308. Where's the Payoff, English Teacher?

"No student is going to keep making a troublesome new distinction unless he sees a payoff.  So where's the payoff on your distinction between the senses of 'civilized' (Post 306)?"

I think there's a payoff right away, in the review immediately following the one that raised the need for a distinction (on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, in The New York Times Book Review, 8-2-15).  In it Ian Buruma says, of our destruction of Nagasaki,  "it's hard to refute [the argument that] that killing a massive number of civilians with a radiating bomb is an act of barbarism."  There we are,  "barbaric" in only one sense of "uncivilized."  (The two senses of "civilized" were "highly developed" and "humane.")

 The sense in which Buruma takes it makes the Greeks and the Romans and all the "advanced" people of the ancient world barbarians.  After becoming aware of the two meanings I don't want to do that so I say, "Wait a minute, Mr. Buruma,  I'm not going along with your 'hard to refute.'"  The payoff is in what you avoid, going along with something you can't agree with when you think about it.

"But all your thought does for you is change 'barbarism' to 'cruelty,' the accurate word you'd have to accept.  A pretty small payoff, I'd say."

I don't think it's small.  With 'cruelty' you become an adult, able to assess how much inhumane behavior is necessary to build and maintain your civilization and how much isn't.  A necessary moral calculation.

"And how do you distinguish necessary cruelty from unnecessary cruelty?"

Not easily, but it can be managed. Looking back we can say that the inhumane killing of the Cimbri at Vercellae was probably necessary to build and preserve the Roman civilization we know and have benefited from.  Whereas the killing of the inhabitants of Mycalessus was not at all necessary to preserve Athenian civilization. 

"I see the difference, but for those who withhold 'civilized' from the inhumane the Romans and the Athenians are both disqualified.  They each were committing 'acts of barbarism' — though I've learned that there were extenuating circumstances at Mycalessus."

You've made my point, letting me make the larger one (this is English-teacher salesmanship now): close attention to words pays off.  Take this word in just one sense and you're standing there accepting the benefits of civilization while calling the givers of those benefits 'barbarians,' indistinguishable from those who would take them away.  You look like — forgive me — a dope.

"Whereas those who see both senses look like what?  Geniuses?"

No, simply adults experiencing the embarrassment they have just privileged themselves to.  "Me, the beneficiary of inhumanity?  Just as I thought I had purged myself of it, civilized myself."

"You don't have to explain the embarrassment to me.  I'm a Christian.  I'm always purging myself, or supposed to be purging myself, of inhumanity."

But you're not always able to do it under the name of civilization.  And before the Age of Enlightenment, the age of the Man of Feeling, you didn't need to.  You could be "civilized" in the classical sense, which carried no "humanity" clause.  The Eighteenth Century, with its expansion of sensibility — and, don't forget, of wealth, which allowed such luxuries — gave us the clause, giving us a new compliment and a new source of embarrassment.

"And gave Christianity it's great chance for a breakthrough.  I have to exult.  All those years hemmed in by the need for survival, victory in worldly competition, with the testosterone necessary to achieve it, finally ended by enough affluence to afford a few Christian feelings.  Oh blessed Enlightenment!"

But not blessed if you let it replace the first meaning of "civilized."  Do that and you forget the givers of this great expansion of humane feeling, the ones who toiled and fought, inhumanely, simply for development — without which you'll have a hard time accounting for the expansion in sensibility.  Forget the givers and you look like an ungrateful child.

"Ah, the Man of Feeling unaware that he stands on the backs of thousands of unfeeling men.  A dope."

No, "child" is the right word.  You've regressed into one-meaning simplicity.  Cut off your education in historical (and moral) complexity.

"It's so hard not to do that.  Life must have been a lot easier before we had these two senses."

Before Christianity came along, you want to say.  I do too.   But I'm not so sure.  I picture pagans happy in their inhumane development of a society, an empire, and then I read Virgil.

"You mean the great celebrator of Rome's bloody victories?"

Yes.  When he looks back on them in the Fourth Eclogue (42 BC) he apparently feels some guilt, what the coming Golden Age will "remove the last traces" of.  He's feeling what "civilized" in sense two would make him feel.  Where did that feeling come from?  It's one sense muscling in on the other, before chronology allows it.

"Ah, but human nature would allow it.  If it's down in there, waiting its time, whatever the religion."

Well, we'll certainly have to allow for the possibility.

307. Hume's Pile of Applesauce

You know, some philosophers are so damn wrong you've just got to quit being an academic and say, "This is a pile of applesauce."  And that's what I'm going to say about one of Alison Gopnik's favorite philosophers (The Atlantic, 10-15), and one of mine (once): David Hume.

The problem is The Self.  Hume says there is no such coherent thing.  There's just a bunch of perceptions and responses.  Gopnik  found that Buddha said pretty much the same thing and loved him for it, and loved connecting the two.  Postmodern French philosophers loved him for it, insofar as they can love any Anglophone philosopher.

OK, where's the applesauce?

J. D. Salinger points us to it.  Awed by the budding beauty and character of a British girl in the course of  his tearoom conversation with her (in "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor"), Salinger hears her put a standard slur on American soldiers.  "I hope that's not worthy of you," he says.  What would her slur not be worthy of?  My fourth-grade teacher hears me speaking the most awful trash on the playground, just so I can make it with some trashy kids, and says, "Roland, that's not you."  My mother, after I've verbally abused the girl downstairs, says, "That's not the Roland I know."  I blush with shame.

What I want Hume, Buddha, and all those postmodernists to tell me is this: What blushes?  What's your name for it?  Something raises expectations, something is trusted, something takes responsibility, something is embarrassed.  Even before my mother and my teachers spoke to me it was there, in me, an idea of what I was.  If it weren't why did I respond so?  Why did I blush?

Plato gave capitals to my idea of what I was. The Idea of Roland. That was abstract philosophy but it was close enough to my experience, to the words people around me used, to the words I used, in the world and inside myself, to check out.  Plato was twenty times closer to this thing my teachers saw in me and Salinger saw in the girl than Hume or Buddha or Paul de Man was.  The ordinary Medieval/Renaissance Christian, with his word "soul," was  thirty times closer.  Dante was forty times closer.  Donne sixty.  Milton a hundred.

Nobody whose time is short (not just me, friends) wants to waste any of it digging into a pile of applesauce.  We all could use a detector.  Here's one I'll pass on: any time you pick up "the destruction of the coherent Self," or any similar locution, keep going.  Life's too short.

306. "Uncivilized" and its Detonators

It's good to be civilized.  It's bad to be an oppressor.  So what do I do about an oppressor, like Harper Lee's second-round Atticus Finch, who looks to me pretty civilized?

"You grow up.  Exchange your kid's view of good and bad for the adult view, expressed by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker (7-27-15): that in Finch, 'as so often with human beings,' the goodness and badness are 'part of the same package.'  Welcome, child, to moral complexity."

I think I've already met it, just in the word.  To be civilized according to one of the two main meanings you have to be "humane," according to the other you don't:

1. Having a highly developed society and culture.

2. Showing evidence of moral and intellectual advancement; humane.  (American Heritage)

Same word, same complimentary force.  But two tests for its use.  By the development test the Minoans and Native Americans fail, by the humanity test the Athenians and Elizabethans fail.  I'll tell you, for us liberal-arts English teachers it will be a lot harder applying the word "uncivilized" to Elizabethans than to Native Americans.

"But what are you going to do?  You can't cut yourself loose from the dictionary."

I know, but I can't call Shakespeare "uncivilized" either.  And that's what I'd have to do if historians caught him, as they caught Queen Elizabeth, enjoying bear-baiting.   You know, that sport where they tie a bear to a stake and watch dogs tear him apart?  As inhumane as you can get.

"Well — forgive me — you'll just have to get used to it.  Worse lies ahead.   The torture-allowing Aristotle will have to be called 'uncivilized,' along with Pericles and Cicero and every venerable Roman and Athenian you know.  After them, Thomas Jefferson.  Slaveholders all.  You're feeling the full pain.  One of the growing pains."

I know, I know.  This is adulthood, having a hard time with words and knowing it.  Children have an easy time using 'civilized' because they take it in only one sense.  To one kind of child anybody who shows inhumanity is uncivilized; to the other kind it's anybody who shows lack of development.

"I think I know the second kind pretty well.  He's quick with the word 'barbaric.'  He sees the medieval age as 'dark' and calls people 'barbarians' as soon as he sees bad plumbing.  Arcadian shepherds are barbarians.  Nearly everybody who lived before the Industrial Revolution is 'uncivilized.'  I don't know the first kind of child so well."

I do.  He's the kind who will come home from a dinner party down South smitten by the grace, the culture, the education of the host, call him "highly civilized," and, when he learns that he flies Confederate flags on his boat take his word back.

"I suppose that for him 'bigot' would be the opposite to 'civilized,' as 'barbarian' was the first child's opposite?"

I'd say so.  It's a word he will come up with readily, since he's insensitive to the complications.  That won't mean, though, that he's insensitive to signs of inhumanity.  He'll be quick to see verbal equivalents of the Confederate flag.  If you want to avoid detonating an explosion from him you'll avoid them.

"Detonating in the way Atticus Finch's statements detonate, I suppose.  Like, 'Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people' (quoted in NYT, 8-2-15).  Like referring to blacks as 'backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization' (New Yorker, 7-27-15)."

Well, those statements obviously qualify.  They certainly detonated an explosion among readers of the new book.

"I believe those statements were made in the fifties, and I can understand why you'd need to avoid them then, and certainly avoid them now, North and South, but wasn't there a time when they were correct?  A time when to deny them required you to believe that blacks instantly became Western adults — that is, people advanced in one kind of civilization?"

Absolutely.  We're forced to say, "Yes, there was a time when what Finch said was true, and a period when it continued to be true."  To deny that would be to deny human possibility, as well as to deny what whites did to blacks, deprive them of all that was available to whites in their education, starting with the ability to read.  And if anybody called Finch "uncivilized" then for making that true statement we'd know that he was taking "civilized" only in sense two, and was a child.

"But, you want me to say, nobody who calls him 'uncivilized' now is a child, since by the fifties the process was complete.  Then you will ask me if I'm sure of that, and I will have to say no, nobody can be sure of that, and you will have me in the old Socratic headlock, and I will have to grunt out what you want to hear: that liberal humanitarians, the people now exploding at Atticus Finch, are immature thinkers with an undeveloped sense of moral complexity.  But I'm going to stop right now and say, 'Friend, let's not do this at all.'"

And I am going to ask what you want me to ask, "Why are you proposing that we not do this at all?"

"Because it's unacceptably academic.  Dedicated to the truth and indifferent to the occasion of speaking it.  Demanding linguistic sophistication and precision.  No idea that being accurate might not be enough to justify being said.  Right now in America we've got to calculate very carefully the dangers of accuracy."

And I thought I was building up to a speech at a dinner party.

"In which, at the present time of crisis in race relations, you'll blow yourself up in three minutes.  You don't understand the needs of time and place.   At dinner tables (and on public rostrums and in editorial pages) the need is not philosophical but rhetorical. In democracies this need takes precedence over the need for linguistic precision and always has."

Your sweep is too broad.  Facts, precisely stated, have always had rhetorical force. 

"Yes, but in some societies more than in others."

And ours, I think, is one of those societies most readily swayed by reliably established statements of fact.  So there's a chance I can speak, and with some weight.  A good chance.

"Not as good a chance as you once had."

Why?

"Because we have such deep skepticism about statements of fact in our audiences now.  To speak in front of one now you've always got to be ready for the weight-remover, the listener who reaches into the pan and takes out your heaviest pieces.  Or, worse, keeps you and the whole company from looking at the scale.  And does it with the support of psychologists, if not philosophers.

I don't know what you're talking about..

"Well, it's not perfectly clear to me but for some time I have made it clearer by putting all recent impediments to truth-stating into one simple exchange.  On an early TV show Dick Smothers put a statement of fact to his brother Tom: 'You're shirttail's out.'  Tom's response was, 'Why do you hate me?'  With Tom types in the audience either the weight disappears or all eyes go from the truth scale to the attitude scale."

And they do this with philosophical support?

"That's indistinct too, but I see a lot of Toms looking toward Paris." 

And, thanks to you, in America I now see a lot of people unwilling to call attention to exposed shirttails because they fear being accused of hate.  Or bigotry.  Or at least of intolerance.  And how about being thought condescending or superior?

"In some places, yes, but certainly outside universities.  What professor ever feared being thought superior?"

You're behind the times.  The academic woods are full of such professors.  You see their fear every time you see chicken-quotes around favorable judgments of Western civilization.  (It's not hard to see them.  They dot The London Review.  They're creeping into the New York Review.)  Look at Edith Hall's note, in her essay on Sappho (NYR, 5-7-15), telling us that conservatives "still claim the ancient Greeks as the cultural ancestors of a 'superior' Western civilization.'"  There's one of our finest Hellenic scholars (Oxford, King's College London), afraid of making a judgment that will make her look condescending.

"And, in saying that, you're aware that there's controversy over whether Western civilization is superior?"

Yes, and it's a controversy made possible only by taking 'civilized' in the single sense children take it in.  And most of the time it's an irrelevant controversy.  Any minority that wants to get ahead in American society has already answered the question.   Any among the millions in the world who want the development, the apparatus, Western education gives them has answered it.  It's an ends-means thing, concealed best by confusing the two meanings of "civilized."

"And you are not confused.  You see Edith Hall and other chicken-quoting professors as people in possession of what the minority needs.  What locates the shirttail."

What locates anything — shirttails, viruses, gene strands, mountains on the other side of the moon.  If it weren't for its inhumanity the Western way of producing knowledge, the way that has taken over the world ecumene, would make the word "superior" pop right out of our mouths. 

"But there are those European imperialists partitioning Africa."

Yes.  And their children are the first to slam their lips on "superior."  It's that damned doubleness in the word "civilized."

"And yet when they become professors the Western way is what they profess."

If it isn't they ought to quit professing.  If there were another culture that had produced  the kind of knowledge-gathering and testing that Socrates came up with and Plato kept going in the Academy, Western professors could turn to it and profess its way.  And wait for the world to come to them.  But there isn't.  The world comes here. 

"And finds the most elevated professors the least proud of what gave them their profession.  A sorry sight.  But why do you care?"

Because I am one of the many who teach the elements of Western civilization — the thinking (Logic), the writing (Composition), the speaking (Debate), the apparatus, if you will.  We need support.  Our jobs would be a lot easier if those professors showed some pride in that civilization. 

"Which they might do, I think, if they saw the similarity between what they are doing when they get a graduate student from a different culture and what we are doing when we get our own young.  We both are teaching students how to work the Western apparatus.  To understand it.

"With the difference that we, with our logic and rhetoric, are surely preparing our young for the public scrimmage, the dinner parties, of a democracy.  With the others, not so surely.  Which to me makes a professor's speaking out all that more important.  As an example."

You're aware of the fact that several professors, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have spoken out, and pretty much the way you want them to.

"Yes, I am." 

And of the Tom Smothers' responses Moynihan and the others have gotten?

"Yes, if that's what you want to call them."

Well I think those responses have just strengthened the fear we see.  Who wants to be seen "blaming the victim"?  But I know that nothing is simple, and maybe that extends to this fear. 

"I think it does.  Why don't you give me the speech you want this truth-teller to make.  I'll be listening for detonators and give you a critique."

I'd like to, and maybe I'll try, but I should tell you first that I have my own fear, and I'm not sure how much it is shared by other white academics.

"And that fear is...?"

That I really am a bigot.  It's what I suspect of some scientists in this area.  There they are, truth-tellers, standing above the arena with all its rhetoric and passions, calmly identifying deficiencies they don't have.  You think that fellow reporting, say, on black attitudes toward education, isn't enjoying his position, his superiority?  You think he's not feeling the pleasure of condescension, looking down?  Or can avoid what goes with it, disdain for those below?  I don't think I could.  I see it in myself.  If you see it and I see it we're seeing what Adam Gopnik saw, "the bigotry that cannot recognize itself.'"   If the audience sees it, boom, there goes the speech.

"The speech in public.  If you made it in a faculty lounge, prefaced by your fears, I think you'd get a different kind of boom, an impatient one, over your fears:  'OK, you're a bigot.  But, don't you understand, it doesn't matter.  What matters is where the shirttail is.  Personal faults don't matter.  You can be a double-died white son of a bitch playing the Foucault power game up to the hilt, but if you've got ahold of the truth everybody needs, if you're the only one with a reliable system for finding it, you're Albert Schweitzer.  If you don't get out there and make your speech I'll be ashamed of you.'"

Yes, I know the fellows quick to say that, and they're just reckless.  They would have me risk what's more important than any of these things, what we all depend on in fact: our national unity, our sense of a shared future.  They're saying, "Get out there and possibly blow apart the social fabric."

"And, for many in your audience, those most alert to developments in philosophy, you'll be out there running that risk by making unjustified claims about truth and your possession of it.  And about the system, the culture, the tradition, the education that gave you that possession."

If I am making claims about possessed truth I am misrepresenting my scientist friends.  They don't want to release possessed truth; they just want recognition, as truth, of what has survived their tests.  They are making the claims of the Western inquirer, who is looking, not for an absolute truth, but for the best truth humans are capable of establishing.  Socrates is the model, and his conversations show us how to carry one on — taking care with our beliefs, acquiring fully, testing thoroughly, trusting what's established as our best "raft to ride the seas of life."  And at every step caring more about that "truth" than we do about Socrates.  But you know this as well as I.

"Yes, but I didn't realize until you spoke how it locates the fault in our over-humane colleagues: they are caring too much about Socrates."

Exactly.  And what fault could be more forgivable?  Their hearts are going out to human beings as the hearts of all of us, in our youth, went out to Socrates as he died.

"Forgivable if you think betrayal is forgivable.  When we care about anything more than we care about truth we betray everything Socrates stood for.  We ought to be punished, as Socrates wanted the friends he left behind to punish his sons if they did that."

But if I make that speech you are waiting for me to make I will have already betrayed Socrates.  When I make a persuasive speech in public I join the orators and sophists he despised. 

"And if you don't make it you join all the chicken-quoters and mealy-mouthers you've been jabbing.  Or you retreat to the Ivory Tower.   But it's too late.  You said at the beginning you were building up to a dinner-party speech.  You closed off your escape long ago.  All you can do now is pull up your socks and make the most effective speech you can."

All right.  The room quiets.  The faces, white and black, distributed as they are distributed in the educated section of our society, turn toward me.  My purpose is to get those listeners to give a hearing to truths that need to be heard before a backward group can change into an advanced group.  Some are reluctant to recognize a need for change.  Most are reluctant even to use the words "advanced" and "backward."  Is that my challenge? 

"Yes, and I fully understand the problem in using those accurate words.  But as a teacher of rhetoric I know there are some good strategies you can employ."

Oh good.  How would you suggest I start?

"By showing your good will.  You are visibly identified with the advanced people who used the backward people and kept them backward, and showed such little good will toward them for so long.  An immediate demonstration of your present good will is a great, almost necessary, preparation for your later message.

Sounds reasonable, but I have serious doubts about doing it.

"Why?  It's been standard oratorical practice since Aristotle."

But how is it going to go here?  A bigot like me stands up and says, "I know.  From the color of my skin you can easily take me to be a member of the 'superior' oppressor class.  I fully understand.  Maybe I once was what you justifiably think you see.  If so, I have changed.  I now have your interest at heart and I hope you will consider some issues I want to bring up."  What do I look like to you?

"Well, you certainly look like an orator following the rules in Aristotle's Rhetoric."

And to a white man there?

"You will look like a white academic who has finally read the Rhetoric.  Before speaking your pain-giving truths you are assuring your audience that your heart is in the right place."

And to a black man?

"You will look like —I see it now — a sincere white son of a bitch who has become a hypocritical white son of bitch."

 So that kills my start.  But I think it could do worse.  It could kill my whole oration.  It could trigger a contest that could throw us off the path to change so badly that we'd never get back on it.

"Contest?"

Yes.  When you display the heart you invite competition.  This is a much bigger danger than in Socrates' time.  People are Christian now, and the heart has become more important.  After the Sermon on the Mount, it, not the world, is the place where you commit or avoid committing adultery and murder.  So display of the heart is more frequent, and its goodness has more rhetorical weight.  I think that only the most exceptional Christian, the most exceptional human being, can resist taking advantage of that weight.  Put a heart that's recognized as good onto the scales and the balance goes your way — against the unrecognized or bad heart in the other pan. 

"I see the temptation, but why can't your succumbing to it be temporary, an obstacle a guest's challenge helps you overcome?  Why does it have to take over the evening and keep the table from getting back to the discussion where the truth-teller is trying to squeeze in his truth?"

Because by now everybody at the table is a Christian, or plays like one.  There won't be any guests to set me straight.  But even if there were I might not be able to keep my heart out of the discussion.  At any hard-pressed point I could get it out there to justify myself, and invite a match.  Hell, I'm a Christian too.  And a blind one, as I'll see when I get home and check with Socrates.

"Why blind?"

Because I won't see the little brothers there.

"What have they got to do with it?"

I'm not sure I can explain it to you, but you can get an idea by looking at an unwary Christian family.  There the goodness-badness game is the one game the little, weak ones can win.  Its play makes them experts.  Their losses in the physical game are soon made up.  When the parent arrives the weights are already in the pan.  "Oh Mama, I am such a victim of this big, bad, strong brother." 

"I can see why it would be tempting to get into such a contest, but surely it's not just Christian."

True.  An over-claim.  Little Jewish brothers probably play the virtue game as well as little Christian brothers.  Maybe better.  The unchurched human family can engage in it.  But with Christians (and with anybody, any atheist, who has soaked up Christian values, as those who live very long in the U. S. inevitably will) the virtue-stamp on the weak is so quickly available and its authority so strong.  Right there in Matthew.  To be meek is to inherit the earth, to be persecuted and reviled is to be blessed.  Which means that when you grow up in our Christian society, and enter our public discussions, and are weak, and are a victim, you can count on an immediate goodness grant.  Which gives you a rhetorical advantage there.

"And therefore elsewhere, between matches, I suppose."

Oh yes.  The elder, the strong, anyone given authority, is never out of sight of that sign, "Little Brother is watching you."

"I think you're too skeptical."

You think only the strong play the Foucaldian power game?  You're not skeptical enough.  It's the weak's skill at that game that keeps us from speaking truth to them.  It's a lot easier these days to speak truth to power than it is to speak it to powerlessness.

"I'm coming to believe it.  It's even hard sometimes to speak it in our own lounge, where the weak have acquired so many friends."

Among the perpetually powerless, the profs.  You know what?  I don't think I can pick my way through this field.

"So what are you going to do, return to the monastery and speak only to the monks on your wing?  Let the world go its stupid way?"

No.  But I'm out of ideas.  No more pages in the Rhetoric.

"Well, maybe you've missed a tactic.  There's this one: you choose a case less sensitive than the black case, but parallel to it.  You argue that case, and when the audience sees the parallel you've made the point you want to make with them."

But what case is parallel to this one?

"I think there's one that comes close.  I was reminded of it when you pictured that scientist reporting on a deficiency in black culture: its failure to encourage education.  Well that raised in my mind an analogous picture: the scientist reporting on the same deficiency in Appalachian culture."

Well, that's certainly familiar to me.  I lived in a state next to an Appalachian state, and taught students who had come over from it.

"Sounds promising, but your rhetoric book says that the first thing you have to do is make sure that your case is close enough for your target audience to get the point and apply it to themselves.  What do you see in Appalachia?"

Well, I'm pretty sure I see a culture ("culture" is still the best word for what particular individual traits flourish in) deficient in stimulating a desire for education. 

"That's the education we provide, the education that makes a Western adult?"

Yes.  Desire for that is the big thing, but aren't there other parallels that might be relevant?

"Well, Appalachian culture is originally agricultural and non-commercial, like native African culture, isn't it?

I suppose.  And if resistance to urban organization and sophistication goes with it, there would be that too.  Appalachian people are often said to be distinctively "independent" and "self-reliant" and "protective of their ways." 

"And suspicious of outsiders?"

Oh yes.  The words I've heard are "outlanders" and "flatlanders."  Accompanied by suspicion of their own who "go flatland."  Educated returnees from  the flatland say  they can feel it.

"And you yourself are convinced that it's Appalachian culture, with the view of education it gives its youth, that best explains the low performance of that youth in higher education, compared to the youth from other cultures?"

Yes.  I think culture matters most.  After many, many years of college teaching I am convinced that family life is the main determinant of performance in college English classes.  How did they use the language?  What did they talk about?  What could they get away with at their dinner tables?  You know, when students spoke at my Honors Tutorial table I could have been a fly on the wall above their dinner tables at home.  And nothing, not up-to-date technology in the schools, not new teaching methods, not the most highly motivated, highly skilled teachers (though they could make a great difference), could make up for a start like that.  I believed that when I listened to Remedial English students.  And though the difference between Honors and Remedial was almost entirely within one culture, I have no reason to believe that different cultures won't produce the same kind of difference.  So yes, I will speak with conviction.

"What a boon to your rhetoric!  Belief in your own case.  I think we've got a tactic here you can really run with.  I see parallels falling into place, hidden as they fall.  Nobody offended, no detonators bumped.  Then the dawn breaks, the whole undeniable resemblance appears, and understanding comes.  Perfect."

No, not at all.  Among Appalachians there's no history of slavery.   No need for pride.  (Those hills are full of pride.  Too much.)  No anger.  No cry for  justice.  No hurt, no need for balm.

"What's this, balm?  Concern for hurt?  Recognizing the need for pride?  I see a heart.  What we agreed is a dangerous exposure."

All right, drop it.  I've already decided I'm not going any further into these waters.

"And you can't be drawn by what is drawing so many conservatives?  Do you know that the demand for political correctness, within which demands for gentle language about blacks are classed, is now so extreme that some American college women want protection from language in the classics?  At Columbia students on the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board now call, in an op-ed in the Daily Spectator, for warnings from the prof before reading Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Because, 'like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom'  (http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/12).  And you can hear the same kind of thing at Cal, at Oberlin, at Rutgers, at Michigan, and at a bunch of others (NYT, 5-17-14)."

No.  These are just silly siders getting sillier.  I've already decided that since every worthwhile movement has its silly side I'm not going to get worked up over silliness here.  The instances are good for ridicule ("Behold, the smelling-salts generation") but not for argument.

"There's no extreme that won't work you up?  How about the sight of a bigoted (with respect to women) barbarian (with respect to cultural development) loser (by the measure of advanced society) bucking himself up with manly chants?"

Man, I've seen zoot suiters twirling their key chains (giving their fingers to society) on too many street corners to let hip-hop bother me.

"And seeing it admired?  The sight of civilized people admiring barbarians doesn't bother you?"

No, because at one time I was one of those people.  My white buddies and I dressed the dress and twirled the twirl.  It's American youth finding the exact finger to give their parents.  That angle, being eternal, can be discounted.

"OK, how about this.  Drama.  One of the biggest battles in intellectual history.  The side accused "of blaming the victim," the Moynihan side, routed at the beginning (by William Ryan, author of the book of that title) and cowering for years, is making a comeback.  A conference on Moynihan's legacy is held at Harvard.  The published papers (Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences, edd. Douglas Massey and Robert Sampson) make a surprising impact.  The battle is on.  "Victims or not, black culture has something to do with this" gains traction in faculty lounges.  Allies in the media are sought.  William Raspberry, writing on "father absence" in the Washington Post  ("Why Our Black Families Are Failing," 7-25-05), is recruited.  But support in the dinner-party circle is needed.   A bastion of Ryan strength.  The Moynihans need you there, my friend,  your people need you."

Oh, I am so moved to join in.  But I'm just too damned afraid I'll slip. 

"I see.  You're still afraid of the essentially bigoted heart that will force the ruinous exposure."

But also of the possibly good heart, which could tempt me into display, and provocation of a dinner-table contest.  You don't know what a thorough Christian upbringing I've had.

 "You're a tough case, but I have a trick for you, my last one: convince yourself that you have no heart.  If you think you have a heart to rely on you will be far more prone to stupid, even cruel, public gaffes than if you think you are essentially heartless." "

Convince myself?  But I'm a skeptic, an academic trained to see through interested attempts to convince.

"Brother, here you've just got to believe. You have no heart. You're the Tin Woodman.  Believe it and you'll have the guarantee against slips that he had."

How so?

"Who was more careful to speak and behave in a considerate way?  Who more scrupulous in observing the rules and customs of decency, the forms of good-heartedness?  Who a better model for statesmen and spouses?  Our longest-kept treaties are entered into by Tin Woodmen, our longest marriages."

OK, I think I've got it.  No heart, no concern for my own goodness.

"Yes.  You're just a problem solver, with a chess-player's interest in this one."

But you will allow me one other interest, I hope. 

"I will as long as it's a selfish one.  What is it?"

It's an interest in the social fabric.  Because I have a stake in it. 

"Ah yes, the stake argument!  Perfect self interest.  Beautiful!  But it has to be long-term self-interest."

I'm pretty sure it is.  I am interested not just in preserving it from violence and revolution, the consequence of one kind of explosion, but in preserving it for the future most satisfying to me, a fabric we can all weave ourselves into — and not, for some, just hang onto. 

"Sounds idealistic, but I think it can be defended as selfish. Your only reason for speaking at this table, your only reason for pushing uncongenial discussion, is that you think meeting threats to that fabric must begin with an accurate picture of the threat.  An accuracy you will present, when you get to it , with no air of releasing truth."

No, though all those years of teaching have given me evidence that it is the truth I will recognize that mine is only anecdotal evidence and conclude my speech simply by saying, "The scientists who speak after me will, I'm sure, give us the best current version of the truth on this matter."  I will be content, as in teaching, simply to start an adult discussion of what they say.

"So, you're ready to go."

Yes, as soon as I get that signal all academics need.

"What!  Still another delay?"

Yes.  You remember at the beginning you said that our fault was that we were "indifferent to the occasion of speaking the truth"?  Many of us academics didn't know or care what we blew up, including the social fabric we cared about.  Doctrinaire Socratists. 

"And now you're worried about their getting the floor?"

Yes.  I haven't forgotten that there are times when we just can't risk an adult discussion, and we have to speak as children.  In order to save the social fabric. 

"Ah, 'Lest ye become as little children ye cannot be saved."

You said it.  But if we're in one of those times now we'll need a warning that we are.  Who do we look to?  Not an academic.  He's still rubbing his eyes down here in the arena.  Not a gladiator.  He's too busy fighting.  We need somebody with a sense of the crowd, which way the thumbs will go — and that, in a democratic society, is a politician. 

"You mean that time-server so regularly deplored in the faculty lounge?  And so maligned in the arena?"

Yes.  But whose career depends on knowledge of the crowd.  When you'll get their thumbs and when you won't.  And, most important, when you'll provoke a field-charging brawl.  So I'll keep my eyes on the best politician I know and wait for his or her signal.

"So, a justifiable wait.   And if you're still looking for guarantees against a slip I can give you something to practice while you wait.  Straight from the ancients.  In your inner monologue, in your private meditations, in your imagined bids for cheers from your own kind, let not a single possibly offensive word enter.  That's what Pericles did.  When he entered public life he resolved to remove from his interior speech any words that he would not use in public, before his Athenian audiences.  So that there would be no slips, no provocation of unnecessary conflict.  Apparently he succeeded."

Very good.  I'll do it.

"Is there any other help I can give you?"

No, I think that's enough.