316. "Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?"

I had, in my last post, justified "trash" as a shorthand judgment of a group of people.  Yes, it was hasty and inaccurate but under the constraints of daily life understandable and surely forgivable.  Judgments that are necessary — as to a parent obliged to warn — should not be condemned as signs of prejudice.  The word "bigots," as used by Harper Lee in Go Set a Watchman for the group she sees her father associating with is in the same class as "trash."  Both Lee and the parents are being as accurate as, under the circumstances, they can be.

I think it was accepted that calling people a bad name like "trash" would, as with any number of bad names — "barbarians," "savages," "racists," "primitives," "decadents" — hurt their reputation and, if they heard it, hurt their feelings.  Hurtful, but given the alternative, acceptable as a necessary price.  Forego it and you'll have a child descending into — whatever.  And you won't be any help to other parents, who, unable to make a study (no personal trip down to the Roller Rink), are guided by reputation.  Yes, "reputation," that gossip-stained, stereotype-making thing to which, in the hurly-burly of parenthood there is, as so often in the daily world, no alternative. 

In Norwood, a lily-white suburb, the Roller Rink was frequented by a white sub-group, kids who had "gone wild," children whose parents had let them go wild.  That is, parents who, it was assumed, weren't worried about a child getting, or getting another child, pregnant, and so not being able to go to college and having to settle for a job in the dime store.  Good parents identified the hazard with one word.

Now comes this seminarist with the question, "Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?"  You know, not a white sub-group but a real minority. 

That's moving the challenge into college.  "Adjust vocabulary as necessary.   At a minimum identify the forces at work.  Allow thirty minutes for the question."  In the street it's likely to be, "Why do you hold back your freely used bad name when you get to blacks?"  Which is exactly what I did in Post 311 when I couldn't bring myself to connect blacks with the gangsta rap I was calling "barbaric."  From further down the street I hear, "Why are you such a wimp?  Trash is trash."  An equal-opportunity human category.

I will begin at the lower end of the street.  "I am a wimp because I am a graduate of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Sunday School, the last place you could ever use derogatory words about a group."  Respect for every  human soul reigned in that Sunday School as respect for skill reigned on the ball field.  As, I think, it reigned, or came close, in other Norwood Sunday schools.  Children in Norwood, if they wanted their Sunday-school teachers to respect them, had to be careful not to hurt the weak and vulnerable.  They had to speak lovingly.

And why am I still unhappy after I hold back the bad name and have my Sunday school teachers thinking well of me? Because I am a graduate and postgraduate of an American university who wants his teachers there to respect him.  For that I have to speak accurately.  Trash is trash, shirt-tails are out, and hazards are hazards.  Determine it carefully, say it without fear or favor.

There's the mischief in the seminarist's question.  Minorities are weak and vulnerable.  Introduce them into the equation  and your calm at the blackboard is shattered.  How can I come out with the respect of both sets of my former teachers?

You can think of my problem as the problem of the American liberal but I think that's too confining.  It's the problem of a host of American citizens wanting the best for their country.  And it's worthy of debate by our most careful thinkers.  How, at this time, can the need to speak accurately be reconciled with the need to speak lovingly?

315. "Judgment" and "Prejudgment"

"Why is it so hard to pass judgment these days?  Use a name that's not neutral or complimentary and you get a rebuke."  That's a friend, retired from the Ohio University philosophy department, speaking a few weeks ago.

Then in a recent post (311) I was trying to draw a line between kinds of people.   When it got hopelessly tangled a younger friend broke in: "That'll teach you not to draw lines.  Why make judgments about people?  Why categorize them?"

That word "judgment."  The first friend takes it in the broad sense where synonyms jump out at you from any thesaurus: appraise, assess, evaluate, grade, rank, critique, etc.  Look at them and you see right away why he might be disturbed.  They state what we all do to make a success of our lives, materially and morally.  Followers of Socrates, if they do this carefully and well, have a chance at The Good Life.

Those words in the thesaurus may also suggest how the first friend becomes, at times, irritated.  While he's doing what the word means in his sense he hears "Judge not lest ye be judged."  From one of those people who conveniently take Jesus's rebuke of hypocritical judgment — you know, casting the mote out of your neighbor's eye without noticing the beam in your own (Matthew (7: 1-5)) — as a rebuke to judgments they don't like.  It's like "innocent until proven guilty," plucked from the legal code and slammed into a conversation.  Irritating as hell.

Then, before the poor geezer can even begin to point out that Jesus also rebuked failure to judge (Luke, 12:57), somebody calls him "judgmental."  He's a personality type whose bad action, as any student of psychology knows, has become a bad habit.  He's in a class with those church ladies who peer from behind window curtains and cut you down at church socials.

"Pay closer attention," he says. "Your preachers and your teachers are not saying what you think they are saying."  And then he gets a rebuke from somebody paying extremely close attention, one equipped with newer techniques, postmodern techniques.  They show him bias in what  he thought were his own most objective statements.  He's absolutely astonished.  "I mean, these guys can pick up attitudes in outer goddam space."

This explains the old man's irritation, but not much beyond that, I think.  The world has never been short of students carrying teachers' words beyond their meaning.   Nor of congregations doing the same, for a longer time, with the words of preachers and prophets.  Nor of people sensitive to minor slights, taking, like Robert Frost's conjectured bird, "everything said as personal to himself."  My friend ought to be used to it.  He's been a teacher.

More importantly, those responses that irritate him don't represent what my younger friend intends.  When she rebukes she means to rebuke intolerance, bias, callousness, inhumanity, insensitive stereotyping, hostile attitudes.  Heard in the judgment she hears.  And judgment to her is "judgment" in a special sense, where the only synonym is "prejudice," or prejudgment, forming "an adverse opinion before or without sufficient knowledge."

This friend is not so naive as to deny the need for appraisal and assessment ("judgment" in the broad sense) to those facing life's options, or the need to judge individuals.  It's judgment of groups of people that she wants to rebuke.

So, do we just have a simple misunderstanding, cleared up when each understands what the other means by "judgment"?  No, because she has put his judgment of groups of people under "prejudgment" and he wants it under the "judgment" necessary to those facing life's options.

Profiling Muslims at airport security is the case he is most likely to offer.   He is in favor of it because he has studied the religion, deduced from its teachings the behavior encouraged or allowed by it, compared the bomb-planting percentage of its followers with that of followers of other religions, figured the cost-risk against other options, and decided to support profiling.  Anybody who rebukes him for prejudice will get a counter-rebuke.  "Judice, man, judice.  Not pre-judice.  Pay attention."

As you might guess from my preceding posts I join my colleague in putting judgment of groups of people under "judgments necessary to those facing life's options."  The parents I knew in Norwood needed to warn their children about "bad company" at the Roller Rink — as a parent today might warn against heroin-tolerant partiers or, for that matter, racism-tolerant fraternities, like the one whose pledges sing N-word songs on their bus rides (Washington Post, 3-10-15).  In the novel that started this string of posts, Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (see posts 306, 311), one glimpse of a white-supremacist magazine is enough for Jean Louise to judge the group of people her father is associating with.  If she has children with inclinations to attend the meetings her father goes to I think she will warn them as the parents of Norwood warned their children about the Norwood Roller Rink (Post 311).

Though she is not likely to be accused of prejudice (the opposite, in fact) she is, strictly speaking, guilty of it.  Hasty judgment.  She glimpses the magazine and judges her father.  Her shudder at the sight of her father associating with the "bigots" in the meeting hall is the same as the shudder the Norwood parent is trying to avoid when she warns her son against associating with the "trash" at the Roller Rink. (That's "strictly speaking," I know, but the unsettling differences between that and "speaking" are too much to get started on here.)

My old friend in the philosophy department has spent too much time in seminars not to hear questions coming thick and fast.  Are the "bigot" shudders and the "trash" shudders equivalent?  Morally equivalent?  Are the two words equally signs of hasty generalization?  Equally signs of prejudice?  Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?  And "prejudice," my heavens, define it as "an adverse opinion before or without sufficient knowledge," ask when knowledge is sufficient or when a generalization becomes hasty, and you'll never settle on an answer.  Which allows me my own guess: that ninety-nine percent of the judgments made in the world today could be classified as "hasty." 

As for rebukes to such judgments, I can't help seeing them in the light of an old Scottish saying: "A maiden's bairns are ae well-raised."  Visions of the perfect way she would raise children.  Her criticisms and rebukes represent a pre-motherhood judgment.  I see my old friend clearly now, as he confronts the postmodern academics plaguing him ("experience-ignoring liberals," "over-sensitive humanitarians").  "Yer a' maidens, ye are.  Get some bairns.  Ye'll find out."

314. Plato Was Right to Throw Poets Out of The Republic. Alas.

It has taken me 66 years but I finally realize that Plato was right about the place of poets in a republic and my New Critic masters were wrong. 

Yes, wrong, those critics and teachers who took on all the scientists and materialist philosophers in the university and proclaimed that no, poems were not sugar-coating applied to truth, they were Truth itself.  Not just Beauty.  If you weren't finding the pearls you hadn't been reading the poem closely enough.  Or you'd been listening to Plato.

I know, those critics have been taken down a notch or two.  The Church of Holy Art, with its altars to Donne and Eliot, has lost its worshippers, and there are no more priests teaching English courses.  But still, who could really be wise without reading novels and plays and poems?  Didn't the flame in Shelley's pages tell us as much about politics as the facts in Tocqueville's?

But now my attention has been called (NYT Book Review, 8-30-15) to Juliana Spahr, a poet who addresses issues every citizen of this republic needs to be concerned about — air pollution, the faults of capitalism, the relations of corporations to human beings.  Her latest book is apparently full of flame — about the BP oil spill, the dispersal of Occupy Wall Street protesters by police, the price of Brent crude, birds displaced from their flight path — and the poem the reviewer, Stephen Burt, finds most moving will give you an idea.  She is nursing her child.  "I hold out my hand/ I hand over/ and I pass on. . . . I hold out my hand and take engine oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me."  The reviewer, warmed to her causes, apparently speaks for a wide readership.

I think of the poem that first inflamed me, one by Robert Burns, recited by my Scottish highland grandmother:

'Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed,

Or tae victorie. . . .

'Lay the proud usurpers low,

Tyrants fall in every foe,

Liberty's in every blow! -

Let us do or dee.

That'll heat a kid up, I'll tell you.  But I cooled off.  At university when I got looking around for examples in history of forces that had worked successfully for peace I discovered that the force of commerce, channeled by Scottish lowlanders (my flame-resistant grandfather was a lowlander), had brought a remarkably long period of peace and prosperity to Scotland, once she had united with England.  And the biggest obstacles to peace were inflamed highlanders, magnifying (with the help of Walter Scott) their essentially street-gang warlords into splendidly patriotic Chiefs. 

And that's what sank Burns as an educator in politics: discovery of complexity, the play of different needs and forces and narratives and world-pictures against each other.  Always requiring trade-offs and compromises.  Burns was for kids. 

It's sort of like saying that in the end English Composition trumps Creative Writing.  What I think Mario Cuomo had in mind when he said, "You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose." 

And isn't that bound to be?  The poet accepts, for the sake of compression and effect, the vagueness that is the great sin in Composition.  "I  can't spend all day explaining."  Emerson speaks for all poets.

Here's Shelley in hottest flame:

Rough wind, that moanest loud

Grief too sad for song;

Wild wind, when sullen cloud

Knells all the night long;

Sad storm whose tears are vain,

Bare woods, whose branches strain,

Deep caves and dreary main,—

Wail, for the world's wrong!

And in vaguest mode.  To young Shelley opposite him the comp tutor says, sarcastically, "Can you think of anything less specific than 'the world's wrong'"?  In response Shelley can't say, "I'll leave specifics to the reader."  Not to this fellow.  He's in the business of getting young writers to make things easy for readers, to take care of them.

So don't expect Juliana Spahr to make clear the connection between engine-oil additive and the wrongs of our time.  That's for scholars, set (first by Plato) in academies to seek truth, sifting through all the needs and forces and narratives and world-pictures.  "Scholarly articles are truth and truth is scholarly articles."  Accept that, find it beautiful, and you are no longer a kid.

I know, that's sad.  But first things first.