320. In Defense of Name-Calling

If anybody's interested in what postmodern theory can do to a guy my recent posts will show him.  Did you notice how careful I was being about just what bad name to call people?  Will it be "trash"?  Will it be "barbarian"?  Or would "uncivilized" do?

That was rhetoric, see, and I was being an orator.  Yes, one of those people.  Not a philosopher, as we followers of Socrates are supposed to be.  Disinterested searchers for truth.  Objective reporters of what we've found.  Please don't tell Simmias.

Not that I was attracted to oratory.  No, I was making the best of what Stanley Fish and sixteen sharpshooters from the Sorbonne had left me.  If language is "rhetoric all the way down," and my students believe that, and everybody at the dinner table believes that, and every intellectual in debate in America believes that, then all I can do is be the most effective orator I can be.  Like: "You know, these people are barbarians."  That ought to have some effect.  But godalmighty what?

It's easier to start with good names, like "civilized."  A compliment word, a eulogism, it gets its force from whatever desire my listener has to be complimented by me, which will be a compliment on membership in my tribe.  That's all.  No matching up with what God wants, or nature promotes, or history demonstrates .  No reference to what Matthew Arnold was sure of ("the best that has been thought and said in the world") or to what C.S. Lewis specified (in his list of the 118 very best).  Not a traditional foundation in sight.

It occurred to me once to illustrate this rhetorical force by showing how a minor-league player just brought up to the major leagues might respond to a eulogism, "Yankee."  It's a neutral word that was made into a compliment word by writers reporting on the success and distinctive behavior of players wearing the Yankee uniform.  When they said a second-year player had shown himself to be "a real Yankee" people knew what they meant.  Somebody like Tommy Henrich.

If you're a baseball fan you know what I mean.  If you're not you need a story.  Or two.  First, Waite Hoyt, the great pitcher on the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig teams of the twenties.  He, late in his career, was pitching for the Pirates against the Cardinals,  a team the Yankees had thrashed in the 1928 World Series.  As the game went on he got more and more abuse from the Cardinal bench.  Finally he walked over in front of the dugout and said, "Watch yourselves.  Go too far and I'll put my Yankee uniform on and scare you to death."

That's drawing on Yankee success.  The Steinbrenner story draws on Yankee character, which, though just as powerful, is less definable.  After a year as president and owner of the club a sportswriter observed that he was "no Yankee," and others took it up.  He wasn't living up to the pin-stripe standard.  I think it had something to do with dignity and reserve, what the leaders to Yankee success, like Gehrig and DiMaggio, had, and yes, the mid-level players, like Henrich. 

Whatever else the expression "real Yankee" suggested, and however much the rookie on the Yankee bench would love to hear it applied to him, and however much he would hate to hear "no Yankee," I want to make him into the student seated before the teacher who has no means to motivate him other than such words.  That teacher's words are "civilized" and "uncivilized," the words all his timid words — euphemistic, conciliatory, concessionary, tactful — drive toward, and all his bold words, like "barbaric," fall back to.  The civilization is Western (necessarily, since this teacher is incapable of teaching any other), and the model, the DiMaggio, is Socrates.  "Real academic," meaning faithful follower of Socrates, is equivalent to "civilized" but bolder, a eulogism suggesting quintessence.

Is all this necessary?  Or have I been so spooked by postmodern theory that I'm hallucinating a worldwide intellectual takeover?  That could be (a retirement home puts you rather out of touch) but in each week's mail delivery there seems to be a revenant who won't leave.  In the latest New York Review the late David Lindberg, "a distinguished historian of science," is quoted by Steven Weinberg as saying that

the proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

If modern thought in science is what has survived scientists' tests this has to be nonsense, and Weinberg, Nobel winner in physics, calls it so.  He also shows me that the issue is still alive.  Is it the postmodern depreciation of logic that's keeping such relativism going?  

I think a prepostmodern, and hope that a postpostmodern, academic would be able to follow Lindberg's statement to its logical end: that one claim to truth is as good as another.  Nonsense, as Weinberg says.  But delivered by a distinguished historian of science and accepted by the editors of the University of Chicago Press, no doubt on the advice of Lindberg's peers in the history of science.

I won't go into the implications of that for the German system that puts all one's peers into a compartment, where group nonsense becomes possible.  Where peer review becomes meaningless.

I'd rather indulge myself in a vision of the Anglo-Hellenic system, not fully imposed (that's too visionary), but introduced, or reintroduced, as a check.  I see Weinberg sitting in — as dean's representative, as a Paul Murphy — on some of the committees in my Department, English, in the eighties and nineties.  Right there, looking at a feminist critique of science, already published in a feminist journal, he tells us how nonsensical it is.  And saves us from embarrassment on the College Tenure Committee, where it becomes a document in evidence, and where our own scientists have to tell us, with collegial tact, without using the word "nonsense," that it is nonsense.

To a graduate thesis committee in my department Paul Murphy (many of my readers will remember him) said, "If this is acceptable then everything I've learned about scholarship is wrong," and denied the grant of the degree.  Steven Weinberg, with his "nonsense," is a Paul Murphy in spades.  But he's speaking in The New York Review.  The way Alan Sokal spoke in Le Nouvel Observateur.  Think of how much would have been accomplished for the academy, for public trust of professors, if both had been able to speak on our examination committees.  In every department.

I'm guessing that our graduate schools are still German enough to be silencing such voices, and I'm too far away, really, to credibly imagine anything, but I can imagine a baseball dugout.  No rookie hearing "bush league."  No idea of what a real Yankee is.  Nothing particular about a Yankee uniform.  No DiMaggio for a model.  Everybody free to go out on the field and think they're playing serious baseball — until they hear the boos.