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.