360. Higher Education: The Great Shift (1)

I would say that in the 73 years that I have been observing higher education in this country nothing has changed more profoundly than our primary goal.  Where it once was knowledge it is now goodness.

In my university, as in many others, it began with the installation of African-American Studies as an academic department.  The aim was to reduce the injustice done to blacks.  Incorporation of such studies into one of the traditional divisions of  liberal education — here that would have been sociology or cultural anthropology or history — would not, it was thought, reduce it enough.  Reducing injustice is good. 

Since this is a sensitive subject I want to say that there is nothing arch in my use of the word "good" here.   I really mean "good," mean it as Greek philosophers meant it, and I think it is the right word for what those who moved universities to establish these and Women's Studies programs were striving for and, in varying degrees, achieved.

At the time it was clear to some but not to all that one cannot do this and still remain within the academic tradition. The origins of that tradition, and its difference from other traditions, are best exhibited by Socrates' activity.  In Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, for example, the title character is presented striving, and helping people strive, for a prime Athenian virtue, piety.  Questioning by Socrates shows, however, that he knows very little about piety, barely enough to keep the concept of it together.  Readers, students, come away believing that it is best to know before you strive. Knowledge takes precedence over goodness.

That's the signature belief of the heirs of Socrates, college professors.  When they go into the world they show it in their signature advice: "Look before you leap."  When that advice was given at my university it got, for years, at least a bored respect.  Then in the sixties we heirs got a surprise.  Say "look before you leap" at a rally, sit down gravely, and a student gets up and says, "and look, and look, and look."  Urgent goodness takes precedence over knowledge.

This change eased the establishment of AAS and Women's Studies programs, which made harmonious appearances in the catalog.  But the disharmony remained.  I have to guess at this, since I am way out of touch, but when I now see an AAS course titled "History of Injustice" I can't imagine an introduction examining the concept of "justice."  I can imagine Socrates questioning this striver for justice as he questioned the striver for piety.

There are occasions, like when aid to escaped slaves, or ratification of the 13th Amendment, was in question in Northern states, when the tradition of goodness, coming to us mainly through our religion and saying "Leap, leap," is strong enough to win out over the tradition of knowledge, and make us professors glad it did.  I think the strike at San Francisco State in 1968, when affirmative action and formation of Black Studies were in question, was one if those occasions — though the happiness of many professors may have had more to do with simply gaining civil peace.

The question I am pressing here can be seen as a fussy-professor question: "With which victories am I free to be glad and with which am I not free?"  I think that a professor who fusses enough has to answer, "I am free to be glad about victories out in the world; I am not free to be glad about victories in universities."  That means he (or she) can be glad about affirmative action laws but can't be glad about African-American Studies programs.  That may be an "academic" conclusion, but it translates into a consequential vote at the faculty senate.

In the faculty senate votes of those days you could see coming the goodness-ruled university of the future.  The rule that started in the catalog went on into codes of behavior for extra-curricular activities and social events, codes of dress (as for costume-wearers at Halloween), and codes of speech for meetings and conferences, even classrooms.  And like all dominant rule this rule, though recognized as moral and generally approved, produced its tyrants, making it resented (see Post 340 on disciplinary actions at Harvard), and its busybodies, making it laughed at (see Post  319 on the excesses of "political correctness").

Both the resentment and the laughter can be dismissed as accompaniments of every movement to the good, but beneath them was a dissonance not so easily dismissed. 

Some of my readers must have felt it.  How about in the Commencement procession?  On one side of you is a professor of African-American Studies who, as you've reasoned it out, is there because what she is striving for is a good that must, even in a traditionally neutral institution, be supported.  Though she is much of the time a knower, and in much of her activity passes on knowledge as rigorously obtained as any in the procession, she is there because she is a striver, and able to help strivers.

On the other side of you is a Professor of History, a knower in the strict academic tradition — meaning coming straight from Socrates through Plato's Academy and the liberally educating Renaissance schools to today's liberal arts colleges.   He fits right into this traditionally neutral institution.

What do you feel, there between them?  Suppose the Professor of History feels resentment, and you sense it.  What are your thoughts?

[Since this, I see, is going to be too much for one post I'll have to leave it there.  To be resumed.]

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.

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!

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.

306. "Uncivilized" and its Detonators

It's good to be civilized.  It's bad to be an oppressor.  So what do I do about an oppressor, like Harper Lee's second-round Atticus Finch, who looks to me pretty civilized?

"You grow up.  Exchange your kid's view of good and bad for the adult view, expressed by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker (7-27-15): that in Finch, 'as so often with human beings,' the goodness and badness are 'part of the same package.'  Welcome, child, to moral complexity."

I think I've already met it, just in the word.  To be civilized according to one of the two main meanings you have to be "humane," according to the other you don't:

1. Having a highly developed society and culture.

2. Showing evidence of moral and intellectual advancement; humane.  (American Heritage)

Same word, same complimentary force.  But two tests for its use.  By the development test the Minoans and Native Americans fail, by the humanity test the Athenians and Elizabethans fail.  I'll tell you, for us liberal-arts English teachers it will be a lot harder applying the word "uncivilized" to Elizabethans than to Native Americans.

"But what are you going to do?  You can't cut yourself loose from the dictionary."

I know, but I can't call Shakespeare "uncivilized" either.  And that's what I'd have to do if historians caught him, as they caught Queen Elizabeth, enjoying bear-baiting.   You know, that sport where they tie a bear to a stake and watch dogs tear him apart?  As inhumane as you can get.

"Well — forgive me — you'll just have to get used to it.  Worse lies ahead.   The torture-allowing Aristotle will have to be called 'uncivilized,' along with Pericles and Cicero and every venerable Roman and Athenian you know.  After them, Thomas Jefferson.  Slaveholders all.  You're feeling the full pain.  One of the growing pains."

I know, I know.  This is adulthood, having a hard time with words and knowing it.  Children have an easy time using 'civilized' because they take it in only one sense.  To one kind of child anybody who shows inhumanity is uncivilized; to the other kind it's anybody who shows lack of development.

"I think I know the second kind pretty well.  He's quick with the word 'barbaric.'  He sees the medieval age as 'dark' and calls people 'barbarians' as soon as he sees bad plumbing.  Arcadian shepherds are barbarians.  Nearly everybody who lived before the Industrial Revolution is 'uncivilized.'  I don't know the first kind of child so well."

I do.  He's the kind who will come home from a dinner party down South smitten by the grace, the culture, the education of the host, call him "highly civilized," and, when he learns that he flies Confederate flags on his boat take his word back.

"I suppose that for him 'bigot' would be the opposite to 'civilized,' as 'barbarian' was the first child's opposite?"

I'd say so.  It's a word he will come up with readily, since he's insensitive to the complications.  That won't mean, though, that he's insensitive to signs of inhumanity.  He'll be quick to see verbal equivalents of the Confederate flag.  If you want to avoid detonating an explosion from him you'll avoid them.

"Detonating in the way Atticus Finch's statements detonate, I suppose.  Like, 'Honey, you do not seem to understand that the Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people' (quoted in NYT, 8-2-15).  Like referring to blacks as 'backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization' (New Yorker, 7-27-15)."

Well, those statements obviously qualify.  They certainly detonated an explosion among readers of the new book.

"I believe those statements were made in the fifties, and I can understand why you'd need to avoid them then, and certainly avoid them now, North and South, but wasn't there a time when they were correct?  A time when to deny them required you to believe that blacks instantly became Western adults — that is, people advanced in one kind of civilization?"

Absolutely.  We're forced to say, "Yes, there was a time when what Finch said was true, and a period when it continued to be true."  To deny that would be to deny human possibility, as well as to deny what whites did to blacks, deprive them of all that was available to whites in their education, starting with the ability to read.  And if anybody called Finch "uncivilized" then for making that true statement we'd know that he was taking "civilized" only in sense two, and was a child.

"But, you want me to say, nobody who calls him 'uncivilized' now is a child, since by the fifties the process was complete.  Then you will ask me if I'm sure of that, and I will have to say no, nobody can be sure of that, and you will have me in the old Socratic headlock, and I will have to grunt out what you want to hear: that liberal humanitarians, the people now exploding at Atticus Finch, are immature thinkers with an undeveloped sense of moral complexity.  But I'm going to stop right now and say, 'Friend, let's not do this at all.'"

And I am going to ask what you want me to ask, "Why are you proposing that we not do this at all?"

"Because it's unacceptably academic.  Dedicated to the truth and indifferent to the occasion of speaking it.  Demanding linguistic sophistication and precision.  No idea that being accurate might not be enough to justify being said.  Right now in America we've got to calculate very carefully the dangers of accuracy."

And I thought I was building up to a speech at a dinner party.

"In which, at the present time of crisis in race relations, you'll blow yourself up in three minutes.  You don't understand the needs of time and place.   At dinner tables (and on public rostrums and in editorial pages) the need is not philosophical but rhetorical. In democracies this need takes precedence over the need for linguistic precision and always has."

Your sweep is too broad.  Facts, precisely stated, have always had rhetorical force. 

"Yes, but in some societies more than in others."

And ours, I think, is one of those societies most readily swayed by reliably established statements of fact.  So there's a chance I can speak, and with some weight.  A good chance.

"Not as good a chance as you once had."

Why?

"Because we have such deep skepticism about statements of fact in our audiences now.  To speak in front of one now you've always got to be ready for the weight-remover, the listener who reaches into the pan and takes out your heaviest pieces.  Or, worse, keeps you and the whole company from looking at the scale.  And does it with the support of psychologists, if not philosophers.

I don't know what you're talking about..

"Well, it's not perfectly clear to me but for some time I have made it clearer by putting all recent impediments to truth-stating into one simple exchange.  On an early TV show Dick Smothers put a statement of fact to his brother Tom: 'You're shirttail's out.'  Tom's response was, 'Why do you hate me?'  With Tom types in the audience either the weight disappears or all eyes go from the truth scale to the attitude scale."

And they do this with philosophical support?

"That's indistinct too, but I see a lot of Toms looking toward Paris." 

And, thanks to you, in America I now see a lot of people unwilling to call attention to exposed shirttails because they fear being accused of hate.  Or bigotry.  Or at least of intolerance.  And how about being thought condescending or superior?

"In some places, yes, but certainly outside universities.  What professor ever feared being thought superior?"

You're behind the times.  The academic woods are full of such professors.  You see their fear every time you see chicken-quotes around favorable judgments of Western civilization.  (It's not hard to see them.  They dot The London Review.  They're creeping into the New York Review.)  Look at Edith Hall's note, in her essay on Sappho (NYR, 5-7-15), telling us that conservatives "still claim the ancient Greeks as the cultural ancestors of a 'superior' Western civilization.'"  There's one of our finest Hellenic scholars (Oxford, King's College London), afraid of making a judgment that will make her look condescending.

"And, in saying that, you're aware that there's controversy over whether Western civilization is superior?"

Yes, and it's a controversy made possible only by taking 'civilized' in the single sense children take it in.  And most of the time it's an irrelevant controversy.  Any minority that wants to get ahead in American society has already answered the question.   Any among the millions in the world who want the development, the apparatus, Western education gives them has answered it.  It's an ends-means thing, concealed best by confusing the two meanings of "civilized."

"And you are not confused.  You see Edith Hall and other chicken-quoting professors as people in possession of what the minority needs.  What locates the shirttail."

What locates anything — shirttails, viruses, gene strands, mountains on the other side of the moon.  If it weren't for its inhumanity the Western way of producing knowledge, the way that has taken over the world ecumene, would make the word "superior" pop right out of our mouths. 

"But there are those European imperialists partitioning Africa."

Yes.  And their children are the first to slam their lips on "superior."  It's that damned doubleness in the word "civilized."

"And yet when they become professors the Western way is what they profess."

If it isn't they ought to quit professing.  If there were another culture that had produced  the kind of knowledge-gathering and testing that Socrates came up with and Plato kept going in the Academy, Western professors could turn to it and profess its way.  And wait for the world to come to them.  But there isn't.  The world comes here. 

"And finds the most elevated professors the least proud of what gave them their profession.  A sorry sight.  But why do you care?"

Because I am one of the many who teach the elements of Western civilization — the thinking (Logic), the writing (Composition), the speaking (Debate), the apparatus, if you will.  We need support.  Our jobs would be a lot easier if those professors showed some pride in that civilization. 

"Which they might do, I think, if they saw the similarity between what they are doing when they get a graduate student from a different culture and what we are doing when we get our own young.  We both are teaching students how to work the Western apparatus.  To understand it.

"With the difference that we, with our logic and rhetoric, are surely preparing our young for the public scrimmage, the dinner parties, of a democracy.  With the others, not so surely.  Which to me makes a professor's speaking out all that more important.  As an example."

You're aware of the fact that several professors, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have spoken out, and pretty much the way you want them to.

"Yes, I am." 

And of the Tom Smothers' responses Moynihan and the others have gotten?

"Yes, if that's what you want to call them."

Well I think those responses have just strengthened the fear we see.  Who wants to be seen "blaming the victim"?  But I know that nothing is simple, and maybe that extends to this fear. 

"I think it does.  Why don't you give me the speech you want this truth-teller to make.  I'll be listening for detonators and give you a critique."

I'd like to, and maybe I'll try, but I should tell you first that I have my own fear, and I'm not sure how much it is shared by other white academics.

"And that fear is...?"

That I really am a bigot.  It's what I suspect of some scientists in this area.  There they are, truth-tellers, standing above the arena with all its rhetoric and passions, calmly identifying deficiencies they don't have.  You think that fellow reporting, say, on black attitudes toward education, isn't enjoying his position, his superiority?  You think he's not feeling the pleasure of condescension, looking down?  Or can avoid what goes with it, disdain for those below?  I don't think I could.  I see it in myself.  If you see it and I see it we're seeing what Adam Gopnik saw, "the bigotry that cannot recognize itself.'"   If the audience sees it, boom, there goes the speech.

"The speech in public.  If you made it in a faculty lounge, prefaced by your fears, I think you'd get a different kind of boom, an impatient one, over your fears:  'OK, you're a bigot.  But, don't you understand, it doesn't matter.  What matters is where the shirttail is.  Personal faults don't matter.  You can be a double-died white son of a bitch playing the Foucault power game up to the hilt, but if you've got ahold of the truth everybody needs, if you're the only one with a reliable system for finding it, you're Albert Schweitzer.  If you don't get out there and make your speech I'll be ashamed of you.'"

Yes, I know the fellows quick to say that, and they're just reckless.  They would have me risk what's more important than any of these things, what we all depend on in fact: our national unity, our sense of a shared future.  They're saying, "Get out there and possibly blow apart the social fabric."

"And, for many in your audience, those most alert to developments in philosophy, you'll be out there running that risk by making unjustified claims about truth and your possession of it.  And about the system, the culture, the tradition, the education that gave you that possession."

If I am making claims about possessed truth I am misrepresenting my scientist friends.  They don't want to release possessed truth; they just want recognition, as truth, of what has survived their tests.  They are making the claims of the Western inquirer, who is looking, not for an absolute truth, but for the best truth humans are capable of establishing.  Socrates is the model, and his conversations show us how to carry one on — taking care with our beliefs, acquiring fully, testing thoroughly, trusting what's established as our best "raft to ride the seas of life."  And at every step caring more about that "truth" than we do about Socrates.  But you know this as well as I.

"Yes, but I didn't realize until you spoke how it locates the fault in our over-humane colleagues: they are caring too much about Socrates."

Exactly.  And what fault could be more forgivable?  Their hearts are going out to human beings as the hearts of all of us, in our youth, went out to Socrates as he died.

"Forgivable if you think betrayal is forgivable.  When we care about anything more than we care about truth we betray everything Socrates stood for.  We ought to be punished, as Socrates wanted the friends he left behind to punish his sons if they did that."

But if I make that speech you are waiting for me to make I will have already betrayed Socrates.  When I make a persuasive speech in public I join the orators and sophists he despised. 

"And if you don't make it you join all the chicken-quoters and mealy-mouthers you've been jabbing.  Or you retreat to the Ivory Tower.   But it's too late.  You said at the beginning you were building up to a dinner-party speech.  You closed off your escape long ago.  All you can do now is pull up your socks and make the most effective speech you can."

All right.  The room quiets.  The faces, white and black, distributed as they are distributed in the educated section of our society, turn toward me.  My purpose is to get those listeners to give a hearing to truths that need to be heard before a backward group can change into an advanced group.  Some are reluctant to recognize a need for change.  Most are reluctant even to use the words "advanced" and "backward."  Is that my challenge? 

"Yes, and I fully understand the problem in using those accurate words.  But as a teacher of rhetoric I know there are some good strategies you can employ."

Oh good.  How would you suggest I start?

"By showing your good will.  You are visibly identified with the advanced people who used the backward people and kept them backward, and showed such little good will toward them for so long.  An immediate demonstration of your present good will is a great, almost necessary, preparation for your later message.

Sounds reasonable, but I have serious doubts about doing it.

"Why?  It's been standard oratorical practice since Aristotle."

But how is it going to go here?  A bigot like me stands up and says, "I know.  From the color of my skin you can easily take me to be a member of the 'superior' oppressor class.  I fully understand.  Maybe I once was what you justifiably think you see.  If so, I have changed.  I now have your interest at heart and I hope you will consider some issues I want to bring up."  What do I look like to you?

"Well, you certainly look like an orator following the rules in Aristotle's Rhetoric."

And to a white man there?

"You will look like a white academic who has finally read the Rhetoric.  Before speaking your pain-giving truths you are assuring your audience that your heart is in the right place."

And to a black man?

"You will look like —I see it now — a sincere white son of a bitch who has become a hypocritical white son of bitch."

 So that kills my start.  But I think it could do worse.  It could kill my whole oration.  It could trigger a contest that could throw us off the path to change so badly that we'd never get back on it.

"Contest?"

Yes.  When you display the heart you invite competition.  This is a much bigger danger than in Socrates' time.  People are Christian now, and the heart has become more important.  After the Sermon on the Mount, it, not the world, is the place where you commit or avoid committing adultery and murder.  So display of the heart is more frequent, and its goodness has more rhetorical weight.  I think that only the most exceptional Christian, the most exceptional human being, can resist taking advantage of that weight.  Put a heart that's recognized as good onto the scales and the balance goes your way — against the unrecognized or bad heart in the other pan. 

"I see the temptation, but why can't your succumbing to it be temporary, an obstacle a guest's challenge helps you overcome?  Why does it have to take over the evening and keep the table from getting back to the discussion where the truth-teller is trying to squeeze in his truth?"

Because by now everybody at the table is a Christian, or plays like one.  There won't be any guests to set me straight.  But even if there were I might not be able to keep my heart out of the discussion.  At any hard-pressed point I could get it out there to justify myself, and invite a match.  Hell, I'm a Christian too.  And a blind one, as I'll see when I get home and check with Socrates.

"Why blind?"

Because I won't see the little brothers there.

"What have they got to do with it?"

I'm not sure I can explain it to you, but you can get an idea by looking at an unwary Christian family.  There the goodness-badness game is the one game the little, weak ones can win.  Its play makes them experts.  Their losses in the physical game are soon made up.  When the parent arrives the weights are already in the pan.  "Oh Mama, I am such a victim of this big, bad, strong brother." 

"I can see why it would be tempting to get into such a contest, but surely it's not just Christian."

True.  An over-claim.  Little Jewish brothers probably play the virtue game as well as little Christian brothers.  Maybe better.  The unchurched human family can engage in it.  But with Christians (and with anybody, any atheist, who has soaked up Christian values, as those who live very long in the U. S. inevitably will) the virtue-stamp on the weak is so quickly available and its authority so strong.  Right there in Matthew.  To be meek is to inherit the earth, to be persecuted and reviled is to be blessed.  Which means that when you grow up in our Christian society, and enter our public discussions, and are weak, and are a victim, you can count on an immediate goodness grant.  Which gives you a rhetorical advantage there.

"And therefore elsewhere, between matches, I suppose."

Oh yes.  The elder, the strong, anyone given authority, is never out of sight of that sign, "Little Brother is watching you."

"I think you're too skeptical."

You think only the strong play the Foucaldian power game?  You're not skeptical enough.  It's the weak's skill at that game that keeps us from speaking truth to them.  It's a lot easier these days to speak truth to power than it is to speak it to powerlessness.

"I'm coming to believe it.  It's even hard sometimes to speak it in our own lounge, where the weak have acquired so many friends."

Among the perpetually powerless, the profs.  You know what?  I don't think I can pick my way through this field.

"So what are you going to do, return to the monastery and speak only to the monks on your wing?  Let the world go its stupid way?"

No.  But I'm out of ideas.  No more pages in the Rhetoric.

"Well, maybe you've missed a tactic.  There's this one: you choose a case less sensitive than the black case, but parallel to it.  You argue that case, and when the audience sees the parallel you've made the point you want to make with them."

But what case is parallel to this one?

"I think there's one that comes close.  I was reminded of it when you pictured that scientist reporting on a deficiency in black culture: its failure to encourage education.  Well that raised in my mind an analogous picture: the scientist reporting on the same deficiency in Appalachian culture."

Well, that's certainly familiar to me.  I lived in a state next to an Appalachian state, and taught students who had come over from it.

"Sounds promising, but your rhetoric book says that the first thing you have to do is make sure that your case is close enough for your target audience to get the point and apply it to themselves.  What do you see in Appalachia?"

Well, I'm pretty sure I see a culture ("culture" is still the best word for what particular individual traits flourish in) deficient in stimulating a desire for education. 

"That's the education we provide, the education that makes a Western adult?"

Yes.  Desire for that is the big thing, but aren't there other parallels that might be relevant?

"Well, Appalachian culture is originally agricultural and non-commercial, like native African culture, isn't it?

I suppose.  And if resistance to urban organization and sophistication goes with it, there would be that too.  Appalachian people are often said to be distinctively "independent" and "self-reliant" and "protective of their ways." 

"And suspicious of outsiders?"

Oh yes.  The words I've heard are "outlanders" and "flatlanders."  Accompanied by suspicion of their own who "go flatland."  Educated returnees from  the flatland say  they can feel it.

"And you yourself are convinced that it's Appalachian culture, with the view of education it gives its youth, that best explains the low performance of that youth in higher education, compared to the youth from other cultures?"

Yes.  I think culture matters most.  After many, many years of college teaching I am convinced that family life is the main determinant of performance in college English classes.  How did they use the language?  What did they talk about?  What could they get away with at their dinner tables?  You know, when students spoke at my Honors Tutorial table I could have been a fly on the wall above their dinner tables at home.  And nothing, not up-to-date technology in the schools, not new teaching methods, not the most highly motivated, highly skilled teachers (though they could make a great difference), could make up for a start like that.  I believed that when I listened to Remedial English students.  And though the difference between Honors and Remedial was almost entirely within one culture, I have no reason to believe that different cultures won't produce the same kind of difference.  So yes, I will speak with conviction.

"What a boon to your rhetoric!  Belief in your own case.  I think we've got a tactic here you can really run with.  I see parallels falling into place, hidden as they fall.  Nobody offended, no detonators bumped.  Then the dawn breaks, the whole undeniable resemblance appears, and understanding comes.  Perfect."

No, not at all.  Among Appalachians there's no history of slavery.   No need for pride.  (Those hills are full of pride.  Too much.)  No anger.  No cry for  justice.  No hurt, no need for balm.

"What's this, balm?  Concern for hurt?  Recognizing the need for pride?  I see a heart.  What we agreed is a dangerous exposure."

All right, drop it.  I've already decided I'm not going any further into these waters.

"And you can't be drawn by what is drawing so many conservatives?  Do you know that the demand for political correctness, within which demands for gentle language about blacks are classed, is now so extreme that some American college women want protection from language in the classics?  At Columbia students on the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board now call, in an op-ed in the Daily Spectator, for warnings from the prof before reading Ovid's Metamorphoses.  Because, 'like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom'  (http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/12).  And you can hear the same kind of thing at Cal, at Oberlin, at Rutgers, at Michigan, and at a bunch of others (NYT, 5-17-14)."

No.  These are just silly siders getting sillier.  I've already decided that since every worthwhile movement has its silly side I'm not going to get worked up over silliness here.  The instances are good for ridicule ("Behold, the smelling-salts generation") but not for argument.

"There's no extreme that won't work you up?  How about the sight of a bigoted (with respect to women) barbarian (with respect to cultural development) loser (by the measure of advanced society) bucking himself up with manly chants?"

Man, I've seen zoot suiters twirling their key chains (giving their fingers to society) on too many street corners to let hip-hop bother me.

"And seeing it admired?  The sight of civilized people admiring barbarians doesn't bother you?"

No, because at one time I was one of those people.  My white buddies and I dressed the dress and twirled the twirl.  It's American youth finding the exact finger to give their parents.  That angle, being eternal, can be discounted.

"OK, how about this.  Drama.  One of the biggest battles in intellectual history.  The side accused "of blaming the victim," the Moynihan side, routed at the beginning (by William Ryan, author of the book of that title) and cowering for years, is making a comeback.  A conference on Moynihan's legacy is held at Harvard.  The published papers (Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences, edd. Douglas Massey and Robert Sampson) make a surprising impact.  The battle is on.  "Victims or not, black culture has something to do with this" gains traction in faculty lounges.  Allies in the media are sought.  William Raspberry, writing on "father absence" in the Washington Post  ("Why Our Black Families Are Failing," 7-25-05), is recruited.  But support in the dinner-party circle is needed.   A bastion of Ryan strength.  The Moynihans need you there, my friend,  your people need you."

Oh, I am so moved to join in.  But I'm just too damned afraid I'll slip. 

"I see.  You're still afraid of the essentially bigoted heart that will force the ruinous exposure."

But also of the possibly good heart, which could tempt me into display, and provocation of a dinner-table contest.  You don't know what a thorough Christian upbringing I've had.

 "You're a tough case, but I have a trick for you, my last one: convince yourself that you have no heart.  If you think you have a heart to rely on you will be far more prone to stupid, even cruel, public gaffes than if you think you are essentially heartless." "

Convince myself?  But I'm a skeptic, an academic trained to see through interested attempts to convince.

"Brother, here you've just got to believe. You have no heart. You're the Tin Woodman.  Believe it and you'll have the guarantee against slips that he had."

How so?

"Who was more careful to speak and behave in a considerate way?  Who more scrupulous in observing the rules and customs of decency, the forms of good-heartedness?  Who a better model for statesmen and spouses?  Our longest-kept treaties are entered into by Tin Woodmen, our longest marriages."

OK, I think I've got it.  No heart, no concern for my own goodness.

"Yes.  You're just a problem solver, with a chess-player's interest in this one."

But you will allow me one other interest, I hope. 

"I will as long as it's a selfish one.  What is it?"

It's an interest in the social fabric.  Because I have a stake in it. 

"Ah yes, the stake argument!  Perfect self interest.  Beautiful!  But it has to be long-term self-interest."

I'm pretty sure it is.  I am interested not just in preserving it from violence and revolution, the consequence of one kind of explosion, but in preserving it for the future most satisfying to me, a fabric we can all weave ourselves into — and not, for some, just hang onto. 

"Sounds idealistic, but I think it can be defended as selfish. Your only reason for speaking at this table, your only reason for pushing uncongenial discussion, is that you think meeting threats to that fabric must begin with an accurate picture of the threat.  An accuracy you will present, when you get to it , with no air of releasing truth."

No, though all those years of teaching have given me evidence that it is the truth I will recognize that mine is only anecdotal evidence and conclude my speech simply by saying, "The scientists who speak after me will, I'm sure, give us the best current version of the truth on this matter."  I will be content, as in teaching, simply to start an adult discussion of what they say.

"So, you're ready to go."

Yes, as soon as I get that signal all academics need.

"What!  Still another delay?"

Yes.  You remember at the beginning you said that our fault was that we were "indifferent to the occasion of speaking the truth"?  Many of us academics didn't know or care what we blew up, including the social fabric we cared about.  Doctrinaire Socratists. 

"And now you're worried about their getting the floor?"

Yes.  I haven't forgotten that there are times when we just can't risk an adult discussion, and we have to speak as children.  In order to save the social fabric. 

"Ah, 'Lest ye become as little children ye cannot be saved."

You said it.  But if we're in one of those times now we'll need a warning that we are.  Who do we look to?  Not an academic.  He's still rubbing his eyes down here in the arena.  Not a gladiator.  He's too busy fighting.  We need somebody with a sense of the crowd, which way the thumbs will go — and that, in a democratic society, is a politician. 

"You mean that time-server so regularly deplored in the faculty lounge?  And so maligned in the arena?"

Yes.  But whose career depends on knowledge of the crowd.  When you'll get their thumbs and when you won't.  And, most important, when you'll provoke a field-charging brawl.  So I'll keep my eyes on the best politician I know and wait for his or her signal.

"So, a justifiable wait.   And if you're still looking for guarantees against a slip I can give you something to practice while you wait.  Straight from the ancients.  In your inner monologue, in your private meditations, in your imagined bids for cheers from your own kind, let not a single possibly offensive word enter.  That's what Pericles did.  When he entered public life he resolved to remove from his interior speech any words that he would not use in public, before his Athenian audiences.  So that there would be no slips, no provocation of unnecessary conflict.  Apparently he succeeded."

Very good.  I'll do it.

"Is there any other help I can give you?"

No, I think that's enough.