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.