385. Poem: Justice

Should the fool suffer for his folly? never? always? sometimes? if it's sometimes when?  and it's not folly it's bad judgment but not always his bad judgment somebody else's sometimes the government's should he suffer for that? and sometimes the judgment was made a long time ago by somebody trying hard no not trying hard being selfish being mean they should suffer but no they can't but we can make their children feel bad.

384. Poem: Poets and Scholars

I became a poet because I could not be a scholar, to suggest deep thoughts rather than actually have them, unless you're Yeats maybe odor of blood when Christ was slain made all Platonic tolerance vain and vain all Doric discipline so deep, but maybe not: exactly how did the blood make the Greek things vain? Poets don't need to spell it out or back it up and when rulers are on the spot who are they going to turn to, get burned enough times and they'll turn to scholars we hope which I cannot be but if I have to be a poet I hope it's one like Yeats.

383. Feminist Philosophy and Critical Thinking

No, despite the understandable alarm in the Wall Street Journal (Jillian Jay Melchior, 5-9-17), critical thinking is not about to come to an end.  Because that thinking, as established now in Western academics, will always be more critical than any thinking that would end it.  You can't get any more critical than Socrates was and as long as we have people who take him as their model those people are going to beat the pants off of any challengers.

Not that they themselves will know their pants are off.  Feminist philosopher Nora Berenstein, who found that its "discursive transmisogynistic violence" made a particular critical analysis unacceptable, seems quite unaware that her pants are even in danger.  (See the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-6-17)

The critical analysis she was attacking was made by Rebecca Tuvel, who, in the philosophy journal (feminist) Hypatia, pointed out that the treatment of transracials was, in liberal theory, inconsistent with the treatment of transgenders.  The outcry by feminist philosophers was so powerful it brought an apology from the editor and partial retraction of the article.  Yet Tuvel's was a standard analytical move, asking for a change in practice or a revision of the theory.  Or at least for deeper questioning and more analysis.  You need (again in standard practice) to do that before you step into the larger academic arena or you'll lose your pants, lose them to somebody more deeply critical than you are, somebody who has submitted his or her propositions to tougher tests.  These will be tests from every angle, even (sometimes especially) an enemy's angle.  That's the Socratic game.

If you look at the Socratic game as the academic game, as most of our predecessors in universities did, you can see that it's got minor leagues and major leagues.  In the minor leagues you get concessions for your handicaps —your youth, your provincialism, your state of training.  That's why the move up to the majors is so painful.  No more easy, bush-league ball.  And that, as I see it, is what Berenstein and the 500 or more academics who protested publication of Tuvel's article want to keep playing.  Which they can do, in journals of feminist philosophy, if they keep articles like Tuvel's out.  Just games among friends.

I have a message for those protesters which, coming from a male, can easily be dismissed.  But I'll deliver it anyway.  "These are the big leagues.  This is the way the game is played.  I know you can play it.  (I've seen women in mathematics and the sciences play men's asses off.)  So come on, get in the game, mix it up.  Don't worry about your pants.  Everybody loses them once in while.  That's the risk you take if you're ever going to win the pennant, that pennant, the Pennant of Fully Tested and Therefore Most Reliable Knowledge."

382. Getting Smart with Tolerance

Usually the newer an idea is the easier it is to get smart with it.  When the idea that environment rather than heredity might make people what they are was new the jokes ("So if a cat has kittens in an oven they'll come out biscuits, ha, ha") just burst out.  Everybody had known for a long time what readers of the Bible well knew, that a man "sowed his seed" in a woman, and the offspring, the crop, came out like him.  Abraham's seed would be like him, obedient to one God.  When the idea of environmental influence became familiar the jokes came harder.

The idea that we should be understanding and tolerant of people quite unlike us hasn't followed that pattern.  The longer it stays and the more extensively it gets elaborated the easier this idea is to get smart with.  Few could get smart with a relatively simple identity designated LGB (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals); now, with an identity designated LGBTQIA, recognized soberly in church bulletins, everybody is getting smart.  And, with the prospect of LGBTQIAPK  (adding Polyamory and Kinky) recognized soberly in the contemporary culture magazine Role Reboot — sort of a church bulletin — smartness will be kicking in before the day is out ("Why the K?"  For men who have it for knotholes.  A splinter group.)

We've got to be careful with smartness, though.  The men in my town in the thirties were smart as whips about the Jews, and made jokes about their suspected habits that doubled you over.  (Mama, suspicious about the silence, with a Yiddish accent: "Abie, Rosie, what are you doing?"  "Fucking, Mama."  "That's nice, don't fight.")  Then Hitler rose to power, and you know what some of them said?  I heard them.  "Well, Hitler's a monster but I admire him for one thing, the way he's handled the Jews."  Only accidents of history differentiated them from Holocaust accommodators.

Times change so thoroughly you need a long life-span, maybe, to be able to recognize the threat in what looks normal. If you lived before my time you'd be able to report on the normality of anti-Semitism in the decades before the thirties.

But this is how atrocities and accommodation to them begin, in tribal or cultural normality, with casual slurs and easy jokes.  Demean people long enough and unthinkingly enough and it's easier, when the time of fear and crisis comes, to do the unthinkable.  Originally unthinkable.  Distantly unthinkable.

Changing cultural normality is what LGBTQIA people are trying to do, and it's a slow and painful business.  They're part of a generation, maybe three generations, in this business.   And we need a reminder about such generations: they get silly. They wave the banner of change too wildly.  Some people, when they're not wanting to hang the last king in the entrails of the last priest, are always wanting to change the names of the months, or do away with collars.

A professor I studied under long ago, Herbert Feigl (eulogized in the preceding post), shows how to take these people, usually young people, who go too far.  He's talking about changers of philosophy, but he might as well be talking changers of culture.  "A young and aggressive movement," he says,  

in its zeal to purge thought of confusions and superfluous entities naturally brandishes more destructive weapons than it requires for its genuinely constructive endeavor.

The lesson is, "Don't be distracted by the inevitable extremism or (in the case of culture) silliness, in a new movement.  Keep your eyes on the sane advancement."

In philosophy departments in the middle of the last century the reward was to be in on, early, the construction of the philosophy, analytical philosophy, that nearly every American and British department eventually found most fruitful.  A finding made by the undistracted.

The equivalent in culture, the building of a fruitful tolerance, offers a similar reward.  Only further in the future.

Note: The post on Herbert Feigl, 381, expanded, will appear in the Fall, 2017, issue of The Philosophical Forum.