300. A Darwinian Explanation of My Discomfort at Seeing Men Kiss Men.

I think the wide email response (Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Washington!) to my last post makes the blog the best place to present these statements:

(1) Since I can't critically think my way out of my discomfort at seeing men kiss each other I take it to come from instinct.

(2) I take the instinct to be one of those deep ones established by the need for survival.  Our species, a social one, is more likely to survive if infertile relationships are discouraged.

(3) The instincts built into us by the need for survival are maintained even after, and maybe long after, survival is assured.

So, my discomfort is a relic, made so by mankind's increasing ability to guarantee survival.  In me (and Mary Anne, and Alex Arhangelskii) I take the relic to be irremovable.

And I think Darwin could explain that.  "Species have a better chance of surviving if, no matter how secure a generation is, a few relics are preserved so that the species will persist through the least secure generations."  

299. Same-sex Ruling

Front page of the New York Times, full of pictures of dudes kissin' dudes.  Why does a change in the legal status of sexual orientation have to include a change in public display?

298. What Do You Think "Critical" Means?

I suppose everybody knows by now which of its seven meanings "critical" has in the expressions "critical theory," "critical pedagogy," "critical ethnography," "critical psychology," "critical consciousness," and "critical race theory."  Nearly all have big entries in Wikipedia.

Well, maybe not everybody knows.  So I'll print the seven meanings and let you guess:

critical, adjective

1. inclined to find fault or to judge with severity, often too readily.

2. occupied with or skilled in criticism.

3. involving skillful judgment as to truth, merit, etc.; judicial: a critical analysis.

4. of or relating to critics or criticism: critical essays.

5. providing textual variants, proposed emendations, etc.:

a critical edition of Chaucer.

6. pertaining to or of the nature of a crisis: a critical shortage of food.

7. of decisive importance with respect to the outcome; crucial: a critical moment.

Since so many of you are of my generation maybe I ought to give you a hint.  Each one of the items with a Wikipedia entry is big in some universities and growing in most. 

So it's Number 3, right?  Wrong!  None of them fit.  Number 1 comes closest but I know you don't want to choose it.  Not with that judgment ("often too readily") appended to it.  Your kind start itching when you see a little tendentiousness.  This would be a kidney stone.

"Well now, after we go over your 'criticals' maybe we will choose Number 1.  What's critical ethnography and how is it different from ordinary ethnography?"

We get the answer right away in the Wiki entry: "In contrast to conventional ethnography which describes what is, critical ethnography also asks what could be in order to disrupt tacit power relationships and perceived social inequalities."

"And the rest of the 'criticals' are like that?  Implying that those of us who accept tacit power and inequality are 'uncritical'?"

Yes.   All are derivations from the parent critical," critical theory" of the Frankfurt school, known to us starkly, though not inaccurately, through Max Horkheimer, who "described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks 'to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.'"  They all have the purpose of liberation from oppressive circumstances.

"Surely not all.  There must be some that hold to 'critical' in the old sense."

Well, let's look.  Critical psychology, drawing "extensively" on "critical theory," "challenges mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in more progressive ways, often looking towards social change as a means of preventing and treating psychopathology." 

"Doesn't that propose social change that liberates?"

No, it looks towards it.  You're loading words.   Here just a little, but still you're giving them more weight than the author gives them.  An author, I might add, who freely appropriates the favorable load sense 3 has given our word.  But let that pass.  How about "critical race theory"?  It, "an academic discipline focused upon the application of critical theory," and proposing that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, "pursues a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination."

"On the mark.  Aims at liberation from oppressive circumstances, finds fault, and judges with severity.  Bingo for sense Number 1."

So it's no surprise that "critical theology" is synonymous with "liberation theology," and "critical consciousness" means "political consciousness."

"No surprise.  They all more or less do what Horkheimer says critical theorists do.  And we, by our Socrates-loving leader, are being led to pass judgment, severe judgment.  Let me skip over a lot of what I see coming and put that judgment bluntly: critical theory stinks." 

Stinks?  You're having me use the word I used for clitorectomy cultures ("My Culture's Better Than Yours," Post 77).  I can't use it for academics but it does let me narrow my charge: critical theorists, the Frankfurt school, are not stinking up the world, they're only stinking up the house, the academic house.  That's all I want to say.  I leave open the possibility that they are right, that present power relationships are unbearable, and that they have the best program to relieve the pressure.  But even if they are right, even if the city, the nation, and the world will be better off going their way, we cannot live in the same house with them.

"But maybe you're exaggerating their importance.  Brian Leiter (Leiter Reports) says that postmodernism, which takes in what you're worried about, 'plays little or no role in most major academic disciplines.'  Even in his field, philosophy, where serious claims are most reliably honored, it has influence only 'at the margins.'"

Maybe so, but as long as those fields with the  greatest influence on undergraduates, to him English and history (I would add communications, sociology, anthropology, and minority studies), we have to worry about it.  We in the academic tradition, the tradition within which critical Socratic thinking has so long and so successfully been introduced to and nurtured among the young, cannot maintain that tradition if in our language the young accept "critical" as meaning "critical of everything except our starting assumptions."  The starting assumption of the Frankfurt school, and by extension of every school subscribing to "theory," is that the present power structure (to them that of late-stage capitalism) is oppressive and must be replaced.  For Socrates and anybody who pretends to follow him everything is open to critical examination, with replacement contingent on the examination.

"You wouldn't have taken so long if you had stuck with my verb 'stinks.'  In Socrates' house, the traditional university, the windows are open.  In Horkheimer's house the windows are closed and he and his friends are stinking it up."

Clever, but so unfair.  Stick with the metaphor and see the whole picture.  Outside the house the odor of critical theory, filling feminism and cultural studies and minority studies, can thrill us, esthetically and politically, with its fragrance.  Release it in the house, close the windows, and you've got an unbearable stink.

"How can you be so sure of that stink?  Have you done the research?  Do you have the statistics?"

No, but I have the writing, and that's enough.  People who say they are "enslaved" by "circumstances," and want to "disrupt tacit power relationship" aren't bothered by vagueness and don't make necessary distinctions. 

"You don't think there are oppressive, tacit power relationships?"

Of course there are, but if we make no distinction, and make a fuss about every one of them, we'll never get through a day.  "Let's face up to your power and fight it out right here, " he said to his doctor, shortly before finding himself at home treating his appendix himself.  Our welfare, our orderly life, our civilization itself, depends on "tacit power relationships."

"And writers who just slop the expression into Wikipedia (obviously a theorist wrote the entry) without recognizing its faulty reference, can't be taken seriously.  Not in the academic circle."

No.  They will show a lack of elementary training.  They will arouse suspicions of what Saul Bellow called "a certain fecal carelessness."

"Now you're being cleverly unfair.  Such writers are taken seriously.  Look at the universities.   Look at the conferences they host.  Who invites these people whose writing is so unlike that of gentlemen?"

Their fellow arrivistes, obviously.

"And what do you propose to do about them? "

Nothing.  And it's not that I'm too old or that the theory battle is over (it's not).  It's what I've indicated, that the lines I know how to communicate on are down.  What kept them up were the rules of serious discourse shown to us first by Socrates.  Deny them, deny the power of logic, deny common meaning, deny responsibility for objective reference, and you were closed out of the circle of discussion, which was open to everything else.  I can communicate seriously only with people in my circle.

"And, since in the critical theory circle your tacitly accepted rules are 'tacit power relationships,' you're closed out.  No wonder you two can't live in the same house."

And that's a shame because there's only one university house and that's the one our young go to.  I can't bear to think of theorists owning it.  I'd be evicted as a corrupter of youth.

"Oh nightmare!  Oh doom!  You're blinding yourself.  Look closely at the list of  'See also' entries following the critical pedagogy entry.  There, just below 'critical consciousness' and 'critical psychology,' is critical thinking, as blue as any of the others.  How it slipped in I don't know.  But a student clicking on it will find entries making every point you are trying to make.  'Socrates set the agenda for the tradition of critical thinking,' and on from there."

Will this do the job for her — a buried click, a string of inferences, recognition of a contradiction, destruction of a position?  That's asking a lot.

"You have to trust the young, as Socrates trusted them.  And as the theorists, with their denial of 'critical' to their own position, do not trust them.  Once the young start clicking from this 'critical thinking'' site there'll no stopping them.  From then on it will be all clicking and thinking and clicking and thinking.  All you will have to do is give them some help when they start writing."

297. Gentlemanly Prose

Gentlemanly Prose

WikiReach

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve this article to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. The talk page may contain suggestions. (June, 2013)

For disambiguation and demystification see critical pedagogy

 and critical theory.

Gentlemanly Prose is a logocentric stylistic deriving from the classical discourse of privileged classes in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known at the time as "the Republic of Letters."   Its product is variously self-described as writing that is "easy," "simple," "clear," or "perspicuous."

Gentlemanly Theory is the extension of this stylistic into theoretical or philosophical discourse.

Nomenclature.  Practitioners have retained the class- and gender-inappropriate term "gentlemanly" for its historical, and therefore explanatory, function.  "Prose" is synechdochic for non-metricized discourse.

Foundational proponents.  Frequently cited as avatars are Socrates (Attic or Athenian style) and Cicero (Roman style midway between the humble Attic and the aspiring Asiatic style). 

Foundational frame.  The cultural frame, taken to be foundational, is that of slave-holding Greek and slave-holding Roman aristocracies, with corresponding lifestyle: patriarchal banqueting and discourse while women ("flute girls") provide the music.

History.

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Gentlemanly prose in the purest Attic style was first valorized in England by the theorist Francis Bacon, exemplified by the chemist Robert Boyle, and imposed in 1662 by the founders of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in their requirements for submitted papers.  The need for "precision and objectivity" paralleled similar needs and similar impositions in France, where René Descartes was the exemplar.

Less pure, but only slightly, was the Attic of philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose conceptual aspirations forced concessions to the Asiatic , making a space for metaphor.

Enlightenment scientists and philosophers retained in their "objectivity" the racialized subjectivity of the Attic avatars, reflecting in the eighteenth century the cultural hegemony of ancient Athens, where Scythian speech was freely called "barbaric" and clumsy forms "barbarisms."  Calling obscure Medieval writers "Gothic" continued this prejudice.

Gentlemanly theorists cite the writing of Joseph Addison as a model of balance between Attic and Asiatic, recreating in the English language Cicero's compromise ("a plain, middle style") in Latin.  Addison's Spectator papers (early eighteenth century) are taken to be the model for the "easy but precise" writing in the magazines produced for the educated middle classes since his time, as now in The New Yorker.  It is the style of Jonathan Swift, taken as the exemplar for longer interventions, observable in the following:

I know not how it comes to pass that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meaning to those who are not of their tribe.

Politics.  Consciousness-raising efforts have led some gentlemanly practitioners to believe themselves marginalized in some areas of the American university.  They have raised complaints against Communications, Sociology, and English (cultural studies) departments, and have felt condescension in Women's Studies and Black Studies programs.  However, little evidence of oppression has been offered, and none of abuse.  Though many gentlemanly writers are struggling to make a space for themselves, there has been little activism.

Polemics.

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Gentlemanly prose has not lent itself to direct polemical assertion.  Literary satire is favored, as in Alexander Pope's Dunciad, a poem "celebrating the goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain" (Wikipedia) or in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, third book, satirizing "scientizing pedants" (the theorists' name for them).  The language of all of Dulness's agents, in the Dunciad or out, is taken to be antipodal to the language of liberally educated gentleman.  Duns Scotus, known for jargonized Scholastic abstractions, and giving his name to the Dunciad, is the pole figure.

Difficulty in identifying current targets in these anachronistic satires no doubt accounts for the ineffectiveness of this polemic — that, and their distance from central postcolonial discourse, within which they appear as "belletristic irrelevance."  For those with a sense of political relevance "gentlemanly," then, demarcates not a positivity but simply a positionality vis-à-vis the normative. 

Pedagogy.  Language used in the way of Socrates and Cicero was imposed on students and teachers in the schools identified with the rise of "humanism" and the education called "liberal."  Renaissance court schools like Vittorino's "House of Joy," in which "anything in the nature of fine writing, of prolix or over-laden description, or of empty commonplace decked out in verbiage, was ruthlessly torn apart," are given credit for shifting the paradigm. The revived Ancient and Renaissance models went on to prevail in Oxford and Cambridge tutorial teaching, and the "tearing apart" there was retained in English Composition courses in America where, though often insensitive, gentlemanly prose became generally gender- and class-neutral.  Writers of such  prose held up as models for students today are as likely to be women (like Zoë Heller and Martha Nussbaum) as men (like Atul Gawande and Tony Judt).

Gentlemanly Theory.  Though hidden agendas are suspected, the open agenda of gentlemanly theorists has been to meet objections to gentlemanly prose. Their three most emphatic responses, condensed:

 (1) "No, gentlemanly prose is not just a feature of European cultural hegemony; it appears clearly (in a different idiom, of course) in the classical Chinese of Han scholars.  It appears in India and in Persia.  It is the writing of advanced civilization."

(2) "Yes, the language of Athenian gentlemen, Roman patricians, and Florentine governors is appropriate for the democratic masses in America because Americans — in their periodicals, on their websites — have to debate, and the language of these 'oligarchs' and 'hegemons' is still the best language for democratic debate.  It is clear, ample, and part of an easily dramatized revolutionary tradition: Paris ferment, salon exchanges, editorial wars, biting commentary, plain-spoken philosophy.  It's the great medium of the dialectical testing democracy depends on."

(3) "No, gentlemanly prose is not a belletristic indulgence; it is a necessary feature of realistic philosophy, as witness the appeals to its standards by the Ordinary Language philosophers of Oxford."

Some gentlemanly theorists argue (4) that meeting the standards of gentlemanly prose is a reliable test for sound philosophy.  Since "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" (George Orwell, taken axiomatically), slovenly philosophers are going to present readers with foolish thoughts.  To avoid this "foolishness" careful thinkers are urged to go to the most gentlemanly teacher or tutor they can find.  "Does this word make sense to you?  Is that paragraph foolish?"  It is claimed that no other test or appeal, as to "reality," provides more reliable protection against folly than this.

Philosophy.  A claim for the deepest relevance of gentlemanly prose has been made as follows: "What philosophers most need is a precise language that is in touch with the world.  Gentlemanly prose satisfies that need better than any other. The language of medieval theologians, the Scholastics and other abstract schematizers was, like that of mathematicians and logicians, precise, but it was not in touch with the world. The language of the marketplace, like that of poets and novelists, was in touch with the world, but it wasn't precise.  The gentlemen who held students to the standards of Socrates and Cicero and Locke and Addison were men of the world, in touch with the world, readers of literature that kept them in touch, and therefore the best servants, and trainers, of philosophers" (feetofsocrates 239).

296. Can Professors Now Defend Tenure?

Soon-to-be Presidential candidate Scott Walker of Wisconsin and leaders of the Republican-held legislature are proposing changes to the tenure rules for college professors there that has quickly provoked "hundreds of faculty members to sign a letter opposing the changes" (NYT, 6-5-15).

There's apparently a national debate coming and before my still-active colleagues get into it I'd like to show what Walker and his friends in the  legislature could hit them with.

But first some recollections.  I became a college teacher at a time (1948) when many of my older colleagues were fresh from — or more accurately, wearied by — the fight to get tenure established, as it was in 1940 in a joint statement by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.  This, the famous "1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure," accepted by administrators, legislatures, and courts, nailed down what we have now.

What needs remembering here is the primacy of academic freedom.  It came first in the statement, and it justified tenure.  Tenure was "a means to certain ends," the first of which was "freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities."  Economic security and the attraction of able people were secondary.

The ground we in the AAUP stood on when we argued in public — as with a legislator — was the common good.  And the common good "depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition."  The search is not free if you have religious trustees ready to fire you if you teach the wrong thing about God.

"But suppose you teach communism.  Is that in the common good?"

"Yes, because we teach communism without advocating it.  We give knowledge of communism.  We college professors are not advocates of anything.  We are searchers — disinterested, impartial searchers — for truth.  And presenters of results."

That's the way the argument went and that, after a lot of tiring repetition (it started in 1934), is what won it.  Professors had to be secure in their jobs or they couldn't serve the common good in their peculiar, truth-seeking way.  Against the possibility that it might be a truth-imposing way, an imposition of my truth — my philosophy, my politics, my group's politics —  you as an administrator or legislator had their promise: we are not advocates.

Now for what you have to keep in mind as you argue with Scott Walker and the Republicans.  The two statements below appeared in 1990 in 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." 

"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." (Lead article, April, 1990.)

Were these statements (uncontested in the journal, as far as I can find) a sign of what would be accepted in our universities?  If Wikipedia, easily accessible to Walker and his legislators, is to be trusted they are.  Wikipedia will tell him that feminist pedagogy, "a form of critical pedagogy," challenges "the view that education is a neutral cognitive process,...that knowledge and teaching methods can be value free." He will find that "the standpoint of a feminist teacher is of the political nature" and that the aim of " feminist analyses [is] to inform and reform teachers’ and students’ ways of acting in and on the world." 

So, by what's laid out under feminist pedagogy or critical pedagogy (worth your checking) either Wikipedia can't be trusted or what English departments accepted 25 years ago is pretty well still accepted.  And Scott Walker can make an issue of that. "Professors," he can say, "no longer have special support for their specially secure position."  

Coming down from that high ground we once argued on does not mean that there is no other good ground.  One might even argue that the common good is better served by a teacher's service to a higher cause, like social justice, though seen by others at the time as just his or her truth. 

That's possible ground, but it's no place to stand when you're arguing with Scott Walker.  A ground on which you would lose fewer points would be the need for economic security.  Legislators will understand that but it's so widely shared in the world of employment that there professors will just have to fight it out like everybody else.  Get ready for this, from the streets:  "Right on, Scott.  Talk about special!  Those people never get laid off.  Who the hell are they?"