231. How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist

 

First, never say anything to a conspiracy theorist about the theory itself.  You are an academic, a scientist, and you don't pronounce on anything without examining it.  So you say, "I haven't looked into it."

Your excuse (and you need one; scientists are supposed to be curious) is that you are pressed for time and have to trust others to filter out theories worth looking into.  In this case you say, "I trust the mainstream American newspapers."

Your defense (and you need one; scientists are supposed to draw only on reliable sources) is that mainstream American newspapers are more reliable filters than any source you can turn to.  You regard an American journalist as a scientist pressed for time.  But remember, you are asking American newspapers only to tell you whether or not to take the theory seriously, not to tell you whether or not it is sound.

Your argument (and you need one; you have named the people who, by ignoring their theorizing, have gotten these theorists called "conspiracy" theorists) is that those who write for mainstream American newspapers are in competition with each other, and are as eager to get ahead as scientists, and are as alert to each other's lapses, while the sources the theorists rely on are in harmony with each other, and ignore each other's lapses.  You believe that judgment tested in competition is more reliable than judgment free of such testing.

Your purpose is to leave open the possibility that the conspiracy theory is true (a scientist never closes the door to new evidence and alternate theories) while avoiding commitment to investigation and even discussion. 

Your chief enemy is your own conscience as a scientist.  You feel uncomfortable showing indifference to offered evidence of a world-changing truth, and trusting non-academics to support that indifference.  You feel guilty turning away from people that look up to you.  But trust me.  If you value ordinary life you don't want to open yourself up to the extraordinary effort examination of a conspiracy theory will require, not if it's anything like the currently popular ones.   There's no end to what's on the Zapruder film, or in the Tower debris, or at the Roswell site.

Maybe, though, the best defense is to get people to stop looking up to you.  Change your identity.  Pull Error Philosophy on them.  Say, "Look, I'm not really a scientist.  I'm just a time-pressed wonk getting through life by making the best hunches he can.  My hunch that the Times and the Post have the right slant on this has taken me this far and since there's not a whole lot of good ordinary life left I think I'll just stick with them."

230. "Don't tell me about your doubts, tell me something you BELIEVE in."

 

Let's say an Error Philosopher hears that, Dave Gardner playing the Southern preacher, and takes it seriously.

"Well, the first thing I believe in is my own mortality.  I am going to die and I don't know when.  If I thought I were going to live forever I'd be wrong to give up on the Ideal, the Truth.  If I thought I had no mortal limitations I'd be wrong to have such a low aim, to avoid Error.  I'd have time to overcome my limitations.  I couldn't be an Error Philosopher.

"The second thing I believe in is the Good Hunch, what truth philosophers call probable inference.  I believe that in the time I have, with my limited abilities, I can come pretty close to what brilliant creatures, with a lot of time, will conclude is very reliable belief.  I mean, close enough, enough anyway to get me through the rest of my life without making Big Mistakes.

"The third thing I believe in is the value of ordinary, normal life.  That's what avoidance of Big Mistakes lets you live.  It's so valuable that, especially for those who have made a Big Mistake or two, or come close, you don't mind missing out on the extraordinary."

Does that mean you doubt the value of the extraordinary achievement?

"No, I doubt the value of a gamble for it.  You often risk the loss of what I have put a high value on, normal life, and you don't get very good odds.  They're like for a straight flush.  But you've got to figure the odds in each case.  And keep in mind that there's a joker in this deck.  From time to time up jumps, from the normal life, an extraordinary achievement.  The person going along, enjoying all that daily life has to offer, suddenly produces work that knocks the socks off of everybody.  That's more likely in some fields than in others (I'm thinking of mathematics) but it's possible in all.  t has something to do, maybe, with peace of mind."

One last thing.  Why do you call this a "philosophy"?

"For the same reason Mark Twain signed a letter to the editor with the name of a preacher friend of his: to give it more weight."

And why do you capitalize so many of your ideas?

"Same reason.  It's what Germans do.  I've even considered giving the whole cluster a German name: Irrtumphilosophie."

229. From First Grade to Weapons Grade

 

"Don't be a Just Me" was a motto on the wall of my first grade classroom.  In seventh grade, where we learned to debate, this had become, "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view."  I thought of this when I read Geoff Dyer's explanation (Financial Times, 12-4-13) of China's declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone in the East China Sea: China is "attempting what aspiring great powers often do to prevent another country from dominating its own region."

All right, grown-up youngster, be fair.  Look at it from China's point of view.  There's the U.S. with its Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) covering all the waters around its borders, there's Japan with its ADIZ, there's Russia with its.  An ADIZ is not a legal or treaty thing; it's just declared.  Great, and sometimes not-so-great, powers have such things. 

Say you're Chinese.  For such a long time your country was far from being a great power.  Just the opposite.  Great powers took from China what they wanted.  In 1895 Japan took, among bigger things (like Taiwan), the Diaoyu Islands.  A small thing  but still a great power thing.  Do you want to be a great power?  Get an Air Defense Identification Zone.  And if it overlaps Japan's ADIZ  at the Diaoyu Islands, so much the better.  Here's mud in your eye, Shinzo Abe.

Not so fast, says Joe Biden, you're "unilaterally trying to change the status quo" (NYT, 12-3-13).

"Whose status quo?" the fair-minded seventh-grader sees himself, Chinese, asking the U.S.  "The established situation in the Pacific has you running things right up to our coastal waters.  Just the way you ran things in 1961 (this 12-year-old does well in history) when Khrushchev sent his boatload of missiles to Cuba.  Remember?  The U.S. had missiles in Turkey, right on the Soviet Union's border.  And was ready to press the button if the Soviets put some on its borders.  "We can do it but you can't," that was the status-quo motto in 1961.

That's the way established powers talk to rising powers.  Most of it is probably arrogance and habit but, you know, I think a lot of it is just plain fear.  Like what Spartans felt when they saw the power of Athens rising.  "What will they do to us when they are fully powerful?"  Martin Wolf, writing in last Tuesday's Financial Times ("China must not copy the Kaiser's errors," 12-3-13) makes the comparison to Germany, and gives us a telling reminder of the fear in the hearts of the established powers, Britain and France, as Germany rose, and moved to stand alongside them in the 20th century.  Wolf shows how that move was mishandled, and we come away certain that established powers can mishandle their establishment as badly as rising powers can mishandle their rising.  His reminder, that "seemingly minor events can quickly escalate to catastrophic proportions," needs no elaboration to give us a shudder.

Keeping an established power happy without making a rising power unhappy is pretty difficult but smart statesmen can do it.  The Kennedy team handling the missiles the Soviet Union (in the position of a rising power) was sending to Cuba did it.  They made a deal: the Soviets would turn their boat around and we would remove the missiles we had stationed in Turkey.  But there would be no public announcement of the removal, or even admission of the deal.  That left Americans, the mass of them, believing that they were as great as they ever were.  Since the turnaround was public they could claim victory.  But their leaders would make no such claims.  "No crowing" was Kennedy's final instruction to the team.  That would let the Soviets think they were as good as anybody. 

The seventh-grader has no seat at the realpoliticians' table but is his voice unheard?  I think not.  No graduate of an American elementary school can entirely silence the voice that speaks for fairness to the other fellow and in this case, inside those tough, anti-communist counselors, I think there must have been a voice asking why the U.S. could put missiles on its adversary's borders and the adversary could not do the same.  I'll go further.  I'll bet some were asking, "What would I be feeling about my borders if countries along them had not leaped across them so many times to savage us, as the Germans did so devastatingly to the Russians just a few years ago?"  Americans, with their 3000 miles of ocean on each side, have a hard time imagining the feelings of exposed countries, but if they're not going to be haunted by their seventh-grade teachers they have to.

Smart seventh-graders read "Look at it from the other fellow's point of view" as a sub-motto of "Use your imagination," and when they grow into realpoliticians the blackboard motto will become "get inside the other fellow's head, look at the world the way he looks at it, and the way he looks at you."  The results could be as different as what's inside a Chinese head and what's inside an Iranian head.

Say a grown-up seventh-grader gets inside an Iranian mullah's head and looks out at us.  What does he see?  Pure Evil.  The Great Satan.  When he looks, as that mullah, at his own people what does he see?  Potential martyrs for Good, caring little about their own lives in the fight against Evil.  If the seventh grader is at all an Error Philosopher (Posts #224 and 226) he'll see tolerance of nuclear weapons in the hands of such a mullah directing a nation as The Big Mistake, to avoid which his country has to Go Big (here meaning "do anything necessary to keep nuclear weapons out of such hands").  So people who adhere to seventh-grade ideals aren't necessarily going to be doves.  They could be bigger hawks than John McCain.  With controlled sympathies.  It won't matter that in the past Iranians have been victims, our victims (in 1953).  Decisions have to be made for, and sympathies directed to, the living and their descendants only.  There's no point, at a bargaining table, in sympathizing with the dead.

That in Iran is a million miles from what we have in the East China Sea, beginning with what's primary inside the Chinese head: material, or commercial, interests — all that trade with the U. S., all that need for the natural resources missing in their own country.  The trouble with the Fighter Against Evil is that in his head there are no material interests you can work with.  In the Fighter Against Foreign Devils there are God's plenty.  What Marx (dialectical materialism) didn't put there Confucius did. Confucius, that god (yes, you can call Confucianism the "Chinese religion") of realism and worldliness.

There, in the Far East, is the hope we can't have in the Near East.  Mutual material interests push China and the U. S., represented by skilled diplomats at the table, to a peaceful settlement that lets each side go home speaking like big-power winners.  "See, we got them to accept our defense zone."  "See, we got them to bring their defense zone down to match that of reasonable nations" (the Chinese ADIZ required — perhaps for future bargaining — more of entering planes than the others' did).  They come out with the Chinese feeling as good as anybody and the Americans feeling as great as they ever were. Rising power happy, established power happy.  Fairness that makes the seventh grader happy.  Achieved by diplomacy that makes the realpolitician happy.

 
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228. When Error Philosophers Become Parents.

 

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I see no reason for the Avoidance Parent not to follow the same general rule the Avoidance Ruler follows: come down big on the Big Mistakes and wave away the little ones.  The Big Mistakes a child can make are the life-ruining ones, like doing heroin.  In my day it was getting a girl pregnant, or getting pregnant.  The promising child goes, bang, from a wide world full of options (this college? that career? the best country to pursue it in?) to a narrow world of practically zilch options (work at this plant?  apprentice yourself to that trade? clerk in whose store?). That was in my town but the range of jobs available to a partially educated husband was small in nearly every town and inability to move far (how could you, with no savings and a baby?) made it smaller.

OK, that is the Big Mistake, that is the nuclear catastrophe, the quagmire, the released genocide, and unless he (or she) is confident the child will avoid it on his own the Avoidance Parent will go big on it as he went big on the toddler to keep him out of the street.  And with the same acceptance of collateral damage, physical or psychological.  No injury by a parent is as great as what an automobile or a heroin addiction can do.

Parents, like nineteenth-century rulers, are prone to gauge a mistake by the injury done not to the child but to themselves, their pride, their sense of their (or their family's) position.  And they often fail to distinguish real injury from symbolic injury.  Dress, facial hair, music, posture, indecorous language, most of the gestures of teenage rebellion, do only symbolic injury.  The Avoidance Parent, having identified the Big Threat that does Real Injury, will wave them aside — as Napoleon III, France's great Attainment Ruler, should have done with the Ems telegram, the indecorous language of which led him to declare the war that lost Alsace.  Loss of a province, loss of a child, the same confusion is behind it.

In the family, as in the world arena, the Error Philosopher will be an anti-romantic.  No "Follow your dream," no "Excelsior!" no "Be President."  Just avoid the Big Crash that, with romantics, follows not just failure but simply falling short.  He'll redefine failure.  So that a child who grows up to be a quarrelsome, dogmatic bore will be recognized as a failure.  Despite his Nobel prize.  The payoff to the child? He'll se that there's no need to make it in the big leagues.  Playing decent ball in the neighborhood is, as long as it satisfies you, good enough.  The payoff to the parent: no reproaches like Biff's to Willy Loman: "I never got anywhere because you blew me so full of hot air I could never stand taking orders from anybody!"

Does this mean that the nation will win fewer Nobel prizes?  It could well be.  Maybe that's the way Error Philosophy will play out beyond the family.  Buy into it and we may buy out of a cure for cancer.

227. How Error Philosophers Find Truth

  

Say you're worried only about mistakes.  Then you call yourself a "philosopher."  Owners of that word are all over you: "You've grabbed the wrong name, friend.  You're a functionary, a technician, an agent.  You carry out what's already been determined, a purpose.  Until there's a purpose there are no mistakes.  Don't we have enough stories establishing this?  You know, guy goes into a place, asks to be castrated, is castrated, then discovers that the place also does circumcisions.  'Oi, that's what I meant, circumcised!'" 

All right, error philosopher, you're only the guy with the knife.  "Great technique" is the highest compliment you can aspire to, "zero mistakes" the best entry in your record. Somebody else decides what you're supposed to do with your knife.

Think of the praise his kind of decisionmaking can bring.   "Oh, he knows what's best for genitals I'll tell you.  With some castration is best, with others even circumcision is bad.  Depends on what kind of life is best."  If the purpose is to live the best life then this doctor can aspire to the highest compliment: "He knows what's best for human beings.  He knows what they should go for, what purposes they should have in living."  So no wonder he gets the big compliment-word, "philosopher."

In a way I can accept that.  People who determine ends should get more credit than people who carry out means.  Their job is harder and they influence our lives more.  Where I complain is in the assumption a lot of those people make: that people worried only about means are no help determining ends.  They haven't thought about them or studied them.  They don't need to.  No wonder some of them are clueless. 

I speak up because I have a clear memory of the moment when, feeling most intensely the absence of purpose in my work as an English Composition teacher, I had a vision of purpose.  Not a clear vision, not the kind where you can say, "I know just where I am going," but a vision nevertheless.

It came to me in a supermarket checkout line, as I was contemplating the reading matter offered on the racks.  Maybe you remember, in the eighties:  "Space alien abducts baby." "Dead mom gives birth in coffin."  It was the extreme of what we have now, and will probably always have.  And, because it said to me, "Trash, trash, trash," so loudly, I could see the outcome of my teaching that I most wanted to avoid, the Worst Possible Case, the Big Mistake, the Failure: students writing crap like that, students believing it, students not recognizing it.

That gave me my purpose, my ideal, my shining Truth.  But it didn't locate it.  It just gave me instructions for a good guess at it, in navigator's terms: "Identify the outcome of your work that would most disappoint you — which, in the teaching of writing, would be the biggest pile of what will make you spontaneously say 'trash' — then set your course so that you leave that pile directly behind you.  180 degrees.  Your goal, your ideal, your truth, your destination, will be somewhere in the direction your bow is pointing in."

Since we distinguish among philosophers according to their different ways of finding truth, and I see this as a way, I call English Composition teachers (and all such functionaries) "error philosophers."  They come at truth the back way, in the daily workroom, grappling with error.  The model error philosopher, as I have said, is Florence Nightingale who, claiming no more knowledge about what a hospital should do than that it shouldn't spread disease, took us from the germ-pits of the 1850s to the shining wards of the 1890s.

226. When Error Philosophers Become Kings

 

Call somebody a philosopher and sure enough you'll get the question, "But how will he do as a ruler?"  Too many minds have been seeded by Plato's pronouncement: "There will be no end to the troubles of the state or indeed of humanity until philosophers become kings or until those we now call kings really and truly become philosophers."  So how do I think my error philosopher (pictured in Post 224) will behave as a king, or ruler?

The error philosopher's first concern, remember, was to avoid gross mistakes, rather than attain fine truths.  And that concern, to avoid rather than attain, would no doubt be carried into government.  In the financial crisis of 2008, for example, he would ask, not "What can we do to rise shining out of this recession?" but "What can we do to avoid falling into a Great Depression?"  Both George Bush and Barack Obama could, I think, be called Avoidance Rulers in that year, and I think most of us now approve — as we disapprove of Herbert Hoover for the mistake that in 1931 tipped recession into World Depression: raising tariffs.

In foreign policy the Cold War gave us perhaps our clearest distinction, since the grossest mistake was so terrible: falling into a nuclear war.  There was no goal so fine that it would be worth suffering that, though there was a goal that came close: containing communism.  So close.  For some it was almost a tie.  What a problem! And there it stood for forty years: to patrol the line against communism without blundering over it into world destruction.

There we have no trouble identifying our Avoidance Statesman: he's the one being so careful to step on the safe side.  The Attainment Statesman will be careful too but he'll have a harder time keeping his balance.  He's got too many forces impelling him ("Drive on, American, drive on!  Fulfill your high destiny!") and too many people pushing on him ("What are you going to be, soft?  A wuss?").  Feel sorry for the poor Avoidance Statesman.  He's got all that testosterone against him, with all that idealism it can dress itself in.

Another word for idealism here is romanticism, typified in Robert Browning's famous lines "A man's reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what's a heaven for?"  The Avoidance Ruler and his Statesman are anti-romantics.  Anti-romantics (sometimes called classicists), if they were to write a counter-poem, would write, "A man's reach should coincide with his grasp, and that's how you mount to heaven."  A few years ago they'd have put their view, or found it, in Greek, to show how deeply rooted it was in ancient wisdom, the old warnings about over-reaching.  Hubris, you know.  But no Greek at election time.  You look a little wussy.

In politics and foreign affairs a close-observing classicist (the most common kind) would see that the romantic idealist's banner-word, "freedom," now means (or has been revealed by our experience in the Middle East to include) "freedom of warlords to go at each other."  So: "Pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship for that?  Extremism in defense of that is no vice?  moderation no virtue?" Oh that young idealist, John F. Kennedy.  Ah that old romantic, Barry Goldwater.  John McCain, would you step forward?

You can feel sorry for the Attainment Statesman too, though.  He's got all those people trying to put more hair on his chest.  Look at him at election time, a manly enough fellow already, being badgered to open his shirt.  Even so, as we observed, he's got to be careful too, and think, and choose the least dangerous steps, and risk looking like a wuss, even on the way to the greatest attainment.

Nuance, that's what's needed in arguments for war or peace, especially now, when cases are so complicated and words jump around so.  Hawks are as capable of it as doves, as we know when think tanks flow out against each other.  But there's this about hawks: when they're in danger of losing an election they know they can tap another tank, the no-think tank, with a spigot doves can barely reach.   Need backing for Marines into Da Nang? bombs on Haiphong?  Out it comes, onto bumper stickers: "Victory over Communism, not Coexistence."  Think of all the work doves would have to do, all the explaining, before they could get that kind of sock into a sticker.

Sure, doves have their spigots.  There is such a thing as liberal reflex, and it's widely exploitable.  But the doves' spigots are nothing like this one.  This one opens directly, with nearly frictionless ease, into the pool of under-educated voters, the great pool that collects under every democracy.  Though a constant in the minds of political scientists, its occupants are known by different names at different times.  What I call the "under-educated" was once, in America, the "Know-Nothing" and is now, more commonly, the "low-information" voter.  Not too long ago he could be called the "dumbhead" voter.  In any case, he's in a pool most easily tapped by hawks.

"Fine.  Your Avoidance Ruler will be above that.  He'll be above — meaning indifferent to — a lot of things that could lead his country into trouble.  But he'll also be indifferent to a lot of things that could lead the world, including his country, into disaster.  Hitler militarizes the Rhineland.  What will he be doing?  Passively waiting for the Great Mistake.  What will he be saying?  'Calm down, you (dumb?) hotheads, calm down.'"

You're missing something.  The Avoidance Ruler is a philosopher, remember.  Thinks.  Sorts out and traces cause and effect.  Visualizes consequence-chains.  Does a cost-benefit.  And what he can't do he has a staff of experts do.  But what he does best, and must do all by himself, is prioritize threats.  So he can concentrate on the big ones and wave away the little ones, no matter how hot his citizens get over them.

I know that sounds presumptuous, but ranking blunders is his thing.  He (or she) is an error philosopher.  So I think, with his philosophy, and his (or his helpers') ability to work out the cause-effect chain, that when Hitler went into the Rhineland, he'd have said, "This is big.  It would be a mistake not to act.  And act big."   You can't call an Avoidance Ruler a passive ruler.

"Got you.  And I think you're letting me call George W. Bush an active Avoidance Ruler.  He went right after terrorists.  It would have been a big mistake, a Rhineland-ignoring mistake, not to."

Oh please, let's not get back into George Bush.  I'm tired of talking about him.  I know, I know, he was an Avoidance Ruler.  I've granted that.  But he wasn't a philosopher.  He didn't come close.  Low standards of evidence, haphazard justification, loose cost-benefit, weak imagination.  I don't think he finished 101.  But I don't think I need to say any more about him.  Ari Shavit, in Wednesday's NYT Op-Ed (11-21-13), has pretty well said all that needs to be said.

225. The Jew's Problem Is a Swede's Problem

 

Jews.  They're members of my family.  And I'm a Swede, whose ancestors were the goddam Vikings.  Now we're looked at as models of Western enlightenment, yes, but let me tell you, when a Swede from the Midwest got the GI Bill and went to college the people he looked up to for enlightened intellectual rigor were all Jews, big-city Jews, East Coast Jews, agnostic Jews, CCNY atheist Jews, the hardest sell a Bible-believer ever faced.  Liberal if not radical, every one of them.  To some they and their kin in Europe were "the culmination of the Enlightenment."  In any case, they represented to me what a Jew was.  Now how the hell, how the hell, I ask in dumb Swedish bewilderment, how the hell can they be connected with the Jews called "liberal" these days and for some time?  Are they the same people, the very same people, who backed, through AIPAC, every Israeli government, liberal or conservative, in the settlement of the West Bank?  Settlement by fundamentalists!  People holding the belief of barbarous ancestors (if Hume didn't hesitate to call the ancient Jews "barbarous" I'm not going to) that the God of their Bible gave that land to them.  "Lordy, what a reason!" says Reason.  It's too much for me, and what makes it hurt is that they're in my family, and I can't quit them.  Wherever you grew up, Sweden or Midwest or Spain or New Zealand, you can't resign from Western culture.  (Not now, anyway, not when you've had such a good look at the alternatives.)

I can't talk to fundamentalists but I can yell.  And I can't help yelling because I, along with a lot of others, see the settlements as the main obstacles to peace in the Middle East.  "Hey you, Gush Emunim, putting your 'facts on the ground' before the first intifada.  You thought you were sticking it to the Ashkenazim, your fellow Jews, the European Jews.  Well I have news for you.  You were also sticking it to every culture-conscious Swede in America.  And we're sore as hell.  You're just lucky we're not running that part of the family because you know what we'd do, little brothers?  We'd send you back to your room.  'Take a time out.  Think about growing up.'" 

That's just blowing off steam though, maybe Viking steam.  I still don't know what gave these children the idea they could push grownups around.  Or think they could get away with such lousy arguments.

Know how to bottle me up (at the risk of sending me over my own barbaric edge)?  Just point to the fact that they still are getting away with their lousy arguments.

224. Error Philosophy

 

 

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Error philosophy is what a teacher of English Composition develops after he discovers that truth philosophy is no use to him.  Aspiring truth philosophers, graduate students, ask, "How does one reach the highest truth?"  Compelled error philosophers (graduate students forced to teach freshmen) ask, "How does one climb out of the deepest error?"

You want an example of the deepest error?  There's one in the latest (11-21-13) New York Review.  Mark Lilla, writing about the response of postwar German youth to their parents' conformism, observes that "when left-wing radicalism was at its violent peak in the 1970s the following false syllogism became common wisdom: Nazi crimes were made possible by blind obedience to orders and social convention; therefore anyone who still obeys rules and follows convention is complicit with Nazism, while anyone who rebels against them strikes a retrospective blow against Hitler" (page 36).

Here's another example.  Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, finds that reason is "impotent" in the face of a "meaningless" universe.  He concludes that reason is impotent in the face of anything in the universe.  It's all or nothing.   (Je veux que tout me soit expliqué ou rien.)   We recognize the common wisdom of the agonized adolescent.

I call that mistake in syllogistic reasoning deep error not because it's down disturbing the theoretical fundament but because it's so hard to dig out.  It's down there in human nature, deep in human nature.  Something in our genome (or in what fallen Adam passed on to us) says to German youth, "If a thing is bad everything associated with it is bad.  If you're good you'll believe this." 

In America we sometimes fix, or locate, this error in freshman nature, but that's wrong.  Graduate students, when the political fight gets warm enough, can commit as many informal fallacies as anybody.  "Be logical," I heard a cool one say to a warm one in 1974.  "Logical?" said the warm one.  "Nixon was logical."

What makes it so hard to dig this error out is that students, the best students, want to be deep.  They arrive shallow, or thinking themselves shallow, Midwest shallow, and the sooner they get deep the better.  They don't know what's deep but they think profs know.  "So who do the profs here think is deep?" It's not always Plato or Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or John Rawls.  In the 1960s in English departments it was Albert Camus, as evidenced by the number of profs who repeated his fallacies.

Have we forgotten?  "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."  The absurdist credo, repeated again and again in commentary on books like Catch-22.  (The above is in Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, A 'Catch-22' Casebook, p. 255)  Repeating the old, deep, elementary errors.

In a semester you don't have time to dig these errors out.  You just chip away at them.  With the absurdist credo, for example, you would try to get the writer to recognize the equivocation (one of the informal fallacies) in the word "meaning."  Most of the time "meaning" means "signification" (as "means" does right there!) but some of the time it means "purpose."   "I mean to be a 'saint,' meaning one canonized by the church."  There are both meanings, properly distinguished, in the same sentence.

But look at that professor's statement of the absurdist credo: "Reason and language, man's tools for discovering the meaning of his existence and describing his world, are useless."  Does Jean Kennard's word "meaning" mean "signification" or "purpose"?  If it means "signification" then "of his existence" makes no sense but "describing his world" does; if it means "purpose" then it's the other way round.  The writer has "reason and language," willy-nilly, doing both, giving him (and Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman, and about a hundred thousand Yippies) a false syllogism that looks like a deep European justification for the trashing of reason.

It would be easier to blame stupid Americans if the equivocation hadn't started with all-or-nothing Camus.  "Look, Reason, if you can't show me the purpose of my existence don't come around trying to explain the street outside."  (Note:  If British philosophers weren't so reluctant to get personal they'd have had Camus' case analyzed in an instant: he's been deprived of God, the traditional giver of meaning (purpose) to man's existence, and is having a hard time getting used to it.  When he matures in his atheism he will, as Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer — those old hands at Godlessness — can tell him, be less excited and more careful.)

The patron error philosopher is Florence Nightingale, who, though she had a hard time saying just what a hospital was or should be, knew one thing about it: that it shouldn't be a place that spreads disease.  That's starting at the small end.  And from that start she went a long way.  If there had been a Jean-Paul Sartre in her day, or teachers in awe of Jean-Paul Sartre, or any awe in her of such teachers, she'd have never gotten on the road.  "Before there can be any truth whatsoever there must be an absolute truth" (Existentialism, p. 43).  Awesome.

From the point of view of an English Composition teacher a European philosopher, then and now, is a regular Typhoid Mary, spreading writing disease from ward to ward.  Forget about philosophy, I say.  That's upstairs.  This is low level: making sense.  With meaningful words.  If you don't know what I'm talking about read Post #209, on the infected Hannah Arendt, whose prose was hailed (then and recently, in their memorial issue) by New York Review editors, themselves looking a little green around the gills.

So what philosophy will you get when you send students, aspirants, up to it sick?  A lot of French and German postwar philosophy, that's what you'll get.  Don't be surprised if there's an Anglophone quarantine.

What will surprise you is not that the quarantine was broken but that the breakthrough came in English departments, the very departments where disciples of Nightingale struggled, carrying lamps through the night.  I wish I could explain it.  I was there.  But it's the biggest mystery of my 42-year career, how we could pound away on the principles of good writing in one room and then walk across the hall and teach (and write respectful articles about) authors who contradicted those principles right and left, not only in their writing but in their theory, their philosophy.  Go figure.

223. "You get the government you deserve."

There's one thing wrong with that wonderful reminder to voters in a democratic country, "you get the government you deserve": it can't be said to those who voted against the majority that produced the government.  Like now, to a Massachusetts liberal suffering under the fiscal thumbs of House Tea Partiers.  "You think I deserve this?"

Tough enough under ordinary circumstances but here the dessert-serving group weren't even a majority, and what they did is not even democratic.  Their majority in the House is a result of Republican gerrymandering (the popular vote in the 2012 election of House members went to the Democrats by 1.2%) and their typical action, stopping funding by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, is a result of a procedural quirk, a leftover from a pro forma budget gesture of 1917.

The polls show that as a nation we're very unhappy with them, with approval of Congress down to 12%, disapproval up to 85%, and more than 70% of those strongly opposed to the job congressional lawmakers are doing (Washington Post/ABC).  So they're rascals, right?  From what you hear in street interviews they're that and more:  "religious nuts," "one-issue extremists," and the old one, "dirty politicians."

Depressing, isn't it, to have such people gaming the system, playing the quirks.  Differences in a democracy are supposed to be worked out, fought out, fair and square on the floor of the legislature.  Lose there and a representative is supposed to go along gracefully until his next chance to fight.  In the designated arena.  That's democracy.  Not slinking around with a wrench looking for a place to jam the machinery — machinery you have yourself already set, or allowed to be set, in motion, for God's sake.  

I can't stand it.  I'm a democrat (and Democrat) about to die of depression.

No, I won't die, nor will the masses of depressed people all around me.  We know that we, unlike the Egyptians, have a fixed, absolutely irremovable, election coming up.  And we have, in our aural memory, another good old American expression to cheer ourselves up with: "Throw the rascals out!"  Straight from the citizens who threw out Boss Tweed and the Teapot Dome gang and the Whisky Ring.  The majority the polls tell us of will assert itself.

How comforting, the thought of those rascals being thrown out, head over heels behind Boss Tweed.  The majority triumphant. 

How comforting, and now, apparently, how vain.  The majority has already shown how it's going to act, and that, in 2014, will be to keep the rascals in.  Ninety percent of them.  That's the percentage of incumbents they returned to office in 2012, when the laments over the terrible 112th Congress were as loud as the laments over ours, the 113th.

"Yes, but voters then didn't know what we know about these machinery-jammers, these district-slicers."

Ah, my friend, you have forgotten.  The jamming and slicing, and making a party of it, were already on display.  John Boehner had his (or the Tea Party's) thumb on the fiscal artery as surely, with his intentions as surely known, in April 2011, as he has now.  There was a partial shutdown of the government, remember?  With a bigger one narrowly averted in August.  What more was there to learn about these rascals?

The general electorate certainly appeared to have learned what it needed.  Hell, going into the 2012 elections you'd have thought that to be an incumbent legislator was to be one step from the tar pot and the feather pile.  Congress's favorable rating was only a little higher (15%) in the Gallup poll than it is now.  Teapot Domers, here they come.  And how many Congressmen got thrown out?  One in ten.  A rapscallion here, a scallywag there.

So, comfort-seekers, get used to it.  Americans, no matter what they tell the nice polling lady, no longer throw rascals out.

222. "No, it's just men wanting to fight."

 

You see people going to war.  You hear it's because they want to remove a threat, or stop aggression, or maintain their credibility, or bring democracy.  You see people rioting.  You hear it's because they find their government, or their employment, or their justice system, or their educational system, unbearable.  Those may be good explanations.  But for many people it's simply what my mother would say it was, "men wanting to fight.'   It's something in human beings, or male human beings.

The craving for physical fulfillment, you can see it in a walk, as in the way Willie Stark's athletic son "balanced on the balls of his feet."  A coiled spring, longing for release.  You could see it in George W. Bush, the swagger that "in Texas we call walkin'."  I saw it in the freshmen entering the out-of-Vietnam marches, carrying ballbats.  I was not seeing readiness to fight for something, or rebel against something; I was just seeing readiness to fight.

See this kind of man fighting and you see a happy man.  See him fighting in a good cause and you see a man as happy as men can be.  He is not only physically fulfilled he is morally fulfilled.

I should have known this long ago when I told my mother I had seen a man pounding another man because he had called his mother a bad name, "son of a bitch."  My awed friend said he was defending his mother's honor.  "No," she said, "it's just a man wanting to fight."  All that about defending a loved one, that was there so he could fight more happily. 

Men in motorcycle gangs are coiled springs, wound tighter the longer they ride, sitting, waiting for the happy occasion.  A guy in an SUV hits a bike and they have what they need, a wrongdoer.  Off the bike and smash his window.  Happiness, fulfillment, physical and moral.  (NYT 9-30-13)

I'm about to say that all men want to feel moral but some men would show me wrong.  They just want what their society makes necessary, a moral cover.  In any case moral cover is desirable, and no generation had a better cover than mine: Adolf Hitler.  I remember an instructor in hand-to-hand combat telling us how to garrote a sentry from behind with a wire, and, if that failed and he tangled with you how you could try to "get at least three fingers under his upper lip so you could rip his face off."  His own fingers showed that he longed for the chance. If anybody doubted that he was a defender of good people against evil monsters, there was the evidence of the death camps. 

Nothing's worse than the loss of cover when you're ready to advance against the enemy.  There we were at the end of the war with thousands of men (among the millions just wanting to go home) on the balls of their feet, ready to go, realizing suddenly that they would be making a naked advance.  No moral cover whatsoever.  No evil enemy.  It took a while for it to hit me: how war-lovers need, how Christian men need, how testosterone needs, an enemy.  We needed one after World War II and we need one now.  Who better, for some, than the old one, the one that served us for fifty years?  So don't propose welcoming Putin as a partner in peace in Syria.  You're taking away our enemy.  (The Weekly Standard, 9-23-13)

in a Christian society, more than in others, I think, the enemy has to be bad.  If he isn't bad you have to paint him bad.  Christians hunger and thirst for signs of unrighteousness.  Evil empires and axes are a godsend.

Among the godsend Hitler's great crimes I'd like to add, if it's not already on your list, this one: a simplification of the moral world so great that generations to come would be unable to complicate it.  Evil existed, by God, and had to be warred against.  And that translated into a simplification of the military world: estimates of enemy capabilities, calculation of assets and liabilities, projection of needs, war-gaming for outcomes, looking ahead.   Those can be skipped, or rushed through.  If your cause is good you've just got to fight for it.  (Looking for good causes now?  None better than the humane relief of suffering, as in Syria.)

To me Bush's cabinet was clearly bursting with testosterone, free-floating testosterone, the kind most powerful in those (like Donald Rumsfeld) who have never been to war.  But you never know.  Every cabinet for a long time has been a mixture of the war-eager and the war-chary and the proportion, from our distance, is hard to make out.  In ignorance you just look for signs.  Which is why a story like last Monday's (NYT 10-14-13) about José Bustani grabs you.  Bustani was head of the international agency (the one that just won the Nobel Peace Prize) that monitors chemical weapons and a Bush man, John R. Bolton, got him fired.  Behind this action, according to Bustani, was "the Bush administration's fear that chemical weapons inspections in Iraq would interfere with Washington's rationale for invading it."  I've seen so many signs of Bush-administration testosterone by now that I say, "Yep, interfere with its release."  They're craving fulfillment, they've got a good moral cover, and here's this Brazilian guy about to blow it for them.

The Times story lets me put down the war-eager in the Bush cabinet but it doesn't let me put down the war-eager in all cabinets.  How we needed them in the Roosevelt cabinet in 1938.  If the aircraft-carrier program hadn't been pushed then there'd have been no Hornet to stop the Japanese at Midway.  That's looking ahead carefully, and that distinguishes them from the war-eager in the Bush cabinet, but the latter, I'm afraid, are the norm.

And we all know that there are times when you just don't care about the thought.  When high-testosterone types are coming after you you've got to have high-testosterone types to hold them off.  "The Vikings are coming up the Seine.  Who will save Paris?"  Nobody.  Charlemagne is dead.  "Call in some other Vikings. "  You don't say 'thinking Vikings.'"  They'll be your heroes regardless.

Ah heroism.  We look back on so many ages we call "Heroic." Achilles' time, Samson's time, Beowulf's time.  We've idolized the ancient warriors as heroes, but failed to recognize in them the warlords we presently deplore, whether on motorcycles in nearby gangs or on camels in distant deserts.  If we categorize accurately, face up to the implications of our categories, and see where nature has to be sliced, we're stuck.   The joints are in the world, not us.  There's no separation between the Samson of old and the suicide bomber of today.  They're one bone, giving their lives for their tribe in order to take down as many of the enemy tribe as possible.  Sit down in Valhalla, Habib, there with the kamikazes.

What did Homer sing?  Warlords.  Were they superior to the warlords in Asia or Africa?  Were their gangs different?  Up against other gangs?  Odysseus finds a gang on the coast at Ismaros:

I stormed that place, and killed the men who fought,

Plunder we took, and we enslaved the women,

to make division, equal shares to all —

How about that treatment of women?  Here's what it felt like to be one, a wife, mourning

                                                                for her lord

on the lost field where he has gone down fighting

the day of wrath that came upon his children.

At sight of the man panting and dying there,

she slips down to enfold him, crying out;

then feels the spears , prodding her back and shoulders

and goes bound into slavery and grief.

You're mine now, baby.  Hold the boat, Odysseus.

We should feel superior to those gangsters, right?  Hell, we're humane Christians.  Good Christian boys stay out of those plundering ships, yes?  I was a good Christian boy and where was I, in my mind, when I read this in Homer, about a gang's setting out:

They pushed the fir mast high and stepped it firm

amidships in the box, made fast the forestays,

then hoisted up the white sail on its halyards

until the wind caught, booming in the sail;

and a flushing wave sang backward from the bow

on either side, as the ship got way upon her,

holding her steady course.

Now they made all secure in the fast, black ship.

and, setting out the winebowls all a-abrim,

they made libation to the gods,

                                                                the undying, the ever-new,

most of all to the grey-eyed daughter of Zeus.

And the prow sheared through the night into the dawn.

I'm right with them, tingling, on into the Aegean.  Bring on the Kikones!  Me, a humane Christian.  Chalk up another one for testosterone.

I should end this on the moral hazards such a chemical in men's bodies presents us with but that's too complicated.  I'll be content to say a few words about the physical hazard: death to all of us.  Put the mind unsettled by the old tingle in charge of war-or-peace decisions and you're obviously not going to get much deliberation.  You're going to get, as I hope is obvious in the preceding paragraphs, haste and carelessness, especially if you give it the kind of moral cover we've been talking about.  Fine if your war is going to be fought with swords, less fine if it's going to be fought with gunpowder, and possibly disastrous if fought with much beyond that.  No news to anybody.  But hard to remember during a drive for physical and moral fulfillment.

We need reminders, and when we had 70,000 nuclear warheads hanging over the world we had good, hard-to-ignore reminders.  There's death to all of us.  The consequences will be less awful  now (just immersion in a quagmire, with death only to thousands) but given the way any American enterprise develops, with shame to leaders for failure, or simply insufficient success, there is always a chance that a little 21st-century war will lead, by little shame-avoiding steps, to a 20th-century-type disaster.  If you accept Clausewitz's estimate of the force of escalation (very high) you will take the chance to be high.  Too high to tolerate haste and carelessness, whatever the moral imperatives.

No, I can't end there.  There remains a caution to teachers, especially to teachers of history: if you share my doubts about testosterone here, and pass it on to the next generation, who might pass it on to the next, you could end the possibility of golden ages in history.  Damp down testosterone, reduce the pressure, and you may be surprised.  The flow into the warfare you lament may have the same source as the flow into art and philosophy and scholarship and exploration, everything that makes some chapters in your book so much bigger than the others.  Talk to the young the way I have been talking and what could you have?  A flat sequence —this one, then this one, then this one.  No Periclean Age, no Elizabethan Age.

That Periclean Age.  A perfect example.  If you want to see testosterone disastrously at work all you have to do is put yourself in the company of Athenian men setting out to invade distant, little-known Sicily.  The rowers, later to be soldiers, are poised on the ships, the citizens are gathered on the shore, the prayers are said together, the hymns are sung, then "out to sea, first sailing out in column then racing each other as far as Aegina" (Thucydides, 32).   Be a young man on one of those fast black ships, feeling the rush, the band of brothers around you.  Be the captain.  Feel the competitive urge.  "Think your boys can row?  Watch this."  You break from the column and pass the wimp whose stern you were about to bump.  They all break and the race is on.  That break.  You don't need a biology lecture to know what's in the blood, or gauge its level.

And where did its overflow lead them, nearly all 5000 of them?  To a miserable death on the island they knew so little about.  Along with the 5000 sent after them to avoid the shame of defeat.  Along with a weakening of their city that eventually put them at Sparta's mercy.  One could hardly have greater cause for lament.

The question is, How freely can we lament, knowing that in the city behind them so many men, so many ambitious, fired up, competing men, were achieving things we can't stop rejoicing in.  Think only of what the competition for drama prizes gave us.

Note: I have received a suggestion from Mary Anne that what we need to do is put a woman in charge of all this testosterone.  If she's right then my nomination would be somebody like Elizabeth I, as explained in Post 157.