270. Recently Marked Words

"the most unoppressed of the world's peoples" .... straight white males.  Charles Isherwood, New York Times.

"a superficial marker of profundity, like bringing Piketty to the beach"  Emily Nussbaum, New  Yorker, 12-15-14.

"He looked like a dog that had just been kicked by Albert Payson Terhune." .... registering sudden, incomprehensible betrayal.  Remembered from a Paul Kendall reference.

"the autodidact's anxiety about not knowing enough"  D. T. Max, New Yorker, 12-8-14.

"Squat and muscular, he looked as if he had been lifting weights and was still mad at them."   D. T. Max, New Yorker, 12-8-14.   Of Chris Burden.

"Art is long, and life is quite long too" .... looking at the proliferation of homes for the aged.  Zoë Heller, New York Times Book Review, 12-21-14.

"Twitter — that device helpfully enabling people to write faster than they can think"  Geoffrey Wheatcroft, New York Review, 1-5-15.

In the U. S. today: "a culture so vulgar that a reality series entitled 'Dating Naked' engenders a collective yawn."  Judith Newman, NYT, 12-28-14.

"the bottomless joys of anal sex" .... one end of the range of recent soul-baring personal narratives.  Daniel Mendelsohn, NYT, 12-28-14.

"a fairly gay-friendly  community in a city of Midwestern reserve and Southern denial" .... the locale of a pastoral crisis.  Rhonda Mawhood Lee, NYT, 12-28-14.

269. Socrates Questions Today's Leading Art Curator

Hans Ulrich Obrist is a curator at the Serpentine, a London gallery "now firmly established as a center for contemporary art" (New Yorker, 12-15-14).  He has spent fifty of the last fifty-two weekends away from his base checking on emerging art and new shows.  He has been named by ArtReview "the most powerful figure in the field."

According to D. T. Max, the author of the profile of him, "The art he is most passionate about doesn't hang on walls and often doesn't have a permanent emanation.  It can take the form of a game or a science experiment, and often leaves nothing behind but memories and an exhibition catalogue."

I immediately see this 46-year-old Swiss man winding up where all thoughtful people in the West must, in my view, wind up: at the feet of Socrates.  He is close to recognizing that the pursuit of the good life takes precedence over all other pursuits.

All that remains for him to do is walk out of a ballpark or chemistry lab and say, "Wow, that ranks right up there with the game or experiment I saw artists doing yesterday."  He'll be taking experiences as they come to him, and measuring them on the same scale.

What a moment that will be!  The fence between art and life has been taken down.  There are suddenly not two arenas, but one, and there, there are artists, painters and sculptors and dancers, competing for attention before a single audience. I can't believe that it's happened in my lifetime.  An art expert and I are sitting in adjacent seats! 

And that, I think, is where Socrates wants us, looking at art and life as equal competitors for our attention, with contribution to the good life deciding the winner.   

How does that, contribution to the good life, become the measure?  Through the kind of thinking Socrates tried to teach us: go through the possibilities, test each one against the other, choose the one that stands up, and formulate the principle of your choice for use when you have to make another one.  In a classroom you do it slowly, in a ballpark or art gallery you do it quickly.  But the process is the same.  And once you've taken the big step, admitting everything into judgment equally, it should be easy.  It's the step I expect Mr. Obrist to take shortly, the step that will make it impossible to tell us apart.

"And if he doesn't take it, what will he be living, the bad life?  In a useless occupation?"

Not at all.  He'll be living the good curator life.  And he certainly won't be useless.  He's already been useful to me, at second hand, by calling my attention to a show where the artist, Alison Knowles, invited visitors to fill in squares with whatever they thought was interesting — as long as it was red.  I'd be drawn to that show.  I think it would be neat to discover what your friends and neighbors, bound by the need for red, thought was interesting. 

I'm grateful to anybody going around narrowing down the world's abundance of neatness for me.  Just the day before yesterday one of my nieces posted on YouTube a video of balls released at the top of a rising escalator, their bounces fighting the rise randomly and, I saw, hopelessly.  Her note said, "Uncle Rol will go for this."  She was my curator.  Whether anybody called it "art" or not I don't know.   And, Socrates reminds me, it doesn't matter.

Socrates lets me be guided by both Sue and Hans Obrist as long as I don't go fencing off the neatness they recommend from any other neatness I find, or am directed to, in the world.  I have to be free to put Koo Jeong-A's installation of the bedroom she had used while making another installation, an installation (of blankets and clothes) on an installation, alongside any other bedroom I have looked into.

"He's a poor seeker of the good life who walls off parts of experience," says Socrates.  You don't protect and you don't privilege.  And that's what a lot of people, especially less talented ones, would love to do.  Need to do. 

Sort them out, curators.  And you know what would make it easier for all of us?  Try doing it without using the word "art."  Without even thinking of that category, or in that mode.  It's the biggest fence there is, and in our time it keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Here's my hope in Obrist.   I think he's on the verge of discarding the word "art."  In the name of The Good Life, the fence-buster.  Do it, Hans, and we can sit indistinguishably and happily together, watching any ballgame, real or pretend.

Not that either of us will know what the good life is.  We learn as we go, we learn differently, and we take different advice, adjusting according to the payoff.  The important thing is not what the good life is (it's not out there, waiting for us to find) but that our conception of it comes first.  Put it second and Socrates will throw us out.

"My conception?  Me?  Me?  Man, that takes confidence." 

Yes, too much for a lot of people.  But for Americans (you can look to them for inspiration, Hans), ah, they've got an author who can charge them up for it.  Emerson.  He's the one who tells each of them, over their high-school library door, that "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."  And then in class, outrageously: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius."  You want confidence in your inner Socratic process?   Stay in touch with Emerson.

Emerson taught young Americans, at a time when they were awed and then over-awed, by the cultural maturity of Europeans, to be confident in their youth.  An American was a boy, and "a boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome.... He gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you."

A European was, perforce, a man.  And "the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with éclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!"

All right Hans (we use first names very freely over here), how does this work for us?  We're at the same circus, life, but it's got several rings.  In one ring the performers are ballplayers and scientists, in another artists.  How do we decide which one to watch? 

Not, says Socrates, by what the rings are named, or by anybody's description of them, or by their history or reputation, or by the number of people watching them, or by the passion in their gaze, or by their elite status.  Not by anything other than what's going on in the ring.  Fix on that, my students, and then measure its contribution to the good life, as you conceive it, against what's going on in the other ring. 

If it takes Emersonian confidence and courage for an American youth to do that, to reject history and reputation and prestigious categories and elite status, and we have given him credit for it, what is it going to take for a European dealer in those things, whose occupation depends on them, to reject them?  Even more.  Especially after he sees that being drawn to a soup can as art comes not from an American impulse but from an essentially European one, founded in a deeper respect for "art."

I would be asking the impossible of you, Hans, if you weren't so close.  The passion of your gaze extends to "games and science experiments."  Which ring are they in?  The sign in front of one says Life, the other Art.  You're within an inch of the Socratic answer: "It doesn't matter."  Your assistant is standing by, ready to carry away the signs.  Give her the word, give her the word. 

268. Wrestling with the Problem of Ishness

Remember "Turkishness"?  It was one of those sets of tribal traits that, if you insisted on it as a nation, kept you out of the European Union.  The Western tribe welcomed only universalists, people who, recognizing the equality and fraternity of all people, rise above peculiarly tribal values, or "ishness."

And now what are we about to get in Britain?  As strong a call for "Britishness," I'll bet, as we have heard in a long time. After the release of findings by the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills investigating conditions in five schools in Birmingham (NYT, 12-7-14) it's hard to imagine any other response.

I may be wrong but you, fellow American, can easily test whether I am or not.  Under the name Americanism you share most of the values in question.  Try bringing them to these findings: that "some teachers and [Muslim-dominated] school board governors... were encouraging homophobia, anti-Semitism and support for Al Qaeda, sometimes inviting speakers who endorsed the establishment of a state run under Sharia law"; that one school "stopped music and drama lessons as well as Christmas and Diwali celebrations, and subsidized trips to Saudi Arabia for Muslim students"; that in another school, "girls and female teachers were discriminated against, and compulsory sex education, including discussions about forced marriage, was banned. Girls and boys seen talking for too long or considered flirtatious were reprimanded, while boys were given worksheets that said a wife had to obey her husband."

The report concluded that there had been a “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action, carried out by a number of associated individuals, to introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos into a few schools in Birmingham.”

If that happened here would you still be a universalist?  To the degree that our Declaration of Independence expects you to be?  My guess is that you'll be saying, "That's a violation of American values that can't be tolerated" — if you're not, as a lumpen patriot, already saying to Muslims what you said to Communists: "Get your heart in America or get your ass out."

 Before getting the more genteel British response I'd like to hear a replay of some of the lectures to the Turks about their insistence on Turkishness, and their punishment of insults to it.  How it was a relic of autarchy, and interfered with the nation's "maturing as a democracy," the sort of thing fully developed nations had abandoned long ago.  Only the insecure would be so touchy about insults.

And now, by George, what do we have, right in our faces?  The most brazen insult to Britishness ever heard in these isles.  Imagine, ending Christmas celebrations.  Telling boys that their wives had to obey them!  Having pupils listen to talk about Sharia as if it weren't a lot of medieval nonsense!  No idea whatsoever of British calm and reserve, no history of laughs at religious "enthusiasm," no abhorrence of zealotry.  And no, absolutely no, sense of progress, away from anti-semitism, away from homophobia.   Really, put that with support for Al Qaeda and a fellow's ready to stick something on his bumper.  Tolerance does have its limits.

The problem has its amusing aspects, but it gets tough once you see that universal values don't stand up by themselves.  They need support, and the only one around is tribal.  Democracy needs a tribe whose members are willing to deal and compromise and stick with the system.  Go universalist and you let anybody, regardless of race, creed, or color, be a member.  You value inclusiveness.

Then wham, you discover that some people hold to a creed that won't let them stick to the system.  They'll just appear to do that until they are strong enough to substitute their own.  So if you include them you could lose deals and compromises and all the other things valued in a democracy, including inclusiveness.  That's a real possibility and you, mugged by it, suddenly find yourself making the statement that will make you the butt of every comedian in your democracy: "To preserve inclusiveness we're going to have to exclude certain people."

That is, you're going to have distinguish them, and learn their profiles, and use these profiles to protect yourself and your tribe, the tribe of universal values and general inclusion.  And, it appears, of a thousand ironies.  Map "Jewishness" onto the population of Israeli liberals and you'd see it, practically one irony per household.  Or Frenchness onto French liberals.  Almost as many.  An enlightened society just can't value ishness without producing ironies.

Whether England is going to compete with these two isn't clear yet.  I'm sure that over there they know the difference between values necessary to keep the democratic system going — only three, really, regular elections, acceptance of their outcomes, and minority rights — and values necessary to maintain tribal comfort.  Ending Christmas celebrations disturbs tribal comfort but is no threat to elections.  A principled democrat will live without Santa Claus until he can persuade the majority to bring him back.  If he can't persuade he accepts.  Sharia is another matter.  Will it end elections?  Can boards of education let visitors preach it to youngsters?  Those are matters to be clarified in discussion with those best qualified to speak for British Muslims.

A lot will depend on the answers, because if they show insistence on values that threaten British democracy then exclusion will be justified, and inclusionists — multiculturalists, pluralists, universalists — will have to live with the multiplying ironies.

267. "Evil" in the World

How variously we react to the word "evil."  George W. Bush, in his memoirs, thinks all the fuss about his use of "axis of evil" was over the word "axis," suggesting that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an alliance like the one Germany and Italy had formed.  "Evil" was not worth remark.

Years later, as his memoirs appeared, others were still lamenting the consequences of all that the word had brought into play.  "Oh that Manichaean view of the world.  Oh the demonizing of enemies.  Look where it's left us."  A leader who inserts "evil" into a speech about another nation, as Ronald Reagan first did, has dropped a canister full of bad germs.

Reviewing all that George Bush was unaware of is a fool's task, I know, but here we've got a puzzle.  He and his advisors seemed to be doing their best to make themselves aware.  I can't count the number of places in Rumsfeld's and Gates's memoirs where, sometimes at Bush's insistence, they stop to "review all the assumptions" and make sure they haven't missed any "concealed hazards" in the course they have chosen.  They are highly motivated, they are bright, and they have gone to the best schools.  And yet, as revealed by their casual acceptance of the bomb-word "evil," they are clueless.  Where it may have counted most.

And it wasn't rocket science.  David Loy, a teacher like the rest in our liberal arts philosophy departments, could have told them right away what was in that bomb.  As he did after 9/11, explaining that "evil" is a term that people in our society, in contrast to a Buddhist society (he was living in Japan at the time), need in order to feel good about themselves.  "We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. If you want to be a hero, well, occasionally a natural disaster will do, but the best thing is a villain to battle.  St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George."

Listen to Loy and professors like him and you, as soon as you hear "evil" come out of Bush's mouth, will start wondering whether Iraq was maybe George's dragon. 

You have a lot to go on.  Bush certainly was rooted in the Christian tradition that makes the opposition of good and evil most dramatic.  He himself had fallen into evil and been reborn into good.   He had chosen a speechwriter from fundamentalist Wheaton College, Michael Gerson, who spoke the language of moral dualism most readily.  And for philosophical justification of the Iraq invasion he chose, for a visit to the White House, a University of Chicago theologian, Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose bedrock convictions, according to colleagues, included "the existence of an absolute good and evil" (see Post #213).  For an alert student Bush will look like just the person who would reach for the word "evil," and start the whole Manichaean thing going.

Except he didn't reach for it.  It was fed to him.  By that graduate of Wheaton, Michael Gerson, who sees "axis of hate" in a draft of the State of the Union speech and knows right away it's not going to get the most out of Midwestern voters.  Change it to "axis of evil."  What's wrong with "hate"?   It's "not theological enough."

So we get the word that drove liberally educated people up the wall.  Graduates of Wheaton College are not liberally educated; they are theologically educated.  And this puts them in tune with voters in the Heartland, most of whom still gain their education in church.  This is power, votes in the Heartland.  Manichaeism is in the saddle.

In a liberal education you learn how to stand outside a culture and its vocabulary.  In English courses you learn how words work, and, drawing on what you have learned in history and philosophy courses, you get an idea of the dangers in words.  In the word "evil" you see, or give yourself a chance of seeing, how it turns eyes from threats to be avoided to natures to be abhorred.  "Evil" is an extreme abhorrence word.  And it brings a string of abhorrent-nature adjectives in its trail — vile, monstrous, wicked, vicious, base, depraved.  You see how those who use these words will be carried further and further from the external world and any threats it might present them with. You see (oh history, history) how it polarizes, how it turns opponents into demons, how it makes compromise or surrender difficult.

And that's why, when your president, in apparent innocence (I leave open the possibility that it was cynicism in his speechwriters), opens the bomb bays in his State of the Union Address and drops a canister like this you are going to be halfway up the wall with everybody else who has profited from a liberal education.

And the only way you can go is further up, because nobody in power, and least of all the president, will be noticing you.  With the painful consequences of the president's neglect of the complex external world in Iraq already, after three years, registering on the nation there he is, in the chapel at Camp David, having "one of the best preachers" he's ever heard confirm the stand he has taken.  "Evil is real, biblical, and prevalent.... Some say ignore it, some say it doesn't exist.  But evil must not be ignored, it must be restrained."  There would be a cost, but, according to Bush's memoir, the preacher reminded the president that "there has never been a noble cause devoid of sacrifice" and assured him that "the Scriptures put great premiums on faithfulness, perseverance, and overcoming.  We do not quit or give up.  We always believe there is no such thing as a hopeless situation."  A Christian up against evil can't compromise, and can't quit.  A liberally educated student, standing outside the Christian culture and vocabulary, will observe how easy it is to substitute "Islamist" for "Christian" in the preacher's vocabulary.

And he or she won't be distracted by the goodness or brightness or earnestness of individual Christians or those who help them.  Bush's helpers, the ones who went over and over their assumptions and listed again and again the hazards, were as good and bright and earnest as any you can find.  They thought hard.  They just didn't think broadly.  It was all theological or military.  They all might as well have gone to Wheaton or West Point.

So, another plug for liberal education and English courses.  Parents, direct your children to them.  Children, listen closely and study hard.  Everybody hope that the teachers understand the tradition they work in.  The further it spreads among citizens the wiser the country's foreign policy will be.  Start in the Heartland.