133. Charisma, Angela Davis, Paris

There you were in 1972, trying to decide whether an injustice had been done to Angela Davis who, unable to make bail, sat in prison waiting to be tried as an accessory (the term for it in most states) to the murder of Judge Harold Haley.  The charge was based on evidence, later confirmed, that she had bought the gun that killed him.

Ordinarily those facts would make it easy for you: the charge was justified (providing the murder weapon would have forced an accessory charge almost anywhere) and due process had been followed in arresting her, imprisoning her, and setting bail (in her case $100,000, well justified by her having already fled).

What complicated your thinking was that many injustices had been done to African-Americans in the United States for a long time and that some in law enforcement, grudging the ground lost in the recent civil rights battles, were using and bending the law to gain some of it back. You had to ask yourself, "Is this justified enforcement or is it another case of racial harassment by the white majority?"  You had to look closely.

But in 1972 there was, especially in academia, something very powerful working against a close look: charisma.  Angela Davis was loaded with it.  So were Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver and all the Black Panthers she was associated with.  And those opposing them?  The Marin County prosecutor, Albert Harris?  Charisma zero.  Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, addressing the nation about the case?  Maybe a negative number.  (Hoover put her on the Ten Most Wanted List — only the third time for a woman — and Nixon congratulated the FBI on its “capture of this dangerous terrorist.") 

I think that if you were an aspiring academic and intellectual in 1972 it would have been as hard for you to resist Angela Davis's charisma as it was for your political opposite to resist the momentum of white resentment.  She was a bright student, she had won a scholarship to Brandeis, she spent a year in Paris, she worked for civil rights, she was beautiful, and she had been a target of Governor Ronald Reagan, who requested that she, because she was a communist, be barred from teaching at any university in the State of California.  She was right there with all the good people who had been persecuted as "communists" in the recent McCarthy era. 

In our present charisma-free environment (at least on this score) we who want to stand with the just can go pretty directly to the essential questions.  About Davis, "Was there or was there not good reason to arrest her, imprison her, and set her bail at the given figure?"  About the Communist Party, "Is it expressing dissent or engaging in rebellion — that is, attempting to overthrow the government?"  In the 70s we had to work through so many layers of charisma that we — outside of a few privileged political-science seminars — had a very hard time getting to these questions.

And you know who had the hardest time?  People who had been to Paris, people who actually lived there or who lived there in their imaginations, people who felt its great postwar attraction.  If anybody these days is in doubt about that charisma all they have to do is read Alice Kaplan's new book, Dreaming in French. There it is, in the lives of three women who spent student days in Paris, and were liberated by that experience, as many others were.  It was wonderful, it was exhilarating, and it was a handicap to clear thinking.  For Americans trying to get to the essential questions about cases like Angela Davis's it was another layer, a very heavy layer, of charisma they had to get through.

For the French, and particularly for Paris intellectuals, there was no doubt about the injustice done to Davis.  It was the confidence of the distant look.  Americans were unjust to blacks, Americans were unjust to her.  In the letters of sympathy to her (some of which Kaplan showed on slides Wednesday at the American Library in Paris) Davis is simply "in prison," without qualification.  Another victim of the system.

That's such a bad example to young American academics.  It tells them they can be good, they can stand with the just, without looking closely.  It reinforces that kind of Christianity, stronger in America than in France, that tells them, dangerously, that goodness is measured entirely in the heart.  Take the right general position, adopt the right attitude, and you are relieved of responsibility for particular judgment — which always requires particular inspection.  (No hearts could be in better condition than those incapable of inspection: the children who wrote the letters Kaplan showed us.)

So should our young not go to Paris?  Not feel the liberation Jacqueline Bouvier and Susan Sontag and Angela Davis felt?  By no means.  There are too many provincial constraints (taking America to be a province of France here) they, in order to grow, need to be free of — among the many they shouldn't be free of, constraints needed for growth and understanding.

A smart young person, after feeling the Parisian liberation, will pause for inspection. "Let's see now, what am I liberated from and what not?"  He (or she) will be the heir of the smart young person in the sixties, who, looking at the Viet Nam mess, said, "Let's see now, what authorities have been discredited and what not?"  The smart ones of both times are trying to avoid the dumb mistakes of wild freedom and blind anti-authoritarianism; both have learned to look closely.

132. Law, Policy, Moral Transposition, and Abortion in China

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There's a law in China that says a couple can have only one child. There's no law in China that says that a woman can't have an abortion. The law restricting family size forces a lot of abortions in China.

The writer of the number one leader in The Economist of 5 May, like many Americans wanting China to become a country observing "the rule of law," rather than a country subject to arbitrary imposition of the leaders' will, is indignant over the way the currently powerful men have put the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng under house arrest for nineteen months, under no law we know of.  This, according to the writer, was done because, after "being praised for years by the local government for advocating the rights of disabled people" he "crossed the line by taking on the local party over the abortion and sterilisations it enforced as part of China's strict one-child policy."

Policy.  Different from a law.   See house arrest for a disagreement on policy and an enlightened Westerner is entitled to get indignant.  See house arrest for breaking a law?  Entitlement not so clear.

Since I believe that having no more than one child is a law in China, and that the leader-writer's word is inaccurate, I cannot share his indignation at the house arrest.  I may be indignant at the law itself, or the making of it, or the way the makers customarily operate, but, even though I go on to be indignant over the severity of the penalty, I can't be indignant over punishing a lawbreaker. 

The reason is that I believe in just what we're calling for in China, the "rule of law."  I know that that expression suggests something very large (from procedural guarantees to substantive rights) but however I expand it, I can't get away from what the word "law" (in the sense of "rule in a legal system") has to include: enforcement.  No penalty, no enforcement; no enforcement, no law.  You might as well call it advice, or a policy statement.

Am I entitled to be indignant over the one-child law itself?  I have to be careful here because I have objected too often to acts of moral transposition by my students to be caught committing one myself.  (Moral transposition: bringing someone distant in place or time into one's own place or time and judging him by standards there.)  So I let the Chinese leaders remain in China, look at the terrible over-population problem they were trying to solve there, try to imagine the trade-offs that could be made to solve it, and, unable to come up with a better solution myself, decide that I am not entitled to be indignant over the Chinese one-child law.

Entitlement to indignation over forceful action is usually gained only after answering three questions: Who am I?  Where am I?  What is my target?  Students of the 60s were not entitled to burn down ROTC buildings because their target was not the Army but the war, or those choosing it or running it.  The Army was needed, and they cheered for itwhen Arkansas police wouldn't let black students into schools in Alabama.  Vagueness, confusion, carelessness, those are the things that deprive us of entitlement.  Unspecific indignation, that's what we count on our newspapers to help us avoid.

From my newspaper, The Economist, I here need to know the specifics of the Chinese law and the facts of its breaking.  I don't need to know, not for my indignation, that Chen is "blind," that he "emerged from poverty," that he "fought for justice," that he's "a brave man," that he's "the best of modern China." That leaves me with no more entitlement than that of the students who burned down our ROTC building.

131. Freedom and the Arts

  
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"Whoever decreed that a word must have a fixed meaning?" asks Charles Rosen (New York Review, 5-10-12).

"What the hell makes you think anybody decreed it?" I ask.  "There's no tyrant behind the demand that words have a fixed reference to things in the world.  It's need.  Little prairie dogs have to learn that a certain sound from a fellow prairie dog means 'Hawk! Dive into your hole.'  Little children have to learn that 'STOP' means 'Stand on the curb until Daddy gets there.'  A fixed meaning.   Jeez, didn't these romantics ever take a kid to school?"

For Friedrich Schiller, Rosen's backup, "the conventions of language and of society are in principle arbitrary — that is, imposed by will."  Ja, mein oberst, will.  It's not the hawks, it's not the traffic, it is, once again, some damned tyrannical father. 

And you know who that father is when the kids get to college?  Me, the English-composition teacher.  Enforcing the conventions of common usage.  Rosen knows that I, with my standard marks in a student's margin (like Reference?) am needed, and even gives me a boost.  Conventions "are the bulwark of civilization, a guarantee of social protection." But still, conventions can be "a prison cell."  In which case there's me (or paranoid me), the cop, throwing children and artists in jail.

I appreciate the freedom the artist longs for. A painter friend of mine looked at the dreary winter landscape of Southeast Ohio and saw how our lovely, thick summer forests had become a bunch of twigs.  He painted the trees with an exaggerated twigginess that, against an unnaturally grey sky, showed me what I had missed about them, and made me view their winter aspect with fresher, more appreciative eyes.  I'm glad he felt free to wrench the real world around his way

But why does Rosen have to enlarge this freedom to include freedom from my composition classroom?  Why does he make referential language the strongpoint of the citadel that has to be stormed?  To me the citadel (or whatever) Rosen's artists and children (and a lot of postmodernists) are storming is the citadel of the knowledge that equips us to live in the world.   It's every public offering in which the knowing say to the ignorant, "This is what you can't wrench around your way."   Today it's all the science courses in the university, yesterday it was all the theology courses, and many days ago it was all the plays we saw in the theater.  The earth will heat up, God will punish, and you can't get a wind for Troy unless you sacrifice your daughter. 

That's meeting a need, according to the knowledge of the time.  The most reliable knowledge in our time is conveyed in referential language governed by logic.  It's what the knowing adults know now and the ignorant little children and prairie dogs don't.

I have not met any artists who do not want their children to get safely across the street.  But more and more critics and theorists are interfering with their ability to do so. Do they think they are defending their art? the humanities?

If they do, they are confused.  Confusion is the problem.