369. The Confusing of the American Mind

In the preceding post I told Donald Trump to quit listening to fantasists on global warming and go to a university and listen to some professors.  Get the facts from those whose reliability is established by tests, one version against another.  I spoke to him as if he were an eight-year-old.

Now I'm wondering about the speaking (condescension) and the testing (reliability). 

Reliability first.  Trump will find that the odds on factual reliability are not going to be the same in every department.  In general they will be lower in the humanities than in the sciences, lower in the soft sciences than in the hard sciences, and lower in English and sociology departments than in others.  And the odds will vary over time.

Time. The long decline in respect for fact that we see in our nation is also visible in our universities, and indeed may have started there.  It was just fifty years ago, in a famous lecture at Johns Hopkins University, that Jacques Derrida injected skepticism about fact into the English department bloodstream, and from there maybe into the bloodstream of humanities departments, and social studies departments, and who knows.  I see it as an infection.

How far it has broken out on the public skin I don't know.  We in the Ohio University English Department spoke theory to each other in our cloister, as academics do, and only if we were overheard would we have contributed to any decline in the public arena.

And you have to consider that most literary theory would have been incomprehensible in that arena.  The eavesdroppers would have to have picked up the talk it generated, as the wave from France carried us along.  A moment at a department meeting showed me its power.  In a discussion of budget reductions our chair used the word "fact" and then added — wryly or sincerely I don't know — "if there is such a thing."

In the simplification I made of the philosophical conflict behind his addition (Post 97), one Smothers brother against the other, the fact-minded brother, Dick, says, "Your shirttail is out," and the motive-minded brother, Tom, replies, "Why do you  hate me?"  French psychoanalysis, or subjectivity, wins out over British empiricism, or objectivity.

I linger on this because it bears on such a serious question: To what extent are American academics responsible for the present confusion in the American mind?  If today's Trump voters are lashing back were we, when we condescended to them — down there so pathetically behind the postmodern wave — were we among the lashers?

Condescension now.  Finding myself too confused to make analytical sense I wrote a poem showing the extent of my confusion:

I hate being told it's all relative especially after I've laid out evidence for global warming which will do in your grandchildren no matter who you are and worst of all when it's Donald Trump blowing off the evidence because he's going to be the President and I hate stupidity in Presidents yes stupidity which I can say because I have already in a post instructed him as if he were in kindergarten which is terribly condescending which if I am to anybody but Trump I get scolded but not when I condescend to him because I guess if you say two million people voted illegally and Barack Obama is not a citizen you ought to be condescended to and even called stupid because you're not in the tribe of thinking people who look for evidence and that's our tribe so whether you can condescend or be condescended to depends on the tribe you're in it's all relative.

368. It's Easy, Mr. Trump, to Take the Right Position on Global Warming.

Sure, you don't have the time and the know-how to do the research yourself.  You don't know, apparently, the scientific method.  You don't have a system.  But sensible gamblers have one.  Why not follow it?

It's all probability.  Odds.  What are the chances that this person or that person knows whether or not the planet is warming, and whether or not the cause is under human control? 

Well, who has the best record reporting facts, and who has the best record explaining them?  Here you have to know a little history.  If you do you're led to the class of people called scientists.  Their track record is so much better than any others you'd be a fool not to bet on them.  History is packed with fools who bet on people who are not scientists — astrologers, alchemists, theologians, prophets, seers of all kinds.  You know them, though lately many have gone by other names — theosophists, homeopathologists, conspiracy theorists.

 But what are the odds that the scientist you go to is a real scientist?  A lot of people who have called themselves scientists (think Christian scientists, think scientologists) really aren't. 

Here the odds aren't so firm because a lot of scientists do their work outside the places where they are usually gathered, universities.  But the odds of finding them outside are low.  Go to a university and the odds are much higher.

You apparently, from the global-warming denier you have picked to lead your transition team for the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the deniers you have chosen so far for your cabinet, don't believe this.  Here you need to know more about science.  Not much more.  What was taught in your ninth-grade general science course will do.  Scientists are reliable sources of knowledge because they can't say they have it until they've submitted what they think they know to a lot of tests, tests by evidence and logic, tests they can count on other scientists to conduct.  If they aren't willing or able to do this they, no matter how welcome they are on internet sites, are not welcome in universities.

In universities, in departments assigned to seek reliable knowledge in the area you are interested in, hard science departments, you'll find the people best equipped to answer your question.  But not because they are smarter, and members of an elite, but because they test each other's answers to questions, and rely only on what has stood up, so far, against those tests.  And open themselves to anybody able to test — you know, with evidence and logic.

These are real horse people, Donald, not touts.  You have surrounded yourself with touts. The kind you find at every track.  Smart gamblers laugh at them.  They test only each other.  In a chamber full of echoes.

Is it too late for you to get smart?  This is one of the most important races you'll ever have to bet on, Donald.  You could lose the farm by betting on the wrong horse.  Everybody's farm.

367. Discrimination, Prejudice, Carelessness, and the Preservation of Democracy

"If democracy is about participating in self-government, its first requirement is a supportive culture, a complex of beliefs, values, and practices that nurture equality, cooperation, and freedom."

Oh how those who have rooted for the success of young democracies — in Europe after the French Revolution, in South America after Bolivar, in Africa after colonialism, in half the world after 1945 — have to believe Sheldon Wolin's words.  Democracies grow only in a supportive culture, and there seem to be only a few of these.  Americans are lucky that so many squires in seventeenth-century England, rather than fight, said what they did to each other: "Let us reason together."  That they had the kind of culture that supported that kind of character.

But we don't have to look abroad.  We've seen how easily indifference to the cultural inheritance can jam the democratic works.  Newt Gingrich ignored the unwritten rules, rules never supported by anything but that inheritance, and shut down the government.  Mechanics alone, the strictest constitution in the world, can never keep a democracy going.

Some doubt that, outside of a few fortunate Northern European countries and their migrating descendants, it can be kept going.  Democracy "soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself," said John Adams, long before African and South American experience lay before us.  Adams was looking back, in 1814, at what had happened in France and the rest of Europe after the Revolution.  "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide," he could understandably conclude.

It makes you sympathize with the French effort to preserve laicité, or secularity, keeping religion out of government and state policies.  They're trying to hang on to the values of their revolutionary generation.

I have heard Americans speak of laicité as if it were just another peculiarity of "those funny Frenchmen."  That's so careless.  The Frenchman's goal can't just be the goal of a nationality or party or class or race.  It has to be the goal of everybody who roots for democracy.  Theocracy, at the bottom of so many religious slopes, is the death of democracy.

Prime Minister Erdogan in Turkey is showing us right now how slippery the slope is.  Come in as a Muslim demonstrating how committed a Muslim government can be to Western democratic values, experience some extraordinary stress, and where are you?  Throwing 120 independent journalists in jail (see last week's papers) and carrying your nation another mile closer to the theocratic bottom demanded by literal interpretation of your Scripture.

"Demanded."  That's logical demand, not popular demand.  The people, the ones identified as Muslims in our society, may be as undemanding of theocracy as any democrat.  You can be assured of that by induction from their general behavior, as revealed in surveys.  Deduction from their Scripture, however, can put them only in one place, on the theocratic bottom, the same place deduction from the Jewish Scripture puts Jews.  Scripture says God gave you certain property so you settle on it.  Scripture says God gave you orders to acquire safe territory for believers so you go for it.

That's the bottom some law of religious gravity seems to pull culturally attached people toward.   Any time they relax — or, since this is religion we're talking about, "tighten up" —  it exerts itself.  With Jews and Muslims the bottom of the slope (not to be confused with the fallacious slope in logic), that bottom is theocracy, rule by God. 

Inner-world and other-world religions will have different bottoms, but Islam and classical Judaism are outer-world, and their bottom is action on earth.  Though Christianity  is mixed, with some sliding toward inner purity and others toward a world-rejecting heaven, no reader of the New Testament can slide toward worldly possessions.  And that's what the Promised Land and Allah's Caliphate are.

What the careful will be doing is discriminating among religions and, if they have responsibility, acting in a way consistent with what they find.  If Wolin is right, that means that Americans looking at newcomers will have to distinguish cultures supportive of democracy from cultures destructive of it.  Baldly, in today's terms, they will have to "practice discrimination."  Which ones are subject to the law of religious gravity?  Which will slide to a worldly bottom and which ones won't?  The bottom is where you quit celebrating diversity.

How various the bottoms of the world's religions are.  A hermit's cave, an ascetic's pillar, a crusader's ship, a missionary's hut, a leper's colony nursing station, a ghetto's soup kitchen, a zipperless wardrobe, a platoon of self-lashers, a hill where infidels' heads are cut off.  Extremes, but occupied because what they are extremes of is admired further up the slope, by the moderates of the religion.  Believe self-denial is holy and the man living on a pillar becomes the holiest of holy men, a cultural hero.  Crave heroism in that culture, crave it to the point of sickness — as the unfulfilled, the failures, the crushed and unworthy, the lost adolescents do — and you climb a pillar and try to burn out your eyes looking at the sun.

Distinguishing among religions according to their bottoms, where terrorists are found, is not prejudice but (if you're going to play the put-down word-game at all) judice, its lift-up opposite.  Careful judgment.  Only the most careless multiculturalism will give it up.

Judice here results in likelihood, not certainty, and does not justify injury of anybody.  It tells you, inside the country, which newcomers may need a culture-change, may need re-education.  Like profiling , another precise word dragged into the put-down game, it tells you which people need special observation.

Special observation.  Be ready to hear, "Police state!" if not "Bigotry!" and "Prejudice!" from the careless.  The motives are fear of offending, wounding, alienating.  All good motives, but we know how often goodness blinds us to carelessness, and here carelessness can poison us.  Our officials doing the observation are trying to protect this rare and fragile thing, democracy.

We observe, and distinguish, and most of the time it is unnecessary.  Nearly all newcomers learn quickly and become better informed about American government and values than natives are.  They are less of a threat to democratic government than Newt Gingrich is.  By the second generation there is no question that they have absorbed the culture that Wolin says democracy needs to maintain itself.

But not all of them, and it's their treatment that tests our minds when our hearts go out — in welcome, in tolerance, in humanity, in Christian love, and sometimes, yes, in habit and reflex — to newcomers and foreigners.  We pass or fail according to what we come up with.  We'll know we've failed when we get hauled before a European court for crimes against humanity, or, at the other end, when we get mugged by what we smiled at. 

It's very hard ahead of time to know what's best, but we make it easier if we constantly keep in mind our main goal:  keeping our culture supportive of democracy.  We make it a lot harder if we take that to be the same as keeping it white.  Anybody who makes any skin color the problem or the solution makes it harder.  Toni Morrison, whatever her service to racial justice, makes it immeasurably harder (think of her prestige!) when she tells us, as she did in the 11-21 New Yorker, that

all immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

No, no, Toni, not "emphasize their whiteness" but emphasize their commitment to "equality, cooperation, and freedom," the values Sheldon Wolin says are necessary.  Whiteness is not "the unifying force," culture is.  The definition of Americanness cannot be color; it has to be "a complex of beliefs, values, and practices."  If that's not what "a real authentic American" is, then down we all go into the pit John Adams saw waiting for us, the last self-murdering democracy on the pile.

366. Normalizing Trump. What a Challenge!

"Normalize" is the common name for what we Americans now have to do in our thinking about Donald Trump.  It makes me think about how English Composition is taught in our colleges.  "Nothing works if your reader doesn't trust you," says the teacher, "and an educated reader doesn't just give you his trust; you've got to earn it.  What you write for him (or her) has to stand up under critical examination." 

A President of the United States can't help being a teacher, and I don't have to tell my readers what Trump will be teaching the young.  Not just that it's OK to grope women but that what their English teachers tell them is all wrong. "Don't worry about critical examination.  They'll believe it because you tell them."  I don't want that normalized.

You'll know I'm not making Trump's message too extreme when you remember his claims that the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese, that President Obama's birth certificate is a computer-generated forgery, and that police are now being shot at record levels.  When that got lapped up "critical examination" went out the window.

Why were we teachers so shocked?  Trump was speaking to uneducated readers.  For them critical examination is always out the window.  The shock must have come from the fact that more than a few of the uneducated held college degrees.

Critical thinking has a good name with everybody but not everybody understands that it comes down to just reading and writing well, what's taught in schools, and not just colleges.  Think hard enough  about what you're trying to say and what somebody else is saying to you and you win the compliment.  How else?  Not by meditations in your closet.

We believed that so easily and for so long that we forgot, until this election came along, how important the concept of "an educated person" was to it.  Sure, we knew that smart orators could lead lazy listeners around by the nose, but we expected to see them blush later.  If they didn't we thought we could make them blush.  First it was, "That's not grown-up" then it was, "That's not educated," or, end of the line, the blunt "That's wrong-headed."  Blushes show that the ideal of the educated person is still alive.

That backward-looking English teachers are now hyper-alert for blush possibilities won't surprise anybody.  Nor that they are  often disappointed.  Look at a Trump crowd.  Not a blush in sight, with none foreseeable.  And there are college graduates there.

I am suspicious of broad explanations but I have one here.  It begins with our ability to say, "That's wrong-headed."  And it requires a historical eye to see that in time, in more and more American universities, you couldn't have a wrong head, or be said to have one. 

If you bore the marks of a handicap, for example, your head was off limits.  That was first.  Then if you bore other marks, of deprivation, of persecution, of poverty, of deep disadvantage, of a tragic history.  Good people honored those marks and were honored for their honoring.  In the university showcase the educated person began to be replaced by the good person. 

Can that kind of replacement ever be a bad thing?  Yes, exactly in what we're talking about, the university.  And, I would say, eventually in the nation as a whole.  Eventually because in the short term goodness can so often have a legitimate lease.

It can't have a long lease because it can't make the decisions that keep a democracy going.  The uneducated, whom I see as children, cannot do that.  Democracies have to be run by grown-ups.  Who can discipline children.  With the approval of the other grown-ups.  Otherwise the children, assured of their own goodness, will be making decisions, and decisions made by the simply good, we certainly ought to know by now, can be terribly wrong.  You've got to use your head, and have the right kind, an educated head.

I think down deep we all know this but we have trouble doing what our knowledge requires of us.  And I think that in America it's harder than in other places because our founding required a faith that can't help endangering our maintenance: faith in "the common man."  That is, the voter.  And to build up that faith and keep it going we had to praise and praise him.

So in our country the common man joins the deprived and persecuted as somebody very hard to call wrong-headed, though we all should know that such people have to be as capable of wrong-headedness as anybody.  (If we think they aren't, aren't we're bigots, condescending to lesser breeds?  No, wrong-headedness has to be open to all, without respect to race, creed, class, or color.)

So there's the common man now, voting commonness into the highest office.  And we're feeling the ties around our tongues.  We want to say that, even if he has a diploma on the wall, it's his defects, his low thrill threshold, his susceptibility to factless persuasion, his easily triggered outrage, that are killing us.  "Your head's on wrong."  But that's a slur, and destructive of the faith we need.  

So, do we give up trying to make him blush?  Give up on the model we matched him against, hoping for a blush?  Give up on the ideal of the educated person?

Right now we face stronger inducements to give up than we have ever faced in our country's history.  If for four years we keep using bad names for the man the wrong-headed elected, making him out as some sort of abnormality, we could so bitterly alienate his followers that we could endanger the democratic polity that supports us all.  Better by far to treat him as normal.  Within the range, anyway.

But, God help us, we can't treat wrong-headedness as normal.  We teachers can't give up our ability to get a blush, to make lazy or resisting heads turn.  We can't give up on the ideal of an educated person. 

And that presents us with a towering challenge in tact, in diplomacy, in verbal agility, in all pragmatic maneuver.  Add what it will require in the way of intellectual discipline and internal fortification and the challenge appears to me as great, in its way, as any we have ever faced in war.  We've got to normalize Trump without normalizing anything he stands for.

That's necessary, but viewed day to day it looks impossible.   Acting as if a head's on right while knowing that it's on wrong?  Protecting it from injury while wanting to injure it with words?  Going along with the uneducated while hanging on to your ideal of education?  Saying uncritical things about them while thinking critically?  It's too much to ask, America, of your citizens, the ordinary citizens your Thomas Jefferson counted on to become educated, and extraordinary, and extraordinarily helpful.

So that's the challenge, to do more than anybody has a right to ask you to do.  Except, maybe, Thomas Jefferson.

365. Poem Addressed to Trump Supporters

I know I shouldn't condescend to you I have all this privilege and I worry all night about my condescension but jesus couldn't you worry a little about why you're being condescended to I mean wouldn't it be better for the country if you put down that twittering piece of plastic for awhile and went home and opened some books and real newspapers and studied you know studied what you didn't do in study hall because it was bohohohoring and you were much happier playing grab-ass in the lunch line?

Oh no I've gone too far making assumptions jumping to conclusions and I learn how far when the new york times writers who never jump to conclusions show me how much a victim you are of forces that take jobs away from everybody who's not a college graduate and I understand you've got to protest so though I don't understand why you have to protest through an incompetent boor I'll at least try to condescend less callously.

Because jesus I have to condescend or do something scold lecture bawl out mock to get you to change or the whole country's going to go down the tube and fill up with grab-ass (male and female ass) louts canaille lumpen bourgeois my god what am I saying that's the common man I an American am talking about.

I'm saying we've got to do something about this but all my classmates who because they were tall sat with the lazy indifferent ones along with the sweetly slow forgivable ones in the back of the room tell me it should have been done long ago change their habits and attitudes, change their approach to life, change their what do you call it culture.

Then I hear or remember hearing don't change it live with it celebrate diversity and I say are you out of your fucking mind live with assholes I mean canaille I mean lumpen bourgeois I mean do the men have to be this common?

364. Reversing the Great Shift in Higher Education

The shift within our universities, as I've explained in preceding posts, is from neutrality to advocacy, or, from a teleological view, from knowledge to goodness.  The enablers, as I will explain here, are Germans, scholars who were so expert and thorough that they captured the imagination of every young American scholar who in the nineteenth century came to them — and then, models of expertise and thoroughness, went home and captured the imagination of everybody building or expanding an American university.

In universities formed on that model the standard is competence within a field, with fields represented by departments — which, with the primacy of competence, might as well have been called compartments.  Examining, hiring, tenuring, promoting, and judging publications were pretty well walled off from the rest of the university.  If they weren't, there was constant pressure on administrators to treat them as if they were.

That compartmentalization, for all that it furthered the advancement of knowledge and the reputation of the university, hindered the solution of a recurring problem: bad department behavior — departments "getting away with things," as members of other departments might put it.

The correction of bad behavior depended, in the end, on the ability of the dean to break in and give orders.  Cease and desist.  That was never going to be easy, but when a department had a couple of Nobel winners, and had given the university a worldwide reputation, and enabled the university president to enjoy that reputation when he (male in those days) sat with other presidents, and solicited gifts from alumni, it was extremely hard.  So universities generally went along with the Germanic tide. 

Now we have departments sliding into advocacy of good causes — racial justice, gender equality, ethnic pride.  That's good behavior.  Good behavior out in the world, that is.  In a university it is bad, and we can't let any department get away with it.

So how do we deal with a famously good department?  With difficulty.  Its goodness is, in our Germanic university, sheltered behind the walls of expertise.  Who are you, inexpert dean, to tell us to change the way we teach?

Suppose the dean calls on a faculty council, maybe the faculty senate, for backup.  Have a debate, get this out in the open, lay the weight of its conclusion on the offending department.

I wish such a dean luck.  In the Germanic university the members of any university council will be too eager to get back to their research, the way you get ahead in a place like this, to give such a debate the time and energy it takes.  Besides, back the dean in this case and pretty soon he'll be on yours.  If he (or she) wants to spend time stiffing departments let him go after the ones hogging the budget and the grants.

If you remember a lingering pre-Germanic university the ease of correcting sheltered error there will occur to you.  It went with the ease of college-wide or university-wide debate.  Before my university became a research university it regularly held general-interest debates, with broad attendance and lively post mortems.  In the early days faculty preparation for them was so important that the library provided special rooms for it, the Philomathean and the Athenian.  It was the way you got ahead in a place like that.  It was also the way you, forced to defend your position, got tested and exposed.

Well, that would be one way to deal with our walled domains, going back to the grand debates of Greece and Rome that would force their lords to come out and defend themselves.  "Question: Is fiat lux the only acceptable fiat in a college of liberal arts?  Moderated by the chair of the philosophy department.  Open to audience participation."  A wonderful way, this Roman way, to solve our problem.  But we can't take it.  We're stuck in old, expert Germany and all we can do is find a way around, or through, the walls it built for us.

And there's a limit to the time we have.  If goodness advances very far into the upper administration knowledge will never have the defender it needs most, a clever and strong dean willing to fight for it.  Cleverness as seen maybe in a proposal to just have little debates, with a dean's agent sitting on promotion and tenure committees, on publication review panels, inside oral examinations, asking the old Socratic questions.  Strength as seen in backup by the provost and president.

The agents of the dean will have to be clever and strong too.  Clever enough to see that goodness never shows itself in universities in outright declaration but in tendencies, selection of subjects of study, questions asked, shadings of vocabulary.  Members of goodness-oriented departments can't be counted on to detect these things, or if they do, sound an alarm. 

Further, the agents will have to be clever enough to see through internal debate, and reject it, however lively it is, as a check on parochial standards.  There's nothing to prevent whole departments, even whole disciplines, from going wrong (that is, going good).  The frame for their debates will be wrong.

That's worth picturing, though those in closer touch will have to tell me how accurate the picture is.  I see in it a test of deans' agents beyond anything you'll find in the movies.  The agents come in politely.  They see debate, all the way up to the highest journals.  They see peer review.  They see a flourishing program, with graduates finding jobs, and newcomers demanding more courses, promising better jobs.  And right away they face a curtain of language.  "These unfamiliar words are needed in our special study.  It's a technical vocabulary," says their guide.  To a casual or unclever agent the department will be off the hook.  Nobody in a Germanic university can object to a technical vocabulary.  It's the mark of special competence. 

But to the conscientious agent from Greece it will be a challenge.  "Maybe so, but let's look into it."  She (we can make the agent female now) digs into the vocabulary in the way of Socrates — or Ockham or a linguistic philosopher or an Oxford tutor.  She may return to the dean saying, "Yes, it's technical."  But she may return saying, "No, it's not technical; it's a tendentious jargon that conceals failure to examine assumptions and first principles."

 I obviously see a high probability of the latter but those closer may not.  Though the reader will have to trust his or her own eyesight here, everybody should see that there's nothing in the Germanic university to keep departments from going this far.  If they do their internal debate, no matter how high it goes, loses weight.  As does peer review.  Reviewers question only inside their own frame, which itself has gone untested.  The great frame-questioner is Socrates, who questions anything, recognizes no walls, and requires answers in plain language.  No jargon-answers, as from sophists, will do.  Peer reviewers here are not peers of Socrates.

If the Socratic model is too distant for us we Americans may look to Emerson.  His ideal, Man Thinking, is exactly the Socratic inquirer.   The whole world of thought is his province.  Try to wall him off and you're just a "thinker."  No matter how great a German you are, how expert and thorough, you, you mere thinker, must bow to Man Thinking, and submit to his questions.

So there she is, the dean's agent, clever and brave, appearing in your committees, listening in on your oral examinations, going through your publications, sniffing out goodness.  A perfect example of a thought policeman.  But only to the inattentive.  She's a freedom-of-thought policeman.  If you're not curbing thought, requiring that it be correct in your own good way, you have nothing to fear.  Open your publications to general criticism, take on destructive critics, place yourselves in the larger arena, prepare your graduate students to fight there, and you have nothing to fear.

 But what, then, will happen to goodness?  Nothing, if it is known.  And only open test and trial will let us know it, the goodness that can defend itself.  "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary," said Milton, famously.  "That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary."

Translate that classic of the academic enterprise — and of Western parliaments, and courts, and science — into advice for today's lovers of the good and you get, I think, something like this: "Knowledge comes first.  Here it's knowledge of the good. First you make sure you know the good.  If you believe that it can't defend itself you get out in the world and defend it, standing on the most reliable ground you can find, that determined by disinterested inquiry in universities."

You can see what will spoil this advice: professors, having assumed success in gaining knowledge of the good, pursuing it in universities.  That reduces their reliability and weakens the fight for good in the world.