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?

88. Pictures. Meaning, Facts.

When I'm told animals are "in danger" I picture fellow creatures I want to help. If I know that a human being is responsible — as the hobby farmer who went away without providing enough water for his stock was — I get angry. I picture cows and pigs and chickens gasping for a drink. I see them dying.

When I'm told that a species is in danger and that human beings are responsible my first pictures make me even angrier. I see families of gorillas dying on mountain slopes — as I once saw, in a movie, herds of dinosaurs gasping on a plain. A whole species going down! Who did this?

Then, when I pay closer attention to the meaning of the words I'm hearing, I realize that "animals" and "species" refer to quite different things, and if death is what affects me then I have to distinguish them. There is no relation between the scenes of animal death that arouse my anger and the security of the species. Animals with many of their kind in the world will die in as much pain as animals with few of their kind, and there will be more of them. In a world of constant predation, disease, and deprivation secure species supply me with more pitiable scenes than endangered species do.

By responding to words more thoughtfully I understand the fellow-creature problem better and that makes me a better member of the community of those who love animals and are concerned about the future. I will have seen that there are two issues here, and that I will damage their discussion, and their campaign — or, better, campaigns — if I confuse them. There's animal death with its causes and consequences and there's species extinction with its causes and consequences. Responsibilities may coincide but they are different.

Words both have meaning and generate pictures and sometimes the pictures take us a lot further than the meaning permits us to go. If the word-suggested picture is reinforced by a television picture we may be taken so far we'll never get back to the meaning. I hear "terrorist" and think "threat." I see five bodies around a bus stop and think "awful threat." I see thirty in a market place and think "monstrous threat." I'm feeling just what a "terrorist," according to the dictionary, wants me to feel, threatened. But how big a threat are these terrorists? The fact is that our chances of dying at the hand of a terrorist are lower than the chances of our dying by walking across the street. Do we consider that when we declare "war" on terrorists, in response to their "war" on us? There's no comparison. Think of what a threat of "war" means to a nation (tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands killed, billions spent). It's not close to what a "terrorist campaign" threatens. Yet there we go, picture-driven, into war.

It was pictures (starving children with flies on their faces) that drove us into Somalia and pictures (helicopter down, American bodies dragged through the streets) that drove us out. It was pictures of Belgian babies with their hands cut off, some say, that drove the Allies at the Germans in World War I. It was a word-picture of Kuwaiti babies taken from their incubators and left to die on the floor that first drove us into Iraq. There are always other forces driving us, of course, but the power is in the pictures — as the propaganda experts who provided those Belgian and Kuwaiti pictures well knew.

Attention to pictures, even false ones, can work for good (driving us into Nazi Germany) or for ill (driving us into Iraq) but it's clear, after all we have seen in the last hundred years, that only attention to meanings and facts can work for understanding. The pictures that drive us never tell us whether we should or should not be driven.

87. Uncertainty About the Word "Moral"

"Quietly but decisively Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system," said David Brooks yesterday on the Op-Ed page (NYT, 10-18-11). "Quietly" meant "not like the Wall Street occupiers" but what did "moral" mean?

I think I know what it means. All good people think they do. But then some good people, like Brooks, give you an example that makes you wonder. His first "moral norm" states that "you shouldn't spend more than you take in." I thought moral advice had to do with right and wrong. You got it from your preacher. Where does this come from? In my experience it could have come from old Moneybags down the street, tipping us delivery boys: "Watch your nickels, sonny, they add up to dollars." He was the town materialist.

So what are we talking about, goodness or prudence? If you think it's good to be prudent then there's no difference and you and Moneybags can go to Heaven together. If you think there is a difference then Heaven is a place for idealists. — not pure, of course, but having something of the ideal, of the spiritual, in them. Moneybags is held up at the door.

Brooks's second moral norm states that "there should be a link between effort and reward." Moneybags is with him on that one, too. "Rise early, sonny. Get ahead of the next fellow." Yet I know what Brooks means here, and I can't help thinking his way. I see Greeks taking it easy, then being rewarded by the hardworking Germans, and I say "wrong." I see banks freely risking other people's money, then being rewarded with a bailout, and I say "bad." Prudence is, and yet is not, a moral virtue.

My instinct puts me firmly on the side of Brooks and his quiet majority, "focused on fundamentals," and my analysis tells me I don't know where I am. "Repairing the economic moral fabric is the essential national task right now," says (through Brooks) the majority. What would they and I lose if that task were restated with the word "moral" removed, and then accomplished? We've got a healthy economic fabric, a nation high in material well-being. What exactly do we expect to add? What's the difference between our nation and the one over there that has a moral economic fabric? I mean, if the GDP is the same.

86. "Testosterone"

I think maybe "testosterone" is the best word for what keeps getting Americans into places like Iraq. Not "hubris," not "pride." Those words are too classroom. We need a street word.

Not any old street word, though. It's got to be one we can use with ease and confidence — without losing weight.  And I think that "testosterone" has gone pop enough to work.

How would it go? I see Americans beating their drums for an invasion. We shout, "Check the testosterone! Check the testosterone!" They say, "Oh, oh, too much," and stop to give their action more thought. We eggheads have communicated with all the confidence of a popular talk-show host or advice columnist.

Testosterone is what Thucydides saw in the Athenians, "seldom enjoying their possessions because they are always adding to them.…They are by nature incapable of either living a quiet life themselves or of allowing anyone else to do so." It's what Aeschylus and Sophocles saw in all men. Over-reaching. Dante, under the word "pride," made it the foundation for every other sin. Our word "testosterone" may sound pop but it hooks into a lot of weighty material.

So it gives us a way to tell the nation, and maybe the world, what it needs most: a good hormone manager. Like Elizabeth I. Oh, could she handle testosterone! I mean, half the royal balls in Europe ("Me! Me! Marry me!") and all the important noble ones — Raleigh, Essex, Drake — in England were hers to manipulate. Or like Pope Urban II, who pointed the really loaded ones at the Holy Land.

The whole world lacked such a manager in the years before World War I. What a loss to Europe! Great Power, Great Power, you had to be a Great Power. Think of all those European lions, growling over the carcass of Africa. Not a tamer in sight.  It's a wonder World War I didn't break out sooner.

Why aren't we Americans better at testosterone management? We have a big army. Who learns testosterone management better than a paratroop colonel? All those young men coming out of jump school, West Point, full of beans. Macho bursting out in all directions. Fights in the bars. Swagger in the O-clubs. He's got to channel it toward the enemy. "Keep your goddam mind on the goddam mission," he says to the lieutenant off on some extra-curricular heroics.

Free-floating testosterone, it's such a problem. In the Pacific it wanted to charge right over without waiting for the new carriers. In the poolrooms it wanted France now, now, before we had the landing craft.

What, let me ask you, was behind the Army's closing off Gordon Liddy's career? Fear of free-floating testosterone. Knowledge of it was just what the FBI lacked when they sent him out undercover to a town in Indiana and he blew the mission by swagger in a bar. "Try taking an airport with guys like that," says the colonel, "and you'll learn something about testosterone."

Some of our leaders have been pretty good at blocking unwanted testosterone.  Nimitz put a quick cork on the kind that would have had us charge west without the firepower, and Roosevelt certainly stifled those who wanted Normandy in '43.

It's in men who have had no experience of war — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Liddy — that the testosterone seems to float most freely. They're the ones you've really got to watch. Give in to them and you could be looking at a busted country.

And they're the ones who make Elizabeth look like such a …what? a gift from God.  She had no experience of war, and oh how she handled those guys. Oh what she gave the country. Years of peace and a surplus in the treasury. How did she do it?

I think it has to be imagination. Learning. Ability to speak to ambassadors in their own language. Good tutors, hard study. Attention to detail. Self-control. A little eggy, yes, but what a contrast with George W. Bush!

85. Suspense in the Sixties, Suspense Now

Street Movements and Moral Clarity (10)

I see that Hendrik Hertzberg in the latest New Yorker (10-17-11) is in the same state of suspense over the Wall Street occupiers that I was in over the Viet Nam war protesters. Will they focus on a worthy goal or will they blow their chance?

From my experience I can give him this exciting answer: some will and some won't. And the good that's done will depend on who the television cameras focus on. In 1968 it was Jerry Rubin and the Yippies — in Hertzberg's terms, "the flaky fringe." Now, who knows, but whoever it is a repetition will mean irrelevance, diffusion of force, disillusion. Hertzberg clearly fears that but, he says, it's "not too late to hope."

I want to tell him, and anybody else now in his state, that there are grounds for hope. You could see them right there in the sixties scene. If in today's university population we have any significant number of young people like those I saw going to work for Eugene McCarthy Hertzberg has nothing to worry about. Some American young people are going to be there ready to focus and, hopefully, make the others focus.

Remember that turnaround in 1968? The war was going on and on, Johnson was going to get re-elected, it would all continue, and then McCarthy stood up, declared against Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, New England's universities emptied their best students into the state to work for him, the votes poured in, and Johnson, shocked, dropped from the race. Power. Exerted by young people. Inside the system.

Humphrey steps in, takes over the Johnson machinery. McCarthy will run against him in the Indiana primary. Indiana, right next to Ohio. In our streets, as in most streets, we're hearing "Power to the People," black power, flower power, student power. Some students, though, are hearing, "power in the ballot box," and don't care if it's coming from what other students are calling "party hacks." They check in with McCarthy headquarters in Indiana and get organized.

In haste. Oh my God the haste. Who saw this coming? Who has any money? Small contributions come in. Veterans for Peace contributes fifty dollars. Not nearly enough for a bus but some students have cars. A prof has a station wagon. Here we go, OU for McCarthy.

Headquarters assigned our contingent two towns, Shelbyville and Franklin, historically tough for Democrats and poison for liberals. Canvassing would take place on separate weekends. Canvassers would be put up in private homes and church basements. They would feed themselves.

It may be hard now to appreciate what these establishment-joiners were giving up: status with the rebels, the hip, the icebreakers who were setting student style; the badges that showed their allegiance, the dress, the smoke, the long hair; even, here and there, the beard. "Lose it," said the boss in Indianapolis. Lose anything that might lose a vote for peace on the porches of Indiana.

The boss in Indianapolis, the one who set up the McCarthy operation throughout the state, was a nineteen-year-old sophomore. She had dropped out of Macalester College in Minnesota in the middle of the quarter. The fellow who was waiting for us in the one lit storefront in Shelbyville (it was one a.m., our people had late classes) had dropped out of Yale Law School. His briefing of arriving groups would take him well into the morning.

OK, so there's sacrifice, there's adulthood, there's the contrast with the juveniles around them, there's emersion from that juvenility. And there's the ground for hope that the young Americans in the Occupy Wall Street movement will focus on something worthy (Hertzberg lists seven possibilities) and not blow their big opportunity.

I hope they understand how big that opportunity is. At this moment the two-party system really is at a stand — worse, in its way, than in 1968. The Republicans won't squeeze the wealthy and the Democrats can't, not really. They need the big money as badly as the Republicans do. Why do you think Obama is so slow to crack down on them? To get re-elected he's got to pay for all that expensive television time. Same with the Democrats in Congress. So, without a campaign-finance law, the country's got nobody. Except, now, you. You've got a lot of eyes on you, OWS.

84. Postmodern Disturbance

Richard Butrick, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, has just sent me a reminder of what most disturbed our declining years at Ohio University. It was the claim that “there are no facts, only interpretation.” Nietzsche made it and postmodern theorists rubbed it in. Jacques Derrida: "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Michel Foucault: "What we call truth is only the expression of dominant power relations that control the cultural semiotic." E. H. Carr: "History is a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.”

It was terrible being told at the end of your career that there was "no such thing as truth." What were scientists searching for? What was the use of their method? What the hell were we (and so many commencement speakers) doing sending graduates out into the world to war against falsehood?

I think our disturbance was understandable, as is that of David Solway, the author of the piece Professor Butrick sent me (The Weakness of the West, pajamasmedia.com ). The shaking we felt was down in the foundations. Below the scientific method was the Socratic method, the questioning, the answering, the testing, the making sure. Below that was every step-by-step procedure human beings had struggled to work out. There wasn't one that didn't require confidence in the preceding step, it's "truth." At the bottom, it seemed, was rationality itself. And all was shaking.

However, the tremors were not as great as we thought they were and we were more disturbed than we needed to be. It wasn't the foundation that was shaking, it was the language. Let's say Butrick, Solway, and I are boarding an airplane for San Francisco with the scariest postmodernist of all, Michel Foucault. We all want to get there alive. The pilot tells us to turn our electronic devices off — an "expression of a dominant power relation" if I ever heard one. What is Foucault doing? Turning off his iPad with the rest of us. Why? Because Monday he saw the same NBC program I saw. A team of scientists, after a five-year study, had determined that there is, indeed, some risk of interference with airplane function during take-off and landing. Foucault, in the world that is not just a world of human power relations, doesn't want his chance of living to be any lower than that of the rest of us. He wants the scientific method to work. He pushes the button and certifies it.

Which tells me that Foucault didn't really believe those statements that shook us up. And Derrida didn't believe his. Is Derrida going to hear the pilot's words appealing "not to facts but to other words"? Not in the world where he, like the rest of us, wants to live.

Yet Foucault and Derrida sounded as if they believed those shocking things. They were "serious as a heart attack," somebody said. Well, I think they were serious, but about different things. They were serious about psychology (psychoanalysis) and politics, the things that were being taken most seriously by the people they were addressing at the time, French intellectuals. We were serious about words, the ordinary ones, the ones so often misused by the people we were addressing, students.

Well, they shared so much with their audience, they were held to so little by it, that they got careless with their words. When Foucault said, "Truth is only the expression of dominant power relations" he didn't mean only. He couldn't. He turned off his iPad. But he had a point to make in Paris so…. It was the same, I think, with Derrida.

So, Professor Butrick, let us enjoy our retirement in peace. You and I and Solway and Foucault and Derrida are all really on the same side.

83. "Barbarian"

We're listening in on Jimmy Carter's advisers as they debate his response to the imprisoning of American diplomats in Iran:

No, no, I really don't want him to use the word "barbaric." There's too much he can get charged with — you know, "colonial arrogance," "Eurocentric condescension," all that. And my God, this is a Middle Eastern country, and Muslim! Academics will be all over him for "orientalism," that old cover for imperialism. No, no word that says, "You have an inferior culture."

Yes, but he's got to have some word that puts those people in their place. And accurately. An accurate put-down name, that's what we need. Accurate enough to justify our going in there and doing something. Otherwise he looks weak. And the nation does too. Already we're being called "a bumbling, helpless super-power." And he's being called a "wimp."

Yeah, "wimp." And for what? For being civilized. For observing the customs — hell, "sharing the culture" — of civilized nations. Civilized nations don't attack each other’s diplomats, they protect them. No matter how "just" their cause.

All right, you've got your word. "Barbarous nations" attack emissaries and envoys and messengers carrying white flags. But keep it to yourself.

OK, I'll shut up. But first I'll ask you, "What would you call the President of a nation who responded to the imprisoning of his diplomats by imprisoning the diplomats of the offending nation?"

I'd call him a barbarian, sure. He's become the tribal chief who kept his messengers safe by knocking off ten messengers of any tribe that bothered them. It would be a reversion.

But it would spring his diplomats. If it didn't he, if he were Carter, could fill his jails with Iranians. There are a lot of them here, a lot more than there are Americans in Iran. He could start knocking them off one by one. He'd get his hostages back and nobody would call him a "wimp" — or us a "helpless super-power."

No, they'd just call him — I know you set me up for this — a "barbarian." And the nation "barbaric." And that would be an accurate call. You've got your put-down word.

Which Carter won't use against the Iranians. I've got the speech ready: "Iran's taking of hostages was a barbaric action which we can counter only by becoming barbarians ourselves. I won't do that, I won't do what they're doing, they know I won't, and there you have the source of their strength — and our weakness." I don't want Carter to knock off Iranians; I just want him to use a good, strong, accurate word. But he won't do it.

Well, there's the guy we work for. He'd rather be put down as a "wimp" than as a "barbarian."

Or than as an imperialist who calls other people "barbarians."

82. Today's Sex and Yesterday's Poetry

This post was first submitted to the Ohio University student newspaper in response to their sex column.

Editor, The Post:

Your BedPost column (23 September) about how couples, or maybe threesomes or foursomes, can enjoy sex while the woman is menstruating made me think of the enjoyment of sex in the literature I used to teach, Renaissance poetry. Here's John Donne addressing his mistress "On Going to Bed":

License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land...

She's a new continent. Oh the wonder of it. Here's Thomas Lodge's idea of the feelings of a responding woman:

Love in my bosom like a bee

Doth suck his sweet:

Now with his wings he plays with me

Now with his feet.

"Love" is Eros, more familiarly Cupid. His best spokesman is Robert Herrick. If he gave advice in a column he'd tell you what to concentrate on:

Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white?
Or else a cherry, double graced,
Within a lily centre placed?
Or ever marked the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half-drowned in cream?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl and orient too?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.

And there were others. Their note was joy and the requirement in hitting it was imagination. So many of them hit it so well that England was called "a nest of singing birds." Joy! Joy! Joy!

Come away, come sweet love,

The golden morning breaks.

All the earth, all the air

Of love and pleasure speaks

The advice common to both your contributors ("throw down a towel" to protect the sheets) comes from Cosmopolitan Magazine.. That magazine, with Playboy, has spoken so matter-of-factly and so long of such things that you might think its tradition — that of sex science, going back to Alfred Kinsey — is the only one. The Renaissance love poets remind us that it's not.

It's possible that the Cosmopolitan tradition will crowd the Renaissance (to which some add Romantic) tradition of lovemaking so far out of our consciousness that it will never — despite the efforts of every literature teacher I know — make its way back into popular culture. What I have seen, or think I have seen, among Americans, or at least college-age Americans, since Kinsey's time makes me think so: a progressive coarsening of the erotic imagination.

Is that so bad? How will you be able to tell? If sex science has flattened your imagination, if it makes no difference to you that Eros has become an orgasm manager, you won't. You'll throw down your towels with no idea of what you're missing.

81. Withdrawn

80. "Repressive regime"

What does a "repressive regime" repress? Human rights. What does a "progressive regime" promote? Human progress. And what do you call a regime that denies human rights and promotes human progress?

We have no word for such a regime but we do have a wonderful example, the regime of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. If by progress you mean movement from the old and benighted to the new and enlightened that state has made it. Its public schools are now up alongside the best in the world, its pension system is a model, its wealth per capita is higher than Britain's, and its corruption is less than that of any state in Asia.

But oh what violations of human rights. Lee imprisoned critics without trial, suspended habeas corpus, arrested union leaders, deregistered unions, and had vandals caned. He also, according to Nicholas Kristof, "banned bubblegum, punished people who did not flush toilets and…forcibly gave haircuts to young men with long hair" (NYT 11-5-00).

Americans have to choose between the put-down word and the build-up word. There is no in-between. So it's case by case. Here's the Shah of Iran, pushing all kinds of social and economic reforms, expropriating large estates for the benefit of small farmers, extending suffrage to women, improving the schools, extending literacy, and raising the national income to record heights. In the New York Times (since 1981, two years after his people threw him out) his regime gets called "repressive" eleven times. Then there's the regime of Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, which tried to do the same and more in Turkey, and succeeded. Not one time is his regime called "repressive." Ataturk had nothing like the Shah's secret police but that word still fit him. He outlawed the fez and tried to cut off beards.

So, no surprise. We use the word "repressive" selectively and we obviously take success into consideration. It's a little like "treason"; if it succeeds who dares name it?

Otto von Bismarck thought success took care of the whole problem. "Our democratic friends," he said, "will pipe in vain when they see princes concerned with their well-being." That was after he set up social insurance for German workers. But America can't stop piping. And its democratic history calls the tune. But alas, the words come from the dictionary. There "repressive" means "inhibiting or restraining the freedom of a person or group of people." And that means that every dictator America supported in the Cold War and every oil autocrat it supports now comes within the word's range of reference. The dictionary shows the world, to which we and Bismarck pipe, how disharmonious our song is.

My guess is that that will never stop us from singing about human rights. After the idealists ask us what we as a nation stand for we won't be able to bear the silence. We've been pretty well taught that there are more important things than harmony.