130. Language Heroism

Here's a real hero for you. Brendan Riley, who covered the state of Nevada for the Associated Press for 37 years refused to use the casino industry's word "gaming" except with reference to electronic games and in titles like Nevada Gaming Commission. He called it a "soft word," meaning a word that gently covers a hard fact. The hard word here, the correct word, the word he insisted on, was "gambling."

Here's an imagined hero, though her character is real, drawn from known students.  Sarah is an 18-year-old, hired for her sweet voice, being prepped to sell things to people randomly called during the dinner hour.  She's told to begin her pitch by saying she's conducting "research."

"But it's not really research, is it?" she says.

"No, but research is something people respect and will talk to you about. The word 'research' gets them into a conversation with you."

"But isn't it just a cover for what I'm really doing, selling stuff?  I'm deceiving them with it, right?  I'm not telling the truth." After seeing the look on the marketing director's face she says, "I don't think I can do this."  And so, though she needs the job (her father has been downsized out of his) and, with her town hard hit by the recession, knows that she, lacking skills, is not likely to find another, she takes off her nametag, gives it to the marketing director, thanks him very much, and walks out.  She, making that kind of sacrifice, is as great a hero as Brendan Riley.

Think what's she's preserved in America. How about our courtesy, our civilized forms?  Here's this company taking advantage of that, using our unwillingness to be rude to strangers to get its huckster foot in the door.  How about our privacy?  Coming right into the house at its own chosen time because we share this device, this telephone, this instrument of so much warm communication.  Get enough calls from the poor, lesser Sarahs and we not only bark at them we bark at the next friend who calls.  There goes American courtesy.

How about our morality? We plaster the walls of our schools with exhortations ("Don't be a Just Me" "Take your turn" "Speak softly") and furnish graduating classes with mottos ("Aim High" "Dare to Dream") that say be good, be true, be nice so effectively that we fill the land each year with Sarahs, fresh, aspiring Sarahs.  Heroic Sarah has, in her case, preserved that morality, our morality.  Against what? An industry forcing her sisters into prostitution.

And then there's our language, the language our English teachers teach us to use correctly and properly. She has kept it clean for use.  Words should have referents, and reveal the world.  They should not obscure it, they should make it clear.  Oh what a defender of words she's been!

Of course the fight for the English language can't be won by just a few. We need a band of heroes.  Well, we've got a start.  Brendan and Sarah, shoulder to shoulder.  Keep producing them, teachers and editors, and we'll win this thing yet, English teachers.

[Oh my fellow teachers, oh how I am thinking of you now, in 2018, after Donald Trump has so displayed his way of using the English language.  How are you responding to his success?  Is it, "All is lost," or is it, "Once more into the breach, dear friends"?  Once more off to school with our briefcases, once more a load of essays, once more those margins waiting for "Are you sure of this?"  I can't see any high hearts.  The best I can see are firmer jaws. "This is a tougher battle than I thought.  One breach after another.  Well into this one.']

129. Camus and Charisma

 

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There's knowing a philosopher's position, the stands he (or she) takes on important questions. There's understanding how it fits into or opposes other philosophers' positions and appreciating what it took for him to take that position. There's wondering where you, and maybe the intellectual world, would be without him. And then there's reading him.

Here's Albert Camus, whom I know and understand and appreciate in all the above ways, presenting to me (in The Myth of Sisyphus) the heart of his philosophy:

I want everything explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense. What I fail to understand is nonsense. The world is peopled with such irrationals. The world itself, whose single meaning I do not understand, is but a vast irrational. If one could only say, just once: "This is clear," all would be saved.

He can't say that and, looking at his own condition, he forms his conception of the absurd:

At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.

Reading that passage as my teachers taught me to read, testing against my own experiece, I find myself almost immediately lost. Nothing Camus talks about so urgently matches my experience. In the world I have known there are some contradictions and nonsense and some consistencies and sensible meanings. That's what fills the world's vastness. I don't see how Camus can call that world, the whole thing, "irrational."

I welcome help and here's Adam Gopnik (New Yorker, 4-9-12) supplying it: Camus meant "life is absurd" in "the sense of unjustified by certainty." I, seeing some uncertainty and some certainty, have the same problem reading Gopnik that I had reading Camus. Gopnik adds, "Life is absurd because Who Knows?" That's a mountaintop answer: "If you've climbed up this far you know what I mean." Gopnik takes no better care of me than Camus did.

And I think I see why, right there in his New Yorker piece. The old Camus charisma still has Gopnik in its spell. He knows it's charisma, his piece features it (in paragraphs on Camus' appearance, his role in the war, his weight in cafe conversations, a photo of him in a trenchcoat), and yet he lets it govern his reading, his response to words on a page.

I think that a charisma-free reader would take the statements I quoted the way an experienced composition teacher would take them: as all-or-nothing declarations of an immature mind. Like adolescent writers who ask the questions he asks, Camus is not really requesting knowledge about any world he shares with his reader, and would not be satisfied if he got it. It would keep him from making the big move, the move that in its grandeur distinguishes him from the writers composition teachers usually see, the move from "I" and "what I fail to understand," to "man" and "the unreasonable world."

That a clear-sighted writer like Adam Gopnik should have his eyes closed by the Camus charisma is testimony to its extraordinary power. Gopnik's own prose is a model of perceptive reader-care. Consider this, from the same piece:

Good editorial writing has less to do with winning an argument, since the other side is mostly not listening, than with telling the guys on your side how they ought to sound when they're arguing. It's a form of conducting, really, where the writer tries to strike a down-beat, a tonic note, for the whole of his section. Not "Say this!" but "Sound this way!" is what the great editorialists teach.

He's a hard hitter. When somebody like him goes soft, and writes soft sentences, you know that this thing that's working on him, this charisma, is pretty strong.

I think it's not just the Camus charisma. I think it's the whole Sartre-Camus-existentialist-postwar-Paris charisma. It's so strong that it holds those writers on their eminence year after year no matter what they have said. They seem to me as invulnerable in the intellectual world as Ronald Reagan was in the political world. I want to call them teflon intellectuals.

128. Is Procreation Immoral?

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Who but a philosopher would ask a nerdy question like that? You know a question is nerdy when you try to answer it in your own regular-guy way. Say I, on my way to the marriage couch, am asked if I think my adding to the population of the earth is ethical. I'm stumped. "How does ethics get into it?" I wonder.

"Here's how," says Christine Overall, the first of three philosophers to speak in recent books (reviewed in the New Yorker, 4-9-12). "Your decision to have a child, generalized for your species, will, through either over-population or under-population, affect the happiness of all future children. Decisions that affect the happiness of others are ethical decisions" (extracted from the review).

Overall stimulates and expands my thinking, as regular guys count on nerds to do.  I hadn't thought about the over-population problem at all, at least with respect to my personal "decision." And over-population is just one of procreation's hazards. David Benatar ("Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence") shows me, through an argument I can almost follow, "that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad — a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pinprick — is worse than no life at all." My child could arrive in a one-pin paradise and still be worse off than if he hadn't been born.

Put Overall with Benatar and I'm thrown into a stew. Overall has taught me that I am ethically responsible for human beings that go onto any kind of planet. Benatar wants me to consider the candidates for occupancy of that planet, none of whom are born yet. Overall, I remember, said that "non-existent people have no moral standing." Does that take the "ethical" out of my choice? There I am, in the stew expert philosophers throw you in.

Now I think the better a reviewer (or teacher, or forum-presider) is at bringing philosophers together the hotter the stew is going to be and the more quickly you're going to be in it. With this reviewer, Elizabeth Kolbert, I get flame after flame and by the time the third philosopher, Bryan Caplan, enters I am really feeling the heat. Like the others Caplan thinks that "people need to think more seriously about the decision to have children." Seriousness to him, an economics professor, means careful, realistic calculation. You can see him at the board, drawing a graph. On the age scale his "pleasant number" (of children, for parents' pleaure) rises from one in the third decade of life to five in the seventh and beyond. He smoothes the curve, stands back, rubs his chin, checks with the class, and, for the rich, full life, goes for three. (While Kolbert, in the back of the room, bless her, is explaining to another regular babe that "kids are a pain in the ass when they're small.") Ah, but there's a hand. The over-population problem? Not to worry. "More people mean more ideas, the fuel of progress," says Professor Caplan.

It's hard to go deeply into an attractive subject without getting nerdy about it, I know, and English professors can be as nerdy as anybody, but their subject does do something for them that philosophy and economics just don't seem to do for these professors. It keeps them, through poems and stories, in touch with real life, messy life, the life regular people live. It's the life Overall and Benatar leave behind when they examine the claim that having a child will benefit (or harm) future generations. Regular people don't make such claims. Overall and Benatar are looking at graduate students around a seminar table. Apprentice nerds.

I know, they're doing that for the benefit of regular people, showing them how to "think more rigorously about the decision to have children" (Caplan) and that "morally rigorous analysis" (Overall) is what professors of ethics teach. I know that that's what academics generally do, teach rigor to the slack, and that it has many benefits. But it's often false to the real world, as it is here.

In the real world people can't see into the future clearly, and they, most of them, know it. So when a professor asks them, "Is procreation immoral?" (or, in their terms, "Is what I am about to do on the couch ethical?") they say something like this: "I know that there could be harm or benefit in what I am about to do but I just can't see how it will come. It's too far in the future and I don't have time to study it that much. So I'll leave it up to those responsible and the experts who advise them. They are my best guide. If they decide, when the time comes, that it's good for citizens to have or not have children I'll probably go along. In the meantime I'm not going to worry about it. I have too much else to worry about."

Stories and poems show how much else there is to worry about and how limited we are in dealing with it. They provide a constant correction to our tendencies to simplify and to over-presume — tendencies that appear clearly in the philosophers Kolbert has chosen. There's Caplan, reducing the good life to graphable numbers, there's Benatar removing common sense from his planet populators, there's Overall trusting a poll to gauge happiness, trusting happiness as a category. And there are all three, trusting that the human mind can adequately deal with these problems.

Poets show how complicated the problems are and some poets, older ones, show how foolish (or tragic) men can be if they presume that they have the power to solve them. Dante and Milton thought that presumption a sin, and had a name for it: intellectual pride.

This is not to set poets against philosophers. John Locke and John Milton warn against presumption in almost the same terms. Milton's finally wise Adam has learned that

     not to know at large of things remote

From use, obscure and subtle, but to know

That which before us lies in daily life,

Is the prime Wisdom.

Some things you have to leave to God, the angel Raphael has told him. "Be lowly wise."

That's just what Locke is saying, in philosopher's language:

Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things; between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.

Does Locke's nearby introduction of God, doing just what Milton's God does (giving mankind all they need for a good daily life), reduce the weight of this for contemporary philosophers? Will it do the same for their students, philosophy majors?  I mean, who on campus is better at doubting the existence of God?

If that's the case I think teachers and forum-organizers need to add more English majors to their stew. Since God fills most of what they read English majors have learned to separate questions of his wisdom from questions of his existence, and here questions of God's existence are clearly a distraction.  It's wisdom we're after.

127. "Imaginative," "Tough," and "Realistic" as Compliments to a President

 

Any president of the United States who deserved those compliment-words would be pretty close to our ideal, wouldn't he? But how would he earn them? What would he look like in action? I have presumed to guess, making Jimmy Carter my star.

As my dream scenario opens he is speaking to Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister, just after Begin has allowed the first settlements in the Occupied Territories (see my preceding post, #126.). He has just asked the big question, "Tell me, Menachem, do you, in your heart, want all of the Occupied Territories for your people?" Let's say that Begin, by ignoring the question, or changing the subject, or indicating that it's bad form to ask such a question, says No, the answer consistent with his representation to America of Israel's goals.

Now the ideal Carter, having already showed his imagination (in his first question, picturing the future) shows his toughness: "What then is this hammering that I hear?" You may note that the American president, who knows his Bible, is counting on Begin to hear the echo of the prophet Samuel. (After Saul had denied having any captured sheep Samuel had cocked his head and said, "What then is this bleating in mine ears?") Smart Carter is asking, "What are you driving at with those houses going up in Ariel?

Begin has been put seriously on the spot. He has to admit he wants the whole thing or look like the dumbest candidate for Israeli leadership in the Bible. Let's say Begin says, "All right, I want all of old Judea and Samaria." Smart Carter, though he knows, asks him why. Begin tells him what everybody in Israel knows about him and the Gush Emunim, the first settlers: that they want the land because God, in the Bible, gave it to them.

That answer prepares imaginative Carter to ask those of his countrymen who support Prime Minister Begin why they support him. Do they do it because they believe that God gave the Israelis the land?

Now many of Begin's supporters in Carter's country will without hesitation say yes. Anybody who takes the Bible as literal truth will have to say yes — or be embarrassed in front of his fellow believers — and that will end the conversation. But those Jews who don't read the Bible literally, they are the ones tough Carter is interested in. "What? You?" he will say, "Right alongside the people you used to scorn? I remember you in college, so full of brains, so tough on evangelical Christians. How can you keep company with them? How can you not ask of Begin the kind of questions you used to ask us?"

Tough Carter's strategy is clear. Embarrass them. Get them to explain. Out in public. Some of these skeptical Jews are influential people, giving heavy support. Carter's imagination has shown him where the settlements are heading, his realism has told him his nation can't ignore that end, and his toughness now makes him press for an explanation from settlement-supporters no matter how many friends he has to embarrass.

The same will go for the ideally imaginative, tough, realistic presidents that follow Carter. Does an Israeli prime minister continue to expand the settlements (as every one of them will do)? Do his supporters count on his reputation as a liberal, secular, enlightened man to supply — despite a settlement here, a settlement there — implicit reassurance? Ask him what he's doing giving support to the faction he scorned. Does he deny giving that support? "What then is this bleating in mine ears?"

When will our ideal presidents stop? As soon as the explanations produce public discussion and debate in Congress. That's all they'll want. Their goal is not Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Things like that are to be determined after debate, after all the other arguments — the need for defensible borders, the need for a bargaining chip, for need for defense against terrorists, and so on — are heard and tested. It would be unrealistic to push for more.

In the meantime realism requires presidents to counter attempts to discourage debate in Congress, attempts that have been so far successful. (It hasn't been just a matter of ignoring the question, or changing the subject; the question simply has not been asked.) Smart Carter's PR staff (or Clinton's or Bush's or Obama's) will, for example, have to keep control of the definition of "tough." It can't just mean "hard on your enemies"; it has to mean "hard on your friends," too." It can't mean "hard on terrorism" or, when you get down to it, anything at all we got used to in the hard-on-soft-on vocabulary of the anti-communism years, the years before Viet Nam. That's pseudo-toughness, poolroom toughness. You show it up by inviting it into the street. "Let's wait until your man mixes it up in Congress. There we'll find out how tough he is."

126. "Facts on the ground"

The expression "facts on the ground" was apparently first used by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the 70s. He was describing the new settlements in the Occupied Territories. By adding "on the ground" to a word that was already sufficient he suggested something to future statesmen: this is something solidly based, stuck in the earth, and you are not going to change it easily.

He also implied a distinction from facts of another sort, I think, the facts you might call "facts in the heart," facts that are hard to see and, some say, easy to change. Disapproval of the settlements is a fact in the heart of many Americans and Israelis. It is certainly a fact in the heart of Tzaly Reshef, one of the founders of Peace Now, who last week wondered (NYT, 3-25) whether the Israeli Supreme Court would be able to get Benjamin Netanyahu to change the old "facts on the ground."

But Reshef and his fellows in Peace Now, and, more distantly, in the United Sates, are dismissed as idealists. Understandably. None of their talk has had any effect. The settlements have continued to expand during the regimes of every Israeli prime minister, liberal or conservative, hawk or dove.

"What do you expect, idealists? That facts on the ground will give way before your heart's desire? Get used to them." That's what I hear the realists, the ones Menachem Begin counted on, saying now.

The tough-ground-soft-heart distinction is not as firm as it looks, though.  Facts on the ground come from human intention — which is to say, the human heart. There is a logical connection (effect to cause) between a settler's hut and a Likud prime minister's heart. Bend your eyes to that and you can raise them to the larger connections — to future needs, to American support, to peace in the Middle East. No, you're not looking at the sky; you're trying to see future facts on the ground.

Imaginative statesmen raise their eyes. Realistic statesmen don't blink at what they see. Tough statesmen don't hesitate to ask questions about them. They're determined to know what, on the ground, their country is going to have to live with. So imaginative, tough, realistic American presidents would have asked each of the Israeli prime ministers who expanded the settlements this idealistic-sounding but very realistic question, "Tell me, Menachem (or Yitzhak or Benjamin), do you, in your heart, want all of the West Bank for your people?"

And all tough, imaginative Americans wanting a realistic foreign policy for their country, would ask all the Jewish groups supporting those prime ministers the same question.

Ah, but is that realistic? Can anybody actually picture any American President putting that question to any Israeli Prime Minister? No, it has suited everybody politically, and has suited everybody politically for 35 years, to keep that question locked up, which is to say, it suits them, linguistically, to keep "facts on the ground" separate from "facts in the heart." Let us, says the Israeli, just look at what's there, now, and leave what will be there out of the discussion. Let us, says the American Congressman, let us not upset the Christian constituency that supports the Israeli moves. You can talk about the heart, but do it in some other context.

I can't help thinking that they will have church in mind. Church is where the idealists gather, isn't it? It is certainly where Christians will hear a lot of talk about the heart. That's where, according to Jesus, you look to find sin.

Yes, church is the perfect place to put Americans who want to talk about the heart. They're accustomed to talking about the facts there before they get back to the facts on the ground during the business week.

But I wonder how much compartmentalizers really know about American churches. Do they know that some congregations pay close attention to world affairs? And some preachers use extreme language? I have known some, and I can hear them now: 'Whoso looketh at the West Bank to lust hath already committed aggression in his heart.'"

And I've heard there are some rabbis who say the same kind of thing. It's not true that all the heart talk comes out of the New Testament. There's "Thou shalt not covet" from Moses. I think we could have a rabbi in the pulpit right next to our preacher, shouting across the water, though I'm not sure about his speech. I hear, "Hey, you. You know you can't covet your neighbor's ox or ass or wife. So what's this you're coveting the West Bank?"

So you can't even count on keeping facts on the ground separate from facts in the heart in church. Some people there are very good at reading the truth in your heart from the facts you put on the ground.