305. Progress in Race Relations, Progress in Language

What Ta-Nehisi Coates says about what black males suffer in white America (quoted by David Brooks, NYT, 7-17) made me think of Socrates right away.  Coates and his fellows are clearly victims.  But they, like Socrates in prison, "are victims not of laws but of men."  And the distinction is important.

To right the injustice of victimization by laws you have to change the system, maybe the whole thing, starting with a society that makes laws like that.  The culture could be wrong.  Maybe you need a revolution.

To right the injustice of victimization by men you just have to change the men.  That's hard, but it's a lot easier than changing a whole society.   In Ferguson it could be as simple as getting whites out of the police force and getting blacks in.  The town was behind in having the ethnic make-up of the force reflect the make-up of the community.  (There had been a rapid change.)

That's physical change.  The more important change may be psychological, changing attitudes.  That's what Coates and a lot of other people, white and black, are trying to do.

Even before we start we know that change like this is going to be difficult.  On square one we had a lot of white people cruelly enslaving a lot of black people.  I mean really cruelly, worse than any slavery before.  They work them dawn to dusk, they break up their families, they don't let them form families, they let them learn nothing that doesn't make them agriculturally productive, they wipe out as much as they can of their native culture, which was agricultural.  It's a crime for them to learn to read. They are victims of the white people in every way, and this may be the worst way, the denial to them of education.  They know nothing of what's available to whites in their culture, none of the good and power-giving and life-enriching things that other cultures have adopted, things different from the cruel slavery thing, though that's part of this culture too. 

On square two blacks are freed from this slavery into the society of the white people, but they are not fully free, since there are many laws restricting them. Through many squares they remain victims of white people.  But over time the laws are changed until they step onto the square where we can say, with Socrates, that they are "victims not of laws but of men."  That's a square closer to our own but how many intervened or how many lie ahead is hard to say.  Anyway we're somewhere on that part of the board, and we're all together on the same square.

My colleagues in other departments — sociology, psychology, government, history, maybe philosophy — are all trying their hardest to determine just where we are, and where we should step next.  The help they offer varies with their training, which determines what they see when they look at the square.  What do I see?  I see a lot of people crowded together talking as persuasively as they can to change attitudes.  I'm in English, where we're trained to examine talk.

So, what needs attention?  Too much for here, but we can attend to one problem: the use of the word "deficient."  It's clearly the accurate word for the black's original condition with respect to these good and power-giving and life-enriching things whites have access to in their education but have denied blacks access to. But going forward it's a word nobody can use easily and confidently.  Recent black slaves can use it but it's difficult for them, being uneducated, to know what they are deficient in. Recent white enslavers know what that is, and can identify deficiency more easily, but the word is too close to "inferior" for them to be able, without discredit, to use it.  "Inferior" was used too often by whites in power contests (lawmaking, for one), making sure that blacks would lose.

 "Inferior," though discredited when it is used categorically ("My culture is superior to yours"), gains credit as soon as it is used conditionally ("My culture is superior to yours at preparing young people for hardship in a whaleboat").  Adoption of an end obliges us to discriminate among means, and where cultures are means — raising chances of landing a whale, or a spot at Harvard, or a job — to discriminate among them.  (I go through this in greater detail in Post 77.)  

The end here is more black young people in Harvard and other colleges.  Whatever it is that gets other young people there, whatever those other cultures have that improves their chances,  would-be helpful whites want to say that black culture is deficient in it.  That's the first step toward any sufficiency, an accurate statement of the deficiency.  

It's all very Socratic and scientific and the best way to solve the problem of Black education, but oh how hard it is to make that initial statement in the talk arena.  We're still too close to categorical "inferior" and all the feelings it provokes.

Better, most educated whites seem to agree, to play it safe.  They might try softeners ("challenged," "lacking in," "insufficient"), hoping they won't be seen through, but they never use the words "deficient" or "inferior" with respect to blacks.  And that's too bad because we're clearly on a square where black attitudes toward education need to be talked about accurately.  Along with all that contributes to those attitudes, in family or culture.  Any person who tries to do that now, though, apparently can't or won't use his most accurate words, not freely.  Let's hope we'll soon get to a square where he can.

304. Greece, Merkel, and Metaphysics

I have been told a hundred times in the last forty years that my fifties notions of what's real won't stand up.  And if fifties notions of reality won't stand up then fifties notions of society and gender and justice and language and human nature and progress won't stand up.    No metaphysical center, no foundation, no starting point for confident reasoning.  (The fact that the confidence was most often exhibited by white European males, though philosophically irrelevant, was no help.)  I lost my belief in a reality.

But it's been coming back.  Listening to statements by Alexis Tsipras during the financial crisis I found myself calling them "remote" and "distant."

"Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of  popular sovereignty are."

"We are working hard for a deal without austerity, without the bailout which has destroyed Greece."

"The strong message of the Greek people will be that Greece will return (to) democracy,"

"We proved that even in the direst of times, democracy cannot be held to ransom, but remains a supreme value and means of resolution.  We showed that democracy won't be blackmailed."

What is that distant from?  I say "reality" and perk up my philosophical ears.  My friend, whose ears are flat, says, "What's the big philosophical deal?  Reality is a pile of money Greece needs and can't get without meeting the conditions of those in possession of it.  The face of reality is the face of Angela Merkel, stating the conditions.  That's obvious, and can be stated simply."

Well, you make a big philosophical deal when you can't end a philosophical pain you've been given and see something in  the world that might relieve it.  I listen to Angela Merkel and think, "Ah! A reality if there ever was one."  I go to Jacques Derrida and say, "I don't need a metaphysical center; I've got Angela Merkel."

Having an Angela Merkel is having a reliable report on something in your way, and can't change, and, if you want to satisfy your desires, have to deal with.  That something here is conditions of a contract, but it might as well be the conditions of what philosophers speak of as "the world."  It's what Derrida removed the center from, a removal which was for me like removing my belly button.  Painful.

At any rate we've got something in Tsipras's words that gives a sense of distance, and those words, we find, give a sense of greater distance than do the words of Yaris Vanouflakis, his finance minister ("Greece should simply announce that it is defaulting ... stick the finger to Germany and say 'you can now solve this problem by yourself'").  Being able to measure relative distance gives us confidence.  There must be something out there that we're measuring distance from.  What is it?  What better word than "reality"?  It means, as above, "something in your way, and can't change, and, if you want to satisfy your desires, have to deal with."  Like all of nature.

Human reality is less solid but we still compliment people or political philosophies for being "realistic" about it.  At the moment I'd give the highest compliment to the IMF people who after Greece had accepted Merkel's terms said they wouldn't accept them without giving Greece some relief on payment of the debt.  Their argument, in the good old peasant terms I hear, was that "you can't get blood out of a turnip," and Merkel's strict conditions were turning Greece into a turnip.  "Lighten up or you won't get anything at all."

That's a tickle, finding somebody more realistic than Merkel, unless you see a higher, or Machiavellian, realism in her.   Like: She goes to the head of the IMF and says, "Look, Christine, there's no way I can allow a Communist leader like Tsipras anything he can call a victory.  But we can't stand around watching all the suffering we're going to cause either, and I would like to get some blood out of this turnip.  So how about, after we sign the agreement, with Tsipras on his back, and all the other far-left parties noticing, you jump in with a nice humanitarian offer, we go along (showing our essential compassion), and everybody goes home happy."

"Just what I've been thinking," says Lagarde, and they bump fists.

303. Tackiness, Deeply Considered

 For some people "tacky" turns out to be a very handy word when they don't want to risk "immoral."  Say the subject of open marriage comes up.  Mutually agreed-upon adultery is to me, raised in the ancien (pre-sexual revolution) regime, immoral.  I want to call it that but, uncertain of the regimes I have survived into, I keep my mouth shut.  If only the word I discussed in my preceding post had occurred to me.  "No, it's only that I find open marriages — you know — tacky."  In what regime could that get you looks?

You may be stronger if you acknowledge that you are square.  But that could take a while.  A poet I knew, the most knowing square of my acquaintance, didn't gain his knowledge until he had what he called an epiphany under a couch in a faculty colleague's living room, where he was groping for his roll of Tums.  The colleague had just done a very cool thing: displayed on the floor nude photos of a student known to many of them in their classes.  (He was an amateur photographer.)  The poet had been bending over with the rest to look at them when his antacid rolled out of his shirt pocket.  He was on his knees, hands sifting the dust balls, when the epiphany came: "What's a person like me doing here?" 

What will be his word for that scene, the cool fellow laying out the pictures for the other cool fellows to enjoy, when he comments on it later?  He doesn't know how much cooler than he his audiences in the big city are, but he senses too sharp a gradient for him to call the behavior "immoral," or "base," or "shameful."  Not even "indecent" will do.  Then it comes to him.  "Well, I just found it too tacky for words."

For a poet searching for substitutes for the more judgmental words in his vocabulary "tacky" looks like pure gold.  And its finding opens a vein for the rest of us.  Down the list of sins and questionables we can run.  Masturbation goes as "undignified," group sex "unfocused," wife-swapping "ignoble," blue movies "down-market," and anal sex "unsanitary."  "Tacky" is so spot-on for lap-dancing — and God knows how many slick magazines (Cosmopolitan, Playboy) — that it remains.  All sex other than nature's one-bulb-one-socket arrangement becomes simply "inefficient."  Presence in cool conversations, life in cool societies, becomes so much easier.

This, working so hard for ease, is what you're forced to when there is no standard for behavior, no yardstick in Buckingham Palace, no meter-bar in Paris.   All you're left with after the ethical center is removed are rhetorical boosts and put-downs.   Knowing that, and prepared by the loss of Plato and God, we former essentialists find it in anything cross-cultural, or intersubjective, or just recurrent in history.

Finding it, this dependable recurrence, is not easy.  You'd think kiss-and-tell books, letting all the kisses hang out ("sex with the princess was fireworks"), would forever be tacky, since the word "cad" had hung in there so long, but kiss-and-tell books have been popular for so many decades now that one begins to wonder.  A society that eats up servants' accounts, including those by public servants, of the misbehavior observed during their time of service, is not going to disapprove of kiss-and-tell books.

Does the fact that there are synonyms for "tacky" in twenty-five languages point to something dependably cross-cultural?  I understand that there's a great synonym, or near-synonym, for "tacky" in Russian, "poshlost."  Vladimir Nabokov, in writing about it, put his finger on what's great about "tacky": in using it "we pass not only an aesthetic but also a moral judgment."  We bluenoses can smuggle the moral in under the esthetic.  (As if anyone were sure of the difference.)

Can we bear the amount of poshlost we'll get in a democracy, where every poshloser gets a vote?  Taste-democracy goes with vote-democracy (every seller of bad taste, every William Randolph Hearst, every capitalist able to influence Congress, will make sure of that) and America, and now pretty much the world, has to live with that fact.  The alternative is totalitarian rule. 

So, if we have to live with it we'd better learn how to handle it.  In our relativistic age that means learning the effective put-downs. 

"Like 'does your mother wear Army shoes?' after a vulgarism?" 

Maybe at one level (you've got to watch the levels here) that would do, but at most levels you've got to show more class.  Like on The Daily Show.  But it's a serious problem, handling tackiness, and we need models.  In my experience Dante's Virgil is the best model.  In the eighth circle of Hell Dante, you may remember, has lingered to enjoy some extreme tack: two louts abusing each other with scurrilous speech and obscene gestures.  Virgil, his guide, notes the slide into voyeurism and says, "Keep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you....The wish to hear such baseness is degrading."  He shames Dante, but not devastatingly.   When Dante wilts too far he says, "Less shame would wash away a greater fault than yours."  This is no revolver-on-the-dresser case.  But it's a case.  Everything's in proportion, and the point has been made.

"And you think Dante's Virgil can be a model for our time?"

Yes, at least as a reminding figure, if only standing behind us. In front of how many screens might we appropriately hear, "the wish to watch such baseness is degrading"?

"But Dante had such great advantages.  His Virgil had Rome and Greece behind him, the authority of their classics, their heroes, his readers already had an elevated conception of man, that creature made in God's image, a nobility that gave meaning to words like 'baseness' and 'degradation.'  As Sir Gawain, or Chaucer's Parson, or Castiglione's Courtier did a few years later.  What can today's poet count on, standing behind his reader, providing conceptions of man?  Biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists.  Kinsey, Masters, Johnson."

Right.  Neutral, or supposed neutral, presences.  Killing our hopes unless there's something inside us, a built-in sense of class, that persists, and holds out against the waves of tack science allows. 

"What evidence is there for that sense?"

Well, where did that letter by the teen in the forum come from?  You know, in the last post.  "Classy is not about clothes, makeup, hairstyles, accessories.  It is not about being posh, or wealthy.....A classy girl is a good person, a good friend."  I feel sure she hasn't been introduced to Plato's Idea of the Good, and it's not likely she has a Virgil or a Courtier in her sights.  So how did she come up with that letter?

302. "Classy" "Tacky"

There are no classes in America but we do categorize people as classy, commonly drawing our illustrations from the British upper class.  Class is a London gentleman accepting undeserved blame in order to save a lady's reputation.  We draw our illustrations of tacky from the same class.  James Hewitt, cavalry officer (Life Guards) sleeping with Princess Diana, blabbing about it, and then trying to sell his letters from her, is irresistibly the exemplar.  Expectations of classiness probably give you a better chance of standing for its opposite, and it's clear we have opposites here.

But tacky has to be distinguished from dishonorable, with which it competes in the Hewitt case.  A military officer charged in court with embezzlement dishonors himself and, worse, brings dishonor on the corps.  His peers (in the old days) show their expectations by leaving a revolver on his dresser, the only stop to dishonor.  Hewitt's peers in the hunt club returned his dues check.  The severity of the judgment shows the severity of the offense.

Tacky must also be distinguished from villainous.  Polonius is tacky; Iago is villainous.  But how about Linda Tripp, that "villain of Shakespearean proportions," as one columnist called her?  Recording on secret tape all the intimacies a friend reveals in girlie talk with you is tacky.  But intending to use what you record to bring down a President (the frolicking Clinton, you remember) is villainous.  We gag at tackiness, we gasp at villainy.  What are we doing here?

Opposites become more distinct if we can find poles, and sports supply polar opposites by the bundle.  For class we've got Baron von Cramm, going over to the Wimbledon judge to tell him that his racket touched the ball (losing him the point that would otherwise have won the match) and for tack we've got Jimmy Connors going over and rubbing out the ball mark before the judge can see it.  But you've got to be careful locating poles.  A penthouse owner who puts plastic flamingos on his lawn plot has made a polar switch.  Tacky played with becomes classy.

Our minds won't give up polarizing, though.  There will always be Muhammad Ali after his TKO of Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, shouting, "I am the greatest! I'm the greatest thing that ever lived."  We line up a hundred champions opposite that one, the most recent champ, I suppose, being Manny Pacquaio with his "He gave me a good fight" after clubbing Tim Bradley for the welterweight title.

Old professors like to think that the past is full of class and the present full of tack.  Ancient Greece is loaded with class.  And then some kid asks, "What's the difference between Muhammad Ali and that braggart Odysseus in Homer?"  Like the kid who wanted to know the difference between the posse comitatus in Beowulf and a Los Angeles street gang.  Class and tack vary with time.  Everything's a social construction.  (You  can see it's hard to argue against social construction, or social relativism, when a category like this is at issue.  Classy and tacky so steadily pronounce judgments on behavior within the tribe.)

Class would seem to have little to do with morality.  The philanderer John Kennedy was immoral but was thought to have a lot of class.  That's by the standards of his time.  Knowledge that he shared a mistress with a gangster would probably deprive him of the compliment now.   Is it classy of a reporter to cover up the mistress thing?  Then but not now?   Do you believe in journalistic relativism?

Is incitement to tack tacky?  College men shouting "Show us your boobs!" at a college woman at a party window are in the dean's eyes clearly tacky, as is the woman when she obliges them, everybody maxing out.  Is Howard Cosell tacky for encouraging, and profiting from, Muhammad Ali's tackiness?  If he's already tacky?  If he's in the tackiness-selling business?

Does tackiness rub off?  Is Princess Diana stained by her association with Simone Simmons, the "natural healer and clairvoyant... a global psychic and personality" (according to her agent, Tony Clayman Promotions) with whom the princess spent eight hours at a time on the phone, and with whom in 2005 she was, said Simmons, "still communicating"?  Had Diana already been tacky?  In an early interview (Bashir) I'd say she holds to class but defaults to tack; in a late one (Simmons) tack keeps coming up on its own.  But that's just my judgment.  Whoever judges now, though, has that movie Queen Elizabeth standing  before them, offering her yardstick.

"Yes, the royal yardstick," say the constructionists, and down goes another eternal standard.  In their midst you hunger for signs of permanent value, anything to throw up against relativism.  Is it a sign that on the net, though there are debates about the tackiness of  70's and 80's and 90's music, there's no debate about posting on Facebook "I know 97% of you won’t repost this, but my real friends will”?  Wearing a translucent blouse and a black bra goes unchallenged as tacky.

To satisfy our lingering essentialism there doesn't have to be any eternal, absolute Idea of Tack, there just has to be in human nature something consistent, some sense of class that persists.  There's this on one of the teen forums:  "Classy is not about clothes, makeup, hairstyles, accessories.  It is not about being posh, or wealthy.....A classy girl is kind, gentle, sweet, empathetic, caring.  She is giving, loving... she is a good person. She has good manners and is a very pleasant person to know. She is a good friend."  Where did that sixteen-year-old get that?  It got more approval than any of the other offerings.

301. A Poem about Corporate Capitalism

It's so hard to understand you start seeing some men sweating digging ditches all day and coming home late to their kids and other men going off in nice cars and coming home early to their kids and you say it's not fair and then you hear to each according to his needs communism and you ask your dad what communism is and he says it's Louie across the street you could see him in his undershirt with his feet up on the railing with his pitcher of beer beside him it's Louie sitting there all day drinking beer and me going off to work and at the end of the day we both get the same amount of money and you say that's not fair and you go to college and some professors say your dad is wrong and some say he's right and they recommend authors to make it clear and those authors are all trying hard but you're still confused because though they go into great detail to make sure they've got the right and wrong of it they can't untangle you from the New England literature your grammar school started you with where you learned how much better spirituality was than materialism just like in church and this one author took you to a cabin he built by himself on a pond to prove it and then your father asks where the axe he used to build the cabin came from and you think of your friend who played the violin divinely and could fill the house with spiritual music because her father was a materialist and made enough capital to buy her lessons and you see you'll have to try harder and dig into the root of the problem which the best people tell you is the law that makes a corporation a person and some scholars tell you that's a bane and some tell you it's a blessing because taking a corporation as a person is what gave capitalism its great boost in our country and made us rich and able to afford lessons for our daughters who could fill the house with divine music and some said no you've got to look more closely and everybody was working very hard, oh my how hard, trying to decide just which of a natural person's rights a corporate person should have, and it wasn't ever easy because to get corporate personhood straight you had to get corporate capitalism straight and oh my god what a problem that was for a person like me who couldn't even get Piketty straight and was losing hope until a critic in the New York Times (7-3-15) showed he maybe had it in a nutshell knowing that for corporate capitalism "nothing matters that can't be quantified and monetized" sent me down to the Museum of Modern Art hoping that the artist, a conceptual artist, one whose deepest concerns, he said, were "continually rendered irrelevant by the pervasive powers of corporate capitalism," might be the helper I was looking for, the final one, the one who had worked the hardest, but alas, though I saw many interesting and provocative pictures I saw nothing that improved my grip on "corporate capitalism," though one, of the word "Diesel" all by itself in one of the frames, did, I think, show that she might be aware of my problem, or at least of the area in which it is found.