340. Harvard's President and the War Between the Sexes

Punish university students for joining a private club?  That's a very big restriction of freedom.  How can President Drew Faust propose to do it at Harvard?  (See Post 339.)

It would have to be that joining one of those single-sex clubs will do harm to the university, to other students, or to the student's own education. That's all a university can be permitted to protect, and protection is, if we're still guided by John Stuart Mill, the only motive any of us is allowed as a justification for restricting freedom.

I have tried and tried and I am simply unable to see how joining one of these clubs  can harm the university or any of its students.  President Faust must have harm to the student's own education in mind.  Here that would clearly be education in acceptable ways to treat and speak of groups outside the longtime dominant group, white males.  For those who adhered to the old, unacceptable ways it would be re-education.

So Faust is conducting the proper business of schools, and Mill allows for it in the exception he makes for children and barbarians.  Such people have to be civilized and we give schoolteachers the power to restrict liberty until it's accomplished.  That's legitimate power.

Claim it for the president of Harvard, though, and I have to say wait a dog-boned minute.  Her restriction of the liberty of these students is justified, according to Mill, only if they're children or barbarians.  Is she taking Harvard men to be barbarians?  Possible case.  Children?  No, no, none at all.

Well, maybe she's abandoning Mill (as a guide; there's no question that in law Harvard can do what it wants to here).  Abandoning Mill in this manner, though some have done it, would at this point be very hard.  You can't remove in a day the support for the arguments (including hers) for liberty and tolerance we've been making all these years.  Not unilaterally, anyway.  I doubt that President Faust would do that, or want to.  Even if she hadn't noticed her slip from university president back to high-school principal. 

Puzzle over it long enough, cut through the sociological language, and maybe it will come to you, as it came to me: her actions are explained easily if you just see them as moves in a war.  With an enemy, and emotions, and all the escalations and descents and temptations that Clausewitz speaks of.  Here it's the old war between the sexes, and whether there was a peace or whether there was an armistice, she broke it.  And for the most common of reasons: one side goes past equality, the old maintainer of armistices, into preponderance of power, and is tempted to use it while they have it.  A few warrior types succumb to the temptation and boom, there goes the armistice.

Do you doubt that there's a war between the sexes?  Well, there's "The Wife of Bath's Tale" waiting for you to read, if you haven't already.  Or James Thurber's cartoons.  Do you think the weak don't build up resentment, and want revenge? There's Nietzsche, loaded, waiting for you.  And if you think the powerless who become powerful won't become intoxicated and play the old game you might try going back to your Foucault and reading again what he has to say about power, this time inverting it.

Taking it further, do you think that academics, searchers for truth, playing the power game (if they play it at all), wouldn't play to the crowd?  Do you think seekers of justice, the most pure, the women, wouldn't?  Adjust the frame on your Drew Faust picture.  You're at Harvard, the big arena.  Every articulate feminist will be watching.  In goes the sword, into the hump, between the horns.  Down goes the bull.  Give her an ear, comrades.

As you might guess, my juices are flowing.  But hell, didn't she start it?  Did she think no man would notice that denying scholarships and team captaincies to men who joined those clubs was a retributive act?  That men would just bear it?  That drawing pay from an Ivy League school made them wimps?  Forever?

I know the replies available to her, the big one being that the decorum and decency taught in lower schools have always been taught and enforced, though less directly, in colleges.  Once it was the D and D of Victorian times, now it's a different D and D.  Maybe better.  Maybe it's progress, which won't take place unless college presidents get behind it.  You can criticize it as "enforcing virtue the way the Puritans did" but the majority has always wanted to establish its kind of virtue.  By the test of what's allowed in mainstream publications the virtue called by its resisters "political correctness" now has majority backing.  It's the decorum and decency of our time.  It's what schools should encourage and if necessary enforce.  "I'm at Harvard and I'm enforcing it," can be her counterthrust.

I feel the weight behind it.  "Political correctness" keeps ethnic prejudice from getting started, and (the great lesson taught us by the Nazis) letting it start is a very dangerous thing to do.  She gets no resistance here.  Agreement and rejoicing rather.  (See my Post 319).

So I've got an irresistible opponent — until she locates herself, at Harvard.  There's where our quarrel is, over what kind of teaching and enforcing is justified at the university level.  And I am accusing her of taking us down in level to the high school and back in time to the nineteenth century. 

You punish one student in order to deter others, making them fear violation.  That's the way you spread virtue through a class of unruly boys in sixth-grade, in the room or out on the playground, where I have happily remembered barbarians being punished by enlightened women in the thirties, women, carriers of a higher civilization (Post 311).  The boys feared detention, in a corner, being deprived of bats and balls for a day.

What do the men of Harvard fear?  Look closely.  It's ridicule, satire, bites of wit from the more sophisticated, the cooler.  Nothing like the rod in the classroom, but a chiller here.  Just being thought uncool by the really cool.  Though it's incomprehensible at lower levels it's what the societies we consider most advanced, most enlightened, have counted on.  What men in a high civilization fear most is being put in a Dunciad, a Molière play, an Orwell novel.  On the local level a piece in the humor magazine or on the student op-ed, will do the job.  Satire and ridicule have worked well at this level for years.  But Drew Faust doesn't trust them.

I do, so my challenge is,  "Let our Popes and Swifts and Addisons do what your fiats do, Ms. Faust.  Trust them."  And my counter thrust: feel some fear yourself.  Beware a Juvenal, an Aristophanes.  In America beware a Holmes who decapitates moral bullies. The more you tremble at what you might find on Comedy Central the better you illustrate the superior force of educated disapproval.  Nobody is going to fire you, or deprive you of a grant.  That's not necessary at this level.

How do you avoid such cuts? By trusting the intelligence and sensitivity, the civilization, of your students, President Faust.  At the level of education they have already reached.  Even the men.

339. Keep Trump's Backlash Vote Going, Harvard

All of us puzzling over the great male flame for Donald Trump have some news from Harvard that we need to consider.  The college, according to an announcement by President Drew Faust, is going to punish students who join a single-sex club.  According to the Economist (5-14-16) she has the old all-male clubs in her sights.  Is this the gasoline?

Suppose you long ago recognized the misogyny in clubs like the Porcellian, suppose you're ashamed that Harvard did not admit women until 1977, suppose you're embarrassed still by the figures showing how many women report "non-consensual sexual contact" with club members.  You're sorry.  And then you read that any student who joins your club will "not be allowed to lead official campus groups or captain sports teams" or "be eligible for some scholarships."  

I'm thinking of the old boy who fears being called an old boy, or being associated with old boys, and who, though recognizing patriarchy's injustice to women, and genuinely regretting the misogyny,  still has a little old boy, or middle boy, or shit any kind of boy in him.  How much can he let women do to him?  All right, you got me down, and I said uncle, but God damn it do you have keep beating my head on the pavement?

That's the street educated, the scrapper, the Norman Mailer.  The pipe-smoker is saying, "What about freedom of association?  What about 'safe spaces' women want set aside for themselves?  What about black student centers, and those rooms where minorities could be 'culturally comfortable'?  What about the principles advanced in arguing for these things?  What about the logic that requires consistency between principles and practice?

That's a guess at what's in the minds of males at each end of the spectrum, and it could be wrong.  If it is, though, what is behind these astonishing vote totals for an obvious incompetent?  

338. Poem About Obama at Hiroshima

Obama at Hiroshima

Right there looking at it,

in the pool of horrors.

The fountain, Barack, is elsewhere,

is man's pride (see Dante, long ago).

Also from the fountain modern medicine, symphonic music,

     internet communication, and every secular

     accomplishment since Dante (long ago),

from the sins he rendered in earth,

as a mountain, Purgatory, terraced,

Pride at the bottom, holding them all up.

Yeats rendered it in fire,

     penicillin, miracle rice, Congo conquests, grape-shot,

     quantum mechanics, cancer-cutting lasers,

dynamite, gas, liftoff.

"Whatever flames upon the night,
man's own resinous heart has fed."

337. Get Off Trump, Get on Education

 Individual fools are no threat in a democracy; it's masses of fools we have to worry about.  And man, do we ever have one in the vote for Donald Trump.

Wasn't education supposed to take care of that?  Wouldn't schooling, open to all, save us from the folly monarchists were sure democracies fell into?  Didn't Thomas Jefferson assure Lafayette that, after thirty-four years of it in independent America, "The yeomanry of the United States are not the canaille of Paris," the mob demagogues deceive?

  

Well, apparently not so, or not so now.  And I just got a clue to a possible reason, in the Huffington Post, reporting the results of a study by  the Center for Information and Research on Civil Learning & Engagement at Tufts University.  In our high schools the number of required civics courses is down and the number of quickly graded, objective tests is up.  "States are, to a greater extent, using multiple-choice only tests that focus primarily on memorizing information, rather than demonstrating civic skills” (HuffPost Education, 10-12-12). 

The HuffPost analyst believes that "the shift away from civic education over the past decade can be partially attributed to federal policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top" and fixes a lot of the blame on those policies.  I can see why, but I would be more convinced if there weren't so many now playing the blame-your-favorite-bogey game.  And since so many things contribute to an education in critical thinking, the great demagogue-protection skill, I'm not sure of the weight here. 

One thing I'm sure of is that an inability to think clearly and critically will show up in argumentative essays required in English Composition.  Indeed, in argumentative essays, maybe in exposition essays, maybe just in essays, in any course.  With every subject of any complexity the sub-subject is "How to Think," isn't it?  No wonder now that above every college teacher watching the Trump crowd pops the cartoon bubble: "Where the hell were these guys when the marked-up essays were handed back?"

Yes, I know, a lot of them were not in college but off working at the jobs left over after the steel mills closed.  But, by the vote totals from the affluent suburbs, a lot of them were in college.  Taking English Comp.  And all those other courses you flunk if you don't learn to think.  What do we conclude?

First, the conclusion we'd all like to avoid: that Jefferson was wrong to trust the yeomanry.  The common man's gut, despite temporary control by his educated brain, will rule in the end.  So hear Trump, cheer Trump.  On the farms, in the suburbs,  it's canaille (from Italian canaglia, pack of dogs) all the way up.

With Jefferson down, down goes Rousseau, and all the endowments of the natural man trusted in the French Revolution.  And indeed, in every revolution we call Enlightened.  But we have to stop here.  America at this stage of her development can't draw such conclusions. 

There are sweeter ones.  The capable, conscientious but dyslexic fellow, quick with his hands but slow with the his words, who sits in the back longing to make wooden cabinets, drops out, does carpentry, has children, makes enough money to move to the suburbs — he's much too busy to detect the red-mark faults, the looseness, the wag, the fork in the tongue.  He's not canaille.  The tide of Trump testosterone just catches him — with how many others? — and he goes along.

A not-so-sweet conclusion about the suburban vote, one professors are prone too, is that there are a lot of capable-but-not-conscientious types out there, student playboys and playgirls who, in their phrase, "could care less" about poetry and prose.  How many contacts would that get for you on the golf course?  How many votes for fraternity queen?

Another conclusion is that the power of education has just been overwhelmed by the power of silent, bottled up resentment.  Republicans bottled up resentment over the share-of-wealth figures, the one percent slice, by holding over it the capitalist club: outcries ignited class warfare, and made you Marxist.  Bernie Sanders sees what's bottled and pulls the cork.  Donald Trump did the same with political correctness, the silly one percent, resentment kept silent under the liberal club: outcries made you a beast or bigot.  The cork he pulled flooded even the suburbs.

I have to believe that such defeats are temporary.  In the long run education will win.  For one thing time in language-sharp courses makes you better at ridicule, that great anglophonic alternative to political violence.  Makes you appreciate it, at least, and enjoy programs like The Daily Show.  As long as Jon Stewart and his like have large audiences I don't think we'll have to worry, not for long, about Donald Trump and his like.  The English majors in the suburbs, in America, will eventually take him down.

336. Odysseus Has Your Back, Donald

Isn't this something?  Our political analysts, by the number of explanations they are pouring out, must be completely stumped.  It's probably the most urgent, difficult case they've ever seen.  With only one person out of the way Donald Trump could be President of the United States!  In a matter of months.  This fellow who can't even talk straight. 

Are the Republican males who got him nominated not listening to him?  Is a fifth of the electorate deaf?  If they are — or worse, if they are not — what does that say about democracy's faith in the common man?  Oh our poor, naive Founders.

Worse yet now, after the New York primaries, what does it say about the educated man?  Surveys (NYT, 4-28-16) show that he went for him too.  There in the well-off suburbs.  Oh our poor high-school civics teachers.  Hell, our poor Ivy League professors.

In Post 34 I offered my own explanation: that it's backlash against political correctness, which is essentially a backlash against Christian love.  There is a question, though, of whether it's love that's being lashed at or whether it's the way it's being channeled.  Huck Finn is lashing back at nicey-nice, Miss Watson's way of channeling it — sort of the way Nietzsche's aunts channeled it to him, provoking his gigantic backlash.  If it's just the extremes political correctness has gone to, into blue-nose finger-wagging, then Christian love is safe and Trump's people don't look so bad.  If it's not then the U.S. is in deeper trouble than anybody realized.

You have to remember, we're not talking about Trump's astonishing support, we're talking about what's fueling it.  Whether these males will admit it or not.  They might tell a visiting journalist or exit pollster that they voted for Trump because they're sick of losing jobs and being neglected and seeing America taken advantage of, and they might be right, but here we're not believing it.  Those are good, respectable reasons, and good respectable reasons are given in public when the real reason is not respectable.

Here the real reason, down deep, is that they're sick of being required to show love.  They're sick of being rebuked for insensitivity, for being unhelpful to the handicapped, cold to the foreigner,  suspicious of the sexually different, blind to the racial and ethnic marks of suffering.  They're sick of tip-toeing around the emotionally fragile.  But most of all  they're sick of being reprimanded by a lot of gah-dam pussycats.

And on top of all this they're sick of the gag order society has put on them.  They can't reply to the pussycats. The speech of liberal, educated, enlightened Americans is now the national norm.  Violate it and your offense goes viral.  Along with all the tuts from the pussycats.  Up on the moral high ground.  Who, in our country, can talk back to anybody up there?

Ah, but as a voter anybody can.  With anonymity.  So, the testosterone-swollen male goes into that voting booth and casts a ballot for Donald Trump.  That'll stir 'em up.  Hens, you want to squawk?  Here's something you can squawk about.  Pundits, you want to analyze motives?  Well analyze this.

Oh blessed anonymity.  As one dog at his computer said to the other dog at his computer, "Nobody knows we're dogs."  Nobody knows that the votes that turned Trump's total from large to overwhelming, and kept it there, came from people in whose mouths butter wouldn't melt.  Or in which it melted only in the hearing of an interviewer alert to causes and stands, movements against oppression, cries for deserved attention.  This is no place, reporters, to listen for movement in the grass roots.  No, no, the back story here is hormonal.

What, even the educated, the highly educated, driven by their hormones?  Of course.  They're men, aren't they?  It won't come out though, especially these days, until they get some anonymity, and feel safe.  Didn't we have a university president a while back who felt so safe in his office on Sunday afternoons that he made obscene phone calls?  Full of hate speech.  There's pressure in every male.  My most liberal colleague saw what he thought would be its most comical, but plausible, release: leaving the party drunk, going out in the car with his buddy, closing the doors tight, and yelling, "Nigger! Nigger!  Nigger!" at the tops of their voices.  He was a good Presbyterian.  For too long, I guess.

Underestimate the thrill of transgression  and we miss what's behind the rise in Trump's vote after Mitt Romney scolded him.  Romney's the schoolmarm, adding spice to badness with every wag of the finger.  You can't talk back to her in class, she's so smart, she's so good, but find yourself alone? with the means at hand?  Voilá the vote, a dirty phone call to Miss Watson.  It's the bad boy talking back to the good woman.  The dumb student talking back to the smart ones.  Yeah, talking back to the prof, the liberal intellectual, moonlighting to think tanks.  Well, baby, here's the total we're building up in the suburbs.  Put that in your tank and think it.

Yes, you can hear pressed American testosterone talking back to American liberals, American panty-waists, American women, but if you're a historian you can hear more.  You can hear all the testosterone in the ancient world talking back to Christianity, the religion that, with the backing of slaves and women, won out over noble Roman worship of the emperor, a being who had some balls.  It's what was working in Odysseus when he put out the eye of the Cyclops and showed he was rich in "spirit," a wealth Christians were to gain by showing meekness, and humility, and patience under persecution, estrogen-fed virtues.  It's what was working in Sir Thomas Malory's peers when, despite his many violations of the Peace of God (the church's attempt to "Christianize the feudal structures of society through non-violent means" — Wiki), they kept him in good standing as a knight. 

Christian love has a long history of conflict with what's powering Trump and charging up his followers.  And it has a long history of humbling those so powered.  When the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire offended he he had to go barefoot to Canossa and confess to the Pope.  When a contemporary politician offends he has to go on TV and confess to the American public.

In every era you can hear "real men" gagging at such sights.  And, from one era to the next, feel what's happening to the old testosterone.  Love, sliding century by century into sensibility, into psychology, and into, now, politics, cuts off the flow, raising the pressure.  And raising resentment, oh the resentment.  There's the power.  The resentment of the morally conquered.  Not as strong as the ressentiment of the physically conquered (Nietzsche), maybe, but still, in a breakout, strong enough to flood a convention.

335. Donald Trump's Deep, Respectable Power Source

Adam Gopnik once said, of a very gifted columnist (I think it was Walter Lippmann — it's been too long), that more important than giving liberals their arguments, he "showed them how to sound."  The right note for an untuned, uncertain orchestra.  And that, I think is what Trump does for his ragged band.  To the violins: don't sound apologetic.  To the brass: end on a note of confidence.  What Trump's followers mean when they say, "He tells it like it is" is, "He shows us how to sound."  The manly sound is more important than the sense.

We know well by now what the resulting senselessness brings on.  English teachers up the wall.  Logic teachers with their heads in a bowl.  TV satirists, party wits, everybody in the game enjoying the low bar, having a field day.  The well-educated never had such a chance to display their worth. 

And I am in the crowd, applauding.  I can't leave, however, without wanting to post a warning.  First, if we hear in Donald Trump just a sound we miss what even the basest notes should tell us: that this is an expression of one of the fundamental forces in human life.  It goes by various names, like "will to power."  I name it "testosterone" but whatever it's called it's eternally set against this other great force in our lives, the instinct to love and be kind and considerate — out of (to me) an opposing estrogen. 

My warning is like the warning a colleague, Edgar Whan, issued to me about a student radical in the sixties as we stood listening to one of the fellow's radically absurd speeches.  "Don't laugh so hard," said Whan.  "He's trying to tell you something.  He may not be telling it very well, and he may not understand it very well himself, but it's important.  And you better listen."

What, listen to a twenty-year-old so full of juice that he thinks he can end an argument by zipping up his jacket and saying, "Bullshit"?  He thinks that's the way do it, that's all it takes, energy and conviction?  Passionate intensity?

Why would anybody with an office in the ivy want to listen to testosterone?  That's what George W. Bush listened to.  C-student, fraternity-president testosterone.  That's what made us invade Iraq, wasn't it, rationalized testosterone?

It's so hard to say a good word for testosterone these days, after all that it's gotten us into.  If only we didn't have such short memories, such short lives.  We forget that the days we live in are particular days, bringing particular gifts.  In our day the gift is security and affluence and time to attend to moral and esthetic refinements.  We have to have lived very long to know days that were otherwise, with no such gift.  Either that or be able to read history with a very creative, or re-creative, imagination.

What I would like to have my contemporaries re-create, to the point of getting inside of, is the child in Europe, needing protection, watching the lines of Nazi advance on newspaper maps, on and on, towards him or her.  John Updike brought me close to that when he recalled watching Allied armies "fleeing like harried insects" on the maps he had spread out on his living room floor in Pennsylvania, early in the war.  I had done the same thing.  But we weren't children in Europe.  Neither was Meg Greenfield, but she was a Jew, and when she in Newsweek delivered her message to her young contemporaries (essentially, "you know the Allies were going to win; we didn't") she brought us about as close as we're going to get to that European child.

In that child, stripped of our security and affluence, we ask in fear, "What will stop the Nazi armies?"  And the answer, I think, has to be "testosterone," as we have been conceiving it. You can't control testosterone without drawing on it.  It's the back fire that stops the fire heading for the town.  With the Nazi fire nothing else will do.  Years of enlightened emptying, privileged peace, may conceal the need, but one Hitler will reveal it.

I don't know what the equivalent of that is in government, in politics, in the choices offered the American voter, but surely it's something we can't afford to kill, or hoot entirely off the stage.  We need aggressiveness, we need competitiveness, we need the last-ditch, dig-in, goal-line pride. 

Recognize that need and we at least won't take Trump as a joke, an opportunity for wit.   As the noise of the crowd and the size of his vote should tell us, Trump's testosterone must be treated with respect, meaning treated the way Clausewitz advised us to treat war.  "Don't be casual about it.  You're handling fire."  Maybe a threat to life, maybe a preserver of it, but certainly fundamental to it.

So as a nation we've just got to live with testosterone.  That will be hard, especially for academics.  A balancing act.  We've got to respect it and value it for what it can do and at the same time educate it so we can stand to listen to it.