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.)