326. Socratism

What distinguished followers of Socrates, I once decided, was being very careful about what they believed.  That got them called philosophers.  I wanted to be a follower.  Then I saw that followers also had to be very careful about how they lived.  And then I saw that followers had to be very careful about how they spoke.  And finally I discovered that if you're too careful about these things you're going to have a devil of a time doing them in combination.

Take that care about belief.  You are so careful that you discard every proposition requiring belief in God's existence.  Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) has made a case that, you conclude, cannot be refuted.  You declare your conclusion at coffee hour after church.  "Great Heavens, watch your words," says your wife on the way home.  You are going to hurt a lot of feelings and get yourself kicked off the vestry if you aren't more careful.

And why are these two cares, about belief and speech, in conflict?  Because you decided that to live the good life you had to join the human race.  Living alone in your head or your office is not a good life.  But the human race lives in tribes and you can't join one without respecting tribal beliefs and speaking tribal words.

Belief-wise tribal words are careless words but speech-wise they're just the thing.  Can you get one right without getting the other wrong?  Only through fine adjustment, if at all.  Only with the greatest care.   Are you up to it?  Can you lead the examined life if you're not?  OK, here you go. 

You're at a dinner party.  Is it true that blacks perform poorly in the classroom?  Is it true that desire to perform well is not much encouraged by black parents? by fellow blacks in school?  Is there a problem with black culture?  You, careful as you can be, report the findings of people that you have carefully determined to be the most careful you can find, university professors.  So that you all can go on to the big question: What do blacks need to do to get out of the fix they're in?  Over the horizon is the question, What can whites do to help?  On the way home your wife tells you that you have hurt a lot of feelings and that you could wind up not being invited back.

So you see that you've got a prior problem.  Before worrying about speech or belief you've got to worry about where you are, whether you're in a tribe or not, and if you are in a tribe, which one?  You think you started in an academic tribe, which you think of as tribeless, and you think (because the good life is a life engagé) that the problem is to deliver a message, in this case a message presenting truths as objectively determined as human beings can make them.  That is, a message from scientists, our purest academics.  Just what warring tribes need.   And then you hear your tribeless tribe called "the tribe that kids themselves" and you realize you've got a problem prior to the prior problem.  Yes, the unexamined life is  "not worth living," and yes, Max Beerbohm, the examined life "is no bowl of cherries either," but jeez, you may not be up to this.

OK, pull back.  Take your pure academic, your scientist, down from his pedestal and put an orator on it, an expert in rhetoric, the art of care with people's feelings.  My Socratist friends will see an elevation of carelessness.  I see a necessary change in kinds of care.  I defy them.  "Yep, you got it right.  I'm going careless."

Then a voice: "And will you go careless any old way, any old time?"  That's Aristotle, thinking of everything, reducing your big talk again.  I have to admit that to be justifiably careless, as to be justifiably angry,  I've got to be careless "to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way."  For that I've got to pay close attention, and discriminate.  You know, be careful.  If I don't admit this I'm no longer in the Socratic circle at all.

What I have to keep in mind is the principle of due proportion.  Learned from a philosopher but taught most urgently in war, and most clearly in an amphibious landing.   A soldier's wedding ring catches on a metal fitting and tears his finger off as he leaps with his full-pack weight into an assault boat.  The officer in charge allows not a pause, not a deviation, in the forward movement of the landing.   We're late for the beach.  Late means the gunners behind the beach have time to get their heads up.  Possible slaughter.  Early means you're caught in the fire meant to suppress them.  Time is vital.  Pain in a boat, the agony now in the well, is peripheral.  Blood loss here is secondary, tertiary, exponentially tertiary, to what could be lost there — where the blood lost is itself secondary to the success of the assault, the accomplishment of the mission.  All in due proportion.

That's war.  New officers, recent civilians (think 1942), learn due proportion the hard way.  Marginalize what has to be marginalized, close your ears to peripheral noise, or else.  War is violent and awful, but it confirms what we (or maybe only close examiners) learn in the most peaceful life.  Fail to distinguish between a trivial and a non-trivial proof and you, mathematician, can waste a morning, a day, a week, a semester.  Care over the trivial is pedantry, and wastes life. 

You don't have to go to war or do proofs to learn due proportion.  Just take Freshman Composition.  Learn to delete whole paragraphs because they are immaterial to your case.  Develop a sense of relevance, an eye that discriminates.  Recognize a page that's been cleared of pedantry.   You'll make a fine officer.

Or, since due proportion is something you've really got to nail down, take an Interpretation of Poetry course.  What will this poem, this line, this image add to my understanding of life, and where the good is?   Is the line for the retina or the ear drum?  Or for the mind?  Is what I'm trying to understand vital or peripheral?  Or take a Criticism course.  Which brings the life-displaying poem closer, the heartfelt recommendation by your roommate or the microscopic analysis by the critic? the emphasis given by the reader or the bricolage offered by the theorist?  It's hard.  You go along marginalizing what you think has to be marginalized.  You note how it turns out.  You learn.

In an American Literature course you see how Captain Vere learned.  France, representing "unbridled and unbounded revolt," cannot be allowed to defeat England, representing "founded law and freedom defined."  That's vital.  Billy Budd's life, which must be taken if Vere's ship is not to contribute to that defeat, is marginal.  Billy is the figure writhing in the well of an LCVP.  Collateral damage.

The death of Socrates is collateral damage.  Preservation of the laws of Athens is vital.  Socrates' escape to avoid the legal sentence upon him, death, will undermine the laws.  Socrates chooses the vital and accepts his death as collateral.

Think you can avoid these difficult choices?  There's life, full of them, with labels you can barely read: "Probably leads to the good," "Tends toward the bad," "Could lead to the blessed," "Possibly leads to the cursed."  Think you can postpone them until you can read exactly, know certainly?  There's death, mortality, putting a limit on your time and ability, blurring your vision.  Your best result is only a probability, a hunch.  Not a proof but certainly not trivial.

So, to hang on to the engagement here, what's the lesson for today?  What are the choices my recent blog posts on black education point to?

Well, first, and in the end not least, there is the choice of whether or not to put quotation marks around the word "superior" in the expression, "superior Western civilization." Can I stand before my readers the way Edith Hall stood before  the readers of The New York Review (a fair sample of the Anglo intelligentsia), apologizing for what I teach? 

It depends on my audience.  With dinner-party guests the apologetic marks are OK.  Feelings are primary.  With anybody I'm teaching they're not OK.  With children they're obviously not OK.   Knowledge is primary, the surest knowledge, acquired the Western way.  The same with adults who are still children. 

How about visitors from developing nations, come to the West for a degree? multiplying the cultures represented in our classes and in our country.  Many of them, I find, are children with respect to Western civilization.  Nicholas Kristof's account (NYT, 2-21-16) of the education of Rafiullah Kakar confirms my finding.  Rafi's Pakistani mother sent him to a madrasa where he could memorize the entire Quran.  All he needed was an ear and a memory.  But Rafi, by a selection that seems almost miraculous, was introduced to Western education at a liberal arts college in South Dakota and his mind was changed.  He ended learning the highest degree of care in tutorials at Oxford. The minds of Pakistanis who came West to become doctors and engineers, he noted,  were not changed.  They had gained "the confidence of a university degree without the critical thinking that (ideally) comes from an acquaintance with the liberal arts."  That is to say, they were still children.

I teach (or taught) visiting students who are not engineers or doctors yet, and maybe won't be.  Lower level.  But Composition, so I have a chance with them.  Do I save their feelings?  "Your school, your madrasa, your way of doing things, your Muslim culture, your civilization, is as good as mine?" Let them go back home as innocent of critical thinking as Rafi's engineers were?  Stand before them, while they are here, as if I were ashamed of what I teach?  Ashamed of critical thinking? Not possible for an American teacher.  Screw the Anglo intelligentsia.

If I didn't believe that many blacks are still children I'd be making a whopping exception of blacks, since I believe that many adults of every other race are still children (see Post #1). But here in the United States the blacks who are still children are so much more a part of our future that their juvenility has to be a worry.  The fact that they are so much more in our face than the children of other races would itself make them a worry.  I mean hip-hop blacks, gangsta rap blacks, the ones I was listening to when I wrote Post 311, the ones Thomas Chatterton Williams had to rescue his education from at Georgetown University.  These juveniles have a lot of influence.  I think Williams' picture of them in Losing My Cool justifies my saying that.

And I've got to play my white teacher's part knowing they are there, children of a race my race has criminally abused.  And they know it.  I, teaching in Composition what distinguishes Western civilization, Socrates' way of gaining and using knowledge, am a criminal.  However I play it, my presentation has to acknowledge that.  But (here's the trick) in a way that lets me get the teaching done. 

I'll make a stab at it.  "OK, I'm a criminal.  But I'm a criminal bringing some gold for you."  I'll know I've succeeded when I hear them say, "Yeah, that's gold.  A superior metal."

That may not be the best play, or gamble, but I think it does the main thing, shift attention to the vital.  The what's taught rather than the teacher.  Get the marks of apology in the right place.

325. Arts Section vs. Science Times

The science section of the New York Times brings you up to date on the products of the kind of thinking I see as obligatory on followers of Socrates (academics, most clearly seen in scientists): the careful, skeptical reasoning that establishes reliable belief. 

The arts section brings you up to date on the products of the kind of thinking that for most of us makes life worth living and English professors worth hiring: the careful selection of parts of life that show how rich and stirring it is.  Imagining.  Most clearly seen in poets.

The news and editorial sections mainly show you the need for the first kind of thinking and the inadequacy of the second.  You put those sections down in the evening saying things like, "Goddamit, George Bush, make sure that belief in the existence of WMD is reliable" and "Ho there, John McCain, project the casualties in your intervention, compare them with those you'd intervene to stop, do the arithmetic."  Scientists do arithmetic.  Journalists, scientists working under a time constraint, give you good numbers and careful projections.

And because there is so much, visible from so many angles, to compare and calculate, they often leave you saying, "Oh, how complicated it all is!"  There are the Serbs doing all that damage in Kosovo.  How much damage in Belgrade will stop the damage in Kosovo?  OK, do it.  Oh my God we hit the Chinese embassy.   How soon will we hit a hospital?  Recalculate collateral damage.  Recalculate.

Poets — the term covers all storytellers and film-makers — are the darlings of the arts section but they are a danger in the world the news section reports on.  If they stir us enough (like with images of the collaterally wounded) we'll stop the bombing and let the wounding we wanted to stop go on — that wounding we were called on to stop, but which, at the moment, we have no stirring images of.  So we get a worse consequence than the collateral consequence of the primary consequence. Poets are so often, as the wise West-Winger in the TV program said, "new to consequences."

Collateral damage is a consequence of human inadequacy.  Our wartime Navy knew all about human inadequacy.  "Three percent never get the word," you were told the minute you started planning an operation.  Put a hundred boats in the water and three of them will be wandering around wondering where they are supposed to go.  Count on it.  The high purpose of the morning will leak away in the afternoon.

Write a law that requires all policing forces to treat all races and ethnicities the same and three percent are going to violate that law.  Count on it.  Somewhere in the United States there will be a Jefferson, Missouri, where the laws have changed but the men have not.

If you become a victim of men who violate the law what are the chances that you will accurately identify your victimizer?  Well, what are the chances that any of us will become a Socrates?  You know, see, under a death sentence, that you are "a victim not of laws but of men"?   How many victims of today will make that fine distinction and be at peace, as Socrates was in the Crito? 

Whatever the number, it is bound to be lower at times of pain and shock, as now with Ferguson and all the other displays of informal racism set before us on our screens.  Shock and pain bring forth poets, anecdotalists, like Ta-Nehisi Coates.  They make us who weren't there feel the pain, and see how we might have inflicted it, or, once, allowed by laws, did inflict it.  They provide material for those who work to change the laws.  And they work to change the men where it counts, inside.  That they also work less admirably — in moral upmanship, in guilt games, in Foucauldian power plays — does not diminish their accomplishment.  Poets are a help.  (See Post 321, on anecdotalists)

But they don't make the careful distinctions Socrates showed us how to make.  Coates, as his reviewer, Thomas Chatterton Williams pointed out (London Review of Books, 12-3-15), does not distinguish between behavior determined by white oppression and behavior determined by blacks themselves, nor, within white oppression, between morally fallible people and a morally culpable system — that is, between laws and men.

Williams, a black essayist living, like Coates, in Paris, does make those distinctions and, on questions like the disproportionate incarceration of blacks, is more the scientist.  Where Coates is simply indignant Williams cites a study (by Michael Javen Fortner, another black) showing that "working and middle-class black families for decades actively supported and sometimes participated in the implementation of many of the most notorious tough-on-crime measures that helped put the current US prison system in place."  Simple proportion, number of crimes to number in jail, but in the end, oh how complicated!   Williams the scientist asks, in the fraternal idiom, the vital question, "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?  This is a terrible question that any analysis of black life must eventually confront."  Coates the poet can't come close to such a question.  It would make his anecdotes less vivid, less stirring.

Stirring anecdotes are the enemies of due proportion.  In a news section that observes due proportion the vital will play big and the peripheral will play small.  Just the way they play in scientific analysis, where the distinction is vital academic business.  Collateral damage remains collateral.  Where the business is commercial or political — raising circulation figures, Nielsen ratings, or poll numbers — the collateral is promoted to the vital.  Donald Trump now leads in this promotion but Ta-Nehisi Coates, though not in Trump's class, is in the same business, rhetorical stirring.  Coates needs to suppress vital-peripheral proportioning in order to keep stirring what he's stirring.   It's the need that elsewhere puts Coates before Williams as a man "in ardent search of an affront."  

Passion got poets thrown out of Plato's Republic but passionate promoters of necessary revolutions, changers of bad laws, correctors of insidious attitudes, have an excuse.  It depends on what the times call for.  When revolutions succeed, laws are rectified and attitudes changed, the passionate lose their excuse, a question that immediately brings before us Ta-Nehisi Coates and his passionate book, his cri de coeur, Between the World and Me.  Has Coates lost his excuse?

Our answer will depend on how well we think the civil rights revolution succeeded, and the weight of that answer will depend on how well we distinguish the wrongs of laws from the wrongs of men. 

If you believe (as I do) that we are in the implementation phase of the civil rights revolution, which rectified the laws, then Coates can't be giving us what is called for in our time.  Cool problem-solving is called for.  What Williams is pointing us toward.  To me that means Western science.  What gives us, as its main gift to our daily lives, the solution to social, political, economic, practical problems.  Not the certain solution, not that ever, but the best solution possible to us in our time.  With careful Socratic, academic testing. 

We are so affluent in these solutions now that we forget how they are obtained.  Postmodern French philosophers, rolling since Pasteur in evidence-based benefits, have forgotten that there's a foundation for them, or even a need for a foundation.  We, with problems like low performance of blacks in school nagging us, are less likely to forget. 

It's clear to me that the solution of the performance problem lies in the application of and, most importantly, acceptance of the results of, scientific analysis.  If that analysis starts (as it is supposed to start) with  a realistic (some would say "unblinking") picture of the current state of affairs (some will say it's already started — in academic settings) it is bound to reach the point Williams foresees, where analysts will ask, "How much are blacks contributing to their own plight?"  Their answer, that result, when they give it, must be accepted as truth ("what has so far passed our most rigorous tests") by every follower of Socrates — which I take academics and want intellectuals to be.  That lets us go on, building from there.

Williams lets me imagine a common future; Coates does not.  With Williams I see a solid, cooperatively (though in the process painfully and shakily) built structure that will in the end hold the solution to the problem.  For Coates I see...what?  Nothing cooperative, certainly, nothing solid at the end.  Further cries of the heart, more sympathy maybe, changes in attitude that might gain better cooperation from whites, but not much cooperation, not much softening, on the black side.  Hardening rather.  There's that barrier between him and the world, built entirely by whites.  Why should he be expected to help tear it down?

So, throw him out of the Republic?  Not at all.  Attitudes, consciousness, still need to be changed, awareness expanded.  We can follow his success in the Arts Section, where I think his aspirations take him.  Williams' aspirations probably take him there too, but I think he'd like to see, certainly I'd like to see, results in the editorial section he could get some credit for.

What do we, citizens of a living republic, aspire to?  Continuation, I suppose, survival of the republic, in as lively a way as possible.  We can see how it's going each day in the news section.  Do we play no part?  Well, we cheer and we boo and we vote. 

And some of us play a larger part.  We sit on committees to advise on awards.  I see myself on one, selecting for the MacArthur.  It's going to Coates.  "No, no!  Give it to Williams!"  That's the modern equivalent of throwing Coates out of the Republic.  (Note:  Coates won his MacArthur in 2015, the year Between the World and Me won the National Book Award.)