346. How Trump Turned White Eggheads into Black Rappers

"Egghead" is, leaving out its derogatory coloring, a word for "a person who is highly academic or studious" and that person is "often a professor or the protégé of a professor."  

If "egghead" fit me and my colleagues who taught English Composition it meant keeping your writing unified and coherent and choosing specific words over vague words.  In argumentative compositions it emphatically meant avoiding violations of logic.  If anything like a Donald Trump speech appeared before us it would have gotten a flat F.

Now it appears that many of our white male protégés and even a few of our colleagues are telling pollsters, by word or, more likely, by anonymously clicking a button, that they intend to vote for Donald Trump.

It's the great unexplainable of our academic lives, and nobody inside or outside of academia has been much help.  In the public forums I follow there are plenty of explanations for the less-educated men's behavior but none, zero, for the well-educated men's.

When you're hard up for explanations you explore the outer reaches and, spurred on by polls showing Trump gaining ground, I have thought harder and harder about what it might be in me and my colleagues that would allow an entry by somebody like Trump.  And the only thing I found is almost too outré to report: hatred of self-contradiction, the archetypical fault of the bad mind all teachers, but especially Composition and logic teachers, are trying to turn into the good mind.

"Impossible!" you say.  I do too.  Who is more full of contradictions than Donald Trump?  You'd have to find a pretty objectionable case to compete with his case.

To accept the one I found you'll have to accept, I'm afraid, my explanation of the action of Drew Faust, president of Harvard, in denying scholarships and team captaincies to any student (she was obviously pointing at men) who joined a single-sex club: that it was a blow in the war between the sexes (Post 340) in which she held all the moral weapons.  She and her fellows in the enlightened world were right every time they spoke about patriarchy.  A white man had about as much power in moral suasion as a bare-fisted pagan had in combat with a Roman soldier.  Indeed, what women ruled at that point amounted to a moral empire.

I see frustration, and internal pressure building up.  Testosterone maybe.  And a man can't stand up and argue it away.  Not in a public arena where every spectator understands moral power, and knows who has it.  Furthermore, if he's an academic he's already got his reason, three-quarters on the side of the feminists, keeping the lid on.  Yet he's still a male and can't help feeling those defeats as blows, lashes on a poor pagan's back.  With not a cry from him.

Finally, the salt in the wound, he senses that Drew Faust knows her power and her position atop a moral and intellectual empire.  She's just doing this to rub in her sex's victory.

 But that, too, had to go without complaint in a Christian culture, where there's no credible objection to the kind of power she is employing, the power of the persecuted, the weak, the long-victimized.  Who can object to power when it's used to hold a Christian to his obligation to love?  There can't even be internal objection.  

Except that objection to contradiction.  And when the cause of contradiction, that core fault of the bad mind, is love, a passion, it represents (oh Milton) exactly what would take all mankind (in Adam) down: the victory of the passions over the reason.  This kind of moral correctness is simply uncontrolled love.  It's sentimentality, emotion without intelligence.

And where did the eggheads see this contradiction?  In those employing Drew Faust's kind of power and working next to her, in race relations.  They were rebuking white men for language they freely accepted coming from black men.  The N-word for blacks, the B-word for women, outrageous in a white mouth, was OK in a black mouth.  "I ain't fucking with you, you bitch" lets the rapper, because his race is the victimized race, go on to greater success while, in the middle of paragraphs of hedging and contextualizing, "there are issues of intrinsic differences of aptitude" [between men and women in science and engineering], gets the white man removed from his position (as president of Harvard, and Faust's predecessor — the justice of which removal I'm not questioning here).

The egghead has been living with these burrs in his underwear, correctness burrs, this last one the worst, for years now.  And he hasn't been able to cry out.  Then he sees a place that's not public and where frustration and outrage don't have to be suppressed, a polling booth.  There he will, as the surveys show, fill in the circle for Donald Trump.  He will be saying to Drew Faust, who's name is to him now legion,

I ain't fuckin' with you

You little, you little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you

I got a million trillion things I'd rather fuckin' do

Than to be fuckin' with you.

334. Explaining Trump's Followers

It's not Donald Trump who needs explaining, it's his followers.  How can so many Americans go for such an empty entertainer?  Have they lost their minds?

No, no, they can't have, not after so many years of education, so many hours in civics classes, so much time reading history assignments, so much attention — oh God, the pain — going over writing that had to be logical and coherent and responsible enough to satisfy English teachers. 

Now those teachers can't bear to watch, and listen, and take in the roars of support.  Half of them in my retirement home are in tears.  Did the seed just all fall on stony ground?

No, there are other explanations, and I would like to offer one, but finding a welcome for it will require some doing.  Everybody with an axe to grind is jumping in now with an explanation that will sharpen his.  Mad at Republican elites? mad at the media? mad at liberals?  Blame them for producing Donald Trump.  There are so many columnists doing this that, according to Noah Berlatsky (LA Times, 3-10-16), there is now a "pundit genre" named "Trump-blame think pieces."  Some blame Clinton's open-trade policy, some Bush's tax cuts, some Obama's bank bailouts.  Among people blamed are John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh, John Kasich, and Al Franken.  All in some way responsible, directly or by backlash, for the Trump phenomenon.

Since the person I am going to add to that list cannot, without risk of immediate turn-off, be named, I want to begin my blaming at a distance, with your memories of a backlash.  Did you ever come out of Sunday School and right away hear somebody say, "Shit!"?  And did you ever feel a tingle at that?  And sense other boys feeling tingles?  Well, if you did, I think you were feeling what a lot of Trump's followers are feeling.  And if it's strong enough you'll run over and give him a cheer.

What is that boy lashing back at?  If you are a philosopher, tracing everything to its ultimate source, and indifferent to turn-offs, you'll say "Jesus Christ."  If you're a pundit, required by circulation levels to avoid turn-offs, you'll stop short and say "love," or, pushing it, "Christian love."  And if you're a reporter, less concerned with deep traces, you'll just say, "his Sunday School teacher."  In any case it's a voice for love, and the boy is sick of it. 

That sickness is what we're trying to understand, and in doing so we constantly need the reminder from the reporter: our responses to love depend a lot on how it's channeled.  It came to Huck Finn, for example, through the  Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, who put him on a chair and taught him how nicey-nice he had to be to other people.  He got sick of it and lit out for the woods.  Nietzsche's two maiden aunts taught him much the same way.  He got sick of it and wrote The Genealogy of Morals.  I know there's room for debate over what caused Nietzsche's indigestion, whether it was the food itself, Christ's beatifying of the weak, or whether it was the way of feeding, but certainly the way of feeding has a lot to do with it in Huck's case.  And, I think, the case of Trump's followers.

What, equivalent to what was delivered by Miss Watson and Nietzsche's aunts, have those followers been hearing?  No, not what is being delivered, but what a man of shaky education will hear as being delivered?  A lot of nicey-nice.  You don't just meet your responsibilities to the poor and the imprisoned and the enslaved, you've got to have affection for them, all of them, everybody you (or they) can call an Other, of whatever race, gender, class, mentality, or capability.  You've got to recognize how they can be hurt, and oh in so many ways you never thought of.

Consider how a man, sensibility undeveloped and testosterone flowing, will now be going through life.  There are unprecedented hazards all around him.  Stereotype here, offend there, accidentally code in front of this one, signal wrong to that one — oh my God she's going to faint — and he's in trouble.  What are those circumlocutions that keep the well-educated safe, the formulas that certify right thought and good heart?  He'll never learn them.  And up ahead so many Others.  Well, he'll try to tiptoe past.  Again.

All right, are you in that fellow's shoes?  Here's Donald Trump walking onto the scene, looking at Megyn Kelly, and saying, "You're a bimbo."  Then at Hillary Clinton and saying, "You're a total phony."  Then, pointing at President Obama, saying, "Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”  Haven't  you seen him before?  He's the kid who walked out of Sunday School, stuck a wad of tobacco in his cheek, and said, "Shit."  If you tingled then you'll tingle now, and just might join the roar for Donald Trump.

333. How can we live on the same planet with such people?

Here we are, on an earth made small by our jets, with communication made instant by our electronics, and destruction made sure by our physics, trying to live alongside people who, because they are true to their faith, want to come together from around the world and destroy us as quickly and surely as they can.  Why do we do it?

Because in our faith, I would say, putting the problem in the most general terms, the skeptical can live alongside the credulous and survive.  Our saints believe that we must live alongside them, and love them, and help them. 

It was through our skepticism that we came up with the physics and the engineering that the credulous, because they have lived among us, are now able to use.  The distinction between the skeptical and the credulous is no small thing; it's one of those profound distinctions, like Scott Fitzgerald's between the sick and the well, that lets you divide all mankind.

Both ancient Jews and Muslims were what David Hume, in a time when one could indulge in such accuracy, called "a barbarous people" — that is, extremely credulous.  They thought God made things work.  Then skeptical Christians figured out how things really worked, and then figured out how to live alongside credulous Christians.  I don't know how this happened, but I see it as the genius of their civilization.  And maybe credulous Christians get the credit.  Maybe by theological moves, re-conceiving God (as in France); maybe by ethical moves, re-theorizing hypocrisy (as in England); or just by falling into apathy, they did it.  I don't know.

Anyway, it's something Muslims didn't do, as made clear (if it weren't before) by Malise Ruthven in his review of three recent books on Islam (NYR (4-7-16).  The struggle for reason against dogma has in that faith been a losing one.  Whatever it was that reconciled the two sides in Christian society is very hard to find in Muslim society.  The re-theorizing hides itself and the apathy ... where is it?  What you can count on, eventually, to drain away the followers of every Kansas creationist, and put, alas, every sweet fundamentalist Sunday School out of business, cannot, in Islam, even get started.  People in this religion seem to know only one way to take their God: seriously.  Meaning, for many of us onlookers, barbarously.

One of the authors, Jason Burke, tells Ruthven (in The New Threat: The Past, Present, and Future of Islamic Militancy) that what makes adjustment to modernity so very hard for Sunnis is their "theology of manifest success."  For 1200 years their conquest and domination "assured them of divine favor," an assurance unavailable to Shias, who lost their leader to a rival, or to Jews, who lost their land to an invader, or to Christians, who lost their man-god to a government.  "This Allah, this God that we of the three great religions of the Middle East share, out of the same original book, favors us Sunnis, possessors of Baghdad and all the land for hundreds of miles east and west.  Look on us, you others of would-be might, and despair!"

We in the West should understand appeals to manifest success, since we've made so many of them.  Do you doubt that Christianity has a divine origin?  Look at the church, its early expansion and then its worldwide provenance.  Overcoming impossible obstacles.  Only by postulating God can you explain it.  That's at one end.  At the other is L. Ron Hubbard pointing at the success of Scientology.  In between are the Mormons pointing to an expansion that rivaled that of early Christianity.  Then there are Christian businessmen.  Do you doubt that there's a God that rewards virtue?  Look at that bank account, buddy.  And if your God is as good as mine, why aren't you rich?  (This has a name, "prosperity theology."  Rising in America.)  Then outside of theology there are Donald Trump's appeals, nearly all to his marvelous success, especially at the polls. 

Well, we know where appeals to manifest success take you, to a cliff.  Let the market crash, the attendance tank, the vote-count drop, and you are sprawled out at the bottom.  

And there, according to Hughes via Ruthven, is where the conquest of their territory by Western skeptics, unbelievers, left the Sunnis.  And they just couldn't handle it.

So what are we going to do, offer ourselves as an example again?  "Look, the British lost a bigger empire than yours, a lot bigger, the sun never set on it, and what did they do?  Cashed in what chips they had, sat back, and watched their young people make fun of the whole game.  What do the managers of the best teams in our best sport say after getting crushed in the big game?  'Win some, lose some.'  All right all you Sunnis, get with it, be cool.  Go watch The Princess Bride.  Get yooosed to disappointment."

Fine advice and, in its superiority and condescension, very satisfying to deliver, but breathtaking in its incomprehension.  You can't address believers as if they were players in a game.  This is a faith, the faith is in Allah, and sainthood is nothing like what Winston Churchill and Joe Dimaggio achieved.  No, Western examples of cool won't do.

Nor will Western testosterone. Bomb the hell out of them.  "Think your success proved the power of your God and his favor to you, do you?  Well, how about some failure?  More failure.  Bigger failure."  So we go over to the bottom of their cliff and stomp on them.  It would be as satisfying as burying Trump in a landslide.  Just the thing for people who stand on manifest success. 

But equally uncomprehending.  It's not this religion's ordinary followers doing us harm, it's its saints and martyrs.  Lump them and bomb them, collaterally damage them, and we create more saints and martyrs.  Furthermore, by making them victims we take the word "barbarian" right out of our mouths.  You can't call victims bad names, not in our country.

The problem opens our ears to our own saints, speaking liberal tolerance: "We should live with these people as we would with any other group in our diverse society.  All groups, including ours, have their lunatics.  Deal with the lunatics; don't worry about their religious identity."

Ah yes, we could do that — if all religious identities were the same.  But they're not the same.  Some religions, when their fringe followers go lunatic, have them going one way, others have them going another.  Israeli settlers are the lunatics they are because their religion is what it is, a religion promising a worldly reward, in their case a God-given piece of land.  Followers of other religions live on top of pillars or look at the sun until they go blind, all pursuing sainthood, all counting on a particular promise.  Our worry varies accordingly.  Climb a pillar or stare into the sun and I worry only about you.  Attack unbelievers and I worry about both you and myself.

In that worry I am worrying about religious identity and, though it could start from prejudice, it doesn't have to.  In concern for my safety I, in full academic mode, could have started simply by asking, "In what groups do the paranoiacs, rebellious children, and alienated misfits (found in all large groups) turn to this kind of behavior?"  No prejudgment.  Just rejection of saintly advice and indifference to cries of "Islamophobia."

I labor the point because the Christian has been so pervasively the dominant mode, even among academics.  In that mode we resist causing pain or offense even when our science justifies it.  Take profiling.  The question security forces ask when they lack the resources to identify the possible risks in each individual, and have to discriminate among them, is exactly the question scientists ask above: "In what groups do the extremists turn to the kind of activity we need to prevent?"  If the activity is illegal settlement on the West Bank the answer will be, "Ultra-Orthodox Jews"; if the activity is terrorist self-sacrifice, the answer will be "Muslims."   That makes your profile and gives your agents a marker.

So we skeptics of limited resources give ourselves the best chance of living on the planet with certain credulous people by profiling which, though it pains and offends the innocent among them, and rubs against our Christian upbringing and democratic faith, is justified by practical need and scientific analysis.  The same goes for surveillance.  At least those things are better than bombing.

321. "Anecdotal," "Statistical," and the Force of Christian Love.

I know.  I know.  Anecdotal evidence is lousy evidence, taking you into a thicket of crappy fallacies — misleading vividness, hasty generalization, cherry picking, confirmation bias — and subject, oh so subject, to the availability heuristic.  Your logic teacher and your composition teacher will be all over you on it.  But lordy, it does work.  Oratorically, that is.

It worked that way on editors of the New York Times when they selected for the OpEd page a piece by black astrophysicist Jedidah C. Isler (12-17-15).  Their selection makes vivid the pain of a brilliant scholar reminded by Supreme Court justices of the supposed limitations of her race when right there, in front of everybody at her schools (and reading the OpEd piece) is an individual of possibly unlimited ability (Ph. D. at an Ivy League school, postdoc at Vanderbilt).

I can understand and sympathize with that anecdotal working until I get to Isler's general observation: "obviously black students march into classrooms all over this country and blow physical concepts out of the water."  Then the statistics kick in:  "In 2009, African-Americans [12 percent of the population] received 1 percent of degrees in science technologies, and 4 percent of degrees in math and statistics. Out of 5,048 PhDs awarded in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, 89 went to African-Americans – less than 2 percent" (Huffpost Education, 10-24-11).

Anecdotes are good at showing us personal pain, statistics are good at showing us a national problem.  Anecdotes getting us to feel our fellow citizens' pain are needed to motivate us to do something about the problem, statistics are necessary to solve it, showing us what is working and what isn't.  They are most trustworthy in the hands of "academics" in the sense I have been plugging in this blog: followers of Socrates, multivocal testers, loving truth more than anything else.  Here that's scientists, following the method worked out, and remaining as objective (or, if preferred, "impartial," "disinterested") as they can.  Experience has shown that their way of thinking — statistical, analytical — gets more trustworthy results than the way of partisans and advocates.

We are living at a moment when black pain is most vividly before us, on television in the white police brutalities that have been exposed in such quick succession, and in books like Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, eloquent cries of pain and, sometimes, defiance.  And that vividness, so helpful in motivating us, is, more and more, holding us back in solving our problems.

You could see it first fifty years ago, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report on problems in black culture that, statistical and analytical, presenting facts and making careful conjectures about them, made a good start.  The reluctance verging on outrage with which the academy took up the problems, or, more precisely,  failed to take them up, can best be explained, I think, by unwillingness to cause pain, pain to a group so long pained, and pained by the group to which academics belonged.

Behind this unwillingness I see, even in those longest liberated from Christian belief, residual Christian love, the thing that, with the help of affluence, broke through in the Enlightenment (Post 308).

Christian love is one strong puppy; lose control of it and it will chew up your mind.  The head of the Episcopal Church in the U. S. lost control of it (momentarily we all hope) and brought every intellectual enemy of her religion his blackboard case.  The fortune teller in Acts 16:16-34 is different from us, her sermon went, but we must learn to love everybody who's different from us, without discrimination.  So, necessarily, love fortune-tellers without discriminating between them and prophets.  There goes distinction-making, a fundamental operation of the intellect, the one all rational human beings — including the embattled prophets trying to distinguish themselves from seers — depend on.  The congregation's mind is in shreds.  There's Nietzsche saying, "See!"

Put just a little of that into a university department and you don't make any progress solving the problem.  In sociology departments you don't even address it.  Fear of using hurtful language, everybody understands that, but fear of mentioning hurtful facts?  Sociology went forty years under "self-imposed censorship...on the subject of black culture" under that fear, fear, one presumes, of hurtful facts, hurtful statistics, hurtful analysis.  Orlando Patterson noticed this odd restriction (in The Cultural Matrix), and Thomas Chatterton Williams picked up on it (London Review, 12-3-15), but they, black thinkers both, are in the minority.

So much in the minority that when they ask a question in the old, free academic way it's like bells in the night.  "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?" (Williams).  There it is, the question timid whites have been circling for forty or more years, the question everybody needs to get to.  Damn the hurt.

And damn the love, the Christian love?  No, just keep control of that puppy.  There's a dangerous, tigerish force in it, a force that has to be managed carefully.  Aristotle, that pagan, shows the way.  He says that anyone can be charitable — that is, show love — "but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy."  You've got to use your head, and distinguish.

It's interesting to me that the rector in the Episcopal church I now attend, Lupton Abshire, quoted those very words in his sermon last Sunday.  What better occasion for a chorus on Christian love?  Merry Christmas!

319. Crazy PC on College Campuses? Rejoice and Be Glad.

All right, you're laughing at those silly college kids carrying political correctness into la-la land.  Me too.  And then I realize that, to be consistent with what I wrote in my last post, I have to want us all to rejoice.

What, you're not laughing at what's going on in universities now?  Maybe you're not up.  Let me refresh you, out of the September (2015) issue of The Atlantic:

* During the 2014–15 school year the deans and department chairs at ten University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

* By some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American.

I hear laughter, but I'm not sure about the rejoicing.

* Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.

* Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East.  The group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”

Any rejoicing yet?  I don't hear it.  Well, let's try these.

* Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of interest.” The Daily terminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”

* At the University of Central Florida in 2013 Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the Orlando Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he’d noticed the pained look on students’ faces, so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys are being slowly suffocated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on a killing spree or what?”

After the student reported Jung’s comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] or to the university community” before he would be allowed to return to campus.

Well, if those examples, from "The Coddling of the American Mind," by Greg Lukianoff, a constitutional lawyer, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, don't test you, maybe this, by Caitlin Flanagan ("That's Not Funny," in the same issue) will.  She's summarizing the conditions student organizations set for stand-ups:

They wanted comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

And I want you to be glad for such a weirdo?  I can't believe it.  Yet I'm forced to.  Here's the paragraph from my last post that forces me:

In the eighteenth century Christian love, with the help of affluence, made its breakthrough.  Care for the widow and orphan became care for the imprisoned, the enslaved, the mentally ill, and the incapacitated, as well as for the closer loved ones.  The Age of Sensibility, but of rough categories.  Now love makes a leap.  Care for the lesser capacitated, the mentally fragile, the vulnerable, the marginal, the potentially oppressed, the incipiently persecuted.  The Age of Sensitivity, with finer categories.  Powering it is the vision of a slippery slope, with Auschwitz at the bottom.  The victims and their terrible victimizers.  You put yourself on it by demeaning, depreciating, dismissing people different from you. That's how our great-grandparents started, and that's how we could start.  Catch yourself early.

How early is too early?  Flanagan's imagined kid is way too early, but real cases are not far behind him, and my memory of the casual anti-semitism of my parents and their friends in the thirties, of their assumptions in business dealings, of their easy jokes, and of the resemblance of that to the more sophisticated anti-semitism of educated, literary Europe, tells me to err on the safe side.  Catch it early.  The slippery slope is not just a fallacy in logic; out in the world it's real.