295. The use of the words "offended" and "frightened."

The trouble with my title words is that, like every bid for sympathy, people want to know your circumstances before they honor your bid.  Peggy Noonan finds out you said you were "frightened" in a Columbia classroom listening to a discussion of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and she'll knock you over with ridicule (WSJ, 5-23/24).  Jessica Valenti finds out you said it at a certain fraternity's party and she'll smother you with hugs (theguardian.com, 9-14-14).

The Columbia student newspaper wants hugs for its classroom listener, and defends her word.  Ovid "contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities."  This lets Noonan broaden her target to include the whole grievance-and-change faction that makes such bids.

The more we repeat and analyze these words the deeper we sink into the sands of subjectivity.  Here the subjectivity is double, a subjective report of a subjective state.  And then a judgment of the report (subjective) and of the state, and whether the judgment is shared.  So maybe triple.  But then there's that corrective report of the circumstances, it's sort of subjective too, isn't it?  So maybe quadruple.  Oi.

The more subjectivity there is the more grievances you're going to get.  I have a grievance against the language those students use.  Like "marginalizing identities." I, a dinosaur in the English Department, tell you I am "sickened" by those words.  They're jargon-words from the Women's and Afro-American Studies and Sociology departments.  Can I ask you to credit my nausea?  Not until I show you the evidence in classrooms and journals.  And even then there'll be a question of how many hugs I'm going to get.

After that there's the question of our varying acquaintance with the world and our sense of proportion.  Live awhile and you learn that every sound grievance-and-change movement has its silly side, as does every sound conservative resistance. All, being silly, are perfect targets for Noonan-type wit.  So you don't get too worked up about the silly-siders.  You see that going Noonan all the way wastes energy.  But you still have to keep your feel for the serious issues underneath, and the need for a sound stand.

The most serious issue I feel here is the changing of cultures.  (Can cultures be changed?  Of course.  Anglo-Saxon culture was changed from Semitic-unwelcoming to Semitic-welcoming in a very short time.)  And hurt feelings, which is what all our sympathy bids are about, can be a big obstacle to such change.  Avoid a statement of fact because the fact hurts feelings and you avoid the discussion and analysis necessary to make a change.

Suppose you want to say, "Black culture at this time fails to encourage black education."  Your support for that statement comes from scientific studies, work done by people who have stripped themselves, as far as any human being can strip himself or herself, of subjectivity.  But that statement of fact hurts feelings.  Do you keep your mouth shut? 

I suppose that if you want a hug badly enough you do.  But if you want to explore change, if you believe that a change here will benefit this minority culture (giving  those immersed in it better chances for a good job, say) and benefit every culture in the mix America is trying to manage, then you blow away the hug and speak the fact.  And any other fact relevant to the problem. 

Not that you're going to avoid giving offense, even with this understood.  Too many people have spoken neutral words with offensive intent, as aggressive anti-gay extremists spoke the word "homosexual," ruining it for neutral use.  Michigan State's guide to language expresses the common sense of it: "Speak of all members of the University community in relationship to the issues at hand...If you specify race or ethnic origin, be certain it is relevant."  Extend this to listeners: "If it's relevant to the issues at hand forget your ethnic sensitivities."

Oh how hard that is to do in a time of war, culture war.  Demonstrations of allegiance, reviews of grievances, visions and revisions of history, attacks on silliness, inculpations, exculpations, all those are so hard to resist when you're in combat.  And they're all so irrelevant. 

What brings us out of that?  For me it's a question, heard in the voice of a parent or an old prof: Do you want justification or do you want to solve a problem?  Which is more important to you, getting a hug, giving a knock, or finding a solution?

If it's the solution you go for then (if you'll excuse me one more time) English Composition becomes your guide.  From here on you try to avoid "Relevance?" in your margin.  Show how depressing (or inspiring) your history is, demonstrate your victimization (or your victoriousness), display your grief (or your confidence) and there it will appear, in red.

Relevance: the principle that representatives of Western culture, looking at Socrates, adhere to more thoroughly than anybody.  See it in Western science, see it in Western law.  Then forget it.   Westerners, Easterners, Northerners, and Southerners.  Look only at the model.  It's your guide through every argumentative essay and every public discussion.

Now you're looking at me, maybe as proud as Thomas Babington Macaulay of that model.  Maybe as humble as Uriah Heep.  Forget me.   Just follow the model.  Use the apparatus (Post 292) my predecessors have developed.  That is, if you want to avoid your old English teacher's marks in your margin.

294. Defending Civilization in the Baseball Dugout

Do you have convictions about what language is acceptable and what not?  Take them into a major league baseball dugout.  The other team's catcher is about to settle under a pop foul near you and you, a rookie, yell, "I got it," impersonating an oncoming teammate of the catcher.  He, fearing a collision, swerves away, the ball drops to the ground, and your manager comes over to you shaking his head.  "That's bush," he says.  Right in front of everybody.

"Bush" is a derogatory reference to the minor leagues, pictured as out in the country — "the sticks."  The players are stereotyped as "hicks" or "rubes."  The manager hurts your feelings when he uses the word. 

According to one model of behavior, the traditional one, the manager is doing what every parent and teacher has to do.  When lectures and example don't work you scold, and embarrass,  and shame — anything to get the immature to be more mature, the juvenile to be more adult, the barbarian to be more civilized.  It's all an effort to turn minor leaguers into major leaguers, and its importance justifies the hurt it causes.

Prominent now is the model for behavior and language in multicultural settings, visible in college-orientation booklets and guides to style in public discourse.  "Avoid using any biased language including language with a racial, ethnic, group, or gender bias or language that is stereotypical" (Purdue).  We look to this model for the same reason we look to the other: to become more civilized.

Most of the time we can follow both models, since they fit together pretty well.  But sometimes they don't and then we civilizers have a problem.  How do we adjust for a misfit?

Maybe English teachers will see the problem first, maybe in tailor's terms.  There's just not enough cloth in the new pattern to cover authors like Samuel Butler (making fun of Puritans) or Oliver Wendell Holmes (making fun of passionate New England evangelicals) or Mark Twain (ditto for Midwestern evangelicals) or Molière (making fun of parvenu vulgarians).  There's bias against a group if you ever saw one.  By the time you get to Aristophanes, making fun of those hicks from Sparta, you see that the material in the orientation guide will never stretch to these and a host of other satirists, all covered nicely by the old cloth. 

It would be easier if the satirists were modeling in a different show, say a gotcha show, but most tailors will tell you that they are not.  The good ones are in the big one, the civilization show.  Who's a greater civilizer than Molière, holding the clueless up to ridicule?  And then his followers, hauling rube after rube up to the stage for a dressing down — and then, hopefully, a dressing up.  It's all a turning of barbarians into people the cultured can live with.

Older teachers will, I think, easily see themselves dressing down a student as the manager dressed down the rookie.  A pretty good model, that fellow.  He speaks in front of the whole team so they all see the standards and know what won't do.  (In the known case, the manager of the Astros let it be known that he had called the manager of the Angels to apologize — enlarging their picture of the civilized world, broadening the lesson.)

It's when feelings come into play that the misfit pinches.  The rookie could be crushed after being called a rube in front of the whole team.  "Well, he ought to be crushed," say the major-leaguers looking to the older model.  "That's the only way you can get the bush out of some guys."  They don't want to go out on the field with any player who did what this rookie did.

"What that language — that indifference to offense, that stereotyping, that bias against a group —does to the rookie is not worth the change you're trying make," say those looking to the newer model.

Since most of the time we find, through imagination and tact, another way to accomplish the change, the misfit doesn't matter much and we can, at ease, think about what's behind each model.  Aren't those people constructing the first model looking at a lower civilization, with barbarians closer to the gates?  And aren't those constructing the second looking at a higher civilization, with (thanks to the older people) the barbarians further off?  With one group attention to feelings is a luxury, with the other it's an expression of a higher, more refined civilization.

It looks to me as if our day-to-day attachment to each model is going to vary with the distance of barbarism and the size of its threat, according to our perceptions.  With Aunt Sarah coming in an hour we say to the obscenity-prone child, "The name for you right now is 'dirty mouth' and dirty-mouths can't sit at the table with Aunt Sarah."  If the visit were a month off our imagination would no doubt come up with something less hurtful.

That's a big threat there from the obscenity spouter, but it's only a local one.  How about a big national one, where the barbarians are in your midst?  I considered Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman dangerous barbarians, a threat to rational debate, the peace movement, and the Democratic Party.  They and the Yippies were as bush league as you could get and I hated going out on the field with them.  OK, I had to speak about them at a university.   I called them "barbarians," as you might predict.  This was before the new model became prominent. 

I see in my performance material for a thought experiment.  In it you bring somebody like me into a similar situation to speak before a university audience now.  Then you work out the dynamics and the possible results.

You'll know that "like me" means an English teacher, one likely to be familiar with the views of important characters in great novels, like those of Willard Carroll in Philip Roth's When She Was Good.  Willard has left behind his upbringing in the backwoods of the North "not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized."  It's going to be hard for an English teacher, or maybe any teacher in the humanities, not to approve of Willard's ordering: civilization first, feelings second.  Don't leave this out of your experiment.

293. A Dream of Mathematicians, and A Vision of America's Future

Here's a dream that will thrill you:  A succession of people of every age, size, race, sex, politics, and dress come to stand in front of a blackboard with pieces of chalk in their hands, and people in the audience attend to only one thing: what they're putting on the board.

Not thrilled?  Then you haven't been living in a university among feminist theorists who defend advocacy of feminism in the classroom, and deny that advocacy can be avoided, that it can only be concealed, as male physicists conceal theirs.  On the other hand, if you've been living with mathematicians you'll probably roll over and go back to sleep.  Another reminder of the daily job.

At one time I was living among feminist theorists and attending mathematicians' conferences, from which my dream comes.  During the week I fought for objectivity, the possibility of it, and its presence — under fallback names like "impersonality" and "disinterestedness — in the academic enterprise.  I tell you this so that you can feel the exhilaration of a move from the personal and political to the impersonal and apolitical.

Here's the moment of feeling.  The proof of the daring theorem is going up on the board.  The mathematicians are watching.  It comes to me in my dream that if that theorem holds up they're going to rush down to the speaker and hug him, her, or it, no matter what he, she, or it rules, is ruled by, looks like, feels like, or smells like. 

In the dream I, like the movie Alan Turing rushing to plug in his Enigma solution, rush back to the Foucault seminar.  "Hold on, I've got it, a counter-example.  There is perfect academic objectivity.  Not in this department, maybe, and not in that one, but over in this one."  There it was, the ideal.  Stephen Mailloux had to  be convinced.

There were no real hugs, of course.  This was a vision, a dream.  But oh how useful dreams can be!  This one could be plugged into sixteen thought experiments, with results that could turn the tide of postmodern theorizing.  And Martin Luther King's dream, how about that, that vision of the day when whites and blacks could "sit down together at the table of brotherhood"?  Far off, maybe, but who's going to unplug it from American politics now?

It does admit of splicing, though.  I'd like to splice into it my academic dream.   The combined dream has whites and blacks sitting down together and concentrating just on the blackboard.  If a person stands before them as president of a company they keep their eyes on the figures.  The same with the performance of a professor, or a plant supervisor, or a city manager, or any candidate for those positions.   The same, more gloriously, for a governor or a President.

All you can do with an impossible ideal, like spliced brotherhood-impersonality, is measure earthly progress toward it.   Mathematicians are very close, the mass of Americans are closer than they were before the anti-discrimination laws of the sixties, but still have a long way to go.  Kisha Foster, when she said, "I am not a woman poet, I am not a black poet, I am a poet," is closer than Michelle Obama in her recent speech at Tuskegee (White House Release, 5-9-15).  There she quit saying, "I am the nation's First Lady," and, for the first time in my memory, said, "I am a Black First Lady." 

I hope readers won't forget that I am measuring distance from a particular ideal, which at any given time may not be the best, or the most needed, or the most advantageous ideal to move toward.  Maybe it's best right now for the First Lady to speak as she did. 

Would it be best for the President to speak that way too?  I think not, because he has a lot more to put on the board than the First Lady does.  We all want to concentrate on that, and have him concentrate on that.

As for the American future, I return to the dream: everybody ignoring the doer and concentrating on what's done.  How old, how big, what color, what sex was that person?  "Jeez, I don't remember.  I was paying attention to what was on the board."  Mathematicians are models of concentration.   

292. "Apparatus"

It's hard, in today's multicultural society, to speak of Europe's superior "achievements" in science, technology, economy, politics, and warfare without sounding braggy.  But Palmer, Colson, and Kramer, authors of the textbook A History of the Modern World, make it easier.  For them Europe, between 1500 and 1900, "supplied the apparatus" for achievement in those areas. 

Apparatus.  No great thing sitting out there to be compared with your thing, you other continents and races and cultures. Nothing to hurt your peoples' feelings.  Nothing to intimidate them, or embarrass them, or get their hackles up.  Just some machinery.  How it's used is more important than who gets credit for it.  Anybody can use it.  

Like the scientific method.  Like formal logic.  Like the constitutional transfer of power.  Like schools that teach skepticism.  And like schemes organizing armies and weapons for more efficient killing.

The great thing about "apparatus" is that it names the means and not the end.  Ends, what we want, are mainly what bring us praise and blame, usually moral.  Means, what we choose to get what we want, follow from the end.  Who blames the apparatus in Frankenstein's laboratory?

Thank you, thank you, Palmer, Colson, and Kramer.  You've saved us Eurocentrists from so much blame.

     

291. Struggling toward Walden

The attention you can give is a finite quantity, like your wealth.  Only the inverse.  There's a lot of it available at the beginning of your life and not  much at the end.  It varies directly with energy.  Where it is most like wealth is in the need for good management.

When you're young you have so much energy available that you can honor every little claim on it.  Watch me, Daddy, look at this, Daddy, what's that, Daddy, why, Daddy.  When you're older your child will answer his teacher's Father's Day question (what's the nicest thing you can do for your Daddy?) with this: "Leave him alone."  He's learned that what you have left after doing the income tax is just enough to get the evening newspaper read.  When you're a lot older you get somebody else to do the tax, serve on the committees, and write the reports — so you'll have energy to answer your grandchild's questions. That's good economy.

Thoreau's economizing is the model for the slow shutting down required of the elderly.  "Simplify, simplify, simplify."  Do it right, be sure the fringe stuff you're letting go is really fringe stuff.  "Confront only the essential facts of life."  That will come close to the end, down to the essential satisfactions.  Picture a cabin somewhere.  Aging, at the end, is an effort to get to Walden Pond.

But I'll tell you, in the 21st century it's a struggle.   We've got these MacBooks and iPhones.  And we can't give them up.  They give contact with children and grandchildren and music and baseball scores.  Essentials.  But they also give Steve Jobs, or his ghost, contact with us.  And Steve Jobs wants money from us.  He wants to keep it coming.  A revenue stream.  And by God he doesn't care if it runs through Walden Pond, if it drains the place, or not. 

All I want to do is find out how the Reds did.   Before I get back to the New Yorker on my porch with my coffee.  But no.  There's a pitch for the iWatch filling the screen and no way to get it off.  No way I can see.   (The bastard knows what a dufus I am at navigation; it's been in one of my cookies for a long time, I'm sure.)  By the time I get help I've forgotten the point Menand was making, my coffee is cold, and I've lost my morning chance for peace of mind, an essential. 

This is not White Whine.  It is not forgetfulness of complexity and the need for trade-off that octogenarians are famous for.  I know that the system that brings me baseball scores and grandchild cuteness has to be paid for.  I long ago accepted, as fringe, the hucksterism that went with capitalism, the essential commitment of my country.  You wouldn't believe the hokum I have been willing to put up with, as an alternative to Marxist hokum.   I just want you young, energetic people to know that your marvelous technology has this down side.

So that you can do something about it.  I don't have the energy even to suggest what it might be.  But I can say, in the metaphorical way that comes easy to weakened minds, what it might look like: a cleared path through the woods.     

What you young will first have to clear away are all the opportunities for accidental, clumsy hits on a screen, all the fat-finger, hovering bursts of extensions, alternatives, enrichments, modifications, and refinements that cool computer cats know what to do with, and bring up by intention, but that us old dogs bring up by accident and don't know what the hell to do with.  And, worse, leave us not knowing how to get back to the simple path we were on.

Then you can bend aside some of the updates.  I know, as Jobs tells us, that they nearly always give "greater stability and security," and I have to accept with that the revenue-enhancing adjustments to my cookies that they're probably really for, but can't you, if you're really good with cookies, take out the insistence that I update all programs?  And that if I don't they'll be back on my screen in an hour, or that afternoon, or, at the latest, tomorrow.  There are now no other choices.  I'm with my friend in 80's Moscow, waiting for a late-night knock on the door.

What complicates life is stuff you have to keep tending.  A good economist asks, "Is it worth the tending?"  When Thoreau found out that the paperweight he'd gotten needed dusting every day he threw it out the window.  That's the way I feel about apps and programs.  I'll bet that for contact with my offspring and my team and a few friends and scholars I need about a tenth of the stuff Jobs keeps wanting me to attend to.  If you could just put that in a cookie.  "This customer is content with A, B, and C, and he's ready to throw the rest out the window.  If you don't want the whole laptop to go, keep that in mind." 

No, that's too crude, and the bluff is obvious.  How about this for the cookie, counting on Jobs to be a reader of Thoreau:  "This customer would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to himself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

290. I Witnessed a Cultural Revolution!

I am so glad to be able to read the Sunday (4-26-15) NYT story  about cultural change in Cincinnati with a memory of that town in the thirties and forties.  How casually my father and his business friends told jokes about Jews.  How easily they used the N-word.  How sure they were that Roosevelt's handouts would bankrupt the country.

  Sheryl Gay Stolberg's front-page story is not about that.  It's about how this town in "one of the most traditionally conservative corners of  the Midwest," a town that as recently as 2004 was "the only city in the nation whose charter expressly barred ordinances related to gay rights," has made a 180-degree turn, and is now a city that "national gay rights advocates hold up as a model."  It's a miracle, and because I was there before it came, when the city was just another cripple moving toward Lourdes, I am able to testify to it. 

More than testify.  Realize it, feel it, translate words about it into images and sounds and sensed atmosphere.  I am now what historians, fighting for words that will get through, persistently hope for: a reader who will say, who is able to say, "Yes, that's the way it was.  I know what your words mean."

And you know who was the greatest meaning-supplier of the twentieth century?  Adolf Hitler.   We had that word "racism" in our books and thought we knew what it meant.  Hitler's street gangs and eugenics doctors showed us how little we knew.  Ours was mainly what Bertrand Russell called "knowledge by description" — what you acquired when Louis Agassiz anatomized a fish for you.  We needed "knowledge by acquaintance," the sight of the fish.  And acquaintance varied with distance.  We weren't nearly close enough to know the sheen, the slime, the stink of the fish.  Hitler rubbed our noses in it.

The metaphor is worth sticking with.  I think of myself as a child in a restaurant in the thirties, listening to my father and his business friends, telling jokes about Jews.  If I'd had the nose Hitler gave me I'd have recognized it.  "'Racism,' that's the word."  I missed it then in its early stages but I didn't miss it years later when a German tour guide told jokes about Poles.  Late-stage racism, or ethnicism.  Just a whiff, maybe, but I picked it up.

That's the way it starts, with demeaning words.  Not full-throttle racism yet but...what?  "Dehumanization."  The tour guide has given meaning to that ugly word.  Behind it are the Nazis, saying, "Take it seriously."

And then there's the over-sensitized nostril that smells dehumanization everywhere.  Identify anything that distinguishes one group from another — that is, "discriminate" in the other sense — and you are guilty of "discrimination."  It becomes very difficult to state facts that need to be faced.

How annoying the over-sensitive, the hyper-correct, have been!  But how gratifying to have had them as targets of our wit.  The dull good people, filling The Weekly Standard as they once filled Pope's Dunciad.  And the dull scholarly people.  Colley Cibber and Richard Bentley.  Dullness, dullness, dullness.  Wit seems to be on the side of the conservative, the literary.  "How much bourbon?  Oh, about a jeegroe," said the Southern litteratrice showing her surrender to Yankee liberalism.

No Swift will ever emerge from the office of a liberal activist.  No Aristophanes.  Just moral bullies and political correctness nuts.  Out in the world a sharp mind will choose a witty knave — my father's funny friend, the tour's droll guide — over those types every time.  How can a case made in sociological jargon ever be right and good?

What the sharp mind has a hard time believing is that the dull, the foolish, the righteous, can be right.  And that's what's found here, under all the foolishness, the rightness of sensitivity to racism and a score of isms that smell like it.  It's the rightness of care for others' feelings.

I think it's that rightness that slowly made its way to the surface in Cincinnati.  And that it's not a narrow outbreak.  I'd like to go back now to the playground of my elementary school.  Will I still hear names like "Fatty" and "Ears" and "Dumbbell"?  I did when our favorite Reds player was "Schnoz" on the sports pages, succeeding "Dummy."  If I don't I, a teacher knowing how hard it is to get a lesson really learned, learned by the masses, learned by children, I am willing to call that a cultural revolution, and believe it's a miracle.