325. Arts Section vs. Science Times

The science section of the New York Times brings you up to date on the products of the kind of thinking I see as obligatory on followers of Socrates (academics, most clearly seen in scientists): the careful, skeptical reasoning that establishes reliable belief. 

The arts section brings you up to date on the products of the kind of thinking that for most of us makes life worth living and English professors worth hiring: the careful selection of parts of life that show how rich and stirring it is.  Imagining.  Most clearly seen in poets.

The news and editorial sections mainly show you the need for the first kind of thinking and the inadequacy of the second.  You put those sections down in the evening saying things like, "Goddamit, George Bush, make sure that belief in the existence of WMD is reliable" and "Ho there, John McCain, project the casualties in your intervention, compare them with those you'd intervene to stop, do the arithmetic."  Scientists do arithmetic.  Journalists, scientists working under a time constraint, give you good numbers and careful projections.

And because there is so much, visible from so many angles, to compare and calculate, they often leave you saying, "Oh, how complicated it all is!"  There are the Serbs doing all that damage in Kosovo.  How much damage in Belgrade will stop the damage in Kosovo?  OK, do it.  Oh my God we hit the Chinese embassy.   How soon will we hit a hospital?  Recalculate collateral damage.  Recalculate.

Poets — the term covers all storytellers and film-makers — are the darlings of the arts section but they are a danger in the world the news section reports on.  If they stir us enough (like with images of the collaterally wounded) we'll stop the bombing and let the wounding we wanted to stop go on — that wounding we were called on to stop, but which, at the moment, we have no stirring images of.  So we get a worse consequence than the collateral consequence of the primary consequence. Poets are so often, as the wise West-Winger in the TV program said, "new to consequences."

Collateral damage is a consequence of human inadequacy.  Our wartime Navy knew all about human inadequacy.  "Three percent never get the word," you were told the minute you started planning an operation.  Put a hundred boats in the water and three of them will be wandering around wondering where they are supposed to go.  Count on it.  The high purpose of the morning will leak away in the afternoon.

Write a law that requires all policing forces to treat all races and ethnicities the same and three percent are going to violate that law.  Count on it.  Somewhere in the United States there will be a Jefferson, Missouri, where the laws have changed but the men have not.

If you become a victim of men who violate the law what are the chances that you will accurately identify your victimizer?  Well, what are the chances that any of us will become a Socrates?  You know, see, under a death sentence, that you are "a victim not of laws but of men"?   How many victims of today will make that fine distinction and be at peace, as Socrates was in the Crito? 

Whatever the number, it is bound to be lower at times of pain and shock, as now with Ferguson and all the other displays of informal racism set before us on our screens.  Shock and pain bring forth poets, anecdotalists, like Ta-Nehisi Coates.  They make us who weren't there feel the pain, and see how we might have inflicted it, or, once, allowed by laws, did inflict it.  They provide material for those who work to change the laws.  And they work to change the men where it counts, inside.  That they also work less admirably — in moral upmanship, in guilt games, in Foucauldian power plays — does not diminish their accomplishment.  Poets are a help.  (See Post 321, on anecdotalists)

But they don't make the careful distinctions Socrates showed us how to make.  Coates, as his reviewer, Thomas Chatterton Williams pointed out (London Review of Books, 12-3-15), does not distinguish between behavior determined by white oppression and behavior determined by blacks themselves, nor, within white oppression, between morally fallible people and a morally culpable system — that is, between laws and men.

Williams, a black essayist living, like Coates, in Paris, does make those distinctions and, on questions like the disproportionate incarceration of blacks, is more the scientist.  Where Coates is simply indignant Williams cites a study (by Michael Javen Fortner, another black) showing that "working and middle-class black families for decades actively supported and sometimes participated in the implementation of many of the most notorious tough-on-crime measures that helped put the current US prison system in place."  Simple proportion, number of crimes to number in jail, but in the end, oh how complicated!   Williams the scientist asks, in the fraternal idiom, the vital question, "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?  This is a terrible question that any analysis of black life must eventually confront."  Coates the poet can't come close to such a question.  It would make his anecdotes less vivid, less stirring.

Stirring anecdotes are the enemies of due proportion.  In a news section that observes due proportion the vital will play big and the peripheral will play small.  Just the way they play in scientific analysis, where the distinction is vital academic business.  Collateral damage remains collateral.  Where the business is commercial or political — raising circulation figures, Nielsen ratings, or poll numbers — the collateral is promoted to the vital.  Donald Trump now leads in this promotion but Ta-Nehisi Coates, though not in Trump's class, is in the same business, rhetorical stirring.  Coates needs to suppress vital-peripheral proportioning in order to keep stirring what he's stirring.   It's the need that elsewhere puts Coates before Williams as a man "in ardent search of an affront."  

Passion got poets thrown out of Plato's Republic but passionate promoters of necessary revolutions, changers of bad laws, correctors of insidious attitudes, have an excuse.  It depends on what the times call for.  When revolutions succeed, laws are rectified and attitudes changed, the passionate lose their excuse, a question that immediately brings before us Ta-Nehisi Coates and his passionate book, his cri de coeur, Between the World and Me.  Has Coates lost his excuse?

Our answer will depend on how well we think the civil rights revolution succeeded, and the weight of that answer will depend on how well we distinguish the wrongs of laws from the wrongs of men. 

If you believe (as I do) that we are in the implementation phase of the civil rights revolution, which rectified the laws, then Coates can't be giving us what is called for in our time.  Cool problem-solving is called for.  What Williams is pointing us toward.  To me that means Western science.  What gives us, as its main gift to our daily lives, the solution to social, political, economic, practical problems.  Not the certain solution, not that ever, but the best solution possible to us in our time.  With careful Socratic, academic testing. 

We are so affluent in these solutions now that we forget how they are obtained.  Postmodern French philosophers, rolling since Pasteur in evidence-based benefits, have forgotten that there's a foundation for them, or even a need for a foundation.  We, with problems like low performance of blacks in school nagging us, are less likely to forget. 

It's clear to me that the solution of the performance problem lies in the application of and, most importantly, acceptance of the results of, scientific analysis.  If that analysis starts (as it is supposed to start) with  a realistic (some would say "unblinking") picture of the current state of affairs (some will say it's already started — in academic settings) it is bound to reach the point Williams foresees, where analysts will ask, "How much are blacks contributing to their own plight?"  Their answer, that result, when they give it, must be accepted as truth ("what has so far passed our most rigorous tests") by every follower of Socrates — which I take academics and want intellectuals to be.  That lets us go on, building from there.

Williams lets me imagine a common future; Coates does not.  With Williams I see a solid, cooperatively (though in the process painfully and shakily) built structure that will in the end hold the solution to the problem.  For Coates I see...what?  Nothing cooperative, certainly, nothing solid at the end.  Further cries of the heart, more sympathy maybe, changes in attitude that might gain better cooperation from whites, but not much cooperation, not much softening, on the black side.  Hardening rather.  There's that barrier between him and the world, built entirely by whites.  Why should he be expected to help tear it down?

So, throw him out of the Republic?  Not at all.  Attitudes, consciousness, still need to be changed, awareness expanded.  We can follow his success in the Arts Section, where I think his aspirations take him.  Williams' aspirations probably take him there too, but I think he'd like to see, certainly I'd like to see, results in the editorial section he could get some credit for.

What do we, citizens of a living republic, aspire to?  Continuation, I suppose, survival of the republic, in as lively a way as possible.  We can see how it's going each day in the news section.  Do we play no part?  Well, we cheer and we boo and we vote. 

And some of us play a larger part.  We sit on committees to advise on awards.  I see myself on one, selecting for the MacArthur.  It's going to Coates.  "No, no!  Give it to Williams!"  That's the modern equivalent of throwing Coates out of the Republic.  (Note:  Coates won his MacArthur in 2015, the year Between the World and Me won the National Book Award.)

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!

305. Progress in Race Relations, Progress in Language

What Ta-Nehisi Coates says about what black males suffer in white America (quoted by David Brooks, NYT, 7-17) made me think of Socrates right away.  Coates and his fellows are clearly victims.  But they, like Socrates in prison, "are victims not of laws but of men."  And the distinction is important.

To right the injustice of victimization by laws you have to change the system, maybe the whole thing, starting with a society that makes laws like that.  The culture could be wrong.  Maybe you need a revolution.

To right the injustice of victimization by men you just have to change the men.  That's hard, but it's a lot easier than changing a whole society.   In Ferguson it could be as simple as getting whites out of the police force and getting blacks in.  The town was behind in having the ethnic make-up of the force reflect the make-up of the community.  (There had been a rapid change.)

That's physical change.  The more important change may be psychological, changing attitudes.  That's what Coates and a lot of other people, white and black, are trying to do.

Even before we start we know that change like this is going to be difficult.  On square one we had a lot of white people cruelly enslaving a lot of black people.  I mean really cruelly, worse than any slavery before.  They work them dawn to dusk, they break up their families, they don't let them form families, they let them learn nothing that doesn't make them agriculturally productive, they wipe out as much as they can of their native culture, which was agricultural.  It's a crime for them to learn to read. They are victims of the white people in every way, and this may be the worst way, the denial to them of education.  They know nothing of what's available to whites in their culture, none of the good and power-giving and life-enriching things that other cultures have adopted, things different from the cruel slavery thing, though that's part of this culture too. 

On square two blacks are freed from this slavery into the society of the white people, but they are not fully free, since there are many laws restricting them. Through many squares they remain victims of white people.  But over time the laws are changed until they step onto the square where we can say, with Socrates, that they are "victims not of laws but of men."  That's a square closer to our own but how many intervened or how many lie ahead is hard to say.  Anyway we're somewhere on that part of the board, and we're all together on the same square.

My colleagues in other departments — sociology, psychology, government, history, maybe philosophy — are all trying their hardest to determine just where we are, and where we should step next.  The help they offer varies with their training, which determines what they see when they look at the square.  What do I see?  I see a lot of people crowded together talking as persuasively as they can to change attitudes.  I'm in English, where we're trained to examine talk.

So, what needs attention?  Too much for here, but we can attend to one problem: the use of the word "deficient."  It's clearly the accurate word for the black's original condition with respect to these good and power-giving and life-enriching things whites have access to in their education but have denied blacks access to. But going forward it's a word nobody can use easily and confidently.  Recent black slaves can use it but it's difficult for them, being uneducated, to know what they are deficient in. Recent white enslavers know what that is, and can identify deficiency more easily, but the word is too close to "inferior" for them to be able, without discredit, to use it.  "Inferior" was used too often by whites in power contests (lawmaking, for one), making sure that blacks would lose.

 "Inferior," though discredited when it is used categorically ("My culture is superior to yours"), gains credit as soon as it is used conditionally ("My culture is superior to yours at preparing young people for hardship in a whaleboat").  Adoption of an end obliges us to discriminate among means, and where cultures are means — raising chances of landing a whale, or a spot at Harvard, or a job — to discriminate among them.  (I go through this in greater detail in Post 77.)  

The end here is more black young people in Harvard and other colleges.  Whatever it is that gets other young people there, whatever those other cultures have that improves their chances,  would-be helpful whites want to say that black culture is deficient in it.  That's the first step toward any sufficiency, an accurate statement of the deficiency.  

It's all very Socratic and scientific and the best way to solve the problem of Black education, but oh how hard it is to make that initial statement in the talk arena.  We're still too close to categorical "inferior" and all the feelings it provokes.

Better, most educated whites seem to agree, to play it safe.  They might try softeners ("challenged," "lacking in," "insufficient"), hoping they won't be seen through, but they never use the words "deficient" or "inferior" with respect to blacks.  And that's too bad because we're clearly on a square where black attitudes toward education need to be talked about accurately.  Along with all that contributes to those attitudes, in family or culture.  Any person who tries to do that now, though, apparently can't or won't use his most accurate words, not freely.  Let's hope we'll soon get to a square where he can.