "September 1, 1939." Auden is sitting "in one of the dives/ On Fifty-second Street"

Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade.

And I am with him, oh am I with him. A terrible thing is happening, the start of World War II, and terrible forces, which I do not understand, have been at work producing it. Auden understands so much, the general sweep, "the whole offence/ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad," and the crucial details, "what occurred at Linz," and "What mad Nijinsky wrote/ About Diaghilev" — which is still " true of the normal heart."

I can't tell you how thrilling it was to read this in the middle of the war. I know that every poet says, "Look at me," but he also says, "Have a seat beside me," and for me to be sitting alongside Auden as the world crumbled was just, well, English-major heaven. I understood the war, maybe all wars. This was pure truth, and I sucked it in like a surfacing porpoise.

What I failed to see was how much Auden resembled the salesman who put me alongside him in the Buick commercial. Both were appealing to a passion, one to a passion to feel rich, the other to a passion to feel wise. And both appeals were illegitimate. I could never really be rich and nothing Auden told me would make me wise.

To be really wise on his subject I'd have to know just what was dishonest about that thirties decade, and what, exactly, was clever about its hopes. Auden doesn't say, and he doesn't, in a poem, have space to say. He can only signal the power to say. So trust him, and enjoy the view. Or, buy the snake oil.

Now you may say, "That's poets for you, they can only signal power," and you may say, "That's poetry-readers, they have to trust signals," but, in college, you can't ignore for long the presence of people whose words you don't have to trust, scientists. They're there for you to test, there with the goods, willing to take the time, receptive to your questions, without limit on the length of their answers. In my case I could have gone to a historian, that kind of scientist, and gotten the alternative to Auden's hokum about the thirties: painstaking analysis. I'd see the difference between being wise and having the feeling of being wise.

Obviously, hokum-detection is essential and I know that beyond scientists are philosophers, like Plato, who can equip me, through the example of Socrates, to detect hokum in nearly everything a poet produces, but I'm not willing to go into that at this point. Maybe I'm too intuitively stuck on high poetry to want to bad-mouth it any more. And I must say that the Auden case taught me something about the meaning of "high," as in "high culture."

Here's how it did that. Equipped by Plato I went back to Auden's poetry with a more sensitive hokum detector than any I'd ever had. I came to "September 1, 1939." The detector was clicking like mad: "Pretentious nonsense, pretentious nonsense." Then I discovered, on Wikipedia, that Auden was way ahead of me. He had detected so much hokum in that poem that he couldn't stand it. He called it "trash." He "loathed" it. And he refused to let it be reprinted in his 1966 collection. All while the reading public was eating it up!

Well, there's the meaning of "high" for you. One who writes "high poetry" will have a high sensitivity to hokum. His detector (for Hemingway a "shit-detector") won't keep all the hokum out but it will keep out the really bad stuff, the cheap appeals to the passions, the sentimental pull. But not just that. It will, at the highest levels, keep out the intellectually subtle appeals, the kind that make very intelligent people think they know something when they really don't.

99. "The Defenestration of Prague"

You tell me that what started the great war between Protestants and Catholics in central Europe was "the defenestration of Prague." Somebody removed somebody's windows. Thirty years of slaughter over that?

No, no, no, nobody removed anybody's windows. They threw them through a window. Catholics came to a meeting-room in a Prague castle and Protestants tossed them out.

For that I think the word would be transfenestration, and that's what your historian would have used if it had happened as you say. I think the Catholics must have come up there and taken their windows off. De — remove; fenestra — window . There go the windows and you've got a lot of angry Protestants.

Wait, wait. I'm afraid you've got the prefix de wrong. It doesn't have to mean removal. De can mean away or off or down.

So the Catholics were thrown away from the windows, or off the windows, or down the windows?

Well, they were thrown away from the room, off the third floor, and down to the ground. Would you like to know where they landed?

Yes, but later. Right now I want to get straight what the parts of this unfamiliar word tell me about its meaning. I understand the prefix de by its use in many, many words I am familiar with — defrost, defrock, deflower, debone, decompress, de-emphasize, and many, many others, all indicating removal. I know there are other de- words (derail, degrade) that fit your meaning, but they are much fewer and you often have to twist the meaning to make them fit. Aren't you doing that here, having your Catholic flying away from and off of the window? It's the window that the word tells you you're doing something to, not the poor Catholic.

I don't see how I can deny that. I guess I was straining at a meaning. Yours is more natural — to speakers of English.

Why that qualification?

Because other languages are generally closer to Latin, where my meanings appear more naturally, as they do to English academics familiar with Latin. Ordinary speakers of English see so many words like de-ice and de-claw that their first thought is nearly always of a removal.

What good storyteller wants that here? You're going to lose your English reader if you emphasize the window. His eyes need to be on the body flying through it.

Well, all I can say is that it's too late. You're never going to see a chapter titled, "Transfenestration in Prague." English speakers will just have to live with what's been given them.

And the storyteller, will he be able to live with listeners whose eyes aren't following the body? I think I've heard that the Catholic landed in a pile of manure, safely. With a denouement like that it's a crime to have readers, even for an instant, thinking of windows coming out. Even if they land in manure.

98. "Jewish Self-loathing"

 

I'll never get this one straight. Here are these Jews. They've got this nice religion with all that wonderful food and great jokes. You tell me they hate it. OK, I can believe that, though it's hard. They hate doing Hanukkah or something. But then this smart fellow tells me no, it's not the religion they're sitting there hating, it's themselves! And they all nod their heads as if they understand.

Well, I don't understand. If you're bothered by something hateful you do something about it. You go after it or you go away. If something you are doing or thinking or feeling bothers you you quit doing or thinking or feeling it. The best you can. You don't just sit there.

Comprehension is going to be so difficult here that I think I'd better start way back, with what I'm sure I understand. That's the statement, "I hate myself for X." If I don't know what the speaker is referring to I can ask him.

But the vague "I hate myself"?  I know that there are a lot of things in this area, like doubting ourselves, or accusing ourselves, or feeling sorry for ourselves that are vaguely expressed but which have references we can dig out, and justify the doubt or accusation or pity but hating ourselves? That's tough.

It would be easier if those smart fellows had found a word other than "hate." It's so strong. After I feel dissatisfaction with myself, or disapproval, or disappointment, what's left? I can't see anything to justify "hatred," much less "loathing," which some go on to. "He's filled with self-loathing," Is that a sustainable emotion?  How does he stay filled? That would be very hard. He's going against nature. Self-loving, the not-always-admirable thing you're sure to find in your neighbor, is the natural condition.

We get to the end of the line in talk between Jews about behavior in Israel. One says to another, "You sure picked a bad time — say during an American election — to beat up on Palestinians, or expand the settlements," or whatever, and what does the other answer? Not, "Why do you hate me?" That would be good Smothers Brothers theater, weird but understandable. No, after being told that his diplomatic shirttail is out he comes back with, "Why do you hate yourself? That's really weird.

97. Meet My Philosopher, the Smothers Brother.

J. L. Austin, the Oxford linguistic philosopher, said that we could call oversimplification the occupational disease of philosophers, "were it not their occupation." If that's fair then it's certainly fair for us followers of philosophers to oversimplify each other's positions as taken, say, at a party. The test is personal convenience. "Does the simplification," you ask, "prepare me sufficiently for the next, possibly more serious, encounter? Can I now move on to the next guest?"

I once found it convenient to classify all new academic acquaintances simply as either a Tom or a Dick, following this exchange in the old Smothers Brothers act:

Dick: Your shirttail's out.

Tom: Why do you hate me?

If I identify a Dick I bone up on British philosophy, if a Tom, French philosophy. In one case I'm ready for empiricists, logicians, and hard scientists; in the other I'm ready for phenomenologists, existentialists, and soft scientists, especially psychologists.

Who will I welcome alongside me? That depends on where I am. If I'm in a neighborhood where they break your knuckles if they catch you with your shirttail out I welcome Dick. If I'm at home unconsciously picking on a playmate I welcome Tom. In operating rooms and cockpits it's always Dick; in psychiatrist's offices and confessionals it's always Tom.

There are times when I will positively love Dick. When rumors are flying, when a mob is forming, when a lynching or a pogrom is imminent oh how great it is to have him appear and ask, "Did the provocative event really happen?" When it's a provocation to war — Tonkin Gulf, weapons of mass destruction — it's even greater. Facts. Caring about facts. At last somebody. I could hug him.

But Tom can be helpful too. When I'm listening to a politician, watching commercials, or reading a government-controlled newspaper, I love to hear his voice, "No, what he's really saying is 'Hate this, love that, trust these.'" Tom shows you what a fool you were to concentrate on the shirttail. Those guys were just using it. You've got to love somebody who can take apart propaganda the way Tom does.

The trouble is, Tom and Dick don't get along. Dick thinks he means what he says. He hates to hear "what you really mean." He delights in pointing out the number of places where Tom's philosophers will find themselves with broken knuckles. Tom delights in showing Dick how helpless his philosophers will be before a poem or a subtle philosophy.

I need Dick more than I need Tom simply because I spend more time making my way through the world than I do reading poetry or philosophy. I'd like to trust Tom but I need to trust Dick — as all the scientists, all the physicians I go to, needed to trust him. I can't live without him.

Tom's philosophers weaken my trust in Dick by showing me that he doesn't deserve to be so positive about the "real" world he thinks he's talking about. That world, they say, is just a humanly represented one, and even the representation Dick is surest of is subject to an "uncertainty principle," or an "incompleteness theorem," or its "relativity."

Dick's own philosophers weaken my trust in him by showing me how imperfect his theoretical foundation is. His empiricism proceeds from unexamined dogma and his given, the stuff he gets from his senses, is, they say, largely a myth.

Why should I let criticism from either side weaken my trust in Dick? I don't need a perfect epistemology. I can make my way through the world very well with the epistemology that stood for a long time before Derrida or Rorty or Kuhn revealed its imperfections, or Einstein, or Gödel, or Heisenberg were available to quote.

The old epistemology is not hard to learn, but it is hard to stick to. You don't always notice mistakes, even if you're willing to call them "mistakes." If you have a friend that notices, though, somebody to tell you when your shirttail is out, it's a lot easier. You just have to trust him, even when he doesn't sound like your friend.

96. Complimenting Middle Easterners: "Liberal"

"Liberal" is still a compliment-word when a Westerner is talking to a Middle Easterner about changes in his country. It's sort of a handclasp: welcome to democracy, to tolerance, to progress, to freedom, to equality, to human rights, to the rule of law — welcome to the Enlightenment.

I'd like to use the word, if the occasion ever arose, but I have some problems with it. It's clear that I can't apply it to authoritarian Islamist regimes imposing Sharia on their people, or to secular despots putting the clamps on everybody, but beyond that it gets difficult, especially when regimes are changing.

Consider Egypt now, where thousands demonstrated yesterday against the despotic military council. The Times tells us that "most liberals stayed home" (11-19-11). Why? Because they "looked to the military council to act as a hedge against a religious takeover." They feared that liberal democracy would bring an illiberal party to power. So who am I to compliment for their liberalism, those who support the generals for wanting to keep the illiberals out, or the demonstrators for wanting the democracy that lets them in?

I think that instinct, or long school training, moves most of us Americans to declare for the demonstrators simply because their opposition is, like that of King George III, despotic. And reflection commonly justifies this in Enlightenment terms — the "liberal" cluster.

If we here deny those terms to the Egyptian military council, though, what are we going to do with them when we come to the many despots in Western countries that our history books have for years called "enlightened"? How about Catherine the Great, and Joseph II of Austria, and Frederick II of Prussia? Prussia, for heaven's sake. Yet in that country we see industry promoted, schools established, religious freedom protected, prejudice discouraged. And then there's Napoleon, forcing French enlightenment on the countries he conquered — feudalism ended, peasants freed, church courts abolished, Inquisition ended, the great Code established, legal equality of all individuals assured. Everything but representative government. Unless you're an impossible Anglophile, grant Napoleon a piece of the word "liberal."

I think I'm left without options for a sincere handclasp over the Tahrir Square demonstrations. To those who stay home I'm saying, "Thanks for your help in preventing a retreat (with Shariah) into darkness. Congratulations on your progress. Welcome to our tradition of enlightened despotism." I'm complimenting them for murdering democracy. To those who demonstrate I'm saying, "Thanks for your help in advancing your country into the democratic light. Congratulations on your faithfulness. Welcome to our tradition of representative government." I'm complimenting them for democratically risking loss of every feature of the Enlightenment, including democracy. Either way, there's no escape from irony.

And what is my Egyptian, hearing it, going to say? "This man (or maybe the entire West) is as confused about the Enlightenment as we are." Of course. The word I used, "liberal," is just one of those words that calls up a confusing cluster. That's what I'm stuck with.

95. America's Decline, the West's Decline

It's hard for anyone with a Great Depression childhood to anguish wholeheartedly over the decline of the United States in wealth and power. It will be sad, yes, to come down from that 90's peak, as Fareed Zakaria (The Post-American World) tells us we are doing, but might it give us a chance to learn the joys of eating oatmeal? I mean around the table in the morning, the penny-a-bowl kind, with Dad fortifying himself for battle with the world and Mother getting ready to maintain the fortress. Austerity, for all its grind, did have its exhilarating moments.

Even if you're not captured by sentimental images, as mine might be, you have to admit that when Emerson and Thoreau spoke of the hazards of material success they had a point. Remember them, through the whole race from one technology to another, telling us (from our college anthologies) where neglect of spiritual and cultural values might leave us? "We are in great haste," said Thoreau, "to build a telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, perhaps, have nothing important to say to each other." He should have listened in on Twitter. Maybe austerity would bend our ears toward those authors. It would be exhilarating to see them make a comeback.

Then there's the exhilaration (for some) in the satirical lament. Spokesmen for the spiritual can make fun of those still attached to the material. "Oh how will my daughter live without twenty-cent-a-bowl Choco Puffs? How can my son tolerate a swollen cell phone that does only 250 other things? How can my husband lose his SUV?" Spokesmen for the meek can picture the proud adjusting to their loss of power, presidents from Texas learning a new walk, athletes at the Olympics learning to dip Old Glory as other nation's flags are dipped, in courtesy.

And finally, there's that exhilaration in the knowing lament. You can assure your wise fellows that you too can see the writing on the wall, and yes, it's so sad.

So, contemplating the decline of our nation we find many opportunities for exhilaration. Can we find the same opportunities in the grander decline, that of the West? There certainly is occasion enough, especially if we make America's success the West's success, as Niall Ferguson (Civilization: The West and the Rest) lets us do. We might be stirred watching our fellow Westerners forced to pay more attention to Eastern peace of mind. And satirical lament ("Nations pestering China for aid? World policemen coming from Asia?"), that will still be stimulating.

But, you know, sooner or later most of us are going to ask, about all these world-stage declines, "What the hell do I care?" Who ever changed a single item on his TO DO list, the daily worry sheet, in order to halt his nation's or his culture's decline? Or spur its rise? We know that none of those big expressions make any difference down where we are. Historians fight hugely over "the idea of Progress." All right, in each of my decisions I want to make progress. Over there is a fellow who in each of his decisions just wants to avoid regret. At the end of the day are we in different places? I doubt it.

We don't really care but we think we do. And maybe we think we care because we listen to ourselves when we think we are most serious, speaking in intellectual company. There we make the knowing lament. And there we need Samuel Johnson's rebuke. He called the lament "cant." You (like Boswell) might say, "These are sad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times," but you don't mean a bit of it. Do we need Boswell's honesty when we're caught? "I declare, Sir, upon my honor, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it was, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither ate less, nor slept less."

I think we have a better chance of discovering what we care about by listening to what we say — and don't say — to our children. We don't say, "Work hard, keep America a superpower, don't let the West decline." We say, "Work hard, get ahead, stay out of trouble, be nice." If the aggregate effort brings compliments to our nation or culture, fine. If not, fine. The Swiss look happy, and they're not getting any big-time compliments. If there is such a thing as a "national peace of mind" maybe theirs is the way to it.

93. "Technocratic leader"

Greece and Italy now have premiers they are calling "technocratic leaders" (NYT, 11-11-11). The term distinguishes them from "democratic leaders." It's a distinction to die for these days in Europe, where the people of these two countries accept, in principle, the need for austerity measures to get themselves (and Europe) through the debt crisis, and punish the democratic leader who puts the principle into practice.

No distinction promises to play out better. In the capital one leader speaks for the principle, gets agreement, then leaves. Another comes on and does the practical part. In the streets there is pain, especially among all those losing jobs they got under the political patronage system. "Those dirty politicians!" says one sufferer. "No, no," says another, "this one's not a politician, he's just a technician, making sure the machinery works. You can't blame him." A "technocratic leader" is a leader who can't be blamed.

No premiers will ever be loved more by the premiers they replace. Technocratic premiers preside over an "interim government," which is also a "government of national unity." Those wonderful terms tell the nation that they're not a threat, they'll be gone, the politicians can come back, and, bless the technocrat, there'll be harmony when they do.

Nowadays we're likely to see a computer expert. He takes the program the nation needs, plugs it in, pushes the right buttons, and the machine cranks out the desiderata while everybody else is enjoying their coffee.

What we're looking at is essentially an ends-means machine, and everybody who dislikes dirty work (the old name for what the machine does) should have one. It leaves you free to go for good ends without getting stained by any of the bad means attached to them. This machine just makes the connections on its own.

I would think democratic leaders would want to provide every voter with one of these ends-means machines. Then every time voters demanded that he go for a good end the leader could say, "Call up the program. Follow it through. Decide whether you have the courage to go all the way with it. Then tell me you want it." What a teaching device! The voter's inattention or incapacity, the great plague of democratic leadership, would no longer plague him. He'd never be blamed for failing to produce the impossible.

Would we want this machine to be like the punitive one in Franz Kafka's famous story "In the Penal Colony"? That machine inscribed its lesson on the body. The technician fed it a diagram and needles traced out the crime until the subject, in pain, understood it. Surely our technology could produce its equal.

Our answer will no doubt depend on our view of our fellow human beings. Are they capable of paying sufficient attention? Of doing what's required of them? If we think they are then we'll be willing to punish them for not doing so. Inattention and cowardice become crimes. At the end of the line here is vindictive pleasure: "Neglect your homework, will you? Ruin the country with your ignorant demands? Shame your friends with your timid dodges? Well here's something that will teach you!"

On the other hand, if we think they're not capable we'll scorn the machine, as the humane Europeans in Kafka's story scorn theirs. We'll stick to patient instruction in the world's cause-effect sequences. What's at the end of the line here depends on how serious those sequences can be. If one of them ends in the disappearance of democracy (or, God help us, in the disappearance of the world) then the end for this view is in an appalling complaisance, people sitting around at the last trump wishing they'd been harder on inattention and cowardice.

92. "Concerted effort"

  

A piccolo player, no matter how hard he tries, cannot make a "concerted effort." Only the orchestra can do that. The result is a "concert." The picture of it settles the meaning: people doing something together.

So Mayor Bloomberg can't make "a concerted effort to rebut criticism that he was ignoring the boroughs" (NYT, 1-20-11) and tennis player Vera Zvonareva can't make "a concerted effort to knock Clijsters off stride" (1-20-11). They're piccolo players and the editors of the New York Times are having them and a host of others do only what groups can do. Twenty-three times in the last 90 days. Worse, they're having some of them "make a more concerted effort." Trying harder.

I know, it's a very small thing. A little spot. But these editors have already shown that they take exactness and efficiency — cleanliness — so far down the scale of word use that it's surprising that they have let this spot stay. Is it too small?

Posted by H. R. Swardson at 9:48 AM 2 comments

dictionarieseditorsNew York Timesusagewords

91. What's the Difference between a Yippie and a Wall Street Occupier?

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (11)

In 1968 there were a lot of confused, outlandish people demonstrating in the streets and they were stupid; in 2011 there are a lot of confused, outlandish people demonstrating in the streets and they are not stupid. What's the difference?

The 1968 demonstrators did not see that voters who might press their representatives to end the Viet Nam War would be slower to do so if it meant associating themselves with a lot of outlandish people. Voters could change things. Change yourself, become more landish, and you could change those voters. Those who didn't see that were stupid. And history confirms that judgment. The silent landish vote swept Nixon into office and kept Democrats out for decades.

That taught a lot of us not to side with outlandish people lightly. Give them a boost and the backlash could discredit good causes for years to come. In Athens we saw evidence of that backlash just last week, in a Messenger cartoon. One well-dressed fellow, passing Zucotti Park, says to another, "I'm having a moral dilemma: Do I want to live in a country that caters to the ultra-rich … or do I want to agree with a hippie?!"

Well, 1968 hippies were stupid for alienating those who had the power to change. The 2011 Wall Street Occupiers see (I suppose) that voters no longer have the power to change. The OWS equivalent to "Peace in Viet Nam" is "Regulation on Wall Street." And how will voters bring that about? Not by making a Republican President. He's almost sure to be against regulation. By making a Democrat President? Well, we've got one who had one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate and who promised not to be influenced by lobbyists for special interests. Just the one to make the slam-bang speech against big money and lead the charge on the Hill. Just the one to get the country's biggest mistake in the pre-Great-Recession years corrected. Why isn't he doing that? Because to get re-elected he has to have big money, and to get that money he, through lobbyists called "bundlers" (NYT, 10-28-11), has to go to a lot of people who don't want regulation on Wall Street. We infer influence.

You don't have to give the Zucotti Park riff-raff credit for great powers of perception here. It's been obvious for months that Wall Street bankers, the very people responsible for the 2008 crisis, are successfully working on Senators and Congressmen, no doubt through that need to get re-elected, to hold up or weaken legislation on new rules.

So it looks like the difference is that in 1968 you were stupid if you didn't work through the system and in 2011 you were stupid if you did. The system wasn't working.

What's the smart play? It looks to me like a run at the campaign finance rules. Reduce the need for big money and you reduce the power of Wall Street. Is anybody smart enough to bring that off? Inside the presently jammed system? We won't find any such person in Zucotti Park. But that's not what we look to those occupiers for. It's enough that they keep before us, among all the goofy causes, this most important one.

90. Do We Need the Word "Soul"?

We're losing the word "soul." That is, we can no longer use it in a straightforward way before certain audiences. With the meaning "the disembodied spirit of a human being" the word is lost before an audience of scientists because they don't believe in supernatural things. With the meaning "the immaterial essence of an individual" the word is lost before an audience of existentialists because they depreciate essences. "Existence," they say, "precedes — both goes before and takes precedence over — essence." And no doubt the word is in the process of being lost before other modern audiences.

I may eventually be forced to join one of these audiences but I must say that if I lose "soul" I'm certainly going to be left with a lot of blanks in the pre-modern authors I read. What do I fill in for John Donne when he feels defiled? What is it that's defiled? What is it that De Quincey has abused? that suffers in Shelley? that Herbert must repair? And, the big challenge, what is it that Socrates wanted his students to take care of?

I see an answer, of sorts, to that last question in my preceding post (#89): Socrates wanted his students to take care of what those parents wanted their son away at college to take care of. What is that? To the son it was an ideal, held by his mother and just being established, shakily, in him. It appeared when she said things like, "That's not the Bobby I know." It was obviously an ideal, something to be lived up to.

Is there a word, acceptable in today's vocabulary, that will do for people what "soul" did for Bobby? As soon as he heard it from his preacher he knew he had a core, something around which all his virtues — and vices too, if he weren't careful — clustered. It could be damaged, and look ugly. He was responsible for its condition but, oddly, it made him responsible. It, the whole of him, not a part, is what took the blame, and made him blush.

Might "better self" be called in to do what "soul" did? Maybe, but we won't win back the existentialists or any of the many postmodernists influenced by them. The concept of a "unitary Self" is as vulnerable to deconstruction as any other essentialist concept.

Can philosophers working in this area give me another word? Kant, I find, is sympathetic, but he can't offer anything better than "soul," which he uses reluctantly. "You don't know that it exists but you've got to postulate it as a necessary foundation for morals." Then William James says, "No, no, it's not necessary. Morals and a sense of personal identity don't depend on it at all. 'Soul' (besides referring to an unverifiable entity) is a superfluous word." Many modern philosophers agree with James. I'm still at a loss.

All right, salvage what we can. Let's call this thing a "nexus of values." That word "nexus" makes you think of a place where nerves, or stock holdings, or telephone lines come together, right? Well, I'm glad to have you think that, because that's what I think values do, in a place some call "character." So we've got that much. What we've left out is the big thing with Bobby. His values didn't just sit there, nexus-like. They came out and scolded him. "Hey, you're not living up to us. Get out there and start showing the world we're yours." If we don't have a word that takes that in, one that identifies the Bobby his mother knows and he (though he gained the whole world) could lose, we're still short of "soul."

89. Spooks and Virtues

Good American boy goes to college. Good American parents are afraid he'll lose his morals. Good American boy comes home and sure enough, he's lost his morals. Painful parent-son conversations.

That was the story in many families in the days before parents themselves had been to college, or daughters went there. In the United States, where masses of uneducated immigrants were rapidly enabled, by wealth or the GI bill, to polish their children, it's heard as a peculiarly American story. That may be, but the pain in it, I think, is simply Christian. It's peculiar to the Christian vocabulary.

Take that word "spirit." It started out as Latin spiritus referring to what went in and out of your throat when you breathe. Keep it there and you're alive. Lose it and you're dead. Where does it go? (It's a thing; it has to go someplace.) The ancients were pretty vague about that but the Christians who came along weren't. It (as Anglo-Saxon "soul") went to Heaven or Hell, depending on whether the dead person had been good or not.

But besides referring to a thing the word also, from a very early time, referred to an abstraction. The soul wasn't just something that went along with you and left you; it was you. Not the everyday, apparent you, though, and not even a summation of that apparent you. It was the essence of the apparent you, and all your values were bundled into it. The Greeks made sure this reference stuck.

So, just by the way the language developed, Christians entered the 20th century with this one word that made two very different references, one to a thing and the other to an essence. There is a connection, of course (a good essence gets the thing into heaven), but you need a God to make that connection. It's not necessary.

Now, those parent-son conversations. The son says that because of what he has learned in his science courses he's lost his belief in spirits — like God and human souls. His parents hear that he's lost his belief in values. Naturally. Values are "spiritual" things. They misunderstand his situation and are in pain.

You can't entirely blame the parents for their misunderstanding. Spirits and values have a lot in common. They're both invisible, they're both insubstantial, and neither dies. It's easy to see how thoughtful people of any education might slide from "spiritual" into "transcendent" and "otherworldly" and finally into "supernatural," tying goodness to a heaven.

I'd put some of the blame on the language the parents inherited. It's Halloween today. There are a lot of spirits out there, on front porches and roaming the streets. Are they spiritual? Not those things. But how can you be a "spirit" and not be "spiritual"? What kind of language has one word for both spooks and virtues?