154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Friday, June 29, 2012

 

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154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Americans have to talk about cool because they can't talk about goodness.  "We're better than you."  That's ugly and dangerous.  "Better," coming from Americans in the Balkans, means "more rational, less credulous," and when a Serb or a Croat finds out that 31% of Americans believe in astrology and that 43% believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so" (Gallup, 2007) their tongues are stopped.  Looking at rumor-charged Balkan killers and saying, "Change, be more like us," is not an option."

Claims about what's cool in your country, though, are comparatively safe.  "Sure, there are a lot of Americans believing those things but they're not considered cool, not by educated Americans."

What do you mean, "not by educated Americans"?  More than 30% of Americans over 25 hold bachelor's degrees (2012 Census Bureau).  You must have plenty of educated people believing unbelievable things.

OK, by educated I have to mean, "having learned to be careful about belief," and not "having acquired a lot of knowledge."  The latter can certainly get you all kinds of degrees — professional ones, mainly — but in America (I'll risk it) it won't make you cool.  I mean not as long as traditional philosophy is thought of as cool.

And by "traditional" you mean?

Of the tradition that descends from Plato's Socrates, the careful step-by-step testing that lets limited human beings establish reliable beliefs, the testing that eventually gave us the scientific method — though from Plato's starting points he could never get to what we call science.

What percentage of people in any country are going to be careful enough to meet Socrates' standards?

The number doesn't matter.  As long as those standards are thought cool by people — heck, 2% — that the others think are cool a nation won't wander too far into dangerous belief, that is, careless belief about things that matter, things you go to war over. 

And that 2%, those are professors, I take it.

You take it wrong, though you can expect to find professors, trained academics, to be prominent among those who are careful about belief.  Anybody, schooled or unschooled, can be in the 2%.  Faulkner's barber, Hawkshaw, was in the 2% of careful people in that town of his that did the lynching.  "Get the facts, boys, get the facts."

"Facts, hell!" they said.  "You're a fine white man."

Then the leader, McLendon, the officer, the one who had commanded troops in France: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  He's the one they look up to and they join his mob, leaving Hawkshaw standing.  No prof ever defended the academic tradition more firmly, or more futilely. 

And the lesson for Balkan people?  You're not equating them with Southern racists, are you?

No, but I'm pointing to a comparable need.  Hawkshaw needed some standing in Jefferson.  A coterie, some cool fellows in the drinking places, some fear of their wit from behind the pool cues, somebody to give skepticism a better name.  They don't have to be scholars, they don't have to speak good English.  All they have to have, if they know they have some backing, is a voice.  "McLendon, you're out of your fucking mind."  That might have been enough.

I see.  And if in the Balkans a voice, with some backing, had said, "General Strugar, you're out of your fucking mind," that might have been enough.

Might have, but words like that too easily lead to fights.  Better the teacher's words, the composition teacher going over McLendon's sentence: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  Pronoun reference, Jack.  What do you have in mind each time you use "it"? 

These comp teachers are bears on reference.  Noun reference. "Does this word refer to something in the reader's world, not just your world? Something he or she can check on, and call true or false or something in between.  Assume checking.  Assume Socrates."

Slavov Zizek couldn't assume that if he taught composition. "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  He has to assume concession.

How should those of us with a stake in the old academic tradition respond to Zizek?  We know that his position can't be reconciled with ours.  We doubt that the continental tradition that tolerates and even encourages his position can be reconciled with ours.  Indeed, if we listen to Martha Nussbaum, we'll doubt that reconciliation is possible.  She found the portrait of philosophy in Astra Taylor's documentary, concentrating on figures (like Zizek) outside the strict discipline of philosophy, a "betrayal" of our tradition (see

http://www.thepointmag.com/2010/reviews/inheriting-socrates ).

 So, you hear Zizek's voice: "Truth...measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  Do you pass by indifferently?  So much noise?

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It will depend on where you are.  If you're in a student drinking place that's not noise.  It could be the future.  Raise a warning flag.  "Fire danger: high."  If the drinking place is in a Balkan capital, sound the alarm.  The woods are burning.

153. Balkans: Checking for Cool.

You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures.  You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns.  You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.

That's what will determine the future.  Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead.  A zero in the historical force column. 

I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties.  The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."

Can you feel that, the cool of it?  If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools.  CCNY types.  Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?"  Then they're there with the goods.  Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia.  Those guys are cool.  Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression."   Atheism becomes cool.  Marxism and Freudianism follow.

That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana.  It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum.  When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.

What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade?  Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  Is that true?  Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk?  I, a two-week tourist?  Not a chance.

But I know what I'd be looking for.  First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?"  Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?"  I'd look at the listening students.  If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.

It's not obvious which one is better.  Everything depends on where you are, when.  You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't.  You want them charged up.  You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged.  That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.

Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging.  The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful.  It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies.  Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.

Academic cool can be ugly.  Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.

What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there.  Times and situations change so.  Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively.  "Let's just quit talking about cool.  We'll never be able to say anything helpful.  Forget the whole category."

At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in.  Sam Monk.  "You think there's no cool any more.  You want to know cool?  I'll show you cool.  My period.  Early 18th century.  England is looking back at a bad religious war.  The Western continent is looking back at worse ones.  The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds.  Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

That's cool.  Enlightenment cool."

Is it always and everywhere cool?  It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations.  If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.

152. English Composition vs. Slavoj Zizek, Again

So the next day the New York Review (7-12-12) arrives with a piece on Zizek.  I learn (1) that he sees in Hegel "a new kind of 'paraconsistent logic' in which a proposition is 'is not really suppressed by its negation.'" and (2) that whether Marxian ideas "correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant."

 Is that latter a defect, as it would be according to traditional tests of the worth of an idea?  "No," explains Zizek, "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.

General Strugar couldn't have put it better.  The NYR piece makes me, as the author of Post #151, feel like a fool.  Why was I trimming fingernails when all these bones are broken?

It also makes me feel helpless.  I need the talent of a satirist like Swift or Pope, and I don't have it.  All I can come up with is the crudest transposition of Zizek's words, and anybody who has followed me on my Balkan tour will have already put them in the mouth I hear them coming out of, General Strugar's.  "No. no." he is saying at his trial, "that about the Croatian troops in Dubrovnik was only a falsehood in your sense.  In the paraconsistent sense it was what we call a self-relating truth, measured by the way it affected the subjective position of enunciation."  In other words,  "It worked for me — and on the boys in the army and the people in Belgrade."  We can go on from there to re-measure every inflammatory appeal to bloodlust in history.

In the state I am in coming back from the Balkans I simply cannot see Zizek as a fellow academic, despite his credentials as an honoree (visiting professor) at the best American Universities — Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Minnesota, Michigan, California at Irvine.  I have spent too much time there (not just in Serbia; they all had a General Strugar, more or less) asking, "Where were the academic standards?", with no doubt about what "academic standards" in that question had to mean: "application of reliable tests of belief."  If you can say that people in their eighties have passionate yearnings I think you could safely say that we were, with every bullet-riddled building we saw, yearning more and more passionately to hear of people who tested for truth, people, anybody, who just cared about the truth.

I should say a word about yearning for different behavior.  Displayed in a foreign country it is, like indignation, often an assertion of national superiority:  "Oh that they might rise to our level."  Or displayed anywhere, personal superiority: "Oh that human nature might change — as mine has."  But then there's the display to each other, modestly, over an evening drink or a morning coffee: "Oh if only the things that could have been done had been done."  That's what you get to after you've done enough reading and lived enough life to have given up on a change in human nature and asserted enough national vanity to be tired of it.

What could they have done here, what that's important and doable?  Reduce the inflammatory rumors.  Stop one pre-emptive strike based on rumor and you have, in this land of the pre-emptive strike, done something.  But how do you do that, reduce inflammatory rumor?

"By teaching writing standards," the retired composition teachers (there's always a sprinkling in Elderhostel) jump in to say.  "In practice, getting students to scratch out, from each sentence, every unjustified or intemperate word.  Until a habit is formed."

So there's how we get what we're yearning for.  "Wasn't there somebody, anybody, in that situation who just wanted to make sure of the facts?"  Yes, our guide answers, there was this kid who believed his comp teacher and became a reporter.

And there's my problem with Zizek.  How can I, who taught composition for 35 years, call myself a colleague of somebody who blows its standards away?

"Here's how," says a defender of Zizek — say the one who invited him to the conference.  "The academy is a place open to all views, and you yourself are not an academic if you fail to tolerate a view or allow its full expression in our circle." 

It's a common reply and it's based on the same failure to grasp a fundamental truth about the academic circle: that admission to it depends on acceptance of its supporting rules, most of them set by Plato in the first Academy.  Those rules are what allow the famous tolerance, culminating in the openness of scientific inquiry.  If you claim that you belong in the circle no matter the rules you make yourself indistinguishable from creationists, who also would like to be taken as colleagues.

Now here's a point of strain that I would like to see my genuine colleagues address.  We hate to be caught in a self-contradiction, right?  And people in philosophy departments, our leaders, hate it most, right? (Have you ever heard them debate over there?  "One cannot say, on pain of contradiction, that x...." and, when it's demonstrated, nobody says x any more.)  Now I want you to picture a teacher who, after his English Composition class, walks across the hall to listen to, or even, by assignment, teach, what Zizek teaches.  (Of course it doesn't have to be exactly Zizek; there are plenty of others now who will keep on saying x without respect to demonstration or evidence.)

Now I think all who still feel the pain of contradiction will feel the pain that the composition teacher, alternately holding to and abandoning traditional academic standards, is feeling.  So I hope they will understand his request (or, my request in his name) to his leaders in the philosophy departments of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Cal, Minnesota, and Michigan, insofar as they have influence as faculty senators or administrators or members of curriculum committees: either have your university give up English Composition or quit honoring Slavoj Zizek.

151. A Slovenian Philosopher

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The Balkan philosopher best known to me is Slavoj Zizek, one of eight contemporary philosophers chosen by Astra Taylor to present their ideas in her documentary Examined Life — one of those movies those unable to keep up with philosophy are sure to be drawn to.  (You think you can learn what's going on without killing yourself.)

Back home I found that Zizek was a Ljubljana native who, after getting his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and studying psychoanalysis at the University of Paris (where the influence of Lacan and Heidegger on his thinking significantly deepened), went on to make such a reputation for himself as a political and cultural theorist that there is now a whole periodical, the International Journal of Zizek Studies, devoted to his work.

But his fame apparently goes well beyond the academy.  According to Sean O'Hagan (The Observer, 6-27-10), "Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  If you had to be "influential" to make Taylor's list of eight I suppose this alone would have qualified Zizek.

So, wouldn't you know, I fly straight from Ljubjana, Slovenia, to Athens, Ohio, and there, waiting for me, is the 7 June London Review of Books with a piece by Slavoj Zizek in it.  You can guess how I'll approach it: as the English Composition teacher with an eye out to squash Heidegger and his students (Posts #45 and 120).

The visit to the Balkans has made that role attractive again.  They must have composition (writing) courses in college there; what do the students learn?  What do they learn before that? What's their elementary-school teaching like?  What do their graduate students talk about over their evening drinks?  What's cool?  Those are the questions that, after two weeks of puzzling over the terrible, irresolvable conflicts here, we found ourselves asking.

Now, the Zizek piece.  He is arguing that the Greeks, in fighting austerity, are fighting "the European economic establishment" which, though it claims to be saving Greece is actually destroying it.  Greece's best hope, and ours if we are Europeans, is that the anti-austerity party, Syriza, wins the coming election.  Its leader, Alexis Tsipras, deserves our support.  "By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself."

That's what I get from it.  But how do I get it?  There's this sentence: "If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels's technocracy and anti-immigrant populism."

Zizek knows what the European establishment will hope.  But can it hope this?  Would it call its own program, the one Syriza will interrupt, a "vicious cycle of mutual complicity"? No, that's Zizek speaking.  And Zizek knows far more than we know.  He knows just who the complicit parties are: Brussels technocracy and anti-immigrant populism.  All who know what he's referring to raise your hands. Anybody know how it's a cycle?  "See," I tell the writer after he's read his paper to the class, "you've got to explain.  Your readers are bright and informed but these are complicated matters and not everybody agrees on them."

But satisfying such readers is not Zizek's way and it's not in his tradition.  It is not, I think, going to be in any tradition that looks to aristocracy, as I think the tradition of continental philosophizing does.  I feel it in modern French philosophers, who by their scorn of the bourgeois seem driven to aristocratic habits — in speech, anyway. 

I hear a lord speaking in Zizek's conclusion: Syriza's voice "is not the voice of extreme left 'madness', but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology."  The voice speaking on Zizek's side is the voice of reason.  "You down there.  You're mad.  Believe it because I tell you."

Lordly speech.  How do you acquire it in Eastern Europe, where there was no middle class to scorn?  Was there only the peasant alternative?  Maybe, though, years under authoritarian regimes, a succession of them, any kind, encourage lordly speech, as official to underling.  Maybe any authoritarian lecture system, the teacher addressing an amphitheatre, encourages it.  Who knows?

The opposite of the authoritarian lecturer is the dialectical questioner, epitomized in the Oxbridge tutor, who says to the student (or whom the student can hear saying, whether he says it or not), "This subject is deeper than either of us but let's see what we can dig out together."

It's in the digging that care with words is developed, and insisted on by the tutor — in an oddly authoritarian way.  R. M. Hare, accounting years ago for the difference between British philosophy and continental philosophy, told a reporter that (I've quoted it a hundred times), "here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you, 'What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him." There's no getting out of it.  You've got to make sense to an ordinary, informed reader, for whom your tutor speaks.

That, though often cramped in its expression into marginal comment and quick conference, is (or was) the ideal of English Composition in America.  We in big midwestern universities after the war had our eyes on Oxford and Cambridge, the mothers of lucid scholarship and sharp debate.

So now I want to put Zizek in the student's chair.  He's given a thing to his teacher that says, "The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a 'Europe with Asian values' — which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy."

That word "outmanoeuvred," Slavoj, what do you mean by that?  Does it mean anything more than being defeated in an election?  No?  Well, maybe you'd better just say that.  And "Asian values," what are they?  And whom are you quoting?  Ah, you can supply that.  Good.  Better do it.  That should be easy.  But here's a hard one, this "tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy."  Do you mean "deny people the vote"?  Do you know where this has happened and who did it?  Better give some examples.  Ah, you don't have any particular ones in mind, where capitalism was the cause?  Then you shouldn't suggest that you do.  It's like your reference to behind-the-scenes manoeuvering.  If you know what went on, tell us; if you don't, or don't know reliably, hold off.  Say only what your knowledge limits you to.

Here's where I start hearing all the other Balkan voices I've recently heard, or tuned in on:  General Strugar exhorting his fellow citizens to rise to the threat of Croat soldiers in Dubrovnik, a Vecernie Novosti writer reporting that forty Serb civilians were killed in Pakrac by Croatians, another that forty Serb babies had been killed in Vukovar, Radio Television of Serbia explaining that the people of Dubrovnik were burning automobile tires to simulate the destruction of the city.

"Say only what your knowledge limits you to."  It's cool instruction in a classroom or office, easily delivered in a time of peace or in a secure country.  But it trains.  And in broader ways than first appears.  In learning to write better students learn to listen better, and become critical. 

That last is how they can make their teachers most proud of them, up at the civic level.  A General Strugar (or his American equivalent) speaks and the student says, "Hang on a minute.  Do you really know that? For a fact?"  The retired teacher (Elderhostel is thick with them) who hears that will of course feel proud, but he'll feel more: he'll feel better about the future of his country.

How do retired Slovenian or Serbian or Croatian teachers feel about the time they spent in their classrooms?  Were those classrooms like ours, or not?  That's the trouble with these two-week tours: you don't have time or opportunity to find out.

150. Balkan Tour (13)

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Ljubljana

Optimism!  Here at the end.  Gregor Novak, Slovenian atheist, with four years in New York City where he learned to appreciate diversity ("my friends were all either Jews or Koreans"), believes that "there will be no war."  The Serbs "will not again go military, not in the short term, nor will the Croats.  They've learned what that costs."  He does not talk about, or apparently worry about, "animosity."  Make reasonable economic improvement (boy, does a lot depend on that) and they'll come around, maybe long-term.  The exception is Macedonia.  Things could get out of control with the Albanians.

What I hear is that Clinton's bombing succeeded.  The way to get people to stop doing what they're doing, after persuasion has failed, is to make them suffer.  That's the way of all war.  Here the Serbs suffered and stopped their military action.  They are deterred from further military action.  War brings peace, aggression benefits humanity.

"Yes," said the people of Novi Sad, "but we weren't the ones who needed to be stopped and deterred.  We didn't kill and cleanse.  We voted against Milosevic.  And we got plastered, losing three vital bridges."

The answer to that, implicit in Novak's lecture (one of several that rebuke me for seeing so much partisanship here), is that this is what you get when you form a nation-tribe.  You pay for the tribe's sins.  "And," the American might add, "not equitably.  Suffering-infliction cannot be balanced and fair."

"How about collateral damage?  Three thousand civilians died in Belgrade."

Bombing cannot be perfect.  We (the Americans taking over now) accept collateral damage when we accept our goal, to inflict suffering on the big causer of suffering.  Collateral damage is an accurate, justifiable term for what a humanitarian aggressor has to figure.  It's straight cost-benefit.  Will the suffering of tribal bystanders, as in Belgrade, be less than the total suffering you're trying to stop, as in Kosovo?  If the answer is yes you bomb and live with the results."

"Yes, but suppose it's just the tribe's leader who is making the decisions."

Who made him, or let him be, leader?  It's the nation-tribe again.  But the humanitarian aggressor thinks further.  He thinks about making the tribe suffer so that the leader will, in his political way, suffer, and stop the tribe from doing what it's doing.  Before criticizing Clinton you should ask,  "What would I have done (or have him do), not by deep, retrospective knowledge, the kind academics have, but by surface, immediate knowledge, what's knowable at the time with the resources available?" 

"I mean," says Clinton, anticipating Obama's answer to his counter-recession measures, "do you know a good alternative to what I did?  How would YOU have stopped the Serbs?"  (There's the answer to Sonia — though you'd never give it so bluntly — or to the analytical prof.)

What, Mr. Novak, is the feeling here now about Americans?  "I think people believe that they stopped the war and that that was OK, but now what they do is not OK.  Their behavior is outdated."  (What behavior?  He, or they, didn't say.)

Novak shows us how to take Sonia's word "meddling."  The Yugoslav people want to be (or to have been) saved from killing and cleansing but they also want to be free to call the act that saved them "meddling." 

We end with a kind of swing I haven't mentioned, the one that takes us from the sickening facts showing us what uneducated, credulous farm boys are capable of as snipers to a restaurant (or, usually, a bus) filled with the sweet music of the folk, the jolly farm folk, in their moments of togetherness.  On the bus we've had Croatian folk music ("clappa," lovely), Bosnian folk music, Serbian folk music, and now Slovenian folk music.

This last, with six good strummers and great local food, was maybe the best of our restaurant jolliness and love but, adding in all the tour-ending ceremonies, we got a little impatient with it.  We knew we had to get up at 3:30 (bags out at 4:00!) and we faced 24 hours of plane travel home.

149. Homage to Wikipedia

You're in a part of the world where everybody's got a case, a story, a pitch, an angle.  All day you listen to them.  What do you long for?  Wikipedia.  You can't wait to get back to your hotel room and call it up.  Did those things really happen?  In that way?  Oooooh, they didn't.  Well, I won't trust that person any more.

Who can you trust around here?  The man or woman far away, speaking through your laptop.  Why?  Because he's got a lot of other people keeping watch on him, following rules, making him follow rules.  First rule: maintain a neutral point of view.  No advocacy.  No slanting.  Go partisan and we'll throw your piece out.  Second rule: anticipate challenges.  Be right there with back-up, a cited source your doubter can check.  Third rule: talk it over with your fellow editors and writers — "in a respectful and civil manner, even when you disagree."  No personal attacks.  No sneering.  That's the way differences get ironed out.

That, from the Wikipedia policy page, is cool.  Academic cool. You don't realize how much it means to you until you can't tune in on it.  Your browser's not compatible, the server's down, the hotel's screwed it up, the goddam computer doesn't work.  You've gone a whole day, maybe two, maybe (once) three, without hearing a single cool voice — one, anyway, that could stay cool to the end.  Then..ah, there it is.  First, disambiguation.  Then the layout.  "Here's the way the subject is divided."  Then the division.  Nature sliced at her joints.  Then the hard thought, the care, and finally, cash on the barrelhead, there it is.  The anonymous scholar in the distance is there with the goods.  Oh brother, I believe. 

It's not that you get answers, the truth, from Wikipedia.  It's that you get effort toward it.  Strenuous effort.  Testing, checking, doubting, discussing.   And never saying, "That's it, wrap it up."  The effort may fail but you know that your odds on it here are the best you can hope for.

Who gave us such a thing?  I put the question to Wikipedia.  Proposed in 1999 by Richard Stallman.  There are the other names, with credit judiciously apportioned: Wales, Sanger, Cunningham.  There's a picture, twelve of them, unidentified, in 2000.  Not a gray hair in sight.

I see good students of English Composition.  I have already explained what I take English Composition to be: an essential introduction to the values of the academic tradition, and specifically to those values as conceived in the Enlightenment and formulated in the scientific method (see Posts 45 and120).  It's all pretty well packed into what my textbook told students in the argument section: "Cite evidence, anticipate objections, watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question, don't sneer."

So there they are, those twelve, some of them looking so young they could have been on the front row yesterday.  Ah, man, they really took it in.  Good students.  Good kids.  Way to go.

148. Balkan Tour (12)

Zagreb to Ljubljana

Neat farmhouses, productive farms, some heavy industry (a Renault plant), stable EU (Euro zone) member, 5% unemployment, a relatively homogeneous population, Slovenia is a horse of a different color.

Maybe their distance from Serbia accounts for the Slovenians' quick establishment of independence but you've got to give some credit to their smarts.  They saw an invasion by the Yugoslavia National Army (of which they were a part) coming and prepared plans to transfer all the Slovenes in the YNA to an old, neglected National Guard, locally commanded. On the day of the invasion, surprise, they transferred everybody and had a ready-made army with command structure (which they had filled out and modernized) in place. They fought efficiently and won in ten days.

So, relatively tame politics and from us, by now connoisseurs (if not voyeurs) of violence, more or less a yawn.  Can't help it.  It's late in the tour, we've seen so much, we're a little tired.  OK, let's see the buildings and hear the culture spiel.

We expected a routine bus and walking tour, and it was, except for the fine Austrian-era buildings and then wham, the great interior of this cathedral, St. Nicholas, with a mass going on, celebrating Ljubljana’s patron saint.  A knockout.

But with the heat and the walking Mary Anne and I, dying for a beer, decided to get permission from Julia to drop out.  Our request, though, opened the tap for half the group, and so back to the hotel en masse, not stopping because we, their leaders, wanted our beer time for ourselves.  We had it nicely, in the hotel bar, after a nap and shower.

Slovenia is the place where you catch your breath and start having imaginary conversations with people you met earlier.  "You.  Your Serbs. They believed those stories about thousands of Croatian soldiers in Dubrovnik getting ready to attack you.   Didn't anybody ask, 'Is it true?'  Why didn't they check Wikipedia?"

There wasn't any such thing then.

"But there's always something like it, some upholder of academic standards of inquiry.  They could check with their profs.  Or their profs' students, or former students, their good students."

But even our profs were deceived.  A lot of them went along.  The potential enemy — the one that produced the Ustashe, you know — was so close.  Listen to those profs now and you have to feel sorry for them.  "I was confused after hearing about 30,000 Ustashas on the move! TV Belgrade and Montenegrin TV provided the news and I, like a child, was frightened... Imagine how others felt when even I, a university professor, fell for it."  (Prof. Novak Kilibarda, quoted in Wikipedia, "Siege of Dubrovnik" — I looked it up.)  So he was all for the attack on Croatia.  That happens to smart profs, you know.  In the excitement of nationalism.  Think of all those brainy German professors who went along with Hitler and Goebbels.

Smart profs, the smartest of all, falling for Hitler. And here it is again, the same kind of thing.   We've had some of it in the U.S.  It's a puzzle.  "What prevents smart profs from going jingo?"

If the question had been asked I would not have been ready with an answer.  Prevent a prof from holding a view?  Who in America can do that?  Only, only (it took me a while) other profs.  By putting the credulous prof down.  'Definitely not cool.'  Politicians, statesmen, preachers, journalists, they don't have a chance of putting a prof down.  Profs are too arrogant.  Only other profs can do it.  In the faculty lounge.  "Frosting their ass," as the WWII veterans used to say.  You want to know, Serbian friend, the secret of a culture?  Look to see whose ass is getting frosted.

What are we going to do tomorrow?  Play bridge all morning with our New York lawyer and his partner.  It's scheduled free time.   And we've done our last washing.

147. Balkan Tour (11)

Karlovac, Slunj, and the Plitvice Lakes

How this tour swings between beauty and battle.  Today it was supposed to be beauty with us right in the middle, taking a two-mile hike through woods and past waterfalls to a boat that would take us down the lake beneath the mountains to a landing where, after another hike, a little train awaited to take us through the woods back to point where we could walk back to our starting point.  Shortcut plans were provided for those who couldn't make it.

We were all psyched for this but before we could get to the National Park (and World Heritage site) we had to go through towns Julia had to comment on.  Karlovac.  Serbs were a big minority in Croatia.  Here they, wanting to join Greater Serbia, revolted and the local Croats destroyed many of their houses.  The rebel Serbs battled and took over the town.  The Croat Army came on and a line was formed south of the town.  From behind it the Croats shelled the town and the southern sections were devastated.  We, coming through on our bus twenty years later, saw many facades still pocked with bullet holes.  On to Slunj, town of waterfalls.  Here the Serbs did the damage, destroying a church and a bridge.

Julia added that in a town north of here it was Serb fighting Serb.  One faction wanted to join Greater Serbia.  The other, led by the mayor, wanted to stay with Croatia.  The latter devastated their town.  (How much damage makes a town "devastated"?  What did the Croat mean by "70% destroyed"?  By now we hear in every report the message, "They did worse things to us than we did to them."

The hike was very aerobic, with many ups and downs, but oh, what scenery.  Water cascading down hundreds of feet on all sides into lakes so clear you could see the fish in them, way down there.  Log-paths so close to the rushing streams that sometimes the water gurgled over them.  Storms were predicted but you know our motto: Don't Be Bullied By The Weather.  And, hey, we'd been so lucky so far in our travels so far there surely was no need for US to bring an umbrella.  Well, after a couple of cracks of thunder, as we got off the boat it started to rain.  Rained hard as the path went up and down and then turned into steps that went up and up for ten minutes.  Not even having done what would have been so easily done, thrown in a rain-proof, hooded golf jacket that took up no room, we got what we deserved: about as thorough a drowning as two rats ever got.

What made our misfortune worse (forget "adventure") was that Julia discovered that the restaurant she (the tour company) planned to take us to, the close one, had burned down a few days ago.  So she had to make new arrangements by cell phone during the hike.   For 26 diners.  She coolly did all this, but couldn't protect us from ourselves.

The price of our meteorological arrogance was that one of us (me), after lunch (hot soup, thank you, thank you, Lord), had to join the group going back to the bus, taking the heavy, wet jackets, while the other continued the hike. 

MA the hiker reports more great beauty but also a small dustup.  The guide of an adjacent group, discovering that Julia was Hungarian, rather loudly claimed that she had no right to guide people here.  "You have to be Croatian."  Julia coolly (again) replied that she was not a guide but a group leader, and she held a European Union Certificate that let her lead groups anyplace, thank you.  Her unspoken communication was, I think, "Look, your country is going to join the EU July 1.  Do you want to make an issue of this?"  Once again, though, ethnic touchiness.

Tomorrow Slovenia, the most stable and prosperous of the five republics we are visiting, and the least affected by the war.  It won its independence in ten days, joined the UN and, later, the EU.  Is the fact that its troubles are relatively few attributable to its distance from the troublemaker, Serbia?

146. Balkan Tour (10)

Zagreb

Four hundred kilometer drive through flat, flat farmland to Zagreb, called "a pocket Vienna" for its rich Austrian culture and architecture, gained during the Habsburg rule (1878-1918).  Beautiful 19th-century public buildings and parks, with lively, attractive people on the streets.  Quite a contrast with the unsmiling citizens of Belgrade among their grey buildings.   Still the same graffiti, though, and the smoking. 

The city was bombed by the Serbs twice during the Homeland War (the Croatian name for it), first, our guide Bozena said, to intimidate (1991) and then for spite because they had lost the war (1995).  The Serbs, she said, used the Yugoslav Army against them.  For Djina, our Belgrade guide, the Serbs were just one of many ethnic groups in the Yugoslav Army.  It was Yugoslavia trying to keep one of its provinces from seceding.

What's behind the Serb hatred of the Croats?  Well, we were reminded in Serbia of what the Croats did when the Ustashe were put in control by the Nazis: condemned all Serbs, Jews, and Roma to death in concentration camps.  About 300,000 died.

Bozena took us to the impressive tomb of Franjo Tudgman, surrounded by deposited flowers. He's the father of his country but "the outside world did not understand about Franjo Tudgman," she said, thinking maybe of the kind of press he got from the BBC, who called him an "ultra-nationalist autocrat."  He's the one whose restoration of the flags and other symbols used by the Ustashe threw such fear into the Serbs.

In front of the government building Bozena explained the complicated Croatian flag.  It has five parts, almost like coats of arms, standing for the different regions.  "Croatia is the name of many small parts united together, as the flag shows."

Afterward I asked her if any of the parts wanted independence.  No.  Could they have it if they wanted it? No.  Her expression showed that maybe I shouldn't have asked this.

The highlight of the walking tour for me was a courtyard of wonderful sculptures.  Our guide said the sculptor, Ivan Mestrovic, died in South Bend, Indiana.

Had dinner at a good restaurant with very good beer.  More Austrian influence, maybe.  Walked back to the hotel through parks full of flowers and lovers.

145. Balkan Tour (9) Afterthoughts 2

Back in bed, a dream conversation:

"It's nationalism that's killing you people.  You've got to fight that.  Forget nation.  Think human beings.  Not family values, not clan values, not local values, not national values, but universal values.  Be international-minded."

International-minded, yeah, we were plenty international-minded once.  The Third International.  World revolution.  Forget country.  The unity and brotherhood of workers.  Really worked.

"Yes, but no war between countries.  That's been the great killer, hasn't it?  In every century?  In the last century we set the record, I think.  Is that the way you want to imitate the big countries around you, the ones that have always been around you.  Pushing you around.  Until they turn on each other.  Do you really want to join them?  Play their old game?"

No, but over here we read history closely.  We know that if you don't play that game, and play it well, you get wiped out.  Try to find Poland on the map after 1795.  Maybe you have to live in a disorganized region full of warlords for a while — no common law, no tax system, no big projects, no infrastructure, no security — before you can understand what nationalism gives you.  Read more history.

(The old reminder to Americans: you over there, with three thousand miles of ocean on each side and friends above and below, how can you understand centuries of life in the middle of Europe, with possible exterminators never more than sixty miles away? )

I say, "I've read some history.  I know that until China exchanged its warlords for a strong central government it was helpless before nations powerful in their nationhood."

There's more to their nationalism.  It lets them set up national universities and fund tuition and in the end build high-speed rail networks and put on great Olympics.  But most important, from our Balkan point of view, it lets them defend themselves.

"That is, fight wars.  Which may be good or bad."

Yes but whichever it is, when you're in the country it's better to win than to lose.  And winning depends very much on the national spirit developed in the nation's youth.  There's the "unity and brotherhood" that Zoran said was taught in Serb primary schools.

"I see."  What I saw was my own primary school in Ohio.  A picture of George Washington on the wall.  The flag up front, near the door.  8 a.m.  We stand and face the flag.  At the first notes of "To the Colors," played by the school bugler at the end of the hall, we put our hands on our hearts.  Outside the other members of the Drum and Bugle Corps are raising the big school flag.  At the last note, timed with the arrival of the school flag at the top of the pole, we extend our arms to the room flag.  "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands.  One nation, indivisible...."

This was the ceremony, instituted after World War I, that prevailed through the twenties and thirties in Norwood, and it differed little, I think, from that adopted in most of the nation's schools.  If those who fought World War II had national spirit planted in them early, this must have been it. 

So there I am.  Unless I think we could have fought World War II without such spirit, or think that war didn't have to be won, I have to agree with my Balkan friend: national spirit is a good thing to have.

144. Balkan Tour (9). Afterthoughts.

One thing about cool conversations on hot topics is that you find yourself quietly supplying the heat.  All Road Scholar guides speak, or start out speaking, coolly.  In Belgrade Djina coolly corrected my "Serbs" to "Yugoslavs" and went no further.  I walked back to the bus finishing off her speech on a soapbox:

Look, Americans, Bosnia was trying secede.  Can't you understand that?  You understand secession, don't you?  You fought a war to keep your South from seceding, didn't you?  That's leaving the Union.  Your blessed Union.  You had an idea of it, a vision, and you weren't going to let any provincials break it up, no matter how justified their grievances.  Well, we had a vision too.  It was called Yugoslavia and now it's called Greater Serbia.  That's a troublesome name, I know, but the vision is the same.  Surely you Americans, of all people, ought to understand why we had to fight to keep Yugoslavia from breaking up.

Think that way walking back to the bus and on the ride back to the hotel you might finish off with something like this:

Once upon a time a Big Power was a Very Little Power, occupying a small amount of land. It added to this land, piece by piece and people by people (making the people, at first by force and then by attraction, think of themselves as one people), until it acquired such power that everybody regarded it as a Great Power, and dealt with it with respect, and seldom looked down on its history.

Now, what I want to know, European nations, is this: which of you am I not describing?  Which of the ancient empires you admire?  Where's your Rome?  Where's your France?

In the early days of each of these, modern or ancient, you've got one among many, one city on seven hills, one island in the middle of a river.  Then you get war — that is, blood and cruelty and atrocities (have you looked closely at Caesar's war in Gaul?) — and you wind up with Greatness.

What's the difference between that and Serbia, in the Balkans now?  Only stage and success.  Serbia struggles in an early stage and it's a flop.  With you hanging over it it can't be anything else.

But, Europeans, my example doesn't have to be Serbia.  Let any of these five countries conquer the others, as you did your early neighbors, proclaim sovereignty over an equal area, field an equal number of divisions, with equally deadly weapons, and you will give it a place at the table, regardless of its crimes, which you know in your hearts are not different from yours.

143. Balkan Tour (9)

9. Belgrade

First a guide, Djina Dostanic, making the Serbian case, or slipping it in, as she took us to the largest Orthodox Church in the world and then to Tito's tomb.  "It’s not true that only military targets were hit in the bombing.  A hospital was bombed, a moving train was hit."

"How do you feel about Americans?"  (Asked off to the side.)

"At the time of the bombing I was very angry.  But that's past now.  You are not guilty but you were badly informed, as we were" — presumably by Milosevic.

About the start of the war: "The Croats (I guess the Ustashe) used the Nazi symbol."  She said Serbs were deathly afraid of that.  "250,000 Serbs fled Croatia in one night, fearing for their lives.  I know.  I was teaching near the border.  I saw their children in school the next day."

"Is that the reason the Serbs invaded?"

"Yes.  The Yugoslav Army invaded."

"To protect them?"

"Yes.  The Yugoslav Army was made up of all Yugoslavs.  The Croatian Army was just Croatians." 

She said nothing about leaving the bombed buildings in Belgrade as memorials (Julia's story).  Her explanation was that no buyer could meet the conditions set by the government: that they be restored to their original condition.  They were left unrepaired because repair was too expensive.

Then to lunch at the Dorian Gray restaurant with, at our table, two recent graduates of the University of Belgrade, Sonia (major in "technical translation") and Tanja (liberal arts).  Both very open and friendly and (I think Mary Anne would agree) beautiful women. 

How about dislike of Americans for the bombing?

"That's the older generation.  I [Sonia] remember being very frightened as a child.  But that's past.  We think it's not people, it's politicians."  Sonia admitted that the Kosovo invasion had to be stopped but was unwilling to see bombing as the only way to stop it.  What was the alternative?  I couldn't bring myself to ask.  Their hearts were for peace and good will, and their minds were set against the "politicians" who had to find the means.

They had some questions for us.  "I understand that you can put people in jail indefinitely on suspicion of being a terrorist.  Nobody will know."

"Ah, I think they will.  Our press will find out."

"You think you can trust your press?"

We tried very hard to get across our reasons for trusting our press but I'm not sure we succeeded.  They had the ingrained suspicion of media and government that we have noticed in so many, including Shura, who have come from Communist countries.  Mary Anne explained, as best she could, the Freedom of Information Act.  They came to the table assuming that the obvious could never be true.  "That belief is what's behind most conspiracy theories," I said. They laughed in agreement.  "Oh, conspiracy theories.  You should live in Serbia!"

"Were your families involved in the war?" 

"My father hid from the draft," Sonia said, "but he couldn't get a job.  My mother worked as a nurse."  Like the young women we met in Pskov they were working hard toward careers they had little hope of ever entering.  Jobs are so scarce.  Sonia, with a specialty, has the better chance; Tanja's humanities can lead only to teaching, where the outlook is bleak.  "But," she said, "the learning is good in itself."  (I thought of Zoran's complaint about Serbia's attachment to the humanities: "We educate our people to be unemployable.")

It was great to meet such young people after seeing so much that made us despair.  We loved them, and will remember them every time we get down on the Balkans, or (as people in their eighties do) get down on the human race.

Tonight it was dinner in a dark-wood restaurant in the Bohemian quarter with Serbian plum brandy, phylo-dough pastries, and a six-man string band playing eclectic jump tunes, including a German one and "Oh Susanna" (for our benefit), though it was the native Serb stuff they riffed on.  They came to our table and played leaning over the ladies and we loved them.

Tomorrow it's back to Croatia, the heart of it, where, being among them, we'll probably love the Croatians too.