115. Is Democracy an Ideology?

Is democracy an "ideology"? Does it have "agents"? Would they be "foreign agents"?

"No, you can't talk that way. An agent of a foreign ideology is somebody like those members of the Communist Party in the U.S. in the thirties. Somebody who works to undermine democracy."

Ah, but Marshal Tantawi and Prime Minister Putin are apparently talking that way. When Tantawi's people in Egypt's caretaker government accuse American NGOs of "interfering in domestic politics and stirring unrest" I hear his voice. When Putin's people lay responsibility for "turmoil in the streets" on American democracy-building groups I hear his. Both have gotten louder in the last month, with Putin's people accusing the American ambassador of "promoting revolution" (Huffington Post, 1-18-12) and Tantawi's people putting a travel ban on U.S. pro-democracy activists (Reuters, 1-26-120). What I'm wondering is how exactly their words are different from the words we used when we talked about communists as "agents of a foreign ideology."

"Well, the agents are certainly different and so are the ideologies — whatever the words. These give us enough to identify them."

Maybe so, but by the dictionary I think we're pretty firmly stuck. If an ideology is "the body of doctrine associated with a political movement" and an agent is "a person who acts on behalf of another person or group" and "foreign" tells you that person is from another country then those American-paid democracy-building people in Cairo and Moscow, right up to the ambassadors, are correctly called "agents of a foreign ideology." Putin and Tantawi are right.

"And so the only difference between communist agents in Washington then and democracy agents in Moscow now would be in their ideologies. But, you know, we shouldn't mind being stuck with that as long as we distinguish properly between their ideologies. Putin and Tantawi are each appealing to an ideology peculiar to their nation ("You're in Russia now, Ambassador McFaul") or culture ("Egypt is an Islamic country, sir") with its particular values; our ambassadors and NGOs are appealing to an ideology for the whole human race ("All men are created equal," they are "endowed with inalienable rights"). If democracy is an ideology our agents represent a superior one."

I know, I know. Universal values trump particular values. The American and French revolutions are the best. No nation or culture is justified in opposing them. Wonderful. Our ambassadors and NGOs work for humanity. And you know what? When I look at them all I can think of is "Old Dan Tucker." You know that song? "Get out of the way of old Dan Tucker, running late to get his supper.

"Don't you approve of those values? And of their priority?"

Yes, but they scare me to death. President Bush, appealing to them, loving them in the person of that Western, liberal president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, pushed to get Georgia into NATO. You know what that meant? It meant that if Russian troops invaded Georgia we, by the NATO commitment, would have had to send troops to their aid. All the way to Georgia, a country far from us, and which we could supply only through the Black Sea. Furthermore, it was adjacent to Russia, which still had a load of nuclear weapons. And we'd have had to take them on, or been "humiliated" — as they say of the worst thing that can happen to a Great Power.

The trouble with universal values is that you act on them in particular situations, facing a particular number of troops motivated by a particular culture or ideology. You can, as a friend in the Army once said, lose your particular ass.

"Isn't that the risk, more or less, of acting on any ideal?"

Yes, but risks vary with the ideal, and this one is loaded, especially for Americans. Talk about defending liberty and human rights and we'll line up behind you. How we lined up behind President Kennedy when he said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty” It excites me still. But where did that line lead? Into the agony of Viet Nam.

Think of President Bush going into Iraq. Get out of the way of Old Dan Tucker. He was like the other presidents except that he called up the defend-democracy spirit late, after he was already in the particular place. "No weapons of mass destruction? No Al Qaeda? No real threat? OK, we're here to build democracy." The American public will always excuse action toward that ideal. They wouldn't do that for an "ideology."

"That gives me an idea. Call 'democracy' an ideology and they'll quit excusing action in its name. And they won't be so eager to fight for it in every corner of the world. Good verbal move."

Sure, and it's exactly the move Putin is making. Democracy is an ideology like any other, and it happens that this particular country, the United States, is pushing it. On us.

"Is democracy an ideology like any other?"

Only, I suppose, if the American revolution is a revolution like any other.

114. Reconciliation in Egypt

The news from Egypt is so heartening I can't resist commenting on it. You remember what we were looking at there, this impasse over the new government? The military council and the Muslim Brotherhood dug in? Do you remember your feelings? Me, I was asking, "What hope is there when junta generals and religious zealots go up against each other? When has either one ever softened?"

Then Monday, the word from Cairo: an accord reached on "the creation of a presidential-parliamentary government, a legal system no more Islamic than the previous one and broad guarantees of freedom of religion and expression." It would include some degree, still to be worked out, of civilian control over the military.

There was little doubt in my mind about the zealous fundamentalism of the Brotherhood. I believed what Mary Crane said about it (for the Council on Foreign Relations), that it "seeks to Islamicize societies from the ground up and compel governments in Muslim countries to adhere to sharia, or Islamic law."

Nor did I have much doubt about the generals' determination. I believed that their position let them run and profit from a lot of key industries, knew that they did not pay taxes, and figured they had a lot of income they'd lose if they lost power. They had every reason to dig in.

So there they were, strongmen and zealots, staring each other down, and by the track record of every other horse in either stable there was no way they were going to send me home happy. Yet that's what they did! They sat down and said, "Hell, we're both in this together. Let's work something out." You'd think they were veterans of the democratic process. That's what we say over here, in this old democracy, isn't it? Isn't it?

113. Great and Not-Great Quotes.

 

When Vince Lombardi said, "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing," he didn't say anything great. He didn't say anything at all. There's nothing outside of everything, nothing for him to be talking about. The only people he'll impress will be those who pay no attention to what words mean.

Since there can't be any of those working for newspapers let's assume the people on the nation's sports desks are just pretending to be impressed and go on to what Lombardi has really given us: the minimum requirement for a great saying. It has to say something.

So on a scale of 1 to 10 Lombardi's quote gets a 1. What would a 10 be? I'll nominate what an unnamed Russian came up with when Count Munster asked him to characterize his country's kind of government: "absolutism tempered by assassination." This was the time of the czars. This wonderful Russian has taken a word from the world of compromise and political parties and dropped it into that world's opposite. "Yes, we in our absolute monarchy modify, mitigate, and adjust too. We periodically knock off the monarch."

It's that switch in worlds that pulls a quote into the 10 bracket. A 9 will tickle you to death but a 10 will tickle you in more ways. When that clever Russian stole that word he mapped the whole barbarous East onto the enlightened West. He provided a hundred points of comparison. And the more you knew the more you were tickled. There in your mind's eye could be Peter the Great, strangling with his own hands rivals that threatened his throne. There could be Dostoevsky's divine madman, scorning the temperate reasoner.

You call up the pictures, yes, but with the knowing use of "tempered" you get a statement: "I know all that. I know your vocabulary. I know it well enough to play with it." The Russian answers the German count's question from a point superior to either world.

Imagine, doing all that with one word! But there's still more. The low-key usage shows us that the man is reconciled to his position. He's not going to rage at his country's absolutism, not even going to side against it. He's going to remain a Russian. But he's wearily aware of what that's costing him.

How do we know that, that he's wearily aware? By his tone. "Tempered" is used wryly. It adds an "alas" to his answer. And there's the final tickle. The man who answers the question, this man of the barbarous East, is at least as sophisticated as the man who asks it.

All right, there's a 10, the perfect dive in the verbal Olympics. It shows us what all 10s have to have: a world-switch. Not every world-switch will get you a 10, but if you don't have it you'll have to settle for a 9.

What does a 9 look like? This: Somebody asks you if you believe in baptism. You say, "Believe in it? I've seen it done!" You've got a terrific world-switch. The questioner is in the world of Christian theology, asking where you stand on the efficacy of a sacrament. The answerer is in the world of skeptical scientific inquiry, and he takes the question to be coming from a fellow in that world. Switcheroo! The last person the questioner wants to hear from is a fellow rushing out of the laboratory, or the jungle, declaring that such rumored things really do happen.

OK, why isn't that a 10? You can't fault the leap it takes. The distance from Heinrich Bullinger (in baptism God cleanses and adopts children) to Nietzsche (can you believe that such things are still believed?) is about as far as the human mind can jump. So there's no doubt about the impact. And there's no doubt about how it has registered. The fact that the quote has been attributed, at various times, to William James, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton is testimony to that. On impact it makes it. It's on distribution, I think, that it falls short. Think of the number of places that Russian hit us.

But it's not an easy call to make, and there are many other factors — too many, I see, to assess in one post.

112. Truth in Pictures.

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Bee Wilson, in the London Review of Books, says that Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, made her photo albums for the normal reason: to "preserve and then display an idealized version of home life — aren't we happy!" And there in the selected photo (5 January, p. 27) are Adolf and Eva, Adolf pressing one child to his side and holding the other by the hand. Eva, squeezing the child's other hand, smiles down at her. All that's missing is the faithful dog.

At the time of the sample picture the Allies were taking Rome, landing in Normandy, and rolling toward Germany's eastern borders. Within a year Eva would fly to a besieged Berlin so that she could take poison and die with Adolf — after he had poisoned his beloved dog. At the time she made the album she must have known how far her and Hitler's life was from normal home life. She must have felt the stretch when she set up the picture (the children were a friend's; Hitler was dragooned). It's hard to imagine anybody saying, "Aren't we happy," with greater strain.

In one respect Eva's pictures of happy family life can easily be classed with the SS officer's pictures, taken in Germany's same grim hours, of happy garrison life at Auschwitz. The happiness in both of them looks heedless, unaware. We who look over the album-maker's shoulder know that.

What we don't know is the degree of strain with which the happiness is maintained, or displayed. At Auschwitz we (I at least) listen in vain for the voice that strains to say, "Aren't we happy?" They all just seem to be enjoying themselves, without stress. The photographer sees people who really are happy, and thinks his album presents the truth about them. He's happy.

This absence of strain gets to us every time we think of the gas chambers. How can these killers sing? Surely, the protecting mind says, they won't sing well. Bad people must sing badly. That's certainly what John Milton thought. Listen to his bad people and you'll hear "lean and flashy songs" grating on "scrannel pipes of wretched straw." Plato, Milton's guide, believed that if you're good you'll be happy, and if you're happy you'll be beautiful. For a long time many of us, among them my Sunday School teachers, believed the converse: if you're bad you'll be unhappy, and if you're unhappy you'll be ugly.

Now we have grown-up learning. We know that good, beautiful things can come out of bad, ugly people. Moral snakes can dance like angels. So we shouldn't be shocked when we hear heavenly music coming from Nazi killers — shouldn't, that is, if we really do believe what we have learned as grownups, and aren't clinging to any of the old belief. It's uncertainty about this that makes us want to test ourselves. Bring on the "Abendlied" for another try. How grown up am I? (My own answer: not sure.)

But Wilson, the LRB author, provokes a perhaps more interesting test. She shows us how Eva Braun's picture of the happy Hitler family is a lie and then, when she says it's told for the normal reason, to demonstrate domestic happiness, she puts it to all us family album makers: how big a lie are you telling?

I, myself, don't think I'm telling a very big one. Of course I pick the smiling faces and leave out the pouty ones, and I do work in the neater activities and select the classier decor. I've even staged some shots, though not going as far as Eva went. But on the whole my pictures tell the truth. We really are happy.

I hear, "Yes, that's what the maker of the SS album was saying. He thought his pictures told the truth." The voice is that of the observer looking over all our shoulders, and the test in it for us is in whether we let him get us down or not. If we collapse before his reminder of the subjectivity of all judgments we have failed. If we say "so what " we have passed. We're telling him that we can still discriminate among lies. Pictures might lie but words, like Bee Wilson's, can always correct them and bring us closer to the truth. There's no reason for a normal album-maker to lose confidence in his albums.

111. A Mind-Stretching Experiment: The SS at Auschwitz.

 

As I was reminded on a recent visit to Dresden, German men love to sing shoulder-to-shoulder. And you love hearing them. You can almost love them, there in their white shirts, banked before the crowd in the Schlossplatz, singing those German songs, some so robust and some, ah, the lieder, so tender.

Images linger in the mind, especially the tender ones, and the one I have of the white-shirts, eyes fastened on their leader, singing there in the sun of the music festival, drawing out the sweet notes, has stayed with me ever since. And, as lingering images do, it has made trouble for entering images, a kind of trouble that, I think, is in this case worth sharing and looking into.

First I would like to have you fix firmly in your mind the entering image. It gets in via the famous photo album documenting the happy, normal life of the officers running the Auschwitz camp — their picnics, their dinners, their Christmas-tree decorations, their hiking. Leading the intrusion is a photo of them singing. They are banked on a hillside, following the accordionist below them, singing their hearts out. There's your image. Then the lingering image, of white shirts in Dresden. It comes up and imposes, or superimposes, itself. I hope you're hearing its challenge: "There's not room in this mind for both of us."

OK, I say, the mind belongs to me. I'll settle this. What we're seeing is what's going to be in every normal mind when the images of those storm troopers, brown shirts, enter. They must, the normal mind says, be entirely different from the lingering group. They are different human beings. Or at least different Germans. They are monsters. But how can monsters do such normal things? How can they be happy? How can they sing such sweet songs?

I think the normal mind knows what it has to do. It's not going to get rid of either one of those images. It just has to stretch. "Come on, mind, get yourself around the extremes of human nature." I think I've settled it.

But the human mind, you know. It wants to go to extremes. That's what my mind did and what I, for a test, am going to ask yours to do. I supplied sound to the image. Almost by accident. Here's how it happened. One of the songs on my random-play is Rheinberger's "Abendlied." It's the only one on five CD's where the sound, at particular places, draws the word "heavenly" out of me. It might well draw it out of you. And what I can't help doing now is putting in my ears those sounds as I look at that SS album picture. Those killers are singing the "Abendlied"! I'm there. I'm listening.

Of course I'm making myself a guinea pig in a thought experiment. "OK, zoom in on the faces. Get the mouths, the eyes. Now feed in the sound. Is 'heavenly' coming out of him?" And I may not be a good, or representative, guinea pig. So I'm asking for volunteers. Go to http://isurvived.org/InTheNews/Auschwitz-SSguards_floric.html for the picture, then go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuRpHnz2ZJo&list=RDnuRpHnz2ZJo - t=10 for the sound. If you copy the picture you can look at it while you play the music. (Don't worry that the SS probably wouldn't be singing the song; it just has to be possible.) Then tell me, by email at hswardson@yahoo.com how it went. Is this within your conception of human nature? of the enjoyment of music? of art? Did "heavenly" come out of you?

The experimenter is interested in whether or not you were able to make the stretch. If you have any other observations that might be useful to him please send them.

110. Stripping the Vocabulary

Let's define the word "philosopher" and see how many words we can eliminate if we do it right. Start with this definition: "a person who is very careful about what he believes." That pretty well describes a scientist, doesn't it? What forces you to be more careful about your beliefs than the scientific method? So I'd say we can do without the separate word.

OK, but you've gotten rid of "scientist" by making "philosopher" pretty narrow. You've left out people who are very careful about values. We often call them "sages" or "wise men." Are we going to deny them your title?

Well, since I believe care is the most important thing I think we'd better give it to them. So let's say, "a philosopher is a person who is very careful about what he believes or values." If that's a sufficient compliment then there's no longer a need for "sage" or "wise man."

You're going to say, "what he believes or values"? Suppose one person values something so highly that to keep it he believes nonsense. Another person is very careful about what he values and is very careful about what he believes. Are you going to use the same compliment-word for both?

Yes, I'll just modify the word. The second person is a better philosopher.

Oh, oh, "better" and "worse." Stretch-words. Pretty soon you'll be calling any minimally careful person a philosopher.

Of course. That's the way to eliminate troublesome words. Like "scientist" and "scientific." Get rid of them and you'll no longer hear, "That's not "scientific"; you'll hear, "That's not very careful." Get rid of that other troublesome word, "religion," and you'll no longer hear that big trouble-maker, "That's not science, that's religion." People will more easily get down to the questions that need dealing with: Have we arrived at this belief carefully? And at this value? What needs to be balanced against what? People who do that are "better philosophers" than people who don't. "Better" is a good enough compliment. "Worse" is a good enough put-down. Care is the key.

Yes, look for care, but be careful. That person you see taking more care than anybody else may not be the greatest philosopher; he may just be the greatest pedant, scrutinizing little things while ignoring the big ones.

Like what?

Human limitations, human mortality. Only if you ignore your own mortality, and think you have all the time in the world, can you aim at perfection. Do that when your fellow mortals need your help and I'll call you a "finicky philosopher" — to specify your inferiority.

And to remove the word "pedant" from the vocabulary. But these mortals that need a philosopher's help, I suppose that that's because they themselves are not philosophers?

No, they are "hasty philosophers." Though they need the same thing, reliable knowledge, they don't have time to take the care scientists take. They have to settle for the good guess. Considering their number, and their influence (especially in democracies), and the terrible actions — lynchings, pogroms, foolish wars, genocides — they take when they act on unreliable knowledge, the best thing philosophers can do in the world is improve their guesswork.

You mean the best thing leisurely philosophers can do. You're calling everybody a philosopher.

OK, philosophers with leisure, the kind given them in universities, the place where they have the best opportunity to help the poor hasties, the guessers, the wanna-be-hafta-be scientists. If they don't help, they're "useless philosophers." If they interfere with the help, they're "dangerous philosophers."

I already know the "useless philosophers." They're the pedants. But who are the "dangerous philosophers"?

The dangerous philosophers are those pedants who undermine confidence in good guesswork by showing that its theoretical support is not perfect, or, worse, that there's no support at all. They are dangerous because if enough hasties lose their confidence there will be more lynchings, pogroms, foolish wars, and genocides than there would otherwise be.

Sounds terrible. How do you deal with such people? I'm ready to lynch them.

No, no, hah, hah. They live in universities, where all us leisurelies live. Threats appear in words and you hold them off with words. Here, speaking in the stripped-down vocabulary I'm trying to promote, you could only call the dangerous people "poor philosophers." You'd have to hope that that was enough of a put-down to discourage them.

109. "Science Wars"

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If there's one thing outsiders have learned about that dust-up in universities called "the science wars" — you remember, postmodernists versus scientists, Stanley Fish, the Sokal Hoax — it's that studying it is a high-risk operation. You know that this kind of conflict is going to break out again, you suspect it's fundamental, you feel you ought to understand it, then you get into it and the dust is so thick you lose any track you thought you were on. You waste hours, days.

Well, let me, as a frequent loser of tracks, tell you how to save time reading the people — postmodernists, scientists, philosophers of science, poets, general humanists, whatever — who might be attacking or defending a position in this war, or any future one.

First: don't read further in any author who uses the word "science" without meaning "product-testing." No, I don't mean torturing rabbits with your cosmetic to make sure it doesn't irritate humans. By product I mean what a scientist comes up with — article, proof, talk at a conference, scheme in a book — as an addition to or correction of what's known. It's what's out there for testing. I choose the word "product" to keep what's out there distinct from what got it there, the process.

This is a heads-or-tails distinction. If you don't believe that go to a conference of mathematicians, our model scientists. Try to imagine anything — sickness, low income, grinding oppression, pathetic dress — that will excuse a leaking proof. It's the testing of the product, and only the product, that gives meaning, the operative meaning, the one that has to be dealt with in the world, to the word "science." And it's the one that, perhaps because it's fatal to any attempt to displace science downward, is most commonly ignored. If your author ignores it, drop him. He's not going to say anything useful about science.

Second tip, for those whose author keeps them reading: stop when you find that the author fails to put his own favorite concepts — like paradigms, or vocabularies, or any other large, all-embracing idea — on the testing ground. That author has denied that science is an open-ended discipline, one with no boundaries, no limits, no categories safe from test — all that let us say that scientists were engaged in "a self-correcting enterprise." Unless your author quickly steps in and explains how he's redefining "science," drop him.

Now for those who hate the slightest waste of time a third, riskier, tip: look for the first signs of anything resembling creationism. Read an argument for intelligent design and you hear in the end, "See, there is room for God." In between there will be moves to get anything that crowds God out (the particulars of belief, the details in Scripture, the things people really want to believe in) off the testing ground.  The author wants to move the whole mass toward abstraction.  For a quick exit from the whole thing listen for the first "See, there is room for..."  But listen closely. We want there to be room for mystery, room for poetry, room for dreams, room for psychoanalysis, room for anger and pity.  The author is taking advantage of that desire in order to make room for garbage.  His first moves will look very much like the legitimate ones.  It will be difficult but if you can detect in them an interest in God, even the faintest, you can save yourself a ton of garbage.

108. In Defense of "Publish or Perish"

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Ah, the ghost of deans past, rising again to speak for the real world, rising to dispute my last post (#107). "You forget, you forget. Sing your song about Socrates, that he didn't publish a single word, that he would never have gotten a Ph.D.  Promote his tradition, concentrate on the good life, make the classroom experience the center of higher education. So in the criteria for tenure and promotion you manage to put teaching ahead of publication. And what do you discover? That teaching is the hardest thing in the world to measure. Nothing is reliable, not test scores, not classroom visits, not student evaluations. Scores can be raised by teaching to the test, visit reports are subjective, and student evaluations can give a very distorted picture."

You mean student evaluations aren't reliable?

"Not enough to make trustworthy comparisons. The year they had him students can complain about a teacher as a crabby futz and ten years later thank him for teaching them everything they needed to know. The 'humane' and 'relevant' livewire can be called, in hindsight, a 'shallow entertainer.' It's all so subjective. Student evaluations are helpful, but they require a sophisticated reading. And that will vary according to the sophisticate.

"Publication can easily be measured and reliably used for comparison. Much can be quantified: how many articles, how many times cited by others in the field, how many long reviews. There may be some subjectivity in the editors' choice of articles but they, the gatekeepers, are guided by the peers of the discipline. That thins out the subjectivity. No matter how strongly you urge a Promotion and Tenure committee to prioritize teaching they are going to gravitate toward publication — just because, in a swamp, it gives them some firm, accessible ground to stand on.

"I know, that's gravitation, convenience, not justification. So forget it. Let's talk about your idealistic principles, the ones you inherit from Plato's Socrates. Socrates left you with no doubt about the right approach to truth. It's through dialogue, debate, what you all later lovingly called 'dialectic testing.' The question is, Do you want tough testing or easy testing? Say you've come up with a piece of truth. Will you test it in the classroom? That's too easy. Your students don't know how to be tough. If you really love truth, and are really committed to the Socratic way, you'll lay your piece out in a journal, where the really tough people can test it.

"That, I think, is what one of Plato's most eloquent spokesmen, John Milton, would want you to do. Truth,' he said, 'can't be won without dust and heat,' down in the arena. 'That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.' He who shuns such a trial 'slinks out of the race.' And you know what? That classroom, for all its connection to the good life, for all it contributes to the examination of it, for all its beauty, is a place you are slinking to."

"That's a hard thing to say, but if you accept it I'll tell you something else. You can't want me, your dean, to let you or any of your colleagues do that kind of slinking. First because you want credit for that piece of truth, and you want the credit to be granted objectively. You don't want it to be based on anybody's report of its success in your classroom; you want it to be based on reports that can be compared with other reports — like number of citations. In other words, you, if you really want to adhere to Socratic principles, want our present system. For all its faults."

107. The Structure of Academic Revolutions

Want to know what drives a revolution in an academic discipline? Ask a young searcher for truth what he would rather have in his hand at the end of three years, a new statement of truth or a letter from the dean granting him tenure.

OK, your subject may well plump for the truth. That's nothing to sneeze at, a bona fide truth. But now do this: substitute in his hand a statement of what might possibly be the truth and put around him peers who possibly won't, or can't, recognize it as the truth. He could live alone with it, in an attic, for decades. Put that against a grant of tenure.

You there in the outside world, struggling to hang onto your job, running the rat race, getting by on a smile and a shoeshine, surely you understand the desire for tenure. I mean, a lifetime hold on well-paid independence? a yearly three-month vacation? What's not to understand? But still, you can under-estimate, you can fail to feel the full strength of it, the belief in it.  Have you ever heard that awed statement about the philosophy professor who had made himself into the purest possible nihilist (believer in nothing)?  "He believes only in tenure."

All right you've got that strong desire for tenure. Now give those who don't have it only three or four years to get it. Have them during those years teach some large lower-level courses. Give them a few of the administrative jobs the tenured profs are sick of. Anything to make sure a new Ph. D. doesn't have the time to sit back and think deeply — the way nearly every other discoverer of a significant truth has had to do. Then, a key provision: make publication in a refereed journal — a journal in which our young searcher will have to compete with all those in his discipline who have had the time to sit back and think deeply — a condition of his obtaining tenure.

The young searcher knows about learned journals. You get into them by stirring up truth. And he's got clear eyes. He sees that he's churning garbage. What else can he do on his schedule? Last, he's got a very reasonable human fear: that those deep thinkers, and particularly the journal editors, are good enough at garbage detection to see what he's doing. His only hope is that the distinction between truth and garbage can be obscured long enough for his garbage to get past the editor and onto the list the dean uses to grant tenure. And where does garbage most easily get a pass? In a revolution. You know, like the thing Sigmund Freud pulled off.

But you've got to be sure of the conditions. You don't want any garbage detectors coming down from the dean's office, or one department raking over another department's garbage. So look for department autonomy. Then if you can find a department that has successfully rejected the tests for garbage, or disputed the category, or denied it had distinguishing features, you're on the way. Your ideal, I think, is what Sinclair Lewis called the state university of his time, "a vast department store" — that is, a university from which the notion of a common academic enterprise had been entirely removed.

You have to be careful in your choice of a department. There's no hope in those fields where a new arrival can go to a frontier of knowledge and, using established research methods, add, or stir up, some recognizable truth. You want a field where there's no frontier, or if there is one nobody agrees on where it is, or whether it's moving forward or backward. Like in the arts and, often, the humanities.

You'll find a field of confusion somewhere in there. Uncovering a good one is not nearly so hard as it was before the German Ph. D. program became the model for everybody. Now there are so many arts, crafts, skills, and sports made into "fields" with a "graduate faculty" imposing "responsible standards," so many young scholars wandering around looking for a non-existent frontier, so much pointless rigor, so much free-floating scientism, so much confusion, that you can start a revolution without half trying.

And, without too much effort, you can keep it going — long enough, maybe (if you still haven't had time to really think) to get a promotion out of it. It won't be hard if you've started right. If you've got people revolting against predecessors whose position can be easily, but not too obviously, caricatured; if they've chosen, as a latently revolutionary father, someone who won't disown them when they give his doctrines the necessary exaggeration; if they've introduced enough new terminology to earn credit for new ideas (a vocabulary shift is a sign of a paradigm shift, right?); and if they've managed to start a journal where display of these things will be safe from non-revolutionary criticism, then, since the criteria for promotion are pretty much the same as those for tenure, you'll have no trouble.

The only thing your revolution really has to fear is a revival of the Socratic tradition. When Socrates put the pursuit of the good life at the center of the academic enterprise he marginalized (to spear a good word out of one revolution) every specialty to come. Specialists were the servants of those examining and, yes, enjoying, what was good — the art, the craft, the skill, the sport. The philologist in this tradition is prized for his service to the Chaucer story, the joy in it, not for his philology.

Since your revolution presumes the specialization of the Germanic tradition, with fields and disciplines and a graduate faculty and publication, it's going to fall apart in any institution that decenters (ah, another good word) it in favor of the Socratic tradition. The center (or, more appropriately, the heart) will be in the undergraduate classroom, or in the sculpt lab, or out on the track. With joy going for it. You're not going to be able to build up much steam for a revolution out on the margins.

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