297. Gentlemanly Prose

Gentlemanly Prose

WikiReach

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve this article to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. The talk page may contain suggestions. (June, 2013)

For disambiguation and demystification see critical pedagogy

 and critical theory.

Gentlemanly Prose is a logocentric stylistic deriving from the classical discourse of privileged classes in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, known at the time as "the Republic of Letters."   Its product is variously self-described as writing that is "easy," "simple," "clear," or "perspicuous."

Gentlemanly Theory is the extension of this stylistic into theoretical or philosophical discourse.

Nomenclature.  Practitioners have retained the class- and gender-inappropriate term "gentlemanly" for its historical, and therefore explanatory, function.  "Prose" is synechdochic for non-metricized discourse.

Foundational proponents.  Frequently cited as avatars are Socrates (Attic or Athenian style) and Cicero (Roman style midway between the humble Attic and the aspiring Asiatic style). 

Foundational frame.  The cultural frame, taken to be foundational, is that of slave-holding Greek and slave-holding Roman aristocracies, with corresponding lifestyle: patriarchal banqueting and discourse while women ("flute girls") provide the music.

History.

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.  Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2015)

Gentlemanly prose in the purest Attic style was first valorized in England by the theorist Francis Bacon, exemplified by the chemist Robert Boyle, and imposed in 1662 by the founders of the Royal Society for the Advancement of Science in their requirements for submitted papers.  The need for "precision and objectivity" paralleled similar needs and similar impositions in France, where René Descartes was the exemplar.

Less pure, but only slightly, was the Attic of philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, whose conceptual aspirations forced concessions to the Asiatic , making a space for metaphor.

Enlightenment scientists and philosophers retained in their "objectivity" the racialized subjectivity of the Attic avatars, reflecting in the eighteenth century the cultural hegemony of ancient Athens, where Scythian speech was freely called "barbaric" and clumsy forms "barbarisms."  Calling obscure Medieval writers "Gothic" continued this prejudice.

Gentlemanly theorists cite the writing of Joseph Addison as a model of balance between Attic and Asiatic, recreating in the English language Cicero's compromise ("a plain, middle style") in Latin.  Addison's Spectator papers (early eighteenth century) are taken to be the model for the "easy but precise" writing in the magazines produced for the educated middle classes since his time, as now in The New Yorker.  It is the style of Jonathan Swift, taken as the exemplar for longer interventions, observable in the following:

I know not how it comes to pass that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meaning to those who are not of their tribe.

Politics.  Consciousness-raising efforts have led some gentlemanly practitioners to believe themselves marginalized in some areas of the American university.  They have raised complaints against Communications, Sociology, and English (cultural studies) departments, and have felt condescension in Women's Studies and Black Studies programs.  However, little evidence of oppression has been offered, and none of abuse.  Though many gentlemanly writers are struggling to make a space for themselves, there has been little activism.

Polemics.

The neutrality of this section is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page.  Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

Gentlemanly prose has not lent itself to direct polemical assertion.  Literary satire is favored, as in Alexander Pope's Dunciad, a poem "celebrating the goddess Dulness and the progress of her chosen agents as they bring decay, imbecility, and tastelessness to the Kingdom of Great Britain" (Wikipedia) or in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, third book, satirizing "scientizing pedants" (the theorists' name for them).  The language of all of Dulness's agents, in the Dunciad or out, is taken to be antipodal to the language of liberally educated gentleman.  Duns Scotus, known for jargonized Scholastic abstractions, and giving his name to the Dunciad, is the pole figure.

Difficulty in identifying current targets in these anachronistic satires no doubt accounts for the ineffectiveness of this polemic — that, and their distance from central postcolonial discourse, within which they appear as "belletristic irrelevance."  For those with a sense of political relevance "gentlemanly," then, demarcates not a positivity but simply a positionality vis-à-vis the normative. 

Pedagogy.  Language used in the way of Socrates and Cicero was imposed on students and teachers in the schools identified with the rise of "humanism" and the education called "liberal."  Renaissance court schools like Vittorino's "House of Joy," in which "anything in the nature of fine writing, of prolix or over-laden description, or of empty commonplace decked out in verbiage, was ruthlessly torn apart," are given credit for shifting the paradigm. The revived Ancient and Renaissance models went on to prevail in Oxford and Cambridge tutorial teaching, and the "tearing apart" there was retained in English Composition courses in America where, though often insensitive, gentlemanly prose became generally gender- and class-neutral.  Writers of such  prose held up as models for students today are as likely to be women (like Zoë Heller and Martha Nussbaum) as men (like Atul Gawande and Tony Judt).

Gentlemanly Theory.  Though hidden agendas are suspected, the open agenda of gentlemanly theorists has been to meet objections to gentlemanly prose. Their three most emphatic responses, condensed:

 (1) "No, gentlemanly prose is not just a feature of European cultural hegemony; it appears clearly (in a different idiom, of course) in the classical Chinese of Han scholars.  It appears in India and in Persia.  It is the writing of advanced civilization."

(2) "Yes, the language of Athenian gentlemen, Roman patricians, and Florentine governors is appropriate for the democratic masses in America because Americans — in their periodicals, on their websites — have to debate, and the language of these 'oligarchs' and 'hegemons' is still the best language for democratic debate.  It is clear, ample, and part of an easily dramatized revolutionary tradition: Paris ferment, salon exchanges, editorial wars, biting commentary, plain-spoken philosophy.  It's the great medium of the dialectical testing democracy depends on."

(3) "No, gentlemanly prose is not a belletristic indulgence; it is a necessary feature of realistic philosophy, as witness the appeals to its standards by the Ordinary Language philosophers of Oxford."

Some gentlemanly theorists argue (4) that meeting the standards of gentlemanly prose is a reliable test for sound philosophy.  Since "the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts" (George Orwell, taken axiomatically), slovenly philosophers are going to present readers with foolish thoughts.  To avoid this "foolishness" careful thinkers are urged to go to the most gentlemanly teacher or tutor they can find.  "Does this word make sense to you?  Is that paragraph foolish?"  It is claimed that no other test or appeal, as to "reality," provides more reliable protection against folly than this.

Philosophy.  A claim for the deepest relevance of gentlemanly prose has been made as follows: "What philosophers most need is a precise language that is in touch with the world.  Gentlemanly prose satisfies that need better than any other. The language of medieval theologians, the Scholastics and other abstract schematizers was, like that of mathematicians and logicians, precise, but it was not in touch with the world. The language of the marketplace, like that of poets and novelists, was in touch with the world, but it wasn't precise.  The gentlemen who held students to the standards of Socrates and Cicero and Locke and Addison were men of the world, in touch with the world, readers of literature that kept them in touch, and therefore the best servants, and trainers, of philosophers" (feetofsocrates 239).

295. The use of the words "offended" and "frightened."

The trouble with my title words is that, like every bid for sympathy, people want to know your circumstances before they honor your bid.  Peggy Noonan finds out you said you were "frightened" in a Columbia classroom listening to a discussion of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and she'll knock you over with ridicule (WSJ, 5-23/24).  Jessica Valenti finds out you said it at a certain fraternity's party and she'll smother you with hugs (theguardian.com, 9-14-14).

The Columbia student newspaper wants hugs for its classroom listener, and defends her word.  Ovid "contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities."  This lets Noonan broaden her target to include the whole grievance-and-change faction that makes such bids.

The more we repeat and analyze these words the deeper we sink into the sands of subjectivity.  Here the subjectivity is double, a subjective report of a subjective state.  And then a judgment of the report (subjective) and of the state, and whether the judgment is shared.  So maybe triple.  But then there's that corrective report of the circumstances, it's sort of subjective too, isn't it?  So maybe quadruple.  Oi.

The more subjectivity there is the more grievances you're going to get.  I have a grievance against the language those students use.  Like "marginalizing identities." I, a dinosaur in the English Department, tell you I am "sickened" by those words.  They're jargon-words from the Women's and Afro-American Studies and Sociology departments.  Can I ask you to credit my nausea?  Not until I show you the evidence in classrooms and journals.  And even then there'll be a question of how many hugs I'm going to get.

After that there's the question of our varying acquaintance with the world and our sense of proportion.  Live awhile and you learn that every sound grievance-and-change movement has its silly side, as does every sound conservative resistance. All, being silly, are perfect targets for Noonan-type wit.  So you don't get too worked up about the silly-siders.  You see that going Noonan all the way wastes energy.  But you still have to keep your feel for the serious issues underneath, and the need for a sound stand.

The most serious issue I feel here is the changing of cultures.  (Can cultures be changed?  Of course.  Anglo-Saxon culture was changed from Semitic-unwelcoming to Semitic-welcoming in a very short time.)  And hurt feelings, which is what all our sympathy bids are about, can be a big obstacle to such change.  Avoid a statement of fact because the fact hurts feelings and you avoid the discussion and analysis necessary to make a change.

Suppose you want to say, "Black culture at this time fails to encourage black education."  Your support for that statement comes from scientific studies, work done by people who have stripped themselves, as far as any human being can strip himself or herself, of subjectivity.  But that statement of fact hurts feelings.  Do you keep your mouth shut? 

I suppose that if you want a hug badly enough you do.  But if you want to explore change, if you believe that a change here will benefit this minority culture (giving  those immersed in it better chances for a good job, say) and benefit every culture in the mix America is trying to manage, then you blow away the hug and speak the fact.  And any other fact relevant to the problem. 

Not that you're going to avoid giving offense, even with this understood.  Too many people have spoken neutral words with offensive intent, as aggressive anti-gay extremists spoke the word "homosexual," ruining it for neutral use.  Michigan State's guide to language expresses the common sense of it: "Speak of all members of the University community in relationship to the issues at hand...If you specify race or ethnic origin, be certain it is relevant."  Extend this to listeners: "If it's relevant to the issues at hand forget your ethnic sensitivities."

Oh how hard that is to do in a time of war, culture war.  Demonstrations of allegiance, reviews of grievances, visions and revisions of history, attacks on silliness, inculpations, exculpations, all those are so hard to resist when you're in combat.  And they're all so irrelevant. 

What brings us out of that?  For me it's a question, heard in the voice of a parent or an old prof: Do you want justification or do you want to solve a problem?  Which is more important to you, getting a hug, giving a knock, or finding a solution?

If it's the solution you go for then (if you'll excuse me one more time) English Composition becomes your guide.  From here on you try to avoid "Relevance?" in your margin.  Show how depressing (or inspiring) your history is, demonstrate your victimization (or your victoriousness), display your grief (or your confidence) and there it will appear, in red.

Relevance: the principle that representatives of Western culture, looking at Socrates, adhere to more thoroughly than anybody.  See it in Western science, see it in Western law.  Then forget it.   Westerners, Easterners, Northerners, and Southerners.  Look only at the model.  It's your guide through every argumentative essay and every public discussion.

Now you're looking at me, maybe as proud as Thomas Babington Macaulay of that model.  Maybe as humble as Uriah Heep.  Forget me.   Just follow the model.  Use the apparatus (Post 292) my predecessors have developed.  That is, if you want to avoid your old English teacher's marks in your margin.

285. Theorists, Novelists, and Poor, Struggling Teachers

When I, as a professor of English, first became acquainted with postmodern ways of reading I immediately wanted to find the right set of passages from the toughest epistemologists I knew so that I could show, by impeccable step-by-step reasoning, that the theory of knowledge supporting this new method was unsound.  When Zoë Heller, as an English major, first became acquainted with it she wanted to "lie down in a darkened room and cry."

It's such a sad, sweet story the novelist tells in last week's New York Times Book Review (3-15-15) — coming out of high school and going through her early college years believing that "authors were actual people" who wrote works you tried to explain to a demanding teacher, then discovering that she'd been laboring under a "bourgeois delusion."  Reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play."  You certainly never read an author for his message.

That kind of reading gets its come-uppance in her essay when she reports that the college essays she wrote displaying her expertise at it turned out, on mature review, to be "infinitely duller and cruder than any of my naive high school efforts to figure out what authors actually meant."  Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she has moved back to her prepoststructuralist position.  "Whatever embarrassment attached to re-embracing the old bourgeois delusions was far outweighed by relief." 

Heller tells us that her disenchantment with reading as creative play is paralleled by that of  Zadie Smith, whose "doubts about the readerly freedoms bestowed by poststructuralist theory set in around the time she became a novelist."

Statements about reading by successful writers have a lot of force in English departments, and I was delighted to see these writers employing it in support of the old way, my way, of teaching.  How hard it had been to hold to that way through the years of poststructuralism's triumph.  Now here was the old counterforce, resurgent.  Go Heller, go Smith.  Sock it to 'em.

But then, in mid-cheer, I had to stop.  The memory of somebody I had taught in my old-fashioned way kicked in.  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Voice of the independent American Scholar, promoter of Man Thinking, scourge of obedient thinkers.  They'd be socking it to him!

There he was, right in the middle of the canon, an author my students had to read in the traditional way.  "Do you understand his message?" I had asked them.  "Do you buy it?  Are you willing to live by it?"  And what was his message?  Freedom!  "Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, 'without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.'"  The American Scholar took everything he read on his own terms.  "I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system."

Houston, we've got a problem.  Our targets the poststructuralists were working as hard as Emerson to keep people from becoming satellites.  Look at what Heller disparages, their belief that reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play."  Take out the disparagement and what have you got?  Man Thinking, the self-reliant American Scholar.  Nothing's going to keep him from playing with a text.

Where did Heller run into poststructuralist reading, I mean really run into it, as opposed to hearing about it?  Same place she would have run into Emerson's Man Thinking, Columbia University.  She had come there after education at Haverstock School and Oxford.  From what I know of Oxford education in the eighties nothing in it would have softened her up for poststructuralism.  I doubt that Smith's education at Cambridge would have softened her either. 

So welcome to America, Britishers.  Over here there is "creative reading as well as creative writing."  And to do it you have to trust yourself, as Emerson exhorts Americans to do in "Self-Reliance."  There are no holy texts.  "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."  Socrates will be proud of you.

This tells me that, after I have given up on the impossible question ("How can I make sure my students get Emerson's message of freedom without infringing on their freedom?") I, side-by-side with my fellow-American though maybe over-eager poststructuralists, have to let those free-readers into my class.  They get in on Emerson's pass.

But that throws me into an impossibility.  I just can't teach my lower-level courses at Ohio University with poststructuralists in the room. In Freshman English I have to curb freedom every three minutes. You cannot play, creatively, with the subject-verb-complement structure of the English sentence.  You cannot, if you are to remain teachable, play with anything established by convention or agreement.  You cannot play with the rules of logic.  You are not free to make any inferences you please.   Tell me you are free, as some up-to-date students have told me, and I will go into a dark room and weep.

Yet I want play.  Especially in  the interpretation-of-poetry course, where every new imagination is encouraged to exercise itself.

What I need is a warning in the Course Catalogue that will give me only teachable students.  A fatwa from the head of the English Department.  "You cannot play with the walls around your playground.  In a work of literature what's given you in declarative sentences — the physical set-up, the time-frame, the evidence given you for your own inference-making, the rules of inference-making — is your reality, and it's as hard as concrete."

For my poststructuralist colleagues a petition.  "Please don't write as if these walls did not exist."  That's the way the founding poststructuralists, the French, wrote, and the way American relativists following them wrote.  Only a careful, statement-by-statement display would make sure of it but I think that if you made a quick survey, or maybe just looked at Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value, you would see what caused us the teachers, and them the literary theorists, so much trouble: they did not make clear that the relativism they advocated was cultural and esthetic, not epistemic.  The first two relativisms you can get away with; the last will bring a ton of bricks down on top of you.  Alan Sokal's load.  (That's "get away with" in front of scientists and analytic philosophers, not continental philosophers who, in the eyes of the former, will let you get away with murder.)

It's those analytic philosophers who give me now the most exhilarating and finally most depressing thoughts.  First the exhilaration.  Emerson, I realize, has nothing to fear from their analysis!  Emerson, the man people quote when they deprecate logic ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds").  He separated the epistemic from the cultural and the esthetic, and gave it its due.  The teaching of "elements," the "indispensable office" of colleges, was outside of everything he gave freedom to, as were "history and exact science," which the scholar "must learn by laborious reading."  The old walls.  (His statement, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, was outside them too — for readers who paid close enough attention to see that the consistency he was referring to was temporal, not logical.)

That is exhilarating, isn't it?  The American ex-preacher doing just the thing all these Europe-sucking intellectuals failed to do.  Ask why they failed, though, and you're on the road to depression.  When you give the obvious answer, inattention (they didn't notice science standing there, demanding its due), you can't stop with the intellectuals, you have to go on to the teachers, who didn't notice that they had nothing to worry about.  Why make a big fuss, a science war, a culture war, over poststructuralist freedom?  Just notice the right passages in Emerson, read them to the intellectuals, and get on with your business.

276. Negotiating Muslim Culture

To change tomorrow, change children.  If we've got adults who don't distinguish private religious responsibility from public political responsibility, who take their Holy Scripture as literal and unchanging truth, who think that dying attacking unbelievers is rewarded in heaven, and who take insults to their Prophet with deadly seriousness, and if we don't want to live with such adults in the future (see preceding post), then we've got to change them.

It's a problem of education, also called (in the marketplace) brainwashing, indoctrinating, robot-making, and cookie-cutting.  I decided I had to face it when I saw that short-term measures to live with Islamic fundamentalism were not sustainable.  In the metaphor I had going at the time we just can't afford to have our young fish maturing in that kind of water.

We in the West can avoid that only under the constraints imposed by our dominant culture, that of (still) the Enlightenment.  Here it's the need to preserve freedom.  We were restricting freedom of speech when we justified having lawmen sitting in on imams' sermons, listening for our newly defined incitements to violence.  Here it's the freedom of local governments, specifically school boards, that we want to restrict.  Should a school in Birmingham, England, be free to teach Islamic principles?  Should a school in Kansas be free to teach the Bible creation story?

My answer, minus its development, is, "Yes, as long as they're taught in an academic way, and as long as they're not a substitute for the teaching that prepares youth for democratic citizenship."

The academic way is the way Socrates taught the West, testing beliefs in an impersonal fashion and abandoning those that fail.  The way of science.  Presentation of its results requires disinterestedness.  An academic presenting the creation story says, "This is what Christians believe."

The teaching that prepares youth for democratic citizenship is less distinct, though the ideal product is clear enough, at least for me.  It's that voter who takes up a candidacy or an issue the way a Supreme Court justice takes up a case, holding his or her thinking to what has consequences in the practical world.  Ms. Perfect Voter is Sandra Day O'Connor acting under a time constraint, as Ms. Perfect Journalist is Barbara Tuchman writing in haste.  Perfect-in-the-World is a university scientist without the leisure or the grants.

I believe that a Western democracy's need for something close to this in its citizens is so great that I am willing to reduce almost any of democracy's associated values that get in its way.  Freedom of local citizens from control by the central government is a long-held value in the United States, especially in the Heartland.  I want to say, to the citizens of Ohio, and now Colorado, "Here is something every school must teach.  You are free to teach other things, but you are not free to substitute anything for this."  And I will present them with what I think will make their students most like Sandra Day O'Connor, the curriculum for ideal democratic citizenship.

The benefit of this constraint (I'll get around to the curriculum) is that, like many constraints, it allows greater freedom elsewhere.  Be recognized as an approximation of Sandra Day O'Connor and you can say nearly anything you want, anywhere.  That goes for Muslims who have achieved the approximation.  Regardless of how they started out.  We trust our mandated education.

We also trust the social pressure O'Connor approximations can bring to bear.  Slam an ethnic group, as you are free to do, and O'Connor will show the irrelevance of your slam to the issue at hand.  No gratuitous slaps among her kind, not without bringing a blush.  Her kind attack a belief by demonstrating its consequences.  Call that a slap and you'll blush from the opposite direction. 

Because we think we have enough of O'Connor's kind out in the marketplace we let people there slap and slam as they will.  Satire is fine.  (It's an Enlightened Western country's substitute for violence.)   Incitement to ridicule is OK.  Insult is expected.  Developed populations can call undeveloped populations benighted and barbaric.  Undeveloped populations can call developed populations decadent and rapacious.  All because such callers can be put in their place by better-educated callers, who in Enlightened countries will, like Supreme Court Justices, carry the greater weight.  We in Enlightened countries trust in our education system to supply that weight.  When it does we don't need laws against such speech.

For the weight-supplying curriculum I am going to impose on every local school, I look first to what produced Sandra Day O'Connor.  And I will present school governors with what I think will make their students most like her.   I can make a pretty good guess about what was taught in her El Paso high school, classic college-prep, and an even better guess about what was taught at Stanford, where she got her B.A. in 1950 (my time in school): classic liberal arts.  For the latter, in American colleges, the key course was English Composition.  It was the course, then and now, that was counted on to introduce newcomers to the academic way.  "Address the question, avoid prejudgments, cite evidence, anticipate objections, be skeptical, suspect absolute generalizations" — those were the big imperatives in nearly every composition handbook.

And I would require that they be obeyed in English.  Because that is the language in which democratic debate goes on in America.  It is the language of the marketplace out of which votes come, determining elections. The marketplace.  Where the need for the protection of free speech arose in the minds of our founding fathers. 

So our advice to Muslim leaders is, "Get in on the marketplace scrimmage, friends.  Mix it up.   There are so many things you can attack: our drone strikes, our behavior at Abhu Graib, our insensitive satires of the Prophet.  Go beyond that immediate ugliness; attack our materialism, our hypocrisy, our arrogance, our vulgar popular culture, our all-consuming consumerism, our pornifaction of the inner life.   If you go too far our Sandra O'Connors will put you to shame.  If you incite to violence our police will put you in prison."

267. "Evil" in the World

How variously we react to the word "evil."  George W. Bush, in his memoirs, thinks all the fuss about his use of "axis of evil" was over the word "axis," suggesting that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an alliance like the one Germany and Italy had formed.  "Evil" was not worth remark.

Years later, as his memoirs appeared, others were still lamenting the consequences of all that the word had brought into play.  "Oh that Manichaean view of the world.  Oh the demonizing of enemies.  Look where it's left us."  A leader who inserts "evil" into a speech about another nation, as Ronald Reagan first did, has dropped a canister full of bad germs.

Reviewing all that George Bush was unaware of is a fool's task, I know, but here we've got a puzzle.  He and his advisors seemed to be doing their best to make themselves aware.  I can't count the number of places in Rumsfeld's and Gates's memoirs where, sometimes at Bush's insistence, they stop to "review all the assumptions" and make sure they haven't missed any "concealed hazards" in the course they have chosen.  They are highly motivated, they are bright, and they have gone to the best schools.  And yet, as revealed by their casual acceptance of the bomb-word "evil," they are clueless.  Where it may have counted most.

And it wasn't rocket science.  David Loy, a teacher like the rest in our liberal arts philosophy departments, could have told them right away what was in that bomb.  As he did after 9/11, explaining that "evil" is a term that people in our society, in contrast to a Buddhist society (he was living in Japan at the time), need in order to feel good about themselves.  "We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. If you want to be a hero, well, occasionally a natural disaster will do, but the best thing is a villain to battle.  St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George."

Listen to Loy and professors like him and you, as soon as you hear "evil" come out of Bush's mouth, will start wondering whether Iraq was maybe George's dragon. 

You have a lot to go on.  Bush certainly was rooted in the Christian tradition that makes the opposition of good and evil most dramatic.  He himself had fallen into evil and been reborn into good.   He had chosen a speechwriter from fundamentalist Wheaton College, Michael Gerson, who spoke the language of moral dualism most readily.  And for philosophical justification of the Iraq invasion he chose, for a visit to the White House, a University of Chicago theologian, Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose bedrock convictions, according to colleagues, included "the existence of an absolute good and evil" (see Post #213).  For an alert student Bush will look like just the person who would reach for the word "evil," and start the whole Manichaean thing going.

Except he didn't reach for it.  It was fed to him.  By that graduate of Wheaton, Michael Gerson, who sees "axis of hate" in a draft of the State of the Union speech and knows right away it's not going to get the most out of Midwestern voters.  Change it to "axis of evil."  What's wrong with "hate"?   It's "not theological enough."

So we get the word that drove liberally educated people up the wall.  Graduates of Wheaton College are not liberally educated; they are theologically educated.  And this puts them in tune with voters in the Heartland, most of whom still gain their education in church.  This is power, votes in the Heartland.  Manichaeism is in the saddle.

In a liberal education you learn how to stand outside a culture and its vocabulary.  In English courses you learn how words work, and, drawing on what you have learned in history and philosophy courses, you get an idea of the dangers in words.  In the word "evil" you see, or give yourself a chance of seeing, how it turns eyes from threats to be avoided to natures to be abhorred.  "Evil" is an extreme abhorrence word.  And it brings a string of abhorrent-nature adjectives in its trail — vile, monstrous, wicked, vicious, base, depraved.  You see how those who use these words will be carried further and further from the external world and any threats it might present them with. You see (oh history, history) how it polarizes, how it turns opponents into demons, how it makes compromise or surrender difficult.

And that's why, when your president, in apparent innocence (I leave open the possibility that it was cynicism in his speechwriters), opens the bomb bays in his State of the Union Address and drops a canister like this you are going to be halfway up the wall with everybody else who has profited from a liberal education.

And the only way you can go is further up, because nobody in power, and least of all the president, will be noticing you.  With the painful consequences of the president's neglect of the complex external world in Iraq already, after three years, registering on the nation there he is, in the chapel at Camp David, having "one of the best preachers" he's ever heard confirm the stand he has taken.  "Evil is real, biblical, and prevalent.... Some say ignore it, some say it doesn't exist.  But evil must not be ignored, it must be restrained."  There would be a cost, but, according to Bush's memoir, the preacher reminded the president that "there has never been a noble cause devoid of sacrifice" and assured him that "the Scriptures put great premiums on faithfulness, perseverance, and overcoming.  We do not quit or give up.  We always believe there is no such thing as a hopeless situation."  A Christian up against evil can't compromise, and can't quit.  A liberally educated student, standing outside the Christian culture and vocabulary, will observe how easy it is to substitute "Islamist" for "Christian" in the preacher's vocabulary.

And he or she won't be distracted by the goodness or brightness or earnestness of individual Christians or those who help them.  Bush's helpers, the ones who went over and over their assumptions and listed again and again the hazards, were as good and bright and earnest as any you can find.  They thought hard.  They just didn't think broadly.  It was all theological or military.  They all might as well have gone to Wheaton or West Point.

So, another plug for liberal education and English courses.  Parents, direct your children to them.  Children, listen closely and study hard.  Everybody hope that the teachers understand the tradition they work in.  The further it spreads among citizens the wiser the country's foreign policy will be.  Start in the Heartland.

258. Tribal Loyalty and the English Language

 
-->

Linguistic clarity may be essential to moral clarity, as a subhead on yesterday's (9-6-14) Times' OpEd reminds us, but it's so hard, so hard, to maintain it.  As soon as you leave your neutral academic classroom and join (or admit that you are already a member of) a tribe you feel the muck sticking to your words.

I think I felt it when I recognized my membership in the Israeli tribe, through my attachment to the Judeo-Christian tribe of Western history (Post 225).  As soon as the Egyptian generals overthrew the democratically elected Egyptian government I began to fear clarity in describing their deed.  Why?  Because the generals would, in a pinch, help Israel and not her enemies.  (As, when the pinch came in Gaza they did, shutting off tunnels that the elected Brotherhoood president, I feel sure, would not have shut off..)

So, anticipating that, what do I want of the words describing what the generals have done.  Certainly not clarity.  This is the world, where words serve purposes.  Here the purpose, Israel's security, demands obfuscation.  So I, the lord of accuracy in my Composition classroom, wince at the accurate use of the word "coup" for the action that put the generals where they are.  "Couldn't we have a little muck on this one?"

If there were a tribal membership that Chrystia Freeland, author of the OpEd piece, might discover in herself it would be, through her mother, the tribe of liberal Ukrainians, with clan connections to the tribe of her father, the Liberal Party of Canada, through which Freeland has now become a member of the Canadian Parliament.

Freeland's voice in the beginning of her piece could be that of a colleague speaking in the next classroom.  She speaks up strongly for clear language, and exposure of obfuscation.  She reproaches Western leaders and journalists for their reluctance to use plain terms.  Russia's actions clearly constitute "an invasion," the term Ukraine's cyberactivists use, and are not "an incursion," the term favored by President Obama and accepted by journalists.  She appeals, as we all do, to George Orwell's faulting of slovenly language: "that it makes it easier to have foolish thoughts."

But what would we hear from that classroom if the rest of her piece were before it?  Here's the central paragraph:

We may decide we lack the will to stop this [invasion] or to more forcefully help Ukrainians to stop it, but in making that decision we need to be clear about what is going on.  The distinction between lies and truth matter here because this conflict started with the Ukrainian people's revolt against authoritarianism and in favor of the liberal rights and responsibilities Ukrainians call European values.  In the Ukrainian-Russian conflict, moral clarity is essential, but to get there we need linguistic clarity, too: Ukrainians decided to build a democracy at home and make a trade deal with Europe; Russia invaded.

Well-instructed students will go to the central statement that "Ukrainians decided to build a democracy" and the implication that Russians interrupted that building.  How does it fit what's being described?  A little research will show the student that Ukraine had a democracy.  Their president was voted into office by a majority of the Ukrainian people in an election the international community found to be well within "democratic standards."  What else is democracy, neutrally defined?  And that president was removed by action in the streets.  The word "interruption" fits that, and Russia had nothing to do with it.  What Russia is interrupting now is an interruption of democracy.

I don't know what other academics will make of this.  I suspect that, from the hum I hear, over in political philosophy they're retheorizing faith in the common man.  How can you trust the common man when in the Ukraine he overwhelmingly elects a mug like Yanukovich and then so overwhelmingly rejects him that he, the common man, can't hold himself back long enough to vote him out in the next election?  Same challenge in Egypt.  Give the common man a decent election, finally, and the winners are a bunch of fanatics.

I have no doubt that Chrystia Freedland would make a good Composition teacher.  Her heart, like mine, is in the right place.  She wants words to connect accurately with the world as it is.  But she is as much a tribe member as I am, and you can see it in her words about the Ukraine.

240. Why Didn't Postmodern Theory Ruin College Education?

 

We expect practice to be consistent with theory, don't we?  Well, parents, if the practice of college teachers in the closing decades of the twentieth century had been consistent with the theory that became dominant in those decades none of your children would have come home from college able to think straight.  Now that they are home you have had a pretty good view of their postgraduate thinking.  You have seen that it's no crookeder than ours was.  I'm guessing that you would like to have somebody up there in higher education explain this to you.  I'm going to try.

First, theory.  Here's a sample that's bound to have been influential.  It's from the president of the Modern Language Association and it comes under the category "Theory" that another president had already declared victorious ("The Triumph of Theory," Presidential Address, 1986) in that organization.  The victory had been gained over those the winners called "foundationalists," people who believed in (among other things) objective standards of rational enquiry, commonly referred to by Theorists as "traditional epistemic norms," then said (by a leading anti-foundationalist, Stanley Fish) to be "lying in ruins around us." The most stubborn of the losers were those who thought they needed at least one of those norms, logic, in order to have a dialogue with students.  "Without rules for passing from one belief to another how can we develop ideas?"  The president, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, is, the passage below, trying to reassure foundationalists of that kind.  She says that their needs will be taken care of by

the innumerable, subtle, continuously operating, nonformalized, usually unrecognized, but nonetheless strong behavioral tendencies [Smith's emphasis] that emerge from individual and social practices themselves.  These are not, as terms such as "rules," "norms," "standards," and "constraints" suggest, external forces that operate upon agents to direct and control their actions but are, rather, the recurrent inclinations of the agents themselves: inclinations, to act in certain ways rather than others, that are corporeally inscribed traces of the differential consequences of their own prior and ongoing actions and interactions (Contingencies of Value, p. 162).

I think that after you straighten that passage out you get a belief in natural rationality.  The young already have in them the capacity to choose and follow the practices from which what we call rationality will emerge.  I have quoted the passage in full so that you can see whether or not I have straightened it out right.

That's the theory.  Do you see all that it, logically, cuts out from under teachers in a university?  Nobody in the whole place, facing a fragmented essay, has anything outside the student to appeal to to get him to glue it together.  The teacher has to stand by waiting for an inclination to recur.                                                                                         

You can imagine what this does, logically again, to all those composition teachers (at least 10,000 of them at the time Smith wrote) working their tails off to get students to be more rational.  And, beyond those teachers, to every teacher of every advanced course requiring that students adhere to logic in their essays.  College teachers have no support, nothing to appeal to, nothing they could call a foundation.

The ones Smith's theory really leaves planted in air, though, are the Socratic interrogators, who depend on the student's ability and willingness to connect her answers and so build a structure of belief that will stand up.  You already know what we Socratists most want to preserve: our students' respect for the rules of speech that let us get somewhere in our office or classroom dialogue.  Half of it is working out the implications of what a student tells us she believes — about a poem, or a piece of criticism, or a statement by another student.  You can't get anywhere in that kind of conversation without respect for logic, rules for passing from one belief to another.  The main thing is not to contradict oneself.  That takes some attention and enforcement, more than you'd think, but I myself have never had to go beyond the traditional norms.

Does that seem so serious, losing support for the law of non-contradiction?  Aren't there a lot of gotcha players who ought to lose their support?  No doubt.  "Let it pass, nit-picker, let it pass."  But if a Socratic teacher lets pass a contradiction then the structure he's got the student building could fall down.  If a student gets used to passing over contradictions his character (or, to Socrates, his soul) could fall apart.  He could be a Euthyphro, a mess, or a Yossarian, a sentimentalist.  (Surely I have by now quoted to you G. K. Chesterton's definition of a sentimentalist: "one who enjoys every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.")  The whole purpose of Socratic education, to produce a person of integrity (or, for Socrates, a soul in harmony), is defeated.  Such a person accepts and takes responsibility for all that he believes and wills (that is, accepts the sequences attached to his ideas and the consequences attached to his pleasures).  If that describes an adult then the sentimentalist is a juvenile.  And if postmodern theorists are right then Socratic teachers are no help turning juveniles into adults.  Which, parents, I think is what you wanted college teachers to help with when you sent your children to them.

All right, that's what's cut out from under teachers.  And what, logically still, is the world stuck with?  What are all the informal teachers — parents, friends, officials — helpless to do anything about?  Well think of all the destructive behavior that results from failure to connect P to Q — smoking tobacco to dying of cancer, texting at the wheel to cracking up the car, all that.  What is the nation stuck with?  The same failure to connect appearing in citizens, who will want from their government benefits without cost, rights without duties, war without sacrifice, victory without casualties, battle without gore, attractively humane intervention without repulsively inhuman behavior.  Constant surprise at the ugly means required by the good ends they vote for.  In the world, every democracy ruled by sentimentalists.

Logically, with all that support removed, all those epistemic norms lying in ruins, all that trust that juveniles were naturally rational, we should have by now experienced all those bad effects.  I don't think we have.  We weren't experiencing them in 1997 when I retired and from what I can see we are not experiencing them now.  Fragmented essays are still put back together, logic is still respected, composition teachers still have acknowledged ground to stand on, Socratic teachers still get students to check, and test, and draw consequences, students still internalize the process, sentimentality is no more a threat than it ever was, and young people are no more irrational than they ever were.  Your children are probably coming home from college able to think as straight as you did.

I am at a loss to explain this.  Why did the logical consequences of postmodern theory, a theory declared to the academic world by one of its leading professional organizations to be the victoriously governing theory, not show up as actual consequences?  I can think of some possibilities but I am open to suggestions.