49. Democracy. Debt Ceiling.

Democracy. You have to have the machinery — the laws, the facilities, the parliamentary rules, the system — and you have to have a certain kind of people using the machinery. The collapse of so many democracies after they got started shows how necessary both are and how difficult long-term success is. Democracy, we know, is a fragile thing.

One thing about surviving democracies is that they're full of old machinery, some of it still working well, some kept working by clever adaptation, and some of it — like our Electoral College — just sitting there. It's like junk DNA.

Interesting but harmless, right? Wrong. As long as it's sitting there old machinery can be used, and in ways dangerous to democracy. Somebody can come along and say, "Hey, here's something that will help me get my way." That's the way it was with the rule that senators had to be allowed their full say on the Senate floor. "Hey, I can keep talking and get my way with this legislation." That's the way it is now with the debt ceiling, that junk from World War I.

Neither is compatible with the democratic ideal: representatives judging the will of their constituents, fighting for it in open debate, getting what they can in a compromise, giving in when they lose, and submitting to judgment on their performance in the next election. The machinery opportunist (equally likely to be a Democrat or a Republican) sweeps all that away so he can have his way. Give it to him or he'll jam the machinery.

Here's where you have to talk about the kind of people, their character. The machinery doesn't work by itself. If you trust it to you could see the system fail, the organism die — as cells die when invaders get ahold of some of the junk. You've got to have operators who, at the crucial point, put the life of the system ahead of getting their — or their party's, or their clan's, or their class's — way.

I have, in an earlier post ("Patrimoine." #42), admired the English Protestants of the 17th century as just the right kind of people to operate a democratic system. They gave us the model. In their crucial choices they put the life of the system ahead of the way of their party. I see that many of the Congressmen now making use of the debt ceiling relic are the heirs of those English Protestants. They are in the same ethnic and cultural tradition. How can there be any doubt that, when the crucial point comes, they will choose the life of the system? They can't be invaders.

Well hell, in the heat of debate we Americans are always doubting our opponents' commitment to the system. Plus, it's an effective accusation. After the fight's over we'll play golf together. Surely we'll do that again.

48. What if not?

 

What if there had been no bailout and no stimulus? What if China had not instituted the one-child policy? What if, each time I criticized Barack Obama or Deng Xiaoping for their part in those actions, I were required to imagine the consequences of their not being done, or to say what I would have done at the time?

Yesterday I heard, probably on CNBC, the 553rd Republican complain that the bailout or the stimulus had failed and on the same day read in the Economist (7-23-11) that the one-child policy had had oh-so-many bad effects. The politician did not say what, in his mind, would constitute success, or how he, at the time, would have put us on the road to it. The journalist said nothing about the bad effect, over-population, that the one-child policy was designed to counter, and did not consider what a multi-child China might now look like.

Reviewing world events is like reading a novel: we can do it sharply or dully. Dull readers of Billy Budd see Billy hanged and say, "Oh this is unbearable! This good man! These cruel men!" Sharp readers see Captain Vere hanging Billy and say, "This is unbearable! This good man! This world where choice is so limited and good men have to be so cruel!"

Captain Vere hangs Billy in order to prevent a mutiny. It's a choice that can be justified only by the closest attention to Melville's world, a world in which England's victory over Napoleonic France depends on such choices, however multiple. Sharp readers ask, "What if Billy had not been hanged?" They answer, "England would be defeated." They visualize that defeat and don't want it. They sympathize with Vere. Dull readers deplore Vere's actions and go no further.

We're all potentially sharp readers of novels and observers of world events. What dulls us? Distance from the action, according to Melville. "Little ween the snug cardplayers in the cabin of the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge."  Physical distance can do it, but so can imaginative distance. Abstractions dull us, as reformed Marxists well know.  Passionate adherence to one cause, one value, dulls us, as debt-limit Republicans should know.  Anything that keeps us from putting ourselves into a scene and feeling it, feeling the forces operating there, feeling all the forces, will dull us.

47. "Politicians suck."

That's what I heard Americans on the street, asked about the debt-ceiling crisis, saying all day yesterday into CNN microphones. They hadn't had a chance to read Terry Smith, the small-town newspaper sage I have quoted before. If they had they'd be saying, "There are exact causes of this crisis and we've got to distinguish those that are merely annoying from those that are imperiling the nation. I find X (a particular cause) most perilous and I blame Y (particular Republicans or Democrats) for introducing it."

If you're not talking like that you ought to get off the street. Hide when you see a CNN camera approaching. Americans can't appear before the world saying, "Everything sucks." They can't appear saying, "Politicians suck." Why? Because then they'd have to say, "Democracy sucks," and they can't say that because they'd have to keep adding "but sucks less than other forms of government" and on and on. There's no good way out of that language mess.

Smith finds the greatest peril in those pledges that 95% of Republicans in Congress have made "to never raise taxes anytime, anywhere or for any reason." This keeps them from accepting compromises that give them nearly all of the other things they want —compromises of the kind, I might add, that contending parties in other Congressional conflicts would have been glad to make, and that, in conditions so perilous to the republic, would have been embarrassed not to make.

The only people happy here might be teachers of Philosophy 101 classes. They have been given a wonderful example of "one-principle absolutism," the simplest of all solutions to problems of the good life and the just state.

It's a solution that pretty quickly fails the tests of experience. Take "thou shalt not kill" as your absolute and you fall before the Nazis. Take "no discrimination" inflexibly and your planes fall to the terrorists who get through. Take "unconditional love" unimaginatively and you're enabling the alcoholic you need to get tough with. History is full of failed absolutism.

How does flexibility and imagination do in history? How about the Swiss? There they are, a nation divided into three language groups, each in cultural sympathy with a surrounding country. By all historical experience they are a powder keg, waiting to blow up the next time their European brothers are engaged. What do they do? Suppress expressions of sympathy. Yes, abridge free speech, that most absolute of present American principles. Not that they don't like free speech; they love it. But they see that it, like every other value, has to be adjusted in the light of a greater value, like peace. It's an adjustment their history tells us to admire. How was it achieved? By constant, fatiguing attention to the compromises that had to be made.

So, might "pay attention" be the one principle we can call absolute, never needing adjustment? No, because human beings can't pay equal attention to everything. They constantly need to proportion it. There's no way to avoid adjustment.

Does this call now for a good scolding of the extreme Tea Partiers who forced the pledge? Of course, but no more a scolding of them than a scolding of the extreme ACLU members they see themselves opposing. They are actually brother absolutists. After 9-11 it was clear that the principle of individual liberty would have to be adjusted against the principle of national security. "No sir," said some members. "Not anytime, anywhere, for any reason." Refusal to adjust is not a measurable feature on the right-left scale.

46. Debt Ceiling

Let me get this straight. You consider everything the country needs and what its resources are and you and your colleagues in Congress study the problem as hard as you can, taking in the latest constraints and opportunities, and you make a judgment about the budget. Then you have to submit to the judgment of earlier Congressmen who had no way of knowing what the country would need, and couldn't study the problem, and had only the vaguest expectation of what the constraints and opportunities now are. This limit on the national debt represents their judgment, right?

Right. And you voted for those Congressmen. They are your representatives in a democracy.

They were my representatives. The one up there now is my representative and, since this is a democracy, I want him to do my will. If he's held to this debt limit he's prevented from doing my will. You know what I call people who prevent my elected representatives from doing my will? Tyrants.

Ah yes, but if your Congressman is not held to this limit he may spend more money than you, if you knew the future, would want him to. You may find that he is not doing your will, your best will.

In that case I will vote him out of office. I can't vote a debt ceiling out of office. Yet it comes in and removes the people I have most recently voted for out of office. It won't let them work for me. Why?

Because it (if it had a mind) thinks they won't work wisely.

That's possible. The other possibility is that they didn't want to do the work themselves. It was too hard. But they wanted to look like workers, people who rolled up their sleeves and got tough with spending. So they put in a strict debt limit. "See, we're really tough." Only later, after the election, now, would it become clear that somebody else would have to really, rather than symbolically, get tough.

45. English Composition vs. Martin Heidegger

Marianne Moore once said that she was punishing certain politicians "by not thinking about them." That's the way I've punished Martin Heidegger. It was the only way I could punish him. He was a philosopher. I was a teacher of English composition in a public school. I wasn't capable of getting back at him for confusing my students but I was capable of dismissing him from my thoughts and my classroom. His fame as one of the great minds of the twentieth century would stop right there.

As if he would care. In Heidegger's view the public I speak for is a negligible quantity. My students and I are "practical agents, concerned about [our] projects in the world," and have "forgotten the basic question of what it is to exist, what the nature of Being is" (Wikipedia, condensed). A philosopher discrediting one of his ideas might pain Heidegger but a writing teacher dismissing them? Never.

So you can understand a writing teacher's pleasure when he finds a philosopher discrediting a Heideggerian idea on the same ground he dismisses it. I am thinking of Rudolf Carnap showing Heidegger's word "Being" to be meaningless and of myself dismissing big words in a freshman theme.

Carnap and I come together over our demand that a writer have something clearly in mind when he uses a word. My new freshmen used big words because they thought readers up at the university were too smart, too intellectual, for the ordinary words they knew the meanings of. After they found themselves unable to tell their teacher what, exactly, they had in mind they started to get rid of them. I was unable — I mean unwilling to work hard enough — to say what Heidegger had in mind when he used "Being" but when Carnap challenged him to use it clearly in a proper sentence I heard myself. We, a graduate student teaching English Composition and a leading logical positivist, were brothers in the same fight.

What a strange fight it has turned out to be, though, in my part of the field. It's a dismissal contest. Heidegger dismisses the public and the practical projects I help it with and I, in the name of the public, dismiss him. Who names a winner? The audience? "The applause meter shows...Composition Teachers!" Appointed judges? "We find that you, German philosopher, have dissed the American public more effectively than they dissed you. You win the medal." There can be no winner. It's a Caucus Race.

That could be philosophically disturbing, seeing such contrary dismissals in one academic tradition, but composition teachers won't give it much thought.  No more than they'll cudgel their brains trying to figure out what Heidegger means.  There are so many more important things to worry about.

What's important? Going to war is important. Invading a country, that project, is important. Not knowing exactly what you have in mind, what your words refer to, who your enemy is, what his capabilities are, what courses of action are open to you, that's important. All the things students have to learn in order play their part — as speakers, as writers, as disputants — in preserving a democratic society are important. 

So teaching English composition is important. Teaching the argumentative essay is extremely important. "Cite evidence, anticipate objections, watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question, don't sneer" (the main commands in the argument section of the textbook I used) are the most important commands teachers can give if they want their students to take part in the debate that guides and preserves their country.

So it shouldn't surprise us that they don't worry much about the dismissal contest with Heidegger. The only thing that might make victory in it important to composition teachers is his influence on students. Do they relate to him in any way?

I think that once upon a time students did have a relationship with Heidegger. It was exciting. Now I think they're probably more like people at the end of an open marriage: "We have one but, you know, who has the energy?"

44. "Marginalize"

 

"Marginalized" is a complaint word that carries a lot of trouble in its root, which calls up a geometric shape, something with a center and edges. The trouble appears as soon as you get more than one complaint. How many people or groups can occupy the center? You can't have everybody  there. Is there a geometric shape that has no edges, no periphery? Somebody's got to be out there on the margin.

The complaint, which readily morphs into reproach and accusation, comes from those who have been marginalized — blacks, gays, aboriginal communities, women, handicapped people, the poor, single mothers, freethinkers, and "dissidents whose ideas and views run against those of the mainstream" (Wikipedia) — or from those who are sticking up for them.

Whatever the complaint, though, there is clearly a need in the U.S. for alert complainers. When a person or group is excluded from meaningful participation in any democratic society those running it — the electorate, eventually — need to be told, or jabbed.

But we also need to be alert to the way our complaining words work. Some take us right to the mark and some take us off into space. By now this one has us wandering beyond Pluto. There are the neo-Nazis over there. Do we want them at the center? Certainly not. To us they're asteroids and they might as well know it. To hell with their feelings.  So, we're marginalizers.  What we've done earns us the name because it exactly fits what stupid people do to blacks, gays, women, and so on.

We put people in that fix when we adopt a complaint-word without respect for its reference, to which the root may still be attached. When the root, like this one, gives you an impossible job of picturing, you are going to question yourself into spasms. "Remote from power and economic centers, mountain communities are often marginalized." Remote places are on the geographical margin. Were they out there and then marginalized? By whom? Could you marginalize yourself by moving out there? Nah, people don't marginalize themselves. Not a single example in the Wikipedia entry shows human agency or responsibility. They are all victims there, acted upon by the center, and that's the way it's been since sociologists introduced the term.

Follow that with this, another sociologist's example of marginalization: "Aboriginal communities lost their culture and values through forced assimilation and lost their rights in society" (Wikipedia). Assimilation into? They were marginalized by being moved toward the center. We're in geometrical and logical trouble, whatever the sociology of it.

Apparently, though, many minds can handle this and "marginalize" has gained popularity as its application has become more general. By now the meaning "to belittle, depreciate, discount, or dismiss" has, according to the OED, become "the only meaning of the word that is used." That pretty well takes the complaint onto the basketball court. The dominant social group is dissing the others. The others come back by calling them "bullies," which, according to the OED, is what the accusation in "marginalize" now amounts to. It's wound up as a zinger in highbrow trash-talk.

43. The Struggle To Be Fair.

 

It's terribly hard to be fair to Tea Partiers, I know, but Theda Skocpol and Chrystia Freeland have apparently managed to do it, Skocpol in an academic study of their views and Freeland in an International Herald Tribune piece (7-8-11) grateful to Skocpol and her graduate students for their "careful parsing" of the Partiers' thinking. The thinking, it turns out, does not lead to the contradictions commentators have noted, like accepting Social Security payments while opposing Big Government programs. It's more careful, and opposes those programs only when they favor "people who don't work" — in their term, "freeloaders."

That's the Tea Partiers' main concern, and it accounts for their rebuff, at the polls, of the New York State Republicans who thought their main concern was the Big Brother state. The Tea Party had "fixed on an issue" they had neglected.

"Fixed" on an issue. The word tells us they made it their number one priority. But that's not what they were doing in the IHT headline for Freeland's piece. There they were "fixated." "A movement fixated on 'freeloaders.'" That tells us that they were preoccupied obsessively with the issue, that they were attached to it, yes, but in an immature or neurotic way.  The headline writer has slipped into unfairness.

The word "fixated" does not appear anywhere in Freeland's piece, nor does she suggest anything it suggests. If there were any put-down words in it she has weeded them out. I see her (and Scopcol, and her graduate students) struggling to be fair to the Tea Party right to the end. I know it's a struggle the NYT and the IHT are engaged in mightily. And this could be such a little slip.  Maybe little smacks in this direction were what the headline writer's mind defaulted to, maybe he (or she) was prejudiced, but on the other hand maybe he was essentially fair-minded and just needed two more spaces for a good fit, maybe he was tired.  In any case he thwarted the Post's effort to be fair.  The fact that sometimes our fairest and best newspapers can't carry that effort to very end shows how hard the job is.

42. "Patrimoine"

 

Oh Americans, if only you could borrow this word from the French for a while. It would solve so many of your problems.

Are you offended by the Ten Commandments on government property? Do you have trouble with "In God we trust" on our coins? Think of it not as Christianity forced on non-believers, people free not to believe, but as an honoring of our heritage. And if you don't want to use our word "heritage," if you think that's going to suggest too much that's white, or European, or male, use the French word. "Oh, we're just doing that because it's part of the 'patrimoine.'"

Use the word the French use for "heritage" and then look at how much they cram into it. They're the least-believing, most non-churchgoing people in the world and how do they behave toward their churches? With the greatest reverence. They pour more money into their preservation than we spend on Interstate bridges. "Bien sur, c'est le patrimoine."

I'm reminded of what our young guide said as she excused taking us to view Lenin's living quarters, preserved in Pskov: "It's our history, part of us." Christianity and the English character formed by Christianity are not just part of us, they are the center of us. Without those Protestant constituencies who in the seventeenth century elected the squires who showed us what made parliaments work we'd have never made it in the eighteenth century. And I'm not referring to the production of a constitution. I'm referring to the character that makes a constitution work. I'm referring to what the African statesman saw lacking in his own country when he asked the New York Times writer (memory tells me it was Jeffrey Goldberg) "Why do you obey judges' rulings?"

A constitution, laws, rules, contracts, all can be done in by people who don't work within them in good faith, people who use them for their own purposes. In the end democracy, as we've learned in its fall in so many countries with constitutions, depends on a certain character. And character is developed over time, in a tradition. Ours is indicated on our coins and in our choice of holidays.

The trick of course these days is to honor our coin-holiday tradition without offending Americans bringing the benefits of other, more recent traditions.  Or, I should say, part of the trick. The other part is to keep the vocabulary of offense ("marginalization," "prejudice," "centrism") under control. We best do that, I think, by keeping our eyes on history. History shows us that the Christian Protestant English tradition is accurately called "central" and that other traditions, if you have to say it, are accurately called "marginal." If we speak otherwise we go out of control, linguistically, and — I was about to say "endanger democracy," but I see that's only a remote possibility. So let me just say we make ourselves vulnerable to language satirists like George Orwell. We're doing the equivalent of a Stalinist re-write.