346. How Trump Turned White Eggheads into Black Rappers

"Egghead" is, leaving out its derogatory coloring, a word for "a person who is highly academic or studious" and that person is "often a professor or the protégé of a professor."  

If "egghead" fit me and my colleagues who taught English Composition it meant keeping your writing unified and coherent and choosing specific words over vague words.  In argumentative compositions it emphatically meant avoiding violations of logic.  If anything like a Donald Trump speech appeared before us it would have gotten a flat F.

Now it appears that many of our white male protégés and even a few of our colleagues are telling pollsters, by word or, more likely, by anonymously clicking a button, that they intend to vote for Donald Trump.

It's the great unexplainable of our academic lives, and nobody inside or outside of academia has been much help.  In the public forums I follow there are plenty of explanations for the less-educated men's behavior but none, zero, for the well-educated men's.

When you're hard up for explanations you explore the outer reaches and, spurred on by polls showing Trump gaining ground, I have thought harder and harder about what it might be in me and my colleagues that would allow an entry by somebody like Trump.  And the only thing I found is almost too outré to report: hatred of self-contradiction, the archetypical fault of the bad mind all teachers, but especially Composition and logic teachers, are trying to turn into the good mind.

"Impossible!" you say.  I do too.  Who is more full of contradictions than Donald Trump?  You'd have to find a pretty objectionable case to compete with his case.

To accept the one I found you'll have to accept, I'm afraid, my explanation of the action of Drew Faust, president of Harvard, in denying scholarships and team captaincies to any student (she was obviously pointing at men) who joined a single-sex club: that it was a blow in the war between the sexes (Post 340) in which she held all the moral weapons.  She and her fellows in the enlightened world were right every time they spoke about patriarchy.  A white man had about as much power in moral suasion as a bare-fisted pagan had in combat with a Roman soldier.  Indeed, what women ruled at that point amounted to a moral empire.

I see frustration, and internal pressure building up.  Testosterone maybe.  And a man can't stand up and argue it away.  Not in a public arena where every spectator understands moral power, and knows who has it.  Furthermore, if he's an academic he's already got his reason, three-quarters on the side of the feminists, keeping the lid on.  Yet he's still a male and can't help feeling those defeats as blows, lashes on a poor pagan's back.  With not a cry from him.

Finally, the salt in the wound, he senses that Drew Faust knows her power and her position atop a moral and intellectual empire.  She's just doing this to rub in her sex's victory.

 But that, too, had to go without complaint in a Christian culture, where there's no credible objection to the kind of power she is employing, the power of the persecuted, the weak, the long-victimized.  Who can object to power when it's used to hold a Christian to his obligation to love?  There can't even be internal objection.  

Except that objection to contradiction.  And when the cause of contradiction, that core fault of the bad mind, is love, a passion, it represents (oh Milton) exactly what would take all mankind (in Adam) down: the victory of the passions over the reason.  This kind of moral correctness is simply uncontrolled love.  It's sentimentality, emotion without intelligence.

And where did the eggheads see this contradiction?  In those employing Drew Faust's kind of power and working next to her, in race relations.  They were rebuking white men for language they freely accepted coming from black men.  The N-word for blacks, the B-word for women, outrageous in a white mouth, was OK in a black mouth.  "I ain't fucking with you, you bitch" lets the rapper, because his race is the victimized race, go on to greater success while, in the middle of paragraphs of hedging and contextualizing, "there are issues of intrinsic differences of aptitude" [between men and women in science and engineering], gets the white man removed from his position (as president of Harvard, and Faust's predecessor — the justice of which removal I'm not questioning here).

The egghead has been living with these burrs in his underwear, correctness burrs, this last one the worst, for years now.  And he hasn't been able to cry out.  Then he sees a place that's not public and where frustration and outrage don't have to be suppressed, a polling booth.  There he will, as the surveys show, fill in the circle for Donald Trump.  He will be saying to Drew Faust, who's name is to him now legion,

I ain't fuckin' with you

You little, you little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you

I got a million trillion things I'd rather fuckin' do

Than to be fuckin' with you.

312. Neutral Discrimination: Going, Going.....

Get ready to remove one more word from the list of those we use to discriminate — that is, "distinguish accurately" — among things and people.  The New York Times has proposed (10-20-15) that we retire the word "alien," the word most of us use simply to distinguish a foreigner living in the United States from a citizen living there, but which some use as a disparaging word.  These few, mainly Republicans, have spoiled the word.  So it's both the offensive Republicans and the sensitive Democrats who are taking our vocabulary down.

Projecting the line they've put us on to the end I see we're left with just one noun, "people," and one verb, "love."  Looking at the users of words I see only a loving mush.

292. "Apparatus"

It's hard, in today's multicultural society, to speak of Europe's superior "achievements" in science, technology, economy, politics, and warfare without sounding braggy.  But Palmer, Colson, and Kramer, authors of the textbook A History of the Modern World, make it easier.  For them Europe, between 1500 and 1900, "supplied the apparatus" for achievement in those areas. 

Apparatus.  No great thing sitting out there to be compared with your thing, you other continents and races and cultures. Nothing to hurt your peoples' feelings.  Nothing to intimidate them, or embarrass them, or get their hackles up.  Just some machinery.  How it's used is more important than who gets credit for it.  Anybody can use it.  

Like the scientific method.  Like formal logic.  Like the constitutional transfer of power.  Like schools that teach skepticism.  And like schemes organizing armies and weapons for more efficient killing.

The great thing about "apparatus" is that it names the means and not the end.  Ends, what we want, are mainly what bring us praise and blame, usually moral.  Means, what we choose to get what we want, follow from the end.  Who blames the apparatus in Frankenstein's laboratory?

Thank you, thank you, Palmer, Colson, and Kramer.  You've saved us Eurocentrists from so much blame.

     

290. I Witnessed a Cultural Revolution!

I am so glad to be able to read the Sunday (4-26-15) NYT story  about cultural change in Cincinnati with a memory of that town in the thirties and forties.  How casually my father and his business friends told jokes about Jews.  How easily they used the N-word.  How sure they were that Roosevelt's handouts would bankrupt the country.

  Sheryl Gay Stolberg's front-page story is not about that.  It's about how this town in "one of the most traditionally conservative corners of  the Midwest," a town that as recently as 2004 was "the only city in the nation whose charter expressly barred ordinances related to gay rights," has made a 180-degree turn, and is now a city that "national gay rights advocates hold up as a model."  It's a miracle, and because I was there before it came, when the city was just another cripple moving toward Lourdes, I am able to testify to it. 

More than testify.  Realize it, feel it, translate words about it into images and sounds and sensed atmosphere.  I am now what historians, fighting for words that will get through, persistently hope for: a reader who will say, who is able to say, "Yes, that's the way it was.  I know what your words mean."

And you know who was the greatest meaning-supplier of the twentieth century?  Adolf Hitler.   We had that word "racism" in our books and thought we knew what it meant.  Hitler's street gangs and eugenics doctors showed us how little we knew.  Ours was mainly what Bertrand Russell called "knowledge by description" — what you acquired when Louis Agassiz anatomized a fish for you.  We needed "knowledge by acquaintance," the sight of the fish.  And acquaintance varied with distance.  We weren't nearly close enough to know the sheen, the slime, the stink of the fish.  Hitler rubbed our noses in it.

The metaphor is worth sticking with.  I think of myself as a child in a restaurant in the thirties, listening to my father and his business friends, telling jokes about Jews.  If I'd had the nose Hitler gave me I'd have recognized it.  "'Racism,' that's the word."  I missed it then in its early stages but I didn't miss it years later when a German tour guide told jokes about Poles.  Late-stage racism, or ethnicism.  Just a whiff, maybe, but I picked it up.

That's the way it starts, with demeaning words.  Not full-throttle racism yet but...what?  "Dehumanization."  The tour guide has given meaning to that ugly word.  Behind it are the Nazis, saying, "Take it seriously."

And then there's the over-sensitized nostril that smells dehumanization everywhere.  Identify anything that distinguishes one group from another — that is, "discriminate" in the other sense — and you are guilty of "discrimination."  It becomes very difficult to state facts that need to be faced.

How annoying the over-sensitive, the hyper-correct, have been!  But how gratifying to have had them as targets of our wit.  The dull good people, filling The Weekly Standard as they once filled Pope's Dunciad.  And the dull scholarly people.  Colley Cibber and Richard Bentley.  Dullness, dullness, dullness.  Wit seems to be on the side of the conservative, the literary.  "How much bourbon?  Oh, about a jeegroe," said the Southern litteratrice showing her surrender to Yankee liberalism.

No Swift will ever emerge from the office of a liberal activist.  No Aristophanes.  Just moral bullies and political correctness nuts.  Out in the world a sharp mind will choose a witty knave — my father's funny friend, the tour's droll guide — over those types every time.  How can a case made in sociological jargon ever be right and good?

What the sharp mind has a hard time believing is that the dull, the foolish, the righteous, can be right.  And that's what's found here, under all the foolishness, the rightness of sensitivity to racism and a score of isms that smell like it.  It's the rightness of care for others' feelings.

I think it's that rightness that slowly made its way to the surface in Cincinnati.  And that it's not a narrow outbreak.  I'd like to go back now to the playground of my elementary school.  Will I still hear names like "Fatty" and "Ears" and "Dumbbell"?  I did when our favorite Reds player was "Schnoz" on the sports pages, succeeding "Dummy."  If I don't I, a teacher knowing how hard it is to get a lesson really learned, learned by the masses, learned by children, I am willing to call that a cultural revolution, and believe it's a miracle.

248. "Check your privilege"

 
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How put-downs change!  Especially in political discussions.  In the forties, in the student joints around Tulane, a big one was, "Are you home?"  It suggested that you hadn't been following the train of argument.  "Is your brain in gear?  Are you keeping up with the rest of us?"  There you were, the only one too dumb to see that Socialist contradictions could only lead to....

In our decade, in the joints around Princeton, the big one, apparently, is "Check your privilege" (see NYT 5-3-14).  It suggests that you look into your attitudes.  Are your statements tainted by your class or race status?  There you are, too biased to be trusted.

I know how easy it is to read great sea-changes in a little flotsam washed up on shore but here I think we've got something.  Princeton has given us a clue to what happened, what most deeply happened, in American college classrooms in the decades leading up to ours: the ideal of objectivity was replaced.  By an ideal of goodness.  It was better to be morally upright than to be intellectually sound.  Facts became less important than attitudes.  If there are sea-changes in education, that's a sea-change.

Students get their notions of what's cool, intellectually, from their profs, and in 1946 the profs behind the coolest intellectuals at Tulane, those from New York, were not far to seek.  They were Morris Cohen, of CCNY, and Ernest Nagel, graduate of CCNY (who went on to Columbia), authors of the textbook Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method.  If you wanted to dispute the finer points of cool, the justification for a put-down, you could go through that book:

  Bob says, "That's just what you'd expect a plantation-owner to say." 

"Whoa," says Nathan.  "Definitely not cool.  Look, here it is.  Argumentum ad hominem. "

As a matter of fact, there was a plantation owner (or member of a plantation-owning family) among the arguing leftists at Tulane, Al Maund, whose radical novel, The Big Boxcar, I notice, has just been reprinted by the University of Illinois Press.  I can imagine trying to put him down in the 2014 way.  Remember, you're idealizing the proletariat, so it would come out as, "Check your lack of privilege."  Say that to an Old Leftist who has just nailed down the case against Norman Thomas's social program and your irrelevance silences the table.  Who cares about Al's proletarian credentials?  Anybody home up there?

Who are the profs behind the students who argue politics today, as at Princeton?  I can't identify their persons but I have already (in Post 97) categorized them.  They're in a class with the Smothers brother who, to the statement, "Your shirttail is out," replied, "Why do you hate me?"  They put attitude ahead of fact.  What your words show about you — your values, your politics — is more important than what they refer to.  Measure a prof's distance from Tom Smothers and you've measured, inversely, his responsibility for today's undergraduate cool.

It doesn't have to be a prof, though.  Consider Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.  She (see Post 207) gives you the easiest measurement you could make.  She blesses a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she is different.  Ignoring the fact that the woman is a fortune-teller and a vessel of demons, a person we disapprove of, a person presented for our disapproval, she turns our disapproval into a moral deficiency, making it part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That's about as close to Tom "Attitude is All" Smothers as you can get.

Schori has a better justification for her position than profs do, though.  She's a Christian preacher, and Christian preachers, moving out from the Sermon on the Mount, are bound to put values ahead of facts.  The kingdom of God is within you.  That's her tradition.  The prof's tradition, up to now, has been to put facts ahead of attitudes.

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So, no sea-change up in the pulpit.  But a sea-change at the lectern.  And the interesting thing is, we're winding up with very much the same thing, judging by the behavior of the audience.  How did it happen, in a few decades, that pulpit and lectern drew so close to each other?  How did we reach the point where, sometimes, we have a hard time distinguishing a prof from a preacher?  Culture warriors on the right have been asking that question for some time, and here we see what they're talking about.