326. Socratism

What distinguished followers of Socrates, I once decided, was being very careful about what they believed.  That got them called philosophers.  I wanted to be a follower.  Then I saw that followers also had to be very careful about how they lived.  And then I saw that followers had to be very careful about how they spoke.  And finally I discovered that if you're too careful about these things you're going to have a devil of a time doing them in combination.

Take that care about belief.  You are so careful that you discard every proposition requiring belief in God's existence.  Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) has made a case that, you conclude, cannot be refuted.  You declare your conclusion at coffee hour after church.  "Great Heavens, watch your words," says your wife on the way home.  You are going to hurt a lot of feelings and get yourself kicked off the vestry if you aren't more careful.

And why are these two cares, about belief and speech, in conflict?  Because you decided that to live the good life you had to join the human race.  Living alone in your head or your office is not a good life.  But the human race lives in tribes and you can't join one without respecting tribal beliefs and speaking tribal words.

Belief-wise tribal words are careless words but speech-wise they're just the thing.  Can you get one right without getting the other wrong?  Only through fine adjustment, if at all.  Only with the greatest care.   Are you up to it?  Can you lead the examined life if you're not?  OK, here you go. 

You're at a dinner party.  Is it true that blacks perform poorly in the classroom?  Is it true that desire to perform well is not much encouraged by black parents? by fellow blacks in school?  Is there a problem with black culture?  You, careful as you can be, report the findings of people that you have carefully determined to be the most careful you can find, university professors.  So that you all can go on to the big question: What do blacks need to do to get out of the fix they're in?  Over the horizon is the question, What can whites do to help?  On the way home your wife tells you that you have hurt a lot of feelings and that you could wind up not being invited back.

So you see that you've got a prior problem.  Before worrying about speech or belief you've got to worry about where you are, whether you're in a tribe or not, and if you are in a tribe, which one?  You think you started in an academic tribe, which you think of as tribeless, and you think (because the good life is a life engagé) that the problem is to deliver a message, in this case a message presenting truths as objectively determined as human beings can make them.  That is, a message from scientists, our purest academics.  Just what warring tribes need.   And then you hear your tribeless tribe called "the tribe that kids themselves" and you realize you've got a problem prior to the prior problem.  Yes, the unexamined life is  "not worth living," and yes, Max Beerbohm, the examined life "is no bowl of cherries either," but jeez, you may not be up to this.

OK, pull back.  Take your pure academic, your scientist, down from his pedestal and put an orator on it, an expert in rhetoric, the art of care with people's feelings.  My Socratist friends will see an elevation of carelessness.  I see a necessary change in kinds of care.  I defy them.  "Yep, you got it right.  I'm going careless."

Then a voice: "And will you go careless any old way, any old time?"  That's Aristotle, thinking of everything, reducing your big talk again.  I have to admit that to be justifiably careless, as to be justifiably angry,  I've got to be careless "to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way."  For that I've got to pay close attention, and discriminate.  You know, be careful.  If I don't admit this I'm no longer in the Socratic circle at all.

What I have to keep in mind is the principle of due proportion.  Learned from a philosopher but taught most urgently in war, and most clearly in an amphibious landing.   A soldier's wedding ring catches on a metal fitting and tears his finger off as he leaps with his full-pack weight into an assault boat.  The officer in charge allows not a pause, not a deviation, in the forward movement of the landing.   We're late for the beach.  Late means the gunners behind the beach have time to get their heads up.  Possible slaughter.  Early means you're caught in the fire meant to suppress them.  Time is vital.  Pain in a boat, the agony now in the well, is peripheral.  Blood loss here is secondary, tertiary, exponentially tertiary, to what could be lost there — where the blood lost is itself secondary to the success of the assault, the accomplishment of the mission.  All in due proportion.

That's war.  New officers, recent civilians (think 1942), learn due proportion the hard way.  Marginalize what has to be marginalized, close your ears to peripheral noise, or else.  War is violent and awful, but it confirms what we (or maybe only close examiners) learn in the most peaceful life.  Fail to distinguish between a trivial and a non-trivial proof and you, mathematician, can waste a morning, a day, a week, a semester.  Care over the trivial is pedantry, and wastes life. 

You don't have to go to war or do proofs to learn due proportion.  Just take Freshman Composition.  Learn to delete whole paragraphs because they are immaterial to your case.  Develop a sense of relevance, an eye that discriminates.  Recognize a page that's been cleared of pedantry.   You'll make a fine officer.

Or, since due proportion is something you've really got to nail down, take an Interpretation of Poetry course.  What will this poem, this line, this image add to my understanding of life, and where the good is?   Is the line for the retina or the ear drum?  Or for the mind?  Is what I'm trying to understand vital or peripheral?  Or take a Criticism course.  Which brings the life-displaying poem closer, the heartfelt recommendation by your roommate or the microscopic analysis by the critic? the emphasis given by the reader or the bricolage offered by the theorist?  It's hard.  You go along marginalizing what you think has to be marginalized.  You note how it turns out.  You learn.

In an American Literature course you see how Captain Vere learned.  France, representing "unbridled and unbounded revolt," cannot be allowed to defeat England, representing "founded law and freedom defined."  That's vital.  Billy Budd's life, which must be taken if Vere's ship is not to contribute to that defeat, is marginal.  Billy is the figure writhing in the well of an LCVP.  Collateral damage.

The death of Socrates is collateral damage.  Preservation of the laws of Athens is vital.  Socrates' escape to avoid the legal sentence upon him, death, will undermine the laws.  Socrates chooses the vital and accepts his death as collateral.

Think you can avoid these difficult choices?  There's life, full of them, with labels you can barely read: "Probably leads to the good," "Tends toward the bad," "Could lead to the blessed," "Possibly leads to the cursed."  Think you can postpone them until you can read exactly, know certainly?  There's death, mortality, putting a limit on your time and ability, blurring your vision.  Your best result is only a probability, a hunch.  Not a proof but certainly not trivial.

So, to hang on to the engagement here, what's the lesson for today?  What are the choices my recent blog posts on black education point to?

Well, first, and in the end not least, there is the choice of whether or not to put quotation marks around the word "superior" in the expression, "superior Western civilization." Can I stand before my readers the way Edith Hall stood before  the readers of The New York Review (a fair sample of the Anglo intelligentsia), apologizing for what I teach? 

It depends on my audience.  With dinner-party guests the apologetic marks are OK.  Feelings are primary.  With anybody I'm teaching they're not OK.  With children they're obviously not OK.   Knowledge is primary, the surest knowledge, acquired the Western way.  The same with adults who are still children. 

How about visitors from developing nations, come to the West for a degree? multiplying the cultures represented in our classes and in our country.  Many of them, I find, are children with respect to Western civilization.  Nicholas Kristof's account (NYT, 2-21-16) of the education of Rafiullah Kakar confirms my finding.  Rafi's Pakistani mother sent him to a madrasa where he could memorize the entire Quran.  All he needed was an ear and a memory.  But Rafi, by a selection that seems almost miraculous, was introduced to Western education at a liberal arts college in South Dakota and his mind was changed.  He ended learning the highest degree of care in tutorials at Oxford. The minds of Pakistanis who came West to become doctors and engineers, he noted,  were not changed.  They had gained "the confidence of a university degree without the critical thinking that (ideally) comes from an acquaintance with the liberal arts."  That is to say, they were still children.

I teach (or taught) visiting students who are not engineers or doctors yet, and maybe won't be.  Lower level.  But Composition, so I have a chance with them.  Do I save their feelings?  "Your school, your madrasa, your way of doing things, your Muslim culture, your civilization, is as good as mine?" Let them go back home as innocent of critical thinking as Rafi's engineers were?  Stand before them, while they are here, as if I were ashamed of what I teach?  Ashamed of critical thinking? Not possible for an American teacher.  Screw the Anglo intelligentsia.

If I didn't believe that many blacks are still children I'd be making a whopping exception of blacks, since I believe that many adults of every other race are still children (see Post #1). But here in the United States the blacks who are still children are so much more a part of our future that their juvenility has to be a worry.  The fact that they are so much more in our face than the children of other races would itself make them a worry.  I mean hip-hop blacks, gangsta rap blacks, the ones I was listening to when I wrote Post 311, the ones Thomas Chatterton Williams had to rescue his education from at Georgetown University.  These juveniles have a lot of influence.  I think Williams' picture of them in Losing My Cool justifies my saying that.

And I've got to play my white teacher's part knowing they are there, children of a race my race has criminally abused.  And they know it.  I, teaching in Composition what distinguishes Western civilization, Socrates' way of gaining and using knowledge, am a criminal.  However I play it, my presentation has to acknowledge that.  But (here's the trick) in a way that lets me get the teaching done. 

I'll make a stab at it.  "OK, I'm a criminal.  But I'm a criminal bringing some gold for you."  I'll know I've succeeded when I hear them say, "Yeah, that's gold.  A superior metal."

That may not be the best play, or gamble, but I think it does the main thing, shift attention to the vital.  The what's taught rather than the teacher.  Get the marks of apology in the right place.

324. Wonderful, Wonderful Western Civilization

Well, I can't tell you exactly what lets me come out with that "wonderful" but I can tell you what, after living through most of the century regarded as history's least wonderful (20 million killed in World War I, 60 million in World War II), makes it easier: lying on the floor with my feet up on the couch giving my back a treatment and falling asleep to whatever comes up on the random play of 74 pieces recorded on five CDs by the best musicians in the world.  One day the New Leipzig Bach Collegium doing  Pachelbel, another day the Orchestre National de France doing Bizet.

In the past only nobles and the richest merchants could be soothed as I am.  Think what it took: musicians trained and on call and supported between calls, calls to a special chamber, worked in by the palace architect to be close to the ailing king, but not too close, so that he could sleep while the musicians played on, piece after practiced piece until assured that the king was indeed asleep, then off to their stations awaiting the next call.  Me, I push a button and get the Budapest Strings and drift off.  If I wake there's Chopin, and on and on.  The CDs cost about $12 each and the player $32.95.

The historian Steven Radelet, in The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (Simon and Schuster, 2015) "reckons that the past quarter century has seen the greatest advances in material well-being in the history of mankind," according to Richard N. Cooper, reviewing the book in the latest Foreign Affairs (1/2-16).  And my wife and I, adding all that we have seen since our childhood in the thirties — the great surge after World War II, the steady climb through the seventies and eighties, the tremendous surge since — would certainly testify to that reckoning.  Wealth passed from having a long automobile in the garage to having a second boat in the Caribbean.

But that's not the right measure.  The right measure is the advance in medicine that lets you see the ceiling fixture as you listen to Brahms on your back twenty years after the age at which you would have once gone blind and become unable to read your periodicals and share your thoughts instantly with your colleagues — and, along with pictures and funnies, your children and grandchildren.  Children and grandchildren, I might add, able to work in travels to different parts of the world within days of each other — South Africa, Languedoc, China, Central America, Viet Nam, anywhere in Europe or North America — and text their reactions, with photos and sometimes their own live faces, at any time.  None will die of small pox or be wasted by tuberculosis or be crippled by polio.

That lets me say "wonderful" and then Socrates makes me say "Western" since without him I don't think we'd have the scientific method — the step by step testing and building of reliable belief — that distinguishes this civilization from others.  And gives us our kind of universities, "academies."  (More on this in post 246, a little more in 154  and 245.)

No, imperialism and racism and genocides and arrogance don't (except in the eyes of those ignorant of world history) distinguish us.  Crimes (except in the eyes of those playing for the guilt advantage) don't distinguish us.  Cruelty to the weak doesn't distinguish us.  (Cruelty to the weak is a mark of the strong (us) and it may become criminal but it doesn't become a distinction until the weak display what they are capable of when they become strong.)

What's distinctive in us is our development of the instruments of criminality, or, I should say, our development of instruments among which those of criminality will necessarily be included.  Instruments are morally neutral, but that's so hard to remember when you're looking at the effect of cluster bombs, or nuclear weapons, or gas chambers.  These may have some culpability as temptations, and suggest a Satanic presence, but if they do it's the same one that cuts out cancers. 

This is not to say that there's no difference between the admiral lying off shore sending six-pounders through a native village and Albert Schweitzer bending over an operating table.  It's to say that instruments, cannon or scalpel, are not the proper objects of moral judgment.  Purposes are, choices are.  Which is to say that the African chief unable to use cannon or scalpel cannot (yet) be used for purposes of moral comparison, nor can his civilization.

All right, the admiral is happily taking part in a rapacious colonial takeover.  Though we cannot, looking at a world history full of such crimes, make a confident moral comparison, we can pronounce a confident moral judgment.  That stinks.  

But, maybe because we are Westerners, we have to submit to questioning by Socrates.  "Exactly what stinks?  The takeover?  Totally?"  We're off examining what Socrates is always forcing examination of, two-valued moral judgment.  It stinks or it doesn't.  Here one whiff and you've got it.  Ah yes,  imperialism.  At other times it will be a whiff of racism, or communism, or sexism.  Nazism fixed whiff-judgment for our century.  Oh ho, collaboration!  Adolf Hitler probably did more to encourage two-valued moral judgment than anybody in history.

But back to Socrates.  He's just asked, "Does the government set up by those engaged in the rapacious colonial takeover stink?"  And, looking at the British, we can't say Yes, stinks.  Not without saying Yes about the native "governments" their government replaced and most of those that would replace it.  Not without saying that efficiency, and order, and effort for the common good stink.  So yes, Socrates, the British had a superior ability to organize a government.  And the fact that they cited that ability to justify their takeovers does not negate the government's superiority or reduce its benefits.

And there, exhibited by the British example, is something that I think will hold up as a distinction of Western civilization: superior ability to organize a government, with a superior infrastructure following.  You know, a government that will work and keep on working as other governments, rising in other civilizations, do not.   A recent OpEd in the Times ("Why the Post Office Makes America Great," 1-3-16) by an immigrant from Turkey makes me think we've got something here.  One feature of her new society sums it all up for her: reliable mail service.  She marvels.  Imagine, standardized rates!  "You could just slap a stamp on your letter, drop it in a mailbox, and it would go to its destination."  Add packages and you see how Amazon and eBay are enabled.  "Dependable infrastructure," says Zeynep Tufekci,  "is magical not just because it works, but also because it allows innovation to thrive, including much of the Internet-based economy that has grown in the last decade."  I, looking at my grandchildren, one working out a dance, another composing music for an orchestra, would add that it allows creativity to thrive.

The thing about good, working infrastructure, Tufekci reminds us, is that it's boring.  "We get used to it and forget what a gift it truly is."  As, I would add, we get used to the other gifts of science and Socrates (oh so many posts here  — 84, 103, 107, 110, 120, 154), worked out over time.  You have to pinch yourself to see it or, like Tufekci, be newly arrived. 

I don't have to pinch myself because, looking at the ceiling fixture with this great sense of well-being, I am well aware of the gifts of science and rationality.   Without them no such well-being.  Why have I even bothered to make something of them, and argue for their importance?  Why haven't I just gone to sleep?

Because I have heard so many voices — of the Plato who made Socrates his mouthpiece, of world-scorning Christian saints, of German Idealists, of American Transcendentalists, of the great Emerson, of, oh, my own Sunday School teacher — cautioning me.  All delivering one message: your well-being, old man, is only material well-being.  The greater well-being is spiritual.  Your ceiling is very low. 

In my chastened state I turn my head away from the fixture. There at the side is the CD player, and further on the laptop.  Now I hear the most cutting voices of all, from the philosophers of my own century: “It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly" (Bertrand Russell), and "Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology" (Martin Heidegger).

By now, though, I've learned to do some chastising myself.  "Hold on, you philosophers.  How sure are you of that word 'spiritual'?  Are you confident that it does not apply to the state my fourteen-year-old grandson is in when he hears the notes he dreamed coming out, on his composer's app, in the harmony he hoped for?  Oh, that's esthetic, you say.  Are you sure, sirs, that you can distinguish the esthetic from the spiritual?  Are you sure the word 'heavenly' is all wrong for that harmony?  If you are not, then maybe we can go on to your words 'free' and 'noble.'"

Note:  The words "spirit" and "spiritual" are discussed in Post 89.