244. How to Strengthen a Scofflaw, Crony-Feeding Autocrat

Say his people have a strong sense of the motherland, which, unlike yours, has been deeply invaded twice from the west, devastating the country and mowing down its people.  Say that some time after repelling the last invasion the people saw some provinces of the country break away, and one province take with it a small part of the motherland that, for administrative convenience, had been transferred to it from another province.  Say this part of the motherland had been particularly fought over, so that the people could see a lot of their blood on its ground.

Say the ruler of this country is a scofflaw, crony-feeding autocrat representing an old, objectionable political system, and that a lot of his citizens still find it objectionable.  So his position as leader is not perfectly secure.  What could you as an outsider do to strengthen his position?

Well, obviously, you've got to threaten the motherland so that he can play "guardian of his people."  Nothing plants a ruler in power more firmly.  But you can't do that just bang.  This place is far away and a lot has to have been done earlier to get close.

Say that you're lucky and that that has been done.  Your alliance, NATO, instead of breaking up when this country broke up, and was no longer the threat that NATO was formed to meet, did not break up but stayed together and continued to press.  And your predecessors in office were happy to see it press, and pressed it to press, because so many of their countrymen were pressing them to press.  (I don't know why they did this.  It seems crazy.  Was it habit?  Was it inattention?  Or did they just not know how to behave unless they had an enemy?  I mean, they'd had a really evil enemy, and then a pretty evil enemy, and then people they could plausibly call evil, all those years, and there was all this great equipment ready to use against evil enemies.  How were they going to live without an enemy?)

Anyway, your predecessors put missiles in a country very close to this motherland, and then one of them wanted to press NATO right up to the borders of the now reduced nation.  You know what that's going to do to those people with a motherland sense.  They know that NATO membership means that these nations next to them have the United States ready to go to war, obliged by treaty to go to war, for them.  They, besides feeling ignored, or taken lightly, or affronted, lovers of the motherland are going to feel endangered and be very much on edge.

OK, you've got your chance, but first you are going to have to make some preliminary moves yourself.  The ruler of this reduced country makes some gestures of cooperation, even friendship.  He goes along with what you want to do to secure yourself against Iran and, to help you retract your over-extended neck in the Syrian conflict, offers to mediate.  You've got to keep seeing these as enemy moves.  "Russia tries again to insert itself into the Middle East."  That will shut up the re-set supporters in Russia.

Now you can set your tyrant in concrete, with a marble statue to follow.   He moves to take back the part of the motherland that, with the lost province, will go over to his people's old enemies.  I mean, they think that way too.  So you (or your secretary of state) huff, puff, complain, and threaten in all the old terms, so that the tyrant can (as Putin just did, NYT 3-19-14) quote you and discredit you by showing your hypocrisy (since you have tolerated the same thing in your friends) but most of all by showing your continuing presence as a threat.

As for his big speeches, you've practically written them for him.  "Our country is cornered" (applause), "they cheated us again and again" (applause), "if you press a spring too far it will recoil" (thunderous applause), "Crimea has always been a part of Russia" (standing ovation),  "after a long, hard and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!"  (chants of "Russia!  Russia!").  Tears of joy, tears of approval, tears of gratitude to the guardian of the Russian people.  You couldn't lock a scofflaw, crony-feeding autocrat in office more securely.

243. Conclusions about Postmodern Theorists

 

I am going to hazard a guess that the reader who finds postmodern theorists too subtle, or obscure, or maybe just too various, for him to be willing to make any general statements about them, will be willing to make one such statement: that they commonly count on somebody else to do the work.

Certainly that's true of the theorists taken up in this blog.  Barbara Herrnstein Smith, as we have just seen (Post 240), tells us that rationality in students will be taken care of by their "behavioral tendencies" and "recurrent inclinations."  If it is not (and anybody not spectacularly blind to what goes on in our classrooms will see that it is not) then those people teaching Freshman Composition and Elementary Logic will take care of it.

Stanley Fish, mentor to Smith and many others, tells us that rationality will be taken care of by "the linguistic competence" that "every speaker shares," an pays no attention to the acquisition of that competence.  That will be taken care of by the same lower-level teachers.

There is no place for teachers in postmodern theory.  In all the assiduous undermining of foundations, of notions of reality, of transcendence, of a necessary ground, of necessity itself, there seems not to have been a thought as to what that destruction might imply for the activity of teaching — showing other people how to reach their goals.

The human being pictured in postmodern theory is a creature without desires or goals.  He, even when he is placed (as by Stanley Fish) in a local community, is some non-human knower whose claims to knowledge are justifiable or unjustifiable.  If a claim is based on access to reality (said to be the claim of traditional foundationalists)to Fish the claim is going to be unjustifiable, since nobody can have such access.  Human beings have access only to representations and interpretations, which will vary according to (or be contingent upon) time, place, culture, gender, political need, place in a power relationship, and so on.

Giving a goal to that human being changes all that.  In a world where everything is contingent (the world of Fish's local communities) suddenly a few things become necessary.  To attain A a student has to meet conditions B, C, and D.  Teachers help him recognize the conditions and meet them.  "To build a bridge that won't fall down you must put your piers no further than X feet apart."  Disagreements among teachers are settled by appeal to the world (or whatever) that sets the conditions.  That, in the sense of "what's appealed to," is their foundation and, if you want to call it that, their reality.  But all it is is a set of resistances to the attainment of the goal, resistances to the will.

With teachers the terms "necessity" and "reality" have to refer to something that for the student will name constraints on his will.  If the teacher is to reach her goal (helping the student reach his goal) they can't be dismissed.  Whether you call them "real" or "apparent" they are still there, and whether you call them "representations" or "interpretations" you still have access to them.  Doubt about access to the constraint of gravity is removed by jumping out a window.

Recognition of those constraints on the will cautions us about our use of the word "foundation."  It can mean "what nature rests on" or "what men appeal to" (see Post 239).  The first is what Stanley Fish, looking through Richard Rorty's eyes at preceding philosophers, saw "lying in ruins around us."  The second is what teachers (and debaters and politicians and anybody in disagreement) see when they want to settle an argument.  If it is lying in ruins they have lost the rules of language and logic, the most efficient settler of arguments in the history of human, and particularly Western, intercourse.  Teachers, the people we are concerned about here, can no longer set straight an objecting student.

To a teacher, logic is not anything "imposed from the outside," as by positivists.  It's a tool you take up in order to accomplish something the surest way, by checking and testing.  It's been lying at hand for many years and if you don't take it up, or can't put your hand on it, or lose trust in it, your movements, mainly movements of the mind, are going to be very uncertain and inefficient.  Teachers want their students to move surely and efficiently.  No, better, they want them to want to move, want their minds to move, surely and efficiently.  They want something deep inside the student to say, "In this task I resolve to think logically."  The teacher's question has nothing to do with reality, or the world, or even philosophy.  It's simply, "Are you holding to your resolution?  Are you checking and testing?  Are you using this tool?"

If, on either side of the disagreement between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists, you don't observe the distinction between a tool and a metaphysic you are going to generate exasperation. Include "epistemic norms" (the category that includes logic) in the list of things you see destroyed (as Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Robert Scholes do) and you become a tank that makes helpless every rifleman in the teaching trench.  Think, rifleman, that your norms depend on the existence of some underlying "reality" and you throw yourself under the treads. 

If that describes what happened in any of our recent wars in academia then the formula for peace in the academic world seems clear: nobody gets to carry a gun until he shows he can distnguish between a tool and a metaphysic.

Note: I have taken Barbara Herrnstein Smith to be speaking for a broad range of anti-foundationalists and particularly for Stanley Fish, who has praised her work.  Fish has complained several times that misunderstanding of his theory has led to needless fear that it will lead to lawless subjectivism ("Not to worry," is his famous advice) and since his "interpretive communities" do seem sometimes close to the "community of educated gentlemen" I do not fear at all, and indeed count on, I obviously face some questions that need to be answered.  I will try to do that in a future post.

242. The Descent of "The Economist"

-->

The Economist just (Leader, 3-8-14) called Ukraine's president Viktor Yanukovich "a home-grown autocrat."  That's another thing against him as a very bad man.  But it's a thing not accurately named.  Yanukovich was voted into office.  He is "a home-elected democrat."

So is Mohammed Morsi and so are Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, to name elected officials demonstrated against in the streets by people we have been asked to sympathize with.  Asked, that is, by people who put goodness above democracy.  In America those people must not be very sensitive to words, since they, or their newspapers, are also quick, not noticing the irony, to reproach other people (nations, leaders) for their hostility to democracy.

By now there are now, as I count them, 83 ironies in Americans' use of the word "democracy" since their government backed the Egyptian generals (yes, we controlled them; we could have cut off parts to their tanks and planes) in their overthrow of the elected president.  There was a time when The Economist was sensitive to these ironies, at least enough to keep the blatant slant, the Murdoch slant, out of their nouns.  Maybe after you've made the "vileness" of a regime (Syria's. among others) sufficient cause for action against it the slant gets easier.

Democracy makes  "badness" hard to locate.  What do you call the people who elected the bad Yanukovich (in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards")?  What do you call the candidate who lost to him, prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, or the president elected to serve from 2005 to 2010, Viktor Yuschenko?   They were West-leaning so they must have been good, right?  Well the good politicians had their chance and the people had their choice.  And they elected the bad politician.  What are they, bad people? 

And you know what?  In all that time there wasn't an autocrat in sight.  

241. Ukraine: Sam, You Made the Pants Just Right.

 

How do we tailor our response to Russia's intervention in the Ukraine?  Sam Tanenhaus, in Sunday's NYT (3 1-14), says we should follow the pattern handed down to us by Cold War presidents, who, resisting the calls for tough, forceful action, trimmed and stretched and made accommodations. 

 

Eisenhower, preferring stability to confrontation, stood by while the Soviets sent tanks into Hungary, Kennedy pulled our missiles out of Turkey in exchange for Khrushchev’s calling his back from Cuba, Nixon agreed to cut our stockpile of nuclear weapons in exchange for the Soviets' cutting theirs, and even Ronald Reagan, the great hawk hero, came to the aid of Poland's Solidarity heroes only with words, money, and equipment.

"The Cold War," Tanenhaus reminds us, "was defined from the outset less by outright confrontation than by caution," a caution that came with "adjustment, compromise, improvisation and at times retreat."  He also reminds us that it was marked by denunciations of the cautious as  "weak-willed," "soft," and "naive."

Calling any of those presidents "naive" (as just yesterday I heard somebody on Fox call President Obama for his caution) is about as double-edged a charge as you're likely to hear.  What held Eisenhower back in the case of Hungary and held Reagan back in the case of Poland was an unalterable reality: proximity to Russia and distance from us.  The world's largest standing army, the one that defeated Hitler (yes, it could have done it by itself), was right there; the smaller forces that Representative John W.  McCormack wanted to call on were, for the most part, way over here, on this side of a big ocean.  And he said the Eisenhower administration was living in "a dream world."

If McCormack and his like had in mind the use, not of our comparatively small number of soldiers but of our large number of atomic weapons, they still don't look very realistic.  To avoid "emboldening" the Russians you're going to let fly the atom bombs and start World War III?  That possibility doesn't require some caution?

OK, so what's the first thing you do in an international crisis with the Russians?  As I read Sam Tanenhaus it's simple: tune out Fox network.  Then (I would add) get down to the realities and imagine how our actions might look from their side.  What do we expect from people who, regardless of their form of government then and now, suffered 50-60 million casualties because they didn't make sure that nations on their borders were friendly to them?

What has to be fitted into this reality is our promotion of democracy and the protection of human rights.  It's a tough fit.  That's why today's presidents should do what Tanenhaus says Cold War presidents did: adjust, compromise, and improvise.  You want pants you can wear?  Go to Tanenhaus.

240. Why Didn't Postmodern Theory Ruin College Education?

 

We expect practice to be consistent with theory, don't we?  Well, parents, if the practice of college teachers in the closing decades of the twentieth century had been consistent with the theory that became dominant in those decades none of your children would have come home from college able to think straight.  Now that they are home you have had a pretty good view of their postgraduate thinking.  You have seen that it's no crookeder than ours was.  I'm guessing that you would like to have somebody up there in higher education explain this to you.  I'm going to try.

First, theory.  Here's a sample that's bound to have been influential.  It's from the president of the Modern Language Association and it comes under the category "Theory" that another president had already declared victorious ("The Triumph of Theory," Presidential Address, 1986) in that organization.  The victory had been gained over those the winners called "foundationalists," people who believed in (among other things) objective standards of rational enquiry, commonly referred to by Theorists as "traditional epistemic norms," then said (by a leading anti-foundationalist, Stanley Fish) to be "lying in ruins around us." The most stubborn of the losers were those who thought they needed at least one of those norms, logic, in order to have a dialogue with students.  "Without rules for passing from one belief to another how can we develop ideas?"  The president, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, is, the passage below, trying to reassure foundationalists of that kind.  She says that their needs will be taken care of by

the innumerable, subtle, continuously operating, nonformalized, usually unrecognized, but nonetheless strong behavioral tendencies [Smith's emphasis] that emerge from individual and social practices themselves.  These are not, as terms such as "rules," "norms," "standards," and "constraints" suggest, external forces that operate upon agents to direct and control their actions but are, rather, the recurrent inclinations of the agents themselves: inclinations, to act in certain ways rather than others, that are corporeally inscribed traces of the differential consequences of their own prior and ongoing actions and interactions (Contingencies of Value, p. 162).

I think that after you straighten that passage out you get a belief in natural rationality.  The young already have in them the capacity to choose and follow the practices from which what we call rationality will emerge.  I have quoted the passage in full so that you can see whether or not I have straightened it out right.

That's the theory.  Do you see all that it, logically, cuts out from under teachers in a university?  Nobody in the whole place, facing a fragmented essay, has anything outside the student to appeal to to get him to glue it together.  The teacher has to stand by waiting for an inclination to recur.                                                                                         

You can imagine what this does, logically again, to all those composition teachers (at least 10,000 of them at the time Smith wrote) working their tails off to get students to be more rational.  And, beyond those teachers, to every teacher of every advanced course requiring that students adhere to logic in their essays.  College teachers have no support, nothing to appeal to, nothing they could call a foundation.

The ones Smith's theory really leaves planted in air, though, are the Socratic interrogators, who depend on the student's ability and willingness to connect her answers and so build a structure of belief that will stand up.  You already know what we Socratists most want to preserve: our students' respect for the rules of speech that let us get somewhere in our office or classroom dialogue.  Half of it is working out the implications of what a student tells us she believes — about a poem, or a piece of criticism, or a statement by another student.  You can't get anywhere in that kind of conversation without respect for logic, rules for passing from one belief to another.  The main thing is not to contradict oneself.  That takes some attention and enforcement, more than you'd think, but I myself have never had to go beyond the traditional norms.

Does that seem so serious, losing support for the law of non-contradiction?  Aren't there a lot of gotcha players who ought to lose their support?  No doubt.  "Let it pass, nit-picker, let it pass."  But if a Socratic teacher lets pass a contradiction then the structure he's got the student building could fall down.  If a student gets used to passing over contradictions his character (or, to Socrates, his soul) could fall apart.  He could be a Euthyphro, a mess, or a Yossarian, a sentimentalist.  (Surely I have by now quoted to you G. K. Chesterton's definition of a sentimentalist: "one who enjoys every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.")  The whole purpose of Socratic education, to produce a person of integrity (or, for Socrates, a soul in harmony), is defeated.  Such a person accepts and takes responsibility for all that he believes and wills (that is, accepts the sequences attached to his ideas and the consequences attached to his pleasures).  If that describes an adult then the sentimentalist is a juvenile.  And if postmodern theorists are right then Socratic teachers are no help turning juveniles into adults.  Which, parents, I think is what you wanted college teachers to help with when you sent your children to them.

All right, that's what's cut out from under teachers.  And what, logically still, is the world stuck with?  What are all the informal teachers — parents, friends, officials — helpless to do anything about?  Well think of all the destructive behavior that results from failure to connect P to Q — smoking tobacco to dying of cancer, texting at the wheel to cracking up the car, all that.  What is the nation stuck with?  The same failure to connect appearing in citizens, who will want from their government benefits without cost, rights without duties, war without sacrifice, victory without casualties, battle without gore, attractively humane intervention without repulsively inhuman behavior.  Constant surprise at the ugly means required by the good ends they vote for.  In the world, every democracy ruled by sentimentalists.

Logically, with all that support removed, all those epistemic norms lying in ruins, all that trust that juveniles were naturally rational, we should have by now experienced all those bad effects.  I don't think we have.  We weren't experiencing them in 1997 when I retired and from what I can see we are not experiencing them now.  Fragmented essays are still put back together, logic is still respected, composition teachers still have acknowledged ground to stand on, Socratic teachers still get students to check, and test, and draw consequences, students still internalize the process, sentimentality is no more a threat than it ever was, and young people are no more irrational than they ever were.  Your children are probably coming home from college able to think as straight as you did.

I am at a loss to explain this.  Why did the logical consequences of postmodern theory, a theory declared to the academic world by one of its leading professional organizations to be the victoriously governing theory, not show up as actual consequences?  I can think of some possibilities but I am open to suggestions.