358. How hard it is to point to the Scandinavians.

Have you checked the latest Scandinavian success?  According to The Economist (9-24-16) Norway has made itself securely, deeply rich.  Receiving the kind of windfall that geology gives some countries — Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, for example — these ex-Vikings, postponing satisfaction, planning for the future, ensuring public education, protecting themselves against bad leadership, being fair to everybody, socked their yearly oil revenue into a fund that is now worth $882 billion and producing more revenue than the oil. 

Scandinavians are such great examples, the ants to the world's grasshoppers.  But they're not always easy to point to, not by everybody, and certainly not by me.

I start with the handicap of a Swedish name.  My finger will have the marks of ethnic pride on it.   A slight weight, maybe an imagined weight, but still a weight.  Not there if my name were Capucci.

More distinct is the weight of my Christian upbringing.  Materially wealthy people are not supposed to be examples.  They're not laying up treasures in heaven.  They can't get through the eye of a needle.  I should, with the rest of my Sunday School class, be pointing at Albert Schweitzer.

More widely shared is the weight, in democracies like ours, of the common man's disapproval.  Or, more often, the disapproval of his spokesmen, seeking political weight.  I on point am an elitist, one who fails to recognize that all men are equal.  If I point at one people I can't imply that they are better than other people.  Here my finger has at least the weight of risk, and the need for explanation, and possibly a forced admission on it.

The weight on the Christian gets heavier when he adds to his implication that his wealth shows his goodness the implication that if other people were smart they'd be rich too.   He's an elitist loaded with pride.  That's what the editorial writer for the Boston Globe was when he took up the question (9-18-15) of why Massachusetts was so wealthy. "Because we've got a lot of smart people," he freely answered.  A Christian democrat from the Midwest can only look on with envy.

 We live in an age when disapproval of this kind of thing is on trigger, with telescopic sights.  At the University of California, among other universities, "America is the land of opportunity," is a locution faculty should avoid (Washington Post, 6-16-15).  It apparently implies, at what must be about three removes, "If your people were as good and smart as my people they wouldn't be doing so poorly."  A microaggression.  Here I feel a negligible weight,

There are other weights on my arm, but most interesting is that of cultural imperialism theory. "Cultural imperialism," according to its theorists, "is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture" and it can take the form of "an attitude, a formal policy, or military action."  The theory was widely employed in cultural studies, which was developed mainly in English departments, and for a time, including my own, it enjoyed high prestige there.  High enough, anyway, for me to feel its weight.

I see more clearly now why it shouldn't have.  Cultural imperialism theory was so deeply flawed  that it shouldn't have tipped the scale anywhere.

 The flaw appeared (or would have, if I'd been more alert) right away in its self-designation, which introduced a reproach word, "imperialism," into an objective formulation.  And this introduction produced a conceptual wreck.  How did one distinguish "cultural imperialism" from "cultural acquisition"? How did one tell victims from rational choosers of the good life?  There was no room for Macedonians around Socrates' table, acquiring a superior culture.  Alexander the Great became a victim, conquered by Aristotle.

So that was a temporary weight I can now blow off.  I blow without a quaver since in all my expanded post-retirement reading I have yet to see evidence of any consequences of the theory of cultural imperialism in the world of affairs.  Nobody in a position to get things done pays any attention to it. 

So where does that leave my finger?  We've got to have some kind pointing.  How will the unnoticing ever notice, and profit, unless somebody points?   I'm the one here.  So, whatever my Nordicity, my Christianity, my elitism, I stand up before the less successful cultures of the world and say, "Look, look, you grasshoppers of the world, over there at the Norwegians.  What a culture!  What values!  What a terrific example!"

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.

246. What Fails When Friendship with Socrates Fails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

83. "Barbarian"

We're listening in on Jimmy Carter's advisers as they debate his response to the imprisoning of American diplomats in Iran:

No, no, I really don't want him to use the word "barbaric." There's too much he can get charged with — you know, "colonial arrogance," "Eurocentric condescension," all that. And my God, this is a Middle Eastern country, and Muslim! Academics will be all over him for "orientalism," that old cover for imperialism. No, no word that says, "You have an inferior culture."

Yes, but he's got to have some word that puts those people in their place. And accurately. An accurate put-down name, that's what we need. Accurate enough to justify our going in there and doing something. Otherwise he looks weak. And the nation does too. Already we're being called "a bumbling, helpless super-power." And he's being called a "wimp."

Yeah, "wimp." And for what? For being civilized. For observing the customs — hell, "sharing the culture" — of civilized nations. Civilized nations don't attack each other’s diplomats, they protect them. No matter how "just" their cause.

All right, you've got your word. "Barbarous nations" attack emissaries and envoys and messengers carrying white flags. But keep it to yourself.

OK, I'll shut up. But first I'll ask you, "What would you call the President of a nation who responded to the imprisoning of his diplomats by imprisoning the diplomats of the offending nation?"

I'd call him a barbarian, sure. He's become the tribal chief who kept his messengers safe by knocking off ten messengers of any tribe that bothered them. It would be a reversion.

But it would spring his diplomats. If it didn't he, if he were Carter, could fill his jails with Iranians. There are a lot of them here, a lot more than there are Americans in Iran. He could start knocking them off one by one. He'd get his hostages back and nobody would call him a "wimp" — or us a "helpless super-power."

No, they'd just call him — I know you set me up for this — a "barbarian." And the nation "barbaric." And that would be an accurate call. You've got your put-down word.

Which Carter won't use against the Iranians. I've got the speech ready: "Iran's taking of hostages was a barbaric action which we can counter only by becoming barbarians ourselves. I won't do that, I won't do what they're doing, they know I won't, and there you have the source of their strength — and our weakness." I don't want Carter to knock off Iranians; I just want him to use a good, strong, accurate word. But he won't do it.

Well, there's the guy we work for. He'd rather be put down as a "wimp" than as a "barbarian."

Or than as an imperialist who calls other people "barbarians."

77. "My culture's better than yours."

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A lot of people, citing cultural anthropologists, tell me that I can't say that my culture is better than somebody else's. I am expressing an ethnocentric prejudice.

Yet cultural anthropologists, if the summary of their position in my History of the Modern World is correct, actually do let me say such a thing.  To them, according to Palmer, Colton, and Kramer, "no culture or society was 'better' than any other, all being adaptations to an environment." The permission taken away in the first part of the sentence is restored in the second. I can say, "This culture has adapted better than that one." Better.

For support I point to Chinese culture. Its emphasis on education has filled the awards lists of American high schools with the names of its young. Note the number of graduates high in Silicon Valley. The Chinese have adapted better than anybody to the California environment.

So, we have another reminder (after Post #56) that as soon as we contemplate a particular end, as soon as we abandon categorical assertion, we are entitled to, we are obliged to, discriminate among means. (See Post # 8. "Discrimination," Rational and Irrational.) Here cultures provide the means. And with all the other ends people may have in a mixed society we may do the same.

All right, I move through a mixed society — the U.S., and more and more the world — with a permit to use the words "better" and "worse" with respect to cultures. Holding the permit is not enough, though. You've got to get somebody to honor it. And in today's universities you'll have a devil of a time. "Value judgment" is still a put-down word in science lounges. Look as if you're going to make such a judgment and a sociologist will snort like a spooked horse. You've violated an axiom: "There are or can be no value judgments that are true, that is, objectively justifiable, independent of specific cultures."

So with many of my colleagues listening I still can't say what I want to say to people who force women to have clitorectomies. What do I want to say? This: "You stink. Your culture stinks. Any culture that encourages doing this to little girls stinks."

There was once a way of placing that statement (tempered, of course) under an acceptable category: possible truth. If mankind were one, if sympathies were universal, and if some sympathies were so beneficial that, if shared, they improved the life of all mankind, then there was the chance that any individual, at any time, might express one. If history showed that life was indeed improved when the displayed sympathy was shared then the statement had all the verification needed to be called a "truth."

That way of placing value statements was developed in the 18th century, during the Enlightenment, a period now in bad repute. Its universalism has not stood up under the poundings of relativism. And verification of its "truths"? That comes so far in the future. You have to believe in "progress."

Oh that we Enlightenment types could live for that verification. Oh to be there to see relativists put down. Oh that the Enlightenment had a God who could bring us all together after time has run its course.

I see a representative of the offending culture, surveying the full sweep, seeing where it ended, reflecting for a while and saying, "Clitorectomy, you know. That really did stink."

But God has arranged it so that we're still human. The enlightened offender reproaches me: "Why didn't you tell me?"

And I, savoring my revenge, say, "Because the cultural relativists wouldn't let me."