79. "Animal Rights"

"When you tell me I should treat animals in a humane way I have a pretty clear idea of what you mean. If I have doubts I can ask you. But when you tell me I should give them rights I have no clear idea, and I don't think it will do any good to ask you. Nobody seems to have a clear idea of what 'rights' means when applied to animals."

I am talking to Peter Singer, who once again has called for inclusion of animals "within the sphere of beings with rights" (NYRB, 10-13-11). I am doing so after reviewing my every source on the meaning of "rights." There are natural rights and legal rights and social rights and ethical rights, which break down into claim rights and liberty rights and negative rights and positive rights and economic rights and cultural rights and a few others. It's the most complicated subject you ever saw.

Reading more of Singer I construct his response: "You're letting the broad view obscure the narrow point. If animals have legal rights there will be a penalty for not treating them humanely. Fewer animals will be abused. You can't count on a change in human behavior without a penalty."

That's clear. And its implications are clear. The penalty of disapproval — by my society or (maybe) my own conscience — is not enough. You can't trust that disapproval or see it working. Not the way you can with the government that fines you.

The realism in that makes its humanity convincing, but I think I make Singer's aim too narrow. He certainly wants all of society to disapprove of cruelty to animals. And in that aim he obviously intends his word "rights" to do more than it does in a law book, just as he intended "liberation" in his first book title (Animal Liberation) to do more than it does in a pet-care book. Like any good orator speaking in a good cause he's taking advantage of whatever attraction his words have gained.

For me that move ends the clarity. I'm thrown into the noisiest of controversies. "Animals can't enter into a social contract. They can't make moral choices. They don't recognize obligations and responsibilities. You can't make any contract with them, much less a social contract." It appears, indeed, that with animals you can't have any of the reciprocal relationships within which our term "rights" has gotten its meaning. The concepts don't fit.

So what's the attraction in that word? It's good as oratory — salesmanship, spin. Like "liberation" it has (or had) a lot of pull with educated audiences. And that's good to have in a cause as good as this one, obtaining a penalty for the mistreatment of animals. The question is, Is it worth throwing the whole subject into conceptual disorder?

What would keep order? Using terms that fit the order we already have in our legal system. In that system, animals don't have rights; humans have constraints. Could you get what you want for animals simply by constraining humans, in the law's customary language?

Maybe you could. I think you could. But could you sell it that way? That's another question.

78. Know-it-all Cyber Busybodies

Does anyone have a program nanny as irritating as mine? I type in "word" as a label for a post on this blog. On the screen "complaint word" appears. I had entered it as a label earlier. My subject can never be "philosophy" now; it has to be "continental philosophy."

I have the feeling this nanny has watched over me before. "Roland, this is what you want, this is what you need, this is what you are interested in, this is what your choices are." But worst of all, "This is what you mean." At the speed of light that wagging finger appears. I want to bite it. Am I alone?

77. "My culture's better than yours."

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A lot of people, citing cultural anthropologists, tell me that I can't say that my culture is better than somebody else's. I am expressing an ethnocentric prejudice.

Yet cultural anthropologists, if the summary of their position in my History of the Modern World is correct, actually do let me say such a thing.  To them, according to Palmer, Colton, and Kramer, "no culture or society was 'better' than any other, all being adaptations to an environment." The permission taken away in the first part of the sentence is restored in the second. I can say, "This culture has adapted better than that one." Better.

For support I point to Chinese culture. Its emphasis on education has filled the awards lists of American high schools with the names of its young. Note the number of graduates high in Silicon Valley. The Chinese have adapted better than anybody to the California environment.

So, we have another reminder (after Post #56) that as soon as we contemplate a particular end, as soon as we abandon categorical assertion, we are entitled to, we are obliged to, discriminate among means. (See Post # 8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.) Here cultures provide the means. And with all the other ends people may have in a mixed society we may do the same.

All right, I move through a mixed society — the U.S., and more and more the world — with a permit to use the words "better" and "worse" with respect to cultures. Holding the permit is not enough, though. You've got to get somebody to honor it. And in today's universities you'll have a devil of a time. "Value judgment" is still a put-down word in science lounges. Look as if you're going to make such a judgment and a sociologist will snort like a spooked horse. You've violated an axiom: "There are or can be no value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures."

So with many of my colleagues listening I still can't say what I want to say to people who force women to have clitorectomies. What do I want to say? This: "You stink. Your culture stinks. Any culture that encourages doing this to little girls stinks."

There was once a way of placing that statement (tempered, of course) under an acceptable category: possible truth. If mankind were one, if sympathies were universal, and if some sympathies were so beneficial that, if shared, they improved the life of all mankind, then there was the chance that any individual, at any time, might express one. If history showed that life was indeed improved when the displayed sympathy was shared then the statement had all the verification needed to be called a "truth."

That way of placing value statements was developed in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, a period now in bad repute. Its universalism has not stood up under the poundings of relativism. And verification of its "truths"? That comes so far in the future. You have to believe in "progress."

Oh that we Enlightenment types could live for that verification. Oh to be there to see relativists put down. Oh that the Enlightenment had a God who could bring us all together after time has run its course.

I see a representative of the offending culture, surveying the full sweep, seeing where it ended, reflecting for a while and saying, "Clitorectomy, you know. That really did stink."

But God has arranged it so that we're still human. The enlightened offender reproaches me: "Why didn't you tell me?"

And I, savoring my revenge, say, "Because the cultural relativists wouldn't let me."

76, "Reasonable doubt"

A man can't be executed in the United States unless a jury finds him guilty of a capital crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." That tells us that his living or dying is going to depend on what his jurors take the word "reasonable" to mean.

What's to guide them? The word "beyond" suggests that there's a line. Up to it, reasonable; past it, no. How unrealistic. We're in the human world, not geometry class.

Law dictionaries pretend to help. A few tell us that "beyond a reasonable doubt" means "moral certainty." Oh yes, that's where you find clear lines, in morality. All us jurors are going to know when answers to moral questions are certain.

There's no escape. We're stuck with individual differences. Everybody's stuck. If you do away with juries and go with a judge (or a lord, or an apparatchik) you're stuck with his individual difference.

And aren't we, in philosophy class, stuck with relativism? There's no absolute, no objective judgment, no line-drawing machine. You use words that make it sound as if there is such a thing but my, look where they leave you. "Preponderance of the evidence." "Preponderance": superiority in weight. You look to see which side the balance falls on. Yes, and who's doing the weighing? And how heavy is each thing that goes into the pan? Weights are assigned, not discovered.

Even the expression that supports all this, there in the Constitution, "due process," is infected by subjectivity. "Due": owed. What does a man having coming to him? You can specify the procedures in legal statute and establish them in court practice but still, might he deserve more? or less? We differ, friend.

The more we are convinced of our differences, though, the closer we come to that most dangerous of convictions: that everything in the moral sphere is subjective, or relative. Though possibly true, that belief is dangerous because it invites a slide into two really destructive convictions, that one moral belief is as good as an another, and that there is no good guidance.

You have to leave it to experience to counter the first belief, which it usually does soon enough, but to counter the second all you have to do is look at a Supreme Court opinion on the very expression we're most worried about, "beyond a reasonable doubt." In 1970 the Court said (in re Winship) that this standard of proof is grounded on "a fundamental value determination of our society." There you are, juror. Find out what values your society has determined to be fundamental and apply them to the case before you.

The values are many and about some there may be respectable differences but about the one that brought forth the Court's opinion there is, I think, likely to be difference only among those who haven't learned it. It's that "it is far worse to convict an innocent man than to let a guilty man go free."

That's easy guidance. Hard guidance is guidance in society's values that are not so clear or are still at issue. Here's where teachers come in. Let them get young citizens' values straightened out in school, say in civics class, before they get to a jury room. Get them started, at least, on the meaning of words like "reasonable" and "due."

75. What a Teacher Substitutes for Reality

Why do teachers have to find a substitute for reality? Because relativists have taken it away from them. (See Post #73.) No more real world, no more objective truth. Only representations and constructions.

What can they substitute? I, dealing in words, suggest "resistance." It's a word they can use without claiming any of that knowledge they're not supposed to have. All they claim to know is that there's something out there that has to be overcome before a student, or anybody, can reach his goals.

That's their expertise. Want to fly a kite? Run with it into the wind. Tie the bridle this way. Want to design kites? Here are the laws of aerodynamics. Want to read poems? Start by construing the sentences.

They don't need a name for the something out there that makes all this necessary. All they need is consistency in the resistance it offers. It does no good to teach kite-flying if aerodynamics varies from day to day.

Do they need to know why there is consistency? It doesn't appear so, yet such knowledge would be helpful — in the way that knowing why there is consistency in an aerodynamic resistance would be helpful (it lets you generalize at a higher level). But in teaching you always have to think about time constraints. Can we acquire this in a quarter? Ask that question about what's ultimately behind the consistency, or ultimately behind anything, and experience, university-wide, tells you no.

The criterion of helpfulness reduces the discussion-time for many subjects (metaphysics, theology) in our utilitarian courses. And it removes from the discussion those relativists who think that their choice of a representation or construction is unconstrained by reality — to use the old word for resistances. Those who think one representation of reality is as good as another are outside the circle. There's no point in their taking the course.

Note: I see that leaves me with a definition of reality. It's what relativists have to measure their representations and constructions against.

74. What "Class Warfare" Conjures.

First "conjure": to call up a spirit or devil. "Class warfare" calls up communism. That devil, Congressional Republicans want us to remember, would have had the citizens of every nation, divided into classes, at each other's throats. That's what you, President Obama, would have Americans do when you agitate for higher taxes on the rich.

What you need, Mr. President, is a counter-expression, conjuring up a good spirit, one you'll be acting in the name of. But not acting gently. We've had enough of that. Acting forcefully, like a Crusader. Get the word "war" into your expression.

I know. A lot of people hate war, or at least blood. So you've got to avoid conjuring that. Nothing that can be pictured as a target, nothing that will bleed. But people don't mind wars against abstractions (poverty, terror), and may in fact love them. So, let's find an abstraction that fits what you're doing and sock the Republicans with it.

Not so easy, is it. The best I can come up with is "War on Inequity." I know that "inequity" is a little on the egghead side, which I know you want to get off of, but it is abstract and it does identify your target. It certainly won't bleed. The only hazard I can see is in the typing. If you come out with "War on Iniquity" you're on the religious right's ground and the gotcha humorists will make you bleed.

73. Attention to Words as a Response to Relativism

Oh those conversations in the eighties and nineties. You could hear Richard Rorty quoted ("Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences") in half the disciplines in the humanities. In the English Department the appeals were to Jacques Derrida ("There are only differences") and Chaim Perelman ("There are only audiences") — in addition to Rorty. Imply a claim for objective truth and you'd get one of them. Then you're in a troubling philosophical argument — and all you wanted to do, usually, was clear up a few problems in the Interpretation of Poetry course.

Get into trouble often enough and you'll figure out a way to get out. Here's my way. Say you're a scientist. You're accused of believing in the existence of a real world that can be objectively known. You say, "No, I just believe in the existence of a group of people who call each other 'scientists.' I take 'scientist' to be a compliment-word and I want them to apply it to me.

"What do I do to get the compliment? The same things I have been doing to discover objective reality. I examine nature, declare what I have discovered in a journal, and wait for the compliment. If readers of the journal, replicating my examination, get the same results I got I get the compliment. They were persuaded. That's all I'm doing, persuading people. Just as Aristotle's orator did.

"Except that there's a difference in our audiences. Mine isn't persuaded until the needles on their dials are in the same place I reported my needles to be. There's my rhetoric. When I work day and night in my lab I don't say I'm seeking the truth about the world, I say I'm working on a speech, the only kind that will persuade these people."

The scientist has something quieting to say, then, to each relativist. To Rorty: "With 'scientist' I merely take your compliment a step further, from sentence to sentence-maker." To Derrida: "I too deal only in difference; here it's the difference between language that gets me the compliment and language that doesn't." To Perelman: "I never go beyond the needs of my audience."

That's a scientist's response but it's not so different from mine. In my poetry class my audience needs reports on how English speakers form sentences and give meanings to words. Those reports they get from me, drawing on grammar book and dictionary. Without them they, with relatively little experience in the reading of English, can't construe sentences, the first operation in the reading of a poem.

It's to satisfy this need that I try to keep relativists quiet. Half my work is the work of a scientist, providing reports which, if believed, will allow my audience to proceed to the really rewarding part of their work, letting their imaginations go where the poet points them. In the first half of the job relativistic statements of the type we heard in the last century, are inadmissible. They are admissible in the second half, where differences in what's imagined are all the fun.

Keeping the two straight is one of the hardest jobs in the English classroom, if not in all of the humanities. You can convince beginning students — natural, self-protecting subjectivists — that scientific standards govern part of poetry-reading but it takes a lot of class time. Quarters are too short, life is too short, to allow relativists to lengthen it.

72. How Barack Obama and George W Bush Are Alike.

They both took advantage of a crisis to do what they wanted to do. Bush wanted to invade Iraq, Obama wanted laws expanding Headstart, Pell Grants and a host of liberal projects he had been working for. Both men were going to have a hard time getting what they wanted. Then along came, for Bush, the 9-11 attacks and, for Obama, the Great Recession. Have to have military operations. Include Iraq. Have to have a stimulus to the economy. Work in the liberal agenda.

It's hard to see how, without a crisis, either one would have gotten much public and Congressional support. Imagine, out of the blue: "Let us invade Iraq in order to bring freedom and democracy to its people." Imagine: "Let us now finish the New Deal."

Of course I don't know their actual motives. I'm making inferences from their behavior and known views. In Bush's case these are pretty well documented and I don't need a columnist to point them out. I did need one in Obama's case and on Monday Ross Douthat stepped in and supplied the need:

The hope was that the [stimulus] legislation would do more than just kickstart a recovery: It would lay a new foundation for the economy, with an electric car in every garage and a Solyndra solar panel on every roof. The result, predictably, was a bill that looked less like a temporary exercise in crisis management and more like the Democratic Party's permanent wish list. (NYT, 9-12-11)

Obama joined Bush when he went along with that bill.

The difference between the two is seen in their words after the defects in their policies became clear. Obama is now making speeches that, according to Douthat, suggest

that he intends to campaign for re-election on what should have been the blueprint for his first four years in office: a short-term stimulus highlighted by a payroll tax cut, a medium-term push to overhaul the tax code and a plan for long-term entitlement reform.

In this, which Douthat sees as "a request for a presidential do-over," a "second chance to get things right," we see a man who learns by experience and admits a mistake.

That's the opposite of what we see in George Bush, who in his recently published autobiography, Decision Points,, rests in the belief that the invasion of Iraq was thoroughly justified. And, going by what we are now hearing from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, that belief is not likely to change. Those whose views were closest to his (and even, some say, responsible for his) are suggesting that the Arab Spring confirms that justification.

Sometimes the nation benefits when a perceptive leader takes advantage of a crisis. President Roosevelt, with an eye on the long term, added Federal Deposit Insurance, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority to his immediate recovery measures, slipping them in when the opposition was most frightened.

In the end the benefit depends on the perceptiveness of the leader, and the trust of that perceptiveness in the voters who elect him and keep him going. In 2004 voters trusted Bush enough to keep him going. In 2012 they'll have to gauge their trust in Obama. If we judge by reaction to mistakes the men are more significantly different than they are alike.

71. "Bleeding heart"

 

For centuries a bleeding heart was a good thing — Christ's sacred heart bleeding for humanity, Mary's immaculate heart bleeding for her son, human hearts (in the "imitation of Christ") bleeding for their fellows. Catholic painters gave it to you — the actual heart, there, blood streaming — and Protestant authors reminded you of it. Some of Dickens' most sympathetic characters were found in Bleeding Heart Yard. A bleeding heart meant compassion.

Now a "bleeding heart" means "liberal sap." Are you downtrodden? Are you being called imprudent? Is your favorite species in danger? Here's an organ that will bleed for you.

The opposite of a bleeding heart would be a callused heart. "Callused heart" is not used as a comeback in the put-down contest but if it were I suppose liberals would apply it to Ron Paul, who just objected (Fox News, 8/30/11) to FEMA's enlarged part in aid to disaster victims.

Care has to be taken in identifying either kind of heart, though. The callused heart must be distinguished from the tough heart, which can be loving, and the bleeding heart must be distinguished from the compassionate heart, which is … different how? There's a problem. A compassionate heart bleeds, doesn't it?

Yes, but not publicly. The difference is in the display. The person the conservatives identify is saying, "Look at me. Am I not a good Christian? Am I not sensitive to suffering?" It's more than compassion. "Bleeding heart" distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart displayer.

And "callused heart" (in the Bible the "hardened heart") distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart dismisser. The dismissal comes across in the way victims are spoken of. “The bleeding heart will say, well, we have to take care of them,” said Ron Paul of the flood victims. He's betrayed by his indifferent tone. And also, I should say, by his word-choice. Callused hearts often give themselves away by their use of "bleeding heart."

Which isn't to say that heart-display is good or bad. That's very much in dispute, especially since T. E. Hulme complained about it in the Romantic poets. "I object," he said, "to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other." I think he must have had Shelley in mind. "Wail, for the world's wrong."

Shelley. Would you like to see, or be reminded of, some real sappiness? Follow him through "The Indian Serenade." A dream of his lady wakes him up and a "spirit in his feet," he says, leads him to her chamber window where he's so overcome by love that he passes out.

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast —

Oh! Press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

It doesn't help to say that Shelley was writing for a public which at that time admired sensitive male responses. So much the worse for the public and poets who cater to it.

And so much the worse for our definition of "bleeding heart." We've added cynicism to it. When Shelley, at the end of a very serious poem, "Ode to the West Wind," says, "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed," we see a play to the public. We take him less seriously.

Are Christian hearts more prone to bleeding than others? You'd expect them to be, considering where sin is located for Christians: not in the deed, not in the consequence, but in the motive. Wish to kill your brother and you have killed him. "Whosoever looketh after a woman to lust hath committed adultery in his heart." Locate sin in the heart and you're going to have a lot of looking into it. And oh what temptation to display what you have found, or would like people to think you have found.

Some have wondered whether Christian democracies are more prone to well-intentioned blunders than other nations.   I'd say yes, you'd expect them to be. Their voters will worry more about wanting good ends, having their hearts in the right place, than good means, having their armies in the right place.

70. The Sixties? That's Murk You're Looking Into.

 

All right, the man who gives me the most penetrating insight into the student riots of the sixties, T. E. Hulme, is associated with the fascists of the Action Francaise. Obviously he can't be trusted. Fascists are bad and he's bad. Do I have moral clarity?

No, you have moral facility. You have a litmus test that makes good-bad judgment easy. Thousands before you have applied it. It's the Nazis' gift to moral debate in the twentieth century.

And delivered, I see, by the logic of association (see Post #66), not real logic. A passing cloud. But still, enough to make me go back and check the essay. I see that Hulme's insight stands on its own merits. I'll use it.

Yes, you're the boss, as a man seeking moral clarity has to be.

Thank you. Now I can present you with a real problem. I'd been doing all this marching, real and symbolic, behind the out-of-Viet-Nam banners. The march had changed somewhat, the students were crazier and the banners weren't quite the same ("national crime" had been changed to "national stupidity," but I'd kept marching. Then I thought about what I was saying, what the words on the banner meant. "Get out of Viet Nam." Was that what I really wanted us to do? No. I really wanted us never to have gotten in. That stupidity. But, just as a military analyst, I had to admit that there was a world of difference between getting out and not getting in. Once you're in you face a host of new choices, and you'd better not make them without doing your staff work. Retreat in the face of hostile fire has always been difficult for generals, justification of retreat to the public has always been difficult for politicians, (admit failure? cut and run?) and reconciliation with the conscience difficult for individual citizens (our promises to our allies? our responsibility for countries we've messed up?). It's all extremely complicated. And there I was, saying simply, "Get out, get out." I was one with all the knee-jerk sloganeers who got us in. So what do I do? Go home?

The problem is clear, but I don't know the solution. It's the problem of complexity, made worse here by the fact that, as I remember, there weren't any other marches in town. Here we may be facing one of those problems that are just beyond our powers.

But I've named the problem, "complexity," I don't know the half of it. Consider this, suggested by a friend: what I was seeing on campuses wasn't close to what I was calling it, a political revolution. It was a social revolution. Of course it didn't live up to my expectations. The social and political were all mixed up. It was about as complex a situation as a moralist can imagine.

I can believe that, but I don't think "complexity" is the right name for what my friend described.  Putting a social revolution on top of a political revolution obscures the picture but it doesn't keep a determined moralist from clearing it up. In a political revolution, for example, the agents have aims. In a social revolution the agents just do things in a way that satisfies them more and sociologists call the result a revolution. Seeing differences like that — and there are a lot of them — is difficult but it can be done. The problem is obscurity.

And obviously I can't give up on it. But I think I've now gone as far as I can go so I think I'll let it alone for a while.

69. Watching Students Riot While Teaching Christian Authors

That was a painful sight, bad students throwing bricks and good students smiling on them as they screwed up their revolution. Few of us could explain it — or much else connected with the riots.

Old-time Christians could explain it, of course.  They had a scheme into which the rioting students fit perfectly. Human beings rioted because since Adam's fall they were born to do evil. If they weren't reborn in Christ, they'd keep doing it.

The name "Yahoo" brought in the whole Christian scheme. It was the name Jonathan Swift, an Anglican priest, used in Gulliver's Travels for the unregenerate man. Those university people who couldn't bring in the Christian scheme (out of scientific scruple, say) or didn't know it (out of curricular neglect of the humanities, say) were left in doubt.

I wasn't in doubt long because I was teaching a lot of Christian authors at the time. One of them, John Milton, gave me not only the scheme but the warning to political humanity that went with it. It's so apt and so well put that I'm going to quote it here in full. The archangel Michael is speaking to Adam, who has just recoiled from a vision of Nimrod, the first tyrant.

Justly thou abhorr'st

That Son, who on the quiet state of men

Such trouble brought, affecting to subdue

Rational Liberty; yet know withal,

Since thy original lapse, true Liberty

Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells

Twinn'd, and from her has no dividual being:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed,

Immediately inordinate desires

And upstart Passions catch the Government

From reason and to servitude reduce

Man till then free. Therefore since he permits

Within himself unworthy Powers to reign

Over free Reason, God in judgment just

Subjects him from without to violent Lords,

Who oft as undeservedly enthral

His outward freedom. Tyranny must be,

Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse.

Paradise Lost, XII, 79-96

Teaching Milton to a class with revolutionaries of the sixties in it was thrilling. Milton's revolutionary credentials were impeccable, and so easily dramatized. He had come hurrying back from Italy as soon as he heard of his friends getting engaged in Parliament's stand against the king, he had joined the movement, he had risen, he had become propaganda minister in Cromwell's revolutionary government, he had defended the killing of the king before a Europe full of threatening monarchies. And all the while he was writing those essays on divorce and freedom of the press whose progressive ideas would resound for centuries. You couldn't ask for a better revolutionary.

And here he was coming out for the old internal hierarchy, where reason's place over the passions was firmly fixed. It was Plato, it was Dante, it was Shakespeare, it was medieval, renaissance, and, yes, even enlightenment. It was pretty much the whole Western intellectual establishment, up to the romantic period.

There were a lot of other authors, just in my undergraduate courses, ready to put sixties behavior in perspective for us. Herman Melville, in "The House-Top" (printed out, below) showed us why we were so slow at recognizing the Yahoo, or the Yahoo in ourselves: we were a romantic nation. T. E. Hulme, in an essay in our criticism anthology, made romanticism clear. It taught that "man was by nature good," and that "it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him." Its opposite, classicism, taught that man was "an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal," but that he could be "disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent." (You can read the whole essay, "Romanticism and Classicism," at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/238694)

Not everybody will say that that is moral clarity but I'm going to say it. I didn't know what I was seeing in my students and T.E. Hulme cleared away the fog. There were the students, there were my authors, and there was my country, all clearly placed. My seeing that may not count for much in the larger scheme but this is about personal morality — the person being me.

Like many moral clarifications this one was satisfying because I was in the picture, and standing in a very good light. Professors of the humanities, especially English professors, taught the tradition by which "something fairly decent" could be got out of this creature. I was particularly privileged because I, through Milton, taught the revolutionary tradition, the discipline and order in it.

Reading Hulme in preparation for a class, reading him anew with images of the OU riots crowding in, was the curtain-parting moment of insight. It deserved to be called an epiphany.

Well, if "epiphany" is the word, I'll use it for the moral of the story: don't trust epiphanies. They don't dispel the fog for long. T. E. Hulme, it turns out, was a fascist. Or, in 1908. a fascist precursor. He ran around with the crowd at Action Fancaise, whose founder was the anti-semite Charles Maurras.

But that wasn't the only thing obscuring the moral picture. Other clouds were coming over, as I'll show in the next post.

--------------------

The House-Top

Note: When the Union began drafting soldiers to fight the Civil War affected New Yorkers rioted for four days, attacking mainly blacks — the cause of the war — and hanging scores from lampposts in the city. Arson was directed mainly at black institutions. The mobs went on to general destruction and grew until they overpowered the police. The riots ended only when a regiment marched up from Washington (under the command of a colonel referred to below as "wise Draco") and in effect re-conquered the city.

No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air
And blinds the brain—a dense oppression, such
As tawny tigers feel in matted shades,
Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage.
Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads
Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by.
Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf
Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot.
Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought,
Balefully glares red Arson—there—and there.
The town is taken by its rats—ship-rats
And rats of the wharves. All civil charms
And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe—
Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway
Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve
And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature.
Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead,
And ponderous drag that jars the wall.
Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll
Of black artillery; he comes, though late;
In code corroborating Calvin's creed
And cynic tyrannies of honest kings;
He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed,
Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds
The grimy slur on the Republic's faith implied,
Which holds that man is naturally good,
And—more—is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged.

68. Not Clowns for God but Real, Excrement-throwing Yahoos.

 

If you no longer believe that the side you joined is good you lose your starting sense of virtue.  By the end of 1968 the Yippie side — meaning sixties youth in rebellion against the establishment — was doing so much harm to the good cause of peace in Viet Nam that I felt like a sinner going to their meetings.

Those student meetings. At one of them there was a fellow ready to go to Washington in a football helmet, carrying a baseball bat, wearing a T-shirt that said "Free Manson."

Maybe it was theater. I don't know. My age group was slow. But whatever it was the students at those meetings were ignorant of power. They were blind to the fact that in a democracy it's not in the streets, it's in the ballot box, and in modern America what goes in the box depends on what voters see on screens. What were they going to see here? Not what I saw. Not clever actors in a street drama, not wise fools, not clowns for God, but Yahoos. Real, excrement-throwing Yahoos.

As for the student leaders at this time, they showed me what courage was — not! There was an easy thing you could call courage: standing up firmly to the establishment. This meant going along with the people on your side. And then there was the hard thing: standing up to people on your side. Like saying to that fellow in the helmet, "Nope, can't have people screwing up the revolution. You're outta here." It's exactly the courage we ask modern Muslim leaders to show in dealing with their extremists.

Intellectual leadership? That was found mainly in The Post, our excellent student newspaper, one of the best in the country (one of only three the New York Times kept on file). No matter how good the editors were, though, they couldn't control their letter writers, or, at times, their own instincts for solidarity. By the seventies the establishment not only couldn't punish students right, it couldn't even look at them right. After riots that brought the National Guard to patrol the streets the Athens Police Department put some officers on the roof of Marting's Department Store to watch for further trouble. Post editors were outraged by the insult. A letter-writer's word for it was "tyranny." Logan's Bookstore, after taking several bricks through its windows, put floodlights outside. More insult. They put up cameras inside to protect against shoplifters. The last straw. You cannot, said the intellectuals, insult our Yahoos.

Ohio University students were far from alone in this kind of admonishment. "You have broken some of the best heads in the country," said the Yale student president, wagging his finger at the commencement audience. (How he must cringe now remembering that statement, the pomposity of it. What mature boomer wouldn't be cringing?) As at a lot of Midwestern schools, Ohio University people had their eyes on the Ivy League. That included student leaders.

I have already given my view of what these students, Yale and OU, were doing: expressing (in Melville's terms) "the Republic's faith" that man is "naturally good, and more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged" (Post #32, "Mob"). and suggsted that they were responding to the tremendous flattery they had received in those postwar years. Commencement speaker after commencement speaker had told them how superior they were. They had come in with the highest test scores in history. They were going out in a blaze of achievement. They were the new best, the new brightest.

But there was a deeper flattery, generated first by America's immigrants. Though those immigrants were "wretched refuse" they had these boys (it was always boys) who were going to knock everybody's lights out. If you beam on boys their way those who "succeed," those who, bless the Lord, are in college, are going to have a pretty high opinion of themselves.

Some foreigners I've listened to say that what I was looking at was just another form of "American youth-worship," which they say has a long history. If there is such a thing, in the sixties America certainly paid for it. It produced behavior so ugly that it sent once-worshiping Americans, the majority whose backing was needed for peace, fleeing right back — for a while — to the ugly devils that were for war.

The price I and a number of professors paid was low. In the race to personal morality we'd backed the wrong horse. These kids weren't going to win anything for us. The price the country paid was another matter.

67. English Composition vs. Sarah Palin

 

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I think "Vague" was probably the word most often found in the margins of English Composition themes. You had to be on top of freshmen all the time to get them to be specific.

In yesterday's Athens Messenger Jonathan Alter of Bloomberg News revealed that he must have been an English teacher. He was all over Republican candidates for being so vague about President Obama's decision-making. "What, specifically, has he done wrong on policy? What, specifically, would you have done to create jobs?"

He went on to scold them, and a few politicians on the left, for their dim charges on the stimulus, and bailouts, and jobs, and health care, and the debt limit. If it had been in red his final imperative could have come right from the schoolmarm pencil I used: "Be specific and rational, not vague and visceral."

I can't help thinking about that pencil when I listen to Sarah Palin's speeches. She's a great example. Real Americans, real Americans, real Americans. My wife counted at least four "real Americans" in one short clip.

I think she needs a good scolding. I see it coming from my seventh-grade, Middle-West, middle-class English teacher. "Now Sarah, you know that's a lazy way to write. You've got to think about what you say. God gave you a mind. Use it."

And you know who else you could put in that class, right next to Palin?  Ulrike Meinhof of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, those radicals of the German student protest movement of the sixties, the ones with so much Gramsci and Marcuse in their mouths —claims for "authenticity" and "anti-"fascistization," cries against "repressive tolerance" and "cultural hegemonism," enunciation of one Marxist abstraction after another, further and further removed from "the specific and rational."

Isn't that a happy picture, Sarah Palin and Ulrike Meinhof, squirming in their seats, forced to take a scolding from Mrs. Davison or the visiting Bloomberg journalist?

66. Julian Assange and the Logic of Association

A good way to assure yourself and the world that you are good is to attack something evil. Another way, almost as good, is to attack something associated with that evil. If you want assurance that you're really good you can tear the hell out of it.

That's Julian Assange's way. Secrecy is associated with the KGB and the CIA and the Nixon plumbers. Assange starts WikiLeaks and tears the hell out of it. He's free of any need to think specifically of secrecy's actual operations, or ask how each operation might be logically connected to a good or an evil. The logic of association licenses him to be vague.

The students who burned down the ROTC building in the sixties. operated under the same license. The Army was associated with an evil war. Destroy its ability to produce officers. Ignore the specific need for an Army and its officers — as, say, in Arkansas when Governor Faubus tried to keep black students out of school.

That's the way of all the Americans railing against "Washington." Washington is associated with evil politics. Elect people who will repudiate it. Don't ask where you will put them. (Scatter them around the country? Install them on ships? Send them to the moon?)

Can anything be said for this poor "logic" of association? Sure. It's the only way lazy thinkers can think themselves good.

65. How Alertness to a Word Change Could Have Saved Us in Viet Nam.

What made us WWII veterans share the Yippie view of the Viet Nam War was, oddly, an argument in Curtis LeMay's line: our sending troops to Viet Nam was unjustifiable militarily. Forget the morality of it. You don't attack an enemy without learning his capabilities. We attacked with no idea of the staying power, much less the on-the-ground firepower, of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Who the hell did the staff work? Didn't we have anybody who could see that it was long-term nationalism, not monolithic communism, that explained the staying power?

Apparently President Johnson didn't have anybody, and that doomed him. He couldn't win and he couldn't get out. We'll never forget how terrible it was.

How could he have avoided that terribleness? By broader staff work, says the military man. Johnson's staff failed him in judging the enemy, sure, but it still could have judged his own people successfully. Staffs are used to telling generals about the condition of their troops — their state of training, their health, their morale. Johnson's staff could have said to him, "Sir, we've got people here, not just troops, who hate to lose. They hate to admit that they're losing. That's going to make it very hard to get out of this once you're in it."

That's military. Politicians know such things in their bones. Lyndon Johnson didn't need a staff to tell him that Americans hate to lose. He'd been to Texas high-school football games.

So, did he have a chance of bringing this knowledge to bear, and saving us from that terrible decade?

I think he had a good chance, but to take it he had to be alert to the importance of words — the way English majors are taught to be. In March, 1965, Johnson sent Americans openly into combat at Da Nang. Up to this point they had been "advisers"; here they became "soldiers" — the word naming what many of them had in fact been for some time. You'd just changed words.

If only Johnson had understood the magnitude of that change. An "adviser" can't be defeated. He is merely thwarted. Soldiers can be defeated. "Defeat" is what your rival does to your high school when it outscores your football team. "Thwart" is what city council does to it when it votes to change your principal's busing plan. Substitute the first for the second in the mouths of the people back home and you've put their team on the field. From then on it's "us against them, dig in, hang in there, give 'em hell."

I'm hard pressed to think of a moment when words were more important, when the nation's need for leaders sensitive to words was greater, when just one flash of verbal perception could have accomplished so much. It's not just seeing what big things words can do; it's seeing what big things they can trigger. I think Johnson at Da Nang triggered something so big that no government effort, no diplomatic expertise, no twisting, no turning, could stop it.