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!

320. In Defense of Name-Calling

If anybody's interested in what postmodern theory can do to a guy my recent posts will show him.  Did you notice how careful I was being about just what bad name to call people?  Will it be "trash"?  Will it be "barbarian"?  Or would "uncivilized" do?

That was rhetoric, see, and I was being an orator.  Yes, one of those people.  Not a philosopher, as we followers of Socrates are supposed to be.  Disinterested searchers for truth.  Objective reporters of what we've found.  Please don't tell Simmias.

Not that I was attracted to oratory.  No, I was making the best of what Stanley Fish and sixteen sharpshooters from the Sorbonne had left me.  If language is "rhetoric all the way down," and my students believe that, and everybody at the dinner table believes that, and every intellectual in debate in America believes that, then all I can do is be the most effective orator I can be.  Like: "You know, these people are barbarians."  That ought to have some effect.  But godalmighty what?

It's easier to start with good names, like "civilized."  A compliment word, a eulogism, it gets its force from whatever desire my listener has to be complimented by me, which will be a compliment on membership in my tribe.  That's all.  No matching up with what God wants, or nature promotes, or history demonstrates .  No reference to what Matthew Arnold was sure of ("the best that has been thought and said in the world") or to what C.S. Lewis specified (in his list of the 118 very best).  Not a traditional foundation in sight.

It occurred to me once to illustrate this rhetorical force by showing how a minor-league player just brought up to the major leagues might respond to a eulogism, "Yankee."  It's a neutral word that was made into a compliment word by writers reporting on the success and distinctive behavior of players wearing the Yankee uniform.  When they said a second-year player had shown himself to be "a real Yankee" people knew what they meant.  Somebody like Tommy Henrich.

If you're a baseball fan you know what I mean.  If you're not you need a story.  Or two.  First, Waite Hoyt, the great pitcher on the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig teams of the twenties.  He, late in his career, was pitching for the Pirates against the Cardinals,  a team the Yankees had thrashed in the 1928 World Series.  As the game went on he got more and more abuse from the Cardinal bench.  Finally he walked over in front of the dugout and said, "Watch yourselves.  Go too far and I'll put my Yankee uniform on and scare you to death."

That's drawing on Yankee success.  The Steinbrenner story draws on Yankee character, which, though just as powerful, is less definable.  After a year as president and owner of the club a sportswriter observed that he was "no Yankee," and others took it up.  He wasn't living up to the pin-stripe standard.  I think it had something to do with dignity and reserve, what the leaders to Yankee success, like Gehrig and DiMaggio, had, and yes, the mid-level players, like Henrich. 

Whatever else the expression "real Yankee" suggested, and however much the rookie on the Yankee bench would love to hear it applied to him, and however much he would hate to hear "no Yankee," I want to make him into the student seated before the teacher who has no means to motivate him other than such words.  That teacher's words are "civilized" and "uncivilized," the words all his timid words — euphemistic, conciliatory, concessionary, tactful — drive toward, and all his bold words, like "barbaric," fall back to.  The civilization is Western (necessarily, since this teacher is incapable of teaching any other), and the model, the DiMaggio, is Socrates.  "Real academic," meaning faithful follower of Socrates, is equivalent to "civilized" but bolder, a eulogism suggesting quintessence.

Is all this necessary?  Or have I been so spooked by postmodern theory that I'm hallucinating a worldwide intellectual takeover?  That could be (a retirement home puts you rather out of touch) but in each week's mail delivery there seems to be a revenant who won't leave.  In the latest New York Review the late David Lindberg, "a distinguished historian of science," is quoted by Steven Weinberg as saying that

the proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

If modern thought in science is what has survived scientists' tests this has to be nonsense, and Weinberg, Nobel winner in physics, calls it so.  He also shows me that the issue is still alive.  Is it the postmodern depreciation of logic that's keeping such relativism going?  

I think a prepostmodern, and hope that a postpostmodern, academic would be able to follow Lindberg's statement to its logical end: that one claim to truth is as good as another.  Nonsense, as Weinberg says.  But delivered by a distinguished historian of science and accepted by the editors of the University of Chicago Press, no doubt on the advice of Lindberg's peers in the history of science.

I won't go into the implications of that for the German system that puts all one's peers into a compartment, where group nonsense becomes possible.  Where peer review becomes meaningless.

I'd rather indulge myself in a vision of the Anglo-Hellenic system, not fully imposed (that's too visionary), but introduced, or reintroduced, as a check.  I see Weinberg sitting in — as dean's representative, as a Paul Murphy — on some of the committees in my Department, English, in the eighties and nineties.  Right there, looking at a feminist critique of science, already published in a feminist journal, he tells us how nonsensical it is.  And saves us from embarrassment on the College Tenure Committee, where it becomes a document in evidence, and where our own scientists have to tell us, with collegial tact, without using the word "nonsense," that it is nonsense.

To a graduate thesis committee in my department Paul Murphy (many of my readers will remember him) said, "If this is acceptable then everything I've learned about scholarship is wrong," and denied the grant of the degree.  Steven Weinberg, with his "nonsense," is a Paul Murphy in spades.  But he's speaking in The New York Review.  The way Alan Sokal spoke in Le Nouvel Observateur.  Think of how much would have been accomplished for the academy, for public trust of professors, if both had been able to speak on our examination committees.  In every department.

I'm guessing that our graduate schools are still German enough to be silencing such voices, and I'm too far away, really, to credibly imagine anything, but I can imagine a baseball dugout.  No rookie hearing "bush league."  No idea of what a real Yankee is.  Nothing particular about a Yankee uniform.  No DiMaggio for a model.  Everybody free to go out on the field and think they're playing serious baseball — until they hear the boos.

246. What Fails When Friendship with Socrates Fails.

 
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Well, that's a sad story (Post 245, below), students given their freedom to subordinate everything to their search for the good life and then using that freedom to walk away from those who could help them most, Socrates and his friends. 

Does anybody have any doubt that the students of Barbara Herrnstein Smith have walked away?  Does everybody see that when you trust your tendencies or inclinations or linguistic competence (as the theory of Stanley Fish has you doing), rather than the logic Socrates trusts, you have walked away, mentally?  His friends can no longer be your friends.  They will, to be blunt, find your life not worth living.

How much do you lose when you lose friendship with Socrates?  "Your best chance to be a philosopher," I hear, and approve.  But I wouldn't put it that way.  I'd put the horse before the cart and say you lose your best chance to be an adult.  And I'd define "adult" through my definition of "child": one who, whatever his age, hasn't learned to check his thinking.  Hasn't learned to be careful.  The white grown-up who jumps to conclusions about the behavior of blacks is a child.  The white grown-up who studies crime statistics before entering a neighborhood is an adult.  The grown-up of any color who judges which is a child and which is an adult just by their behavior (staying out of or going into the neighborhood) is a child.

Stick around Socrates and you learn to study, and test, and not jump to conclusions.  Simple, but it's not common among children.  Socrates' students are children learning how to think.  Before the twentieth century Nietzsche said, "Asia has not yet learned how to think."  It has now, but the learning is uneven.  The Iranian who learns engineering in the U.S. and then tells a journalist that Allah will raise mountains to intercept any American air strike hasn't learned how to think.  He's gotten the product of the scientific method but as for the method, he doesn't get it.

There in that Athenian circle, there is the germ of the scientific method, organized common sense tested by experience, the miracle grain of the West.  Walk away from the Athenian circle and you have walked away from the West.  There's a loss for you, the whole West.

The trouble is, it's so hard to stay, as Euthyphro discovered.  You remember Euthyphro, the fellow whose intuition told him all he needed to know about piety, and who found questions about it painful?  The fellow who thought he heard his mother calling when Socrates wanted to continue questioning?  What he found hard about staying is what freshmen in college find hard.  There they are, already anxious, as children everywhere are, about whether they can make it as adults, and then there they are in the middle of this bunch of adults, these carefully speaking, closely listening creatures ready to dismiss you in four months if you don't catch on. 

Those adults aren't "philosophers," they're just teachers.  But there they are, through the tradition coming down from Socrates through Plato's Academy to today's university, friends of Socrates.  And no matter what they teach, they're teaching thinking. 

That's not easy, learning to produce what won't be credited to you as thought until it passes the teacher's tests, and for some it's going to be a struggle.  That makes the dropout inviting.  But for all it's a strain, and that makes the vacation or the binge inviting.  No more of that rigor.  Oh, how good childhood looks!  Oh how happy Euthyphro must have been!  Oh how welcome a theory like Stanley Fish's is!

With Fish's permit in hand you can walk away, but can you walk away without being disapproved of?  Yes!  You can act as if you're walking across.  To another culture or society, at the same level.  If it's a primitive one, with fewer recorded crimes, you can even claim you're moving up.  If it's located at a geographical or historical distance you can imagine its virtues more easily.  It's best, though, to find one at a philosophical distance, with a model that can be exchanged for that of Socrates — an Indian guru, say, or a Buddha.  That will give you the deepest justification for a dropout.

You'll get a lot of in-house help if you take this option.  Western literature is full of noble dropouts (or never-joined), making your move downward feel like a move upward.  Everybody knows or has been taught that Huck Finn's move out (to the territories) is a move up (from Midwestern "sivilization').  Nobody wants Holden Caulfield to join a society full of phonies. 

If you take this route, though, you'll have to deal with Herman Melville.   He's rough on romantic primitives, and he doesn't mind threatening children with pain.  When R. M. Hare says to a student, "You cannot say, on pain of contradiction, that..." Melville's right with him.  He'd pain the draft-rioters of 1863, those children, without reservation.  Who has reservations?  The Romantics who gave America its faith: "that man is naturally good, and more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged."  For Melville it's good to have a citizen fear the pain of physical injury and for Hare its good to have a student fear the pain of embarrassment. 

 There's a definition of adulthood (rationality) for you: capacity to be embarrassed by a self-contradiction.   If you're going to hang onto it, though, you're going to have to be careful not to misread Emerson ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds") or Whitman ("Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself").  Take them to be referring to the assertion of A and not-A and, with excuse in hand, you'll soon be feeling no pain.  Take them to be referring only to a change of mind and you're no longer covered.  Your nerves are still live for the tutor's plucking.

That's the hard life inside the Socratic-Western academic circle.  Students live it so that they can become adults.  They can decline to live it for many more reasons than the one above but the biggest one in America has been that they think they already are adults.  I mean, way before they had "linguistic competence" and "behavioral tendencies," those guarantees of adulthood, they had their "American youth" title.  That very often, by itself, let children think they were adults.

We know how this happens generally, and it starts out very much to our credit.  We love and encourage.   Then we overdo it.  It's a problem for all parents.  You praise a child so that he will think well of himself, not lose heart, and (the whole idea) keep going.  You over-praise, though, and he will think he's already arrived.

There's where America comes in.  It's the land of over-praised youth.  But at some times more than others.  A time when uneducated immigrants are counting on that next generation to haul them out of the mass is certainly going to produce some high-end encouragement.  It's ambition, and pride, but still, at bottom, love.  These are children, after all.  And, when it works, awe.  "Oogh, the things that boy knows."

In any case, that's what made America famous for youth-worship.  If you could graph it you'd probably see a peak in the years after World War II.  The immigrant awe hasn't worn off and the soldier who has lost his own youth is home to raise a new generation.  What a generation!  These things are hard to gauge, but going by what I heard from elders addressing graduates at Ohio University in those years this was the brightest, best, highest-scoring, soundest-thinking group of young people ever to arrive in our midst.  If you had wanted to make children think they were already adults you couldn't have given them higher praise.  The Commencement podium was an altar to them.

219. The Contest Between Paintings and Wallpaper.

 

At each meal in my retirement home I face a wall that has a painting of wallpaper on it.  That's all that's in the frame.  Just a section of wallpaper.

Though it doesn't throw me into transports it does transport me: back to that train station (Post #2) where I immediately thought better of what some people were doing in a passageway when my companion told me that it was "performance art."

You can see what makes the connection between the station and the wall wall: a thing we look at is given added value through a name.  My companion said, "This is art," and so, I think, does the frame.

I argued that a painting shouldn't be given this added value.  It should earn it.  By competing fair and square with everything else offering value.  The performers in the train station are up against anything else you might see in a train station.  The stuff inside a frame is competing against anything you might see outside the frame.  Like the wallpaper.

Now what everything on the wall of a dining room is competing for is the privilege of supplying a background pleasure.  Conversation and food are the foreground pleasures.  You can find all kinds of weighty, paired terms for this division —intrinsic vs. extrinsic, essential vs. accidental, central vs. marginal — but none of them will let you reverse the privilege of the conversation and food.  They (a jazz club will tell it to you) are the trumpet and clarinet, carrying the tune; the wallpaper is just brushes on the drum.

Experience with various pleasures soon taught me, as Socrates taught me later, that for the good life pleasures have to be ranked, and proportioned, and located, foreground or background.  If you disagree I'll take you to a jazz club. 

OK, this retirement home is no jazz club, but the truth I landed on was a general one, applying everywhere.  So here I am, listening closely to my companions (don't think octogenarians aren't worth listening to), and what do I hear?  What has this painter done?  Cued the drummer to take over.  With his brush!  "Quiet, you diners, I'm showing you some art," says the frame.  I look inside.  "Ta da!"  A section of wallpaper.  Outside is inside, background is foreground, lesser is greater, and the effect on me is distraction.  I can no longer keep my mind on the conversation.

So what am I, in a comedy club?  "Hey, the wallpaper guy is here.  Thinks he can use it to test the value of painting." All right, smart-ass, test this.

I know, I'm so vain I think that song is about me, but still I can be useful. How familiar are you with the recent, and in some ways ongoing, culture wars?  Do you know that one side believed in proportion and the other side thought they believed too strongly in it?  The proportionists (also identified as traditionalists, and sometimes classicists) carefully distinguished essential from accidental, intrinsic from extrinsic, central from peripheral — and ranked the former ahead of the latter.  The anti-proportionists (identified as postmodernists) exercised less care and said, in effect, to hell with such ranking.  What traditionalists put in the center they — often playfully, just for a tweak — would put in the margin.

There you've got the retirement home dining room, foreseen by the postmodern painter.  She raises her decentering weapon, her brush, the wallpaper goes into the frame, and pow, there I am with my fork in the air.

Now I've taken enough of these shots (oh those 60s absurdists) to know that the worst thing I can do is go weighty on her.  The purpose, as with those ribbers Hemingway despised, is to get a rise out of you.  Not this time, baby.  I'll play it cool.

How do I do that?  By listening closely to the octogenarian trying to complete her promising thought.  I'll show the painter that, even though I'm internally enjoying her game, it ranks below the game we at the table are still trying to play, however well, the game of understanding life, and what's essentially good in it.  Through talk.  That's Socratic, that's classical, that's Western.  And that's what the postmodernist is turning away from — or having fun with.

155. Art at Home: Rules

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The first rule for painters, as for doctors, is "Do no harm."  Paintings do harm when they call attention to themselves without providing a reward equal to what they have interrupted, like a dinner-table conversation. 

You best discover the rewards of a painting when you look at it by yourself, after the party's over.  When you have a painting that your eyes go back to, and see new things, you know you've got a winner, and you can be glad you bought it. 

I don't know what makes a winner, exactly, but I do know that with me the winner is nearly always going to be a painting you can look into, one with several dimensions.  That stimulates me to imagine new angles, myself, and sort of get into the painting.  It's a pleasure.

Do I want to talk about it?  Not likely.  I don't have the words, and I doubt that my friends will have them either.  It's too mysterious, and you don't need them for the pleasure.

Winners belong in the living room, where your easy chair is and where, before the party, there's not likely to be much for conversation about paintings to interrupt.  In the dining room you want pleasant non-competitors, guests who never substitute their own topic for an ongoing topic — as Andy Warhol's can of Campbell's soup did. 

"Harmless paintings, harmless guests.  You need to justify such an unexciting prospect.  What exactly is it that you're protecting from harm?"

Well, if you can't guess it I doubt that I will be able to say it.  It would be easier if you were a follower of Socrates.  Then when I said, "I'm trying to protect the good life" you would see him trying to live well and you'd understand.  Living well meant speaking well.  The good life was a talking life.  It's an elusive thing but at a dinner table I think you have a better chance at it — seeing what it is, understanding it, contributing to it, enjoying it — than you do anyplace else.

"But aren't paintings part of the good life?  Don't they contribute to it?"

Oh, they do.  If an active imagination is part of the good life (and I feel sure it is when I sit in my easy chair moved to go further and further into a painting) then paintings and other works of art contribute to the good life.  They may make you a better contributor at the dinner table!  But contributions vary and you don't want a lesser one interfering with a greater one.  Conversation contributes more — has a chance of contributing more, anyway — than painting does.  So you put the disruptive painting in the living room.

"'Disruptive.'  I can imagine a conversation in which the Warhol painting would not be a disruption: a conversation about movements in painting."

That would be a specialist or professional conversation.  If your party is all art historians, OK.  If not, if it's amateurs, no go.  You don't want any painting that says, "Hey, look at me.  I'm making a statement about earlier paintings."  Or about any of those special subjects. really.  Socratic, dinner-table conversation is amateur conversation, its subject is life, and it's rude for professionals to interrupt it.  Or even, if they are painters, to speak loudly on their own.  A dining-room wall is no place for them to talk to each other.

"You call your people 'amateurs' but they sound to me like philosophers.  That makes them rather special, doesn't it?  And, excuse me, possibly dull?"

Agh, I've misled you.  Choice of words again.  I said "talk about life." "About" made you think of philosophers, standing above life."  If had said, "talk close to life" you could have thought of your neighbors, people in the middle of life, the life you live, and, like you, lovers of it, amateurs, interested in anything rising out of it.  Put them at a dinner table and the resulting conversation is the one I'm calling "amateur."

"And that's the conversation you don't want to interrupt.  So you put the Warhol painting in the living room.  With the rest of the paintings that call attention to themselves?"

Yes, but with Warhol you've still got the problem of reward.  Can you go into the painting later or did it say all it has to say the first time?  If further contemplation of the can label (or the dots, or the monochrome canvas, or any of scores of other such things) does nothing for you after the party, then you might as well get the painting out of the house.

"Into a museum, maybe?  Where it can at least illustrate a movement?  Or a gallery, where people who aren't so concerned about dinner parties can buy it?"

That would be fine.  In museums you can hear fascinating conversations — painters talking to each other, curators getting them together for talk, curators talking to each other, curators talking to society, and so much else that will interest you.  And you can see the paintings you'd like to have but can't afford.  In galleries you can see the value other people put on them — if you're interested in those values, and you want to take the time.

"Why wouldn't you be interested in those values and be willing to take the time?  Why wouldn't any educated person be interested in learning what our best-educated people think is the best in art?"

The question is not interest but degree of interest, measured against competing interests.  I can be interested in going to an exhibition to see if I've missed anything in a painter that others can show me and I can still stay home — if I'm more interested in what I've got going there.

"Like what?"

Like what can be found in any home: life, dealing with it, exploring it, enjoying it, the life of the imagination, the life of words, talk, parties, the talk of those up close to life, the wisdom of the dinner table.  Is anybody closer to life than a man and a woman, parents, talking babies at a dinner table?  Is anybody more capable of wisdom?  If you don't think so, why gamble on a trip across town to see what paintings or curators or dealers can tell you? 

"Or performers?"

Unless you mean "performers in a play," God yes.  Anybody willing to go three blocks to see what, if he had any imagination, he could see more significantly in his own neighborhood, all the great "happenings" there, just doesn't know how to economize.

"What is this, home economics?  Household management?"

No, it's life management.  Prioritizing.  Recognizing that life is short.  Seeing what's worth spending time on and what isn't.  Knowing what you value, what you need to protect.  Avoiding harm to it.

"And that's where your rule comes in.  You want artists to help?"

Yes.  Artists and curators and historians and anybody whose work is so fascinating it might distract people from this that they're pursuing, which, however they see it, Socrates would see as "the good life."

Note: This subject is also treated in Post #2, "Do We Need the Word 'Art'?"