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.