238. First Gentleman, THEN Philosopher

 

Prof. R. M. Hare points to a word in a student's essay and asks, "What do you mean by this?"  I underline a word in a student's essay and in the margin ask the same question.  Hare teaches philosophy.  I teach English composition.  What's the difference?

I see only a superficial difference.  Hare is speaking directly to a British student, I am writing to an American student, who after class may be spoken to directly when he comes to my office. There may be an ocean between us, culturally as well as physically, but Hare and I live in the same teaching world, the small world where two people face each other, one trying to help the other.  (A class I take to be simply an aggregate of worlds of two people.)

Hare and I are both trying to get the student to use words that his reader will understand and can respond to.  For Hare's student that reader would, I think, be the liberally educated Oxbridge graduate of the mid-twentieth century, successor to the British gentlemen the students of G. E. Moore (and other tutors, in a line that went way back) had to write for in the early twentieth century.  For my student the reader would be some transatlantic equivalent of that.  In any case, not a specially educated reader.

The interesting thing about Hare is that he makes satisfying that general reader, that British gentleman or gentleman-successor (an Oxbridge-educated woman), that amateur, a condition of becoming a philosopher.  In 1961, when Hare explained the difference between British philosophers and continental philosophers to a New Yorker reporter, British (analytic) philosophers were the lords of Anglophone philosophy departments.  How did they get to be such lords?  By being forced to make themselves clear to common people, rank amateurs, you and me after we had gotten our degrees.  "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."  The tutor will check to see if what you supply will make sense to the British gentleman for whom he stands in.

In Post #209 I explained why Hannah Arendt, in her philosophical mode, would never have made it out of my office.  She wouldn't have made it out of Hare's office either, and the explanation is the same: she had been taught to write by the continental philosopher Martin Heidegger and was following his model, a model that put the philosopher far above the ordinary, educated reader.  To Heidegger this lordly position came by intellectual inheritance, a portion from the special reserve of philosophical studies (like phenomenology).  To Hare and his fellows lordliness had to be earned, and there was no special reserve.  Any reader of the Spectator, or The Rambler, or The New Yorker, any sitter at a Paris salon, could challenge you.  You couldn't be a philosopher unless you met the test of their company.

Everybody in American and British philosophy departments knows how great that is for philosophers but I'm not sure everybody there knows how great that is for those who listen to them in a supervised salon or read them in a well-edited journal — you know, a journal with editors doing the R. M. Hare, English-comp job.  How great it is to have somebody at the gate keeping not just philosophers but all scholars out until they write like gentlemen!  Bless the New York Review, bless Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, for doing that.  Bless the teachers and tutors who prepare scholars to crack the NYR by making them write for gentlemen (in the unisex generic sense).

Do I hear scholars blessing them too?  Led by philosophers?  You bet your life I do.  For the shaping of ideas for the non-scholar is not just a test of the scholar, it's a test of the ideas themselves.  What did Socrates do when he had a good idea?  Checked it out with his circle of friends.  "Is that not true?  Do we not say...?"  And who were those friends?  Experts?  Cognoscenti?  No, they were just gentlemen, educated Greek gentlemen.  Get it past them, produce a shapely idea, and you were as close to truth as you could get.  Maybe we lower it with the word "style."  It both shapes and tests thought.

And, I hear from a saloniste, that I am close to romanticizing the ancient past.  Life is too complicated now.  Too many subjects, understandable only in a technical vocabulary, demand philosophical attention.  Language of the grove or salon won't do.

So, are we going to keep the liberally educated "gentleman" out of today's upper rooms? 

Certainly today's technical vocabularies are going to be difficult for that gentleman.  But difficulty is not the same as obscurity.  We English teachers often say to students that John Donne's poems are "difficult but not obscure."  We mean that if a reader takes the time to work out the intricate logic and multiple connections in a Donne poem the meaning will become clear.  Words like "soul," for example, words that might, in a poet like Blake, be mystical and obscure, turn out to be referential and perspicuous.  Donne's souls, you discover, are things with recognizable features.  They can come out of bodies and talk to each other.  "Got it!" says the student.

That's the way it will be with technical terms in modern systems.  Donne's "soul" is just a technical term in an older system.  Like all such terms it looks unsharable, something like what a mystic sees, until you work it out.  Proceed step by step until you reach the familiar referential words you already know.  Then you'll see that it's sharable.

For obscurity there's no better example than Heidegger's "Being."  He says it's "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood."  It's what "underlies" them.  But "the being of beings is not itself a being." Others, to whom we turn for help, say that Being (Sein) is known by "being-in-the-world (Dasein)."  They add more and more hyphens, trying to nail it.  Surely there's something you can build on and hook up and take to something you can share. But no go.  There is not a chance in hell that any gentleman, British or American, will ever understand "Being."

Now that would tell a student opposite Hare or me that Being is a bad idea.  "If you've got an idea you can't put into words for me," reads the invisible sign behind us, "maybe you'd better reconsider the idea."  The student goes home with his draft and thinks, "Hmm,  maybe I haven't got a good grip on this idea.  Maybe it's impossible to grip.  Am I grabbing air?"  I think we've got a budding philosopher there.

237. How a Compassionate Cruelty Program Could Be Kept Going

 

All right, the Alliance for Security and Advancement makes this great start and then what?  Nations get tired of making the necessary sacrifices in goods and trade and Americans get tired of watching all the suffering they are allowing or causing.  Once again reality throws its weight against high resolve.  Another flawlessly theorized program grinds to a halt.

So how will my super president, my Bismarck of the democracies, keep his alliance going and his own people in line?

Well, with the alliance he's got a wonderful resource at hand: money.  Just what Britain had to keep its allies going against Napoleon.  He deals it out as needed, according to the chances of defection.  Remember, the U. S. is not only the richest nation in the world, it's saving money.  By not doing invasions, and maintaining armies abroad, and rebuilding defeated countries, this president can more than make up the losses other advanced nations will suffer.  By the Iraq measure alone he's got over a trillion dollars to play with.  I think that kind of money will do the job.

Next the suffering in the backward countries his people will have to stand by and watch.  This is the really big problem.  No matter how well they have pictured the suffering, no matter how well they have prepared themselves to bear the sight of it, no matter how thoroughly they have blotted out their contribution to those people's earlier suffering, or the presence among them of people to whom the suffering can teach nothing (the already advanced, moderate people), when the sufferers appear on a television screen they can't stand it.  None of us can stand it.  At this point all our softened hearts will cry out for an end to neglect and cruelty.  No matter how convinced we were that it would end in greater humanity.

This may be an insurmountable problem.  A compassionate cruelty program may run so counter to human nature that it's not worth trying to implement.  Especially when the media, the screens, are so alert to cruelty, so quick to stoke compassion.

I can't see any president, no matter how super, opposing this alone, and on the spot.  He'd need the help of prior education, particularly the kind that develops the imagination., the faculty that let's us call up, ahead of time, the images our schemes, our plans, our programs, our desires, will produce.  All that we have committed ourselves to.  In Churchill's time, for the British. it would have been the blood, the sweat, the tears, the cruelty they were going to inflict, the suffering they were going to have to watch.  "Go ahead, Mr. Prime Minister, bomb Dusseldorf no matter how many good Germans are in it."  Collateral cruelty goes with the program.

Here for Americans it would be the ability to see, at the moment they pictured little girls of the future growing up whole and happy, the little girls whose present suffering CNN would put before them each night.  The price paid for the better future. 

What would the American president have to have in order to give his people, in such a short time, this ability to see and accept?  Churchillian eloquence?  Maybe.  For the short term.  For the long term only education, going through history books seeing how much cruelty and injustice is attached to every advance in humanity and justice.  Without some education like that in the populace his eloquence might well fail. 

If he succeeds, his speeches to the moderate, advanced people inside a backward country will not be unlike the speeches Churchill might have made to good Germans.  Our president could, with his people behind him, say, "This suffering, this damage, good Iranians, is the price you pay for putting up with leaders like Khameini, giving them the final say."  Or, borrowing from Mao, he could say to the general citizenry, "You, your culture, your religion, determine the water, the temperature of it, the acidity, in which these jihadist fish swim.  Do something about it or suffer with them."

"But think how we made them suffer, so wrongly, in 1953 ," say the Soft Hearts beside him.  "You are victimizing your own victims."

Here our president has to become a philosopher. "Reconsider," he says.  "Are we trying to satisfy the dead or provide for the living?  I ask the question here as I ask it in Israel, where satisfaction of the Holocaust dead is so urgent.  In both places the welfare of the living and their descendants comes first.  Sure we feel guilty, but that has nothing to do with our decisions and plans."

God knows if that will work.  The president wonders too.  All of those hurting hearts, all of those willing hands, all wanting to help.   So he does things that would shock the pants off philosophers if they ever found out about it.  He has the CIA slip all kinds of aid into the backward countries — arms for the opposition, trainers, advisers, any American (as long as he's not wearing boots) who can help.  And, where he can get away with it, he lies about their presence and mission.  Also, there are the organizations he doesn't have to lie about, the NGOs.  All the while he's been talking up toughness he's been cranking up the NGOs.  Anything to reduce the suffering that will be seen on TV, anything to grease the Soft-Hearts over the rough part of the track.

That lying.  It's a bad thing, but like many a bad thing it's done to accomplish a good thing.  Here the good thing is the best thing any 21st-century president could ever give his country: quagmire protection.  Americans risk a quagmire any time they enter a win-lose situation.  Americans hate to lose a fight.  They hate to have their credibility reduced, their word doubted, their standing lowered.  Most of all they hate to see their buddies die in vain.  They're used to fights that win independence, free slaves, repay Lafayette, avenge Pearl Harbor, stop fascism, and contain communism.  American blood on an island sanctifies it.  "Give back Okinawa?  Have you no gratitude?"  Just the other day (1-10-14), on the front page of the Times: "Fallujah’s Fall Stuns Marines Who Fought There."  It's to keep Americans from feeling and saying such things that American presidents keep the country going in a fight, no matter how hopeless or ill-considered.

Well this president knows from history that if he doesn't give his country a clear-cut victory in a good cause there's not much in it for him at the termination of a war or end to his term.  Fight for eight years, clearly benefit one people, the Iraqi Shi-ites, and have them throw their shoes at you (Bush).  Or clearly benefit nobody and, after a much greater effort to avoid failure, have to retire (Johnson).

This president also knows that that force, the force against losing, kicks in as soon as Americans think they're officially in a fight.  One way is to stay out of unwinnable fights. The other way is to keep whatever fight you're in from becoming official.  No bell bringing you out of your corner.  If you've sent trainers and advisers you never call them fighters.  You even deny their presence. You lie.  You cheat, you steal, you do anything to keep Americans from saying, "It's our boys against their boys now, and our boys don't lose" — as they could say as soon as Johnson sent the Marines into combat at Da Nang and Bush said go to General Schwarzkopf.  In short this president knows that there is a slippery edge he can never put his foot over, because once he does these forces will keep him from pulling it back.  And they operate for years.

Of course eventually one of the members of our free and enterprising press is going to point out that the president's trainers and advisers aren't really trainers and advisers, and that it's the CIA that is pulling the NGO strings.  What's a quagmire compared to the chance for a Pulitzer?

This is the final challenge and though it's not the biggest it may be the hardest for the president to meet.  Maybe he can't, by himself.  He needs PR people.  But God, what an assignment!  "I want you to spin this so that by the end of the month everybody on television is singing  'God bless the CIA.'"

Well, let's say the super president has super PR people.   And gives them two months.  So that he can work in his speech about how this is a new kind of war, requiring covert fighting.  So he can build up agents as fighters.  Better make it three months.  Time for the movies he'll encourage, or plant.  Under Cover in the Swat Valley.  Sleeper Agent in Pakistan.  He Penetrated the ISI.  Anything to take attention off the win-lose Army and put it on the FBI and CIA, whose success or failure is so slowly and dimly revealed.

Maybe he should make it four months.  Give him time to work on Congress for laws fitting the security-liberties balance to a war that's inside our borders as much as outside.  Time to loosen up the courts a little.  So he won't have to be breaking any laws.  No, four is too long.  Come on, Senate, this isn't 1965.  Come on, Supreme Court, the Department of Homeland Security isn't the Stasi.

OK, three months it is.  Super performance by everybody and on CNN a mother whose three sons were in the terrorist-targeted building says, "Thank God for the CIA."

-->

236. How "Compassionate Cruelty" Could Solve the Terrorist Problem.

 

If parents can teach their children and Israel can teach its children (the Ultra-Orthodox men) by being compassionately cruel to them, why, I asked in Post #234, can't advanced nations teach backward nations by being cruel to them?  They might do more for them in the end than by being quickly and constantly kind to them.

I didn't consider something compassionate cruelty might do for the advanced nations: meet the threat of terrorists coming from the backward nations.

I know.  Nearly everybody will tell me that I won't have to consider it long. "Thorough, systematic cruelty?  You're going to have to have worldwide co-operation. One soft heart, one turn to self-interest and you're wrecked. Think of the Congressmen you'll have to get on board.  Think of China.  Think of Russia.  Hell, think of France.  Never happen."

Yes, I say, might happen.  But I set some extraordinary conditions.  First there would have to be a monstrous terror attack by some backward people, something that would fill the U. S. with grief and rage and make all its friends tremble with sympathy and fear.  Then the U.S. would have to have a president of extraordinary imagination and skill.  Those two things.  Without them, forget it.

We already know, from attempts to benefit backward people through cruelty, that softhearted people are our biggest problem.  They can't stand watching the pitiful harvests of superstitious agriculture, the illusions of botched book-keeping, the contradictions in wise men's rulings, the rote recitations taken for education, the ignorance forced on women.  "Oh, child, you're hurting."  And they've never been able to stand inter-tribal massacres, atrocities, cleansings.  "Oh, children, you're hurting each other."

So, just when pain starts to do its work, and the backward (I think the old word fits here) are beginning to advance on their own, the soft-hearted step in, make up for lost harvests, straighten out the book-keeping, outline a proper constitution, write out some rights, and, if tribes are killing each other, send in some soldiers to put a stop to it.  They might even send in an army.  Paddle them into enlightenment.

The hard-hearted, whom you might think would get with such a program right away, are also a problem, though a lesser one.  They say, "These are no children of mine.  They're not even in the family."  The hard-hearted look the other way and think only of their own security.  They are a problem because that inward look thickens their heads, and they have trouble seeing that their security might be improved if they soften up a bit.

All right, at home the president of the U.S. has got all these Soft Hearts and Hard Hearts, opposing and often despising each other, and abroad he's got a lot of balky friends and semi-enemies, some of them despising him.  And he's got this plan, a compassionate cruelty plan, that he has to get past the opposing hearts and out where the three-quarters friends and halfway enemies will rush to his side and co-operate on his plan.

Extraordinarily difficult, yes, requiring extraordinary luck, but let's say he gets it.  The monstrous attack comes.  Thousands killed.  "Oh my God we're all under a terrible threat." 

Our president goes to work.  After steely reassurance of the nation (the easy part), he calls Congressional leaders together.  He gets them all to see that the threat is long term, and then he, a regular Demosthenes, gets the Hard-Hearted to see that that threat will be reduced if the backward country is made more advanced and the Soft-Hearted to see that the short-term suffering they will watch is necessary for this long-term advancement.  I mean, he's really extraordinary.

Then he calls the advanced nations to a big conference.  Full of the balky friends and semi-enemies.  In the past it's been hard to get loose co-operation from them, much less the tight co-operation he is going to need.  But our Secretary of State is going to try for it.  He says (in more diplomatic language, of course), "Look, my nation has suffered all these deaths.  Our people want revenge.  Our president is ready to go ballistic.  If you at this conference don't put something together, some alliance, some program, that will give us long-term security I think he's by God going to launch."  They leave the first meeting fearing that the world's biggest stash of nuclear weapons is under the command of a fear-crazed hawk — not an unheard of belief about American presidents.

The president plays along with his Secretary of State.  In fact, he has set it up.  They're playing sane-cop, crazy-cop.  So that he can get this kind of statement delivered to the world:  "We are forming an alliance for security and advancement, starting with the nations that we are assured are no threat to us.  What makes a nation a threat is...(Here would follow what the invitees, with their eyes on the angry U. S. president, decided were the threats that had to be removed.)

Iran clearly gives them a standard by which to measure threats.  "Frequent naming of the U. S. as 'the Great Satan' by the head of state, frequent denial of obvious fact (like the Holocaust) by the prime minister, demonstrable rejection of the norms of advanced, nay civilized, nations (like abusing diplomats — any of whom around the world could be abused if a nation abandoned civilized standards — and then celebrating the abuse year after year as if it were a heroic action) and, most threatening in a culture that promotes martyrdom, moving toward nuclear weapons.  Finally, fixing these people as an intolerable threat, is pointing out that one of them, as head of state, has the last say on national action, like launching a missile."  There it is, the gold standard, the mark our conferees can work down from.  They decide how far beneath it a nation must go before it can be admitted to the circle.

So to the backward nations who are a threat something like this message goes out: no harboring of terrorists, no tolerating those who incite to terrorism, no silence from leaders when terrorists do attack, and, finally, no weapons of mass destruction, with your agreement to surprise inspections to make sure you're not making them. 

On the back side of that message will go this one: staying out of the circle of security means that you get none of the benefits of advancement.  None.  No favorable trade, no help with development, no participation in world banking, no visas for your leaders, maybe not even landing rights at advanced nations' airports.  In short, sanctions in spades. 

I know.  Half of you will tell me I'm dreaming.  "Russia going along with this?  China?  You'll be lucky if France gets aboard." 

But we won't need luck if our Demosthenes has stiffened us enough to play it right.  Start with our close friends, the most difficult of which is France.  We just get hard with them.  "You break the embargo and trade with that country (or, in the extreme case, give their planes landing rights) you lose trade (or your landing rights) with us." 

True we have lost some of the commercial power to enforce this but we probably still have enough to be usable.  Enough for our president to give it a try anyway.  And remember, these countries know their own interest, they don't like being pinched, and some of them may well have been so convinced that these backward nations are a threat to all of us that they'll go along.

If they don't go along our president has to hurt them, or credibly threaten to hurt them.  And he can do that only if his people are willing to hurt themselves.  This is a big problem, bigger than his external problem.   It's been a long time since an American president has asked his people to give up trade, accept higher prices, and make do with less. 

Our great president will see that it's time for the Great Speech, the Periclean Speech.  "My friends, my fellow Americans, my countrymen, I see you all before me as my predecessors saw you:  good soldiers in a war against evil terrorism.  I think that's the way you see yourselves.  But the picture is not complete.  Soldiers in a war have to act like soldiers in a war.  That means making sacrifices, the sacrifices appropriate to the kind of war we're in, which is a war against terrorists.  With them you can't just send Marines to make their kind of sacrifice, you can't just send drones, and you certainly can't just continue to shop in the old way, showing the enemy that he hasn't hurt you.  You have to be hurt.  You have to show that you are willing to be hurt yourselves.  Anybody who has been in a strike situation, on either the labor or management side, knows this.  At this moment, in the kind of war we are in, I, like a union leader, am asking you the questions any worker ought to be proud to be asked:  Will you tighten your belts?  Will you show your willingness to bear the pain in lost trade, higher prices, and lower standard of living that will go with the pain, doubled, that our allies will see they must bear if we hold to our purpose?   [pause]  Will you answer yes or are you too accustomed to luxury, too fat, to far removed from your ancestors who knew what sacrifice was?  What it took to win a war.  'Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, do without.'  Does that slogan make you laugh?  Well if it does I have one request of you:  Quit talking about terrorism as a great evil threat.  Quit calling this thing you are in with terrorists a war.  Quit thinking of yourselves as fighters.  I am almost ready to say, quit thinking of yourselves as Americans. 

"But I don't think you will hold back this 'Yes' I need from you — that advanced nations need from you, that Western Civilization needs from you, and that the backward nations themselves, if they only knew it, need from you.  Will you hold it back?  Will you hold it back?  Remember, your ancestors are listening.  What will it be?"

We know that a leader in a democracy can orate like that but can he really scold his people like that?  Well, Pericles did it.  If he can do it maybe our super president can do it.

Whether it works or not we're left with a pretty good message to the Hard-Hearts, or at least to their most dangerous faction, the Hard-Asses:  This is the harder hardness, being hard with friends.  Being hard with your own citizens and brothers.  Being hard with yourself.  Being hard with enemies, invading their countries, that's the easier hardness.

Anyway, the president does all that and at least satisfies (or embarrasses) the Hard-Asses.  They'll hold back the Marines they're so eager to land.  But we can't forget the Soft-Hearted, many of whom are ready to bail out over all this hardness.  What will he do to satisfy them?

I see him putting this question directly to one of their gatherings: "Would you like to see an end to the mutilation of little girls?  Do floggings and chopped-off hands disturb you?  We'll make it a condition of entrance into the circle that a nation give up such things."  He gets a paper and pencil and shows how, for example, the number of girls that will be saved from suffering in x future years will far exceed the number that they will see suffer from famine and disease while they wait for the nation to come around.

For their other concerns he will make a promise: he will demand of the advanced nations that they avoid all discrimination against internal adherents of the religion of the backward nations admitted to the alliance.  These citizens must have absolute equality with all the other citizens, be free to wear anything (no bans on religious dress), free to worship in any way, free to observe all their religious holidays, free to celebrate traditions with any food or rituals that aren't harmful, and, most important, have open access to everything — banking, markets, schools, housing — that advanced people enjoy and have used to become advanced.  Thus he will head off Soft Hearted complaints against his rock-hard treatment of the backwards before they are admitted.  But, of course, he will also be sweetening the carrot he holds out to those backward nations.

The final challenge will come from those who, from the beginning, will dispute his word "advanced."  Hard-Heads they are, conceding him none of the claims his favorite words ("enlightened," "progressive," "liberal") make as he dangles his carrot.  "Decadent late capitalism, that's what it is, roping the rest of the world into its consumerist circle.  The old imperialist arrogance, the old colonial paternalism, speaking compassion.  Get out of here with your superpower fiats."  And above these, from the highest brows, these thoughts:  "Consider what you are holding up for these primitives to envy.  A pornified society indulging a popular culture that breaks records for vulgarity.  A civitas that the democratic franchise has filled with half-educated louts.  And on top of all a self-esteem so great that it can present itself to other cultures with full confidence of its superiority." 

These views will be shared to some extent by many middle-brows.  They, in school, will have been made (by Emerson and Thoreau) to feel guilty about their materialism. They will know how T. S. Eliot saw a generation not too far from theirs spending their time: "looking for lost golf balls."   Spiritual idleness.  You expect an abstemious, clean-living Muslim to exchange his zeal, his dedication, for that?

Our wise president will not take that on directly, nor will his think-tank people.  That's for professors and poets.  But he'll know their work and make adjustments to reduce his vulnerability.  He'll make sure that the word "advanced" is not taken to mean "morally advanced."  He's not going to have some literary satirist in Cairo saying, "Oh these advanced nations did away with 20 million of their own in one war and then 60 million in another.  Let's become an advanced nation so we can do that."  He'll make clear that his program is designed, and known to be designed, to stop only one kind of killing, the backward kind.  He'll make clear that the advanced kind, the kind that kills in the millions, is another problem.  "Join up and maybe you can work on it with us," he might add.

And yes, he might, after all, take public note of the heavyweight criticism, even from lightweight comedians.  Showing his own blood, running from satirical cuts, he might say to Egyptians (or Iranians or Bahrainis or whoever), "See, when you're advanced you can do this to your president too."

Well, that's about as much as I can fit into this blog post.  The measures are enough, I believe, to let the compassionate cruelty program begin, but they certainly don't meet all of the objections the Soft-Hearted might make, especially after the allowed pain goes on, and on, and gets full publicity.  "Mr. President, there are many moderate, enlightened citizens in those countries.  In some they're a majority.  They didn't do anything.   You are making all suffer for the behavior of some, as the prejudiced do."

"Furthermore," they might add, "We owe those people something.  "We were terribly unjust to them in 1953 — or whenever, according to the nation.  No wonder they broke out against us so irrationally.  How about a little compassionate understanding?"

Those are serious objections and they need to be met.  There could be a mass soft-hearted bailout.  And you need to see how our president will avoid it.  Well, the picture is too big.  So, a later post?

235. Just ONE Manifestation of Postmodernism

-->

When you say you're hurt by postmodernism you've got to make clear which postmodernism is doing the hurting and where it hurts.  Because I didn't do that in Post #233 (Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore), I'd like to do it here.  There are too many people — architects, painters, interior designers — who aren't hurting anybody for me to give the impression that there's a general plague of abuse.

What hurt me was the manifestation of postmodernism in English departments, poststructuralism.  In one respect, its insistence on the many voices in a literary work ("multivocality"), poststructuralism had much in common with what I was used to, with what anybody of my generation was used to.  We were weaned on Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, cynosure of the New Criticism, and a most loving display of multivocality.  So in one way poststructuralism did not look so revolutionary — though its first advocate in our department made it appear so, setting it against the "univocal" New Critics.  (Just the way we distorted the Old Criticism when we had to give the New Criticism its revolutionary steam.)

In another respect, though, poststructuralism knocked the props out from under us.  It attacked the objectivity that we thought was necessary in the teaching of our courses.  How could we claim a place in the academic tradition if we weren't objective?  How could we claim tenure which (in the AAUP statement of 1940) was won from administrations and boards of trustees almost entirely by the promise to avoid advocacy (in those days, advocacy of communism) and present our material objectively. 

Poststructuralism's treatment of objectivity can now be seen as complicated and nuanced, but in the eighties it came to the Ohio University English Department in a pretty simple way, though our chair did his best to give us the full picture.  He set aside two years for instruction by specialists in the new approach, with plenty of time — time needed by a department so full of traditionalists — for discussion.

For me the whole two years can be summed up in one reply to one question, asked of one specialist (his areas of concentration were critical theory and cultural studies), late one afternoon.  He had gone over our earlier ideas of objectivity and shown, after poststructuralist critique, how little was left of them.  There was no such thing as objectivity.   Is there, he was then asked, such a thing as relative objectivity,  "No," said.  "There is no relative objectivity."

"Surely, you cannot mean what you are saying," said one of our traditionalists.

"Yes, I mean it," he said.  "There is not even a relative objectivity."

This was no young instructor, this was no graduate student, this was no sophomore.  This was a professor at the University of Californian, Irvine, who had just published a notable book, Interpretive Conventions, and would go on to publish several more in the field.  It wasn't till I was on the stairs heading out that I thought of the question that would have made sure he wasn't pulling our legs: "Do you mean that there is no difference between the statement, 'You are five feet six and weigh two hundred pounds' and the statement, 'You are fat'?"  But alas, I (no doubt along with others) was too late.  What was left dominating our minds was the notion that because of defects in our ideas of objectivity the subjectivity of social construction was justified.  "It all depends on which person, in which culture, is delivering the stuff to you, including the stuff you are accustomed to calling 'facts.'"

You can see how that is going to drive scientists up the wall.  "Look, it doesn't matter who is doing the experiment.  Are the needles in the same place when I lower the magnesium as they were when she lowered it?  Is the setup the same?  If so then her experiment is replicated and what she has discovered we'll call reliable knowledge, more reliable than what we had before.  Our gender, race, culture, politics, religion, and power relation to each other don't matter shit.  It's the needle position, you idiots, the objectively (or intersubjectively) verifiable position of the goddam needles."

This fury turned to laughter when the physicist Alan Sokal produced a jargon-filled manuscript that suggested that pi — you know, 3.14159, the relation of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — was culturally (i.e., not physically, not mathematically) determined, and had the manuscript accepted by the editors of the leading journal in [postmodern] cultural studies. 

All right, I could accept that as just more shouting over the gulf between science and the humanities if it weren't for the fact that half of what I taught in my part of the humanities was indistinguishable from science.  Aside from all the supporting historical and linguistic scholarship there was this, right at the heart of our discipline: reading a poem.  In the early stages of that crucial activity an inexperienced student had to be a scientist, a good scientist, or he wouldn't get anyplace.  Not any place that paid off, anyway.  To get to that place he first simply had to construe the sentences.  In that task everything depends on his making good (i.e., probable) inferences.  "There's a word I haven't seen before.  It's in a position in a structure I have seen before, though, so it's probably a verb.  I'll proceed on the assumption that that's what it is.  Now here's a word that has two meanings.  One goes with the others I have already decided on, and one doesn't — especially since it's not a verb.  So I'll take the first one."  

Note how he follows the precept given biology students learning to identify what they see under a microscope: when you hear hoof beats think horses, not zebras (i.e., first make the most probable inference).  Note more importantly that what he recognizes as a given, the grammatical conventions that tell him a word is a verb, is like what the scientist recognizes as a given, the nature that determines the position of the needles.  Neither one can be changed by the observer and both are independent of the observer — his gender, race, religion, politics, etc.  They are "objective entities."

By taking them so the inexperienced student is able to put the poem together — much more quickly, of course, than in my spell-out.  Before he's finished his similarity to the scientist will be clear: both advance into the unknown by making inferences from the known.  Both use the word "fact" for what they have established, or find established, as known.

How much did this change when I moved from first-year "Introduction to Literature" to fourth-year honors seminar?  The students there could construe sentences more easily, and we could start at a higher level, but still, if I were to hold to Socratic teaching, we had to inquire, and build, and establish beliefs much in the way of the scientist — which was, indeed, the way (though disguised by its unscientific, non-empirical premises) of the Platonic dialogue.  Make each step carefully, checking, testing, ordering, and if you avoided fallacy and stayed coherent you could credit yourself with an advance.

And what was the payoff?  With a poem you advanced onto the ground where the imagination, the freely ranging imagination, could take off, making all the bells of image, metaphor, and symbol ring.  Ring with ways that could vary with each reader.  With a piece of DNA you advanced onto the ground where conjecture could take off, making a whole line of future experiments light up the sky (and the NSF).  With lights that could vary with each scientist.  Even in the payoff the two were similar.

The way we each got into that happy, free land of the imagination was the way of Socrates and that, I take it, is the way of the academic tradition.  And that's what I saw postmodernism knocking the props out from under.  When I faced my students I felt I would have no ground to stand on, no theoretical foundation.  If a student, preferring a noun to a verb, said, "Grammatical conventions are what I see them as," I had no supported way to deny him.  Horses could become zebras any time he wanted them to. 

Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish (I forget which) calls that student an "obliging" student, meaning the rare one who gives attacking traditionalists the extreme example they need, but still he's the kind of student I felt facing me after postmodern literary theorists, represented most vividly in my mind by the California professor, had removed the ground of objectivity from under me. 

And, by what my postmodernist colleagues soon were writing in the journals, I saw I would have to feel the same groundlessness when I faced the administration or board of trustees.  Say they wanted to move against tenure.  In 1940 I could oppose their move on the ground that tenure was necessary to academic freedom, which was supported by a promise of objectivity, or disinterestedness.  And, looking at academic writing at that time, no administrator or trustee could find reason to doubt that promise.  But in 1990?  Look at what a trustee might see.  The two below are from College English, the teacher's journal with the largest circulation.

[For equality and democracy] the teacher must recognize that he or she must influence (perhaps manipulate is the more accurate word) students' values through charisma or power — he or she must accept the role as manipulator.  Therefore it is of course reasonable to try to inculcate into our students the conviction that the dominant order is repressive.   (Lead article.)

I would argue that political commitment — especially feminist commitment — is a legitimate classroom strategy and rhetorical imperative.  The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students' conversions to emancipatory critical action.

If the trustee had said to me then, "It looks to me as if you in the English Department have broken your promise," I'd be hard pressed to say him nay.  Statements of the same kind, advocating advocacy courses, could be found in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and the Journal of Advanced Composition.  And if he said to me now, "You are still, on the evidence of those courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies at UCLA, breaking your promise, I'd be hard pressed to deny it.  I'd have to establish that, in the teaching of those courses, there was no advocacy, and I doubt that I could do that.

Even if I'm speaking ing from some distance up the wall, my friends in fine arts can see, I hope, how what postmodernism meant to me (a tectonic philosophical shift that deprived me of my foundation, my tradition, even my calling) is different from what it meant to them.  Their postmodernism, I take it (though I haven't looked carefully), knocks far fewer props out from under them, and does its knocking less forthrightly, with fewer words.

234. How About "Compassionate Cruelty" as a Foreign Policy?

      There comes a time in every parent's education when he or she hears a voice that says, "Pain is a better teacher than you are."  You lecture and demonstrate and harangue and then whacko, zero winds hit the child on the way home from school and the next time he puts on his jacket.

And apparently there comes a time in every advanced nation's education when it hears the same thing.  According to Schmuel Rosner (NYT, 12-27-13) Israel is discovering that its children, the Ultra-Orthodox men who choose not to work or join the army (they stay home and study the Torah while their wives work), might learn to make a better choice if they suffered more.  If, says the government reducing benefits, they prefer "their traditions over participating in the modern Israeli economy," let them freeze.  Rosner calls this policy "compassionate cruelty."  Like Daniel Moynihan's "benign neglect," a 1969 policy to get blacks to rely less on the government and more on themselves, it trusts pain to do the teaching.

The hitch in this approach, as every parent knows, is that you have to watch the pain.  It's not easy seeing a child come in blue, or, if he's of the Haredim, walk around in rags.

Nevertheless, I find myself wondering if the papa of the advanced nations, the United States, might not try this approach with the backward nations of the world.  "Do you prefer loyalty to family, or clan, or tribe over loyalty to nation?  Ancient custom to codified law?  Ruler's wishes to rational organization?  Education in Scripture to education in science?  Patriarchal security over education of women?  Assurance of wives' fidelity over their health and pleasure?  Land-holding over commerce?  Faith over reason?  Very well, continue.  We'll watch you freeze."

What lets you call this compassionate or benign is that you trust the ability of the backward people to watch also, and learn. (Only the extremely soft-hearted, the "soft bigots of low expectations," don't trust them.)  "Over there are nations prospering through commerce, and commitment to law, and education in science, and the freedom of women.  Over there are nations losing less to corruption because their office-holders put loyalty to nation over loyalty to family.  Over there are people who are strong militarily because they organize themselves rationally."  They'll get the point.  Pretty soon you will see them going out the door with their jackets on.  Pain was a good teacher.

You'd have a devil of a time pushing through such a policy but maybe some cunning and imaginative president of some commercial and military super power (that's what it would take) could do it.  Or could at least get it started.

233. Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore

 In the early 90s, before I retired, I became an anti-postmodernist bore.  I couldn't shut up about what was happening in English departments.  Now I see in the Wall Street Journal (Opinion, Jan. 4-5) that UCLA has dropped its requirement that English majors take "one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton."  Instead it will require that they take "a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing."

Why didn't I bore more people?

232. The Lesson of the Poop-Knockers

I noticed right after I moved to Fort Collins last summer that the sidewalk cleaners in my neighborhood had something odd attached to their blowers: a dowel rod that extended about six inches below the barrel, to which it was firmly fastened by duct tape.  I couldn't figure it out.  Finally I asked a cleaner.  "It's to knock the goose poop off the sidewalk, she said — when it doesn't blow off." 

I was up on Canadian geese, the plague of golf courses and parks and beaches.  They were a terrible problem in some of the Eastern cities I knew.  The city of Ottawa, I'd read, was using drone helicopters to chase them away.  One Western city had tried decoy coyotes, another had hired a crew of border collies.  You wouldn't believe the innovative solutions to the problem — specially trained dogs, special goose repellent, fake goose-in-distress calls, "lethal control," water cannon, egg addling (oil on the shells), and "capture and euthanasia using carbon dioxide."  Can't you hear the pitches being made to city councils by ambitious salesmen and pro-active city managers?  Now here was Fort Collins handling its Canadian geese with a method that would hardly have a chance in your ordinary American council or boardroom: just live with them.

Sure they pooped on your sidewalk.  Sure they waddled in front of your car.  Is that going to wreck your life?  Why not go to a little trouble, like taping a dowel to your blower or stopping your car for a moment, and get on with what you're doing?  With your mind at rest.

If sociologists had a reliable happiness meter I'm willing to bet that it would show Fort Collins registering far better numbers than those cities all bent out of shape over their Canadian geese.  And if that's true then the reason, I think, is that they've gotten ahold of a great, life-enhancing principle: live with the shit that doesn't kill you.

At the moment, especially in France, many people in Europe think Gypsies are shit.  They don't get jobs, they clutter the landscape, and they steal.  Mon Dieu, how they steal.  They hang around tourists like crows, picking every badly closed pocket.  We need a bold program.  How about eviction from the country?

Well, that's one solution, but it's not the Fort Collins solution.  The Fort Collins solution would be to tighten the thievery laws and enforce them strictly.  Go after the objectionable behavior, not the objectionable ethnicity.  In other words, get the shit off the sidewalk, the shit that bothers you, and learn to live with the people that bother you.  (I might point out that the Americans, doing a fair job of integrating Gypsies into the work force, could be an example here.)  If part of that learning to live together is avoiding offense then the poop-knocker is a wonderful model: it knocks anybody's, any nationality's, any race's, any species' poop off the sidewalk without respect to its origin.  If geese were sensitive to slights they'd have nothing to fasten on.

The Fort Collins principle is very useful in guiding people away from cruelty to the sensitive.  I remember that in some James Gould Cozzens novel or other there was a congregation in New England demanding that their rector tell the organist to quit practicing on the carillon at odd hours of the afternoon.  It was such a jolt hearing this burst of bells when you didn't expect it.  The rector's advice, as I remember, was pure Fort Collins: live with it a little longer.  The organist was old, and thought the town was happy to hear his music any time.  It would have hurt him deeply to think he had been mistaken all these years.  So, just live with the man.  Bear the jolt.

What the Fort Collins people do is adjust our perspective on the activist, the pro-activist, the man with a plan, the guy who in an interview, or on the hustings, lights everybody up and, in the job or office, is a new broom, sweeping clean.  As president of a company he'll have the stock up 70% in three years.  As President of the U. S. he'll have the nation back leading the world in a year.  He won't take any shit from anybody.  I think you can find the same kind of action-promoter on the other side, leading the occupiers into the administration building, posting the non-negotiable demands, waving the shirt from the barricades. 

Neither of those activists would be where they are if somewhere along the line they hadn't made an impassioned speech, a pitch to a board of directors, or a party convention, or a rally of the disaffected.  Everybody in red-blooded America knows how the speech goes.

I can't help thinking of how the Fort Collins competitor with those charismatic dynamos must have made his or her pitch for election or employment.  "I propose to let well enough alone, to take up problems as they arise, and to look first for the least radical solution.  With problems I can't solve — and there are many — I will draw on my special expertise: muddling along doing the least amount of damage.  I expect to live with some inefficiency and sharp practice in my organization, as I expect the disaffected in my constituency to live with some injustice and oppression.  As they are all now living with some goose poop."

It's the glory of this community that they elected or hired such a person.  And no, I don't think that means that they are passively reconciled to the evils of the world.  I think it shows that they have a sense of proportion, and can see what's worth spending their energy on, their saved-up energy, and what's not.