302. "Classy" "Tacky"

There are no classes in America but we do categorize people as classy, commonly drawing our illustrations from the British upper class.  Class is a London gentleman accepting undeserved blame in order to save a lady's reputation.  We draw our illustrations of tacky from the same class.  James Hewitt, cavalry officer (Life Guards) sleeping with Princess Diana, blabbing about it, and then trying to sell his letters from her, is irresistibly the exemplar.  Expectations of classiness probably give you a better chance of standing for its opposite, and it's clear we have opposites here.

But tacky has to be distinguished from dishonorable, with which it competes in the Hewitt case.  A military officer charged in court with embezzlement dishonors himself and, worse, brings dishonor on the corps.  His peers (in the old days) show their expectations by leaving a revolver on his dresser, the only stop to dishonor.  Hewitt's peers in the hunt club returned his dues check.  The severity of the judgment shows the severity of the offense.

Tacky must also be distinguished from villainous.  Polonius is tacky; Iago is villainous.  But how about Linda Tripp, that "villain of Shakespearean proportions," as one columnist called her?  Recording on secret tape all the intimacies a friend reveals in girlie talk with you is tacky.  But intending to use what you record to bring down a President (the frolicking Clinton, you remember) is villainous.  We gag at tackiness, we gasp at villainy.  What are we doing here?

Opposites become more distinct if we can find poles, and sports supply polar opposites by the bundle.  For class we've got Baron von Cramm, going over to the Wimbledon judge to tell him that his racket touched the ball (losing him the point that would otherwise have won the match) and for tack we've got Jimmy Connors going over and rubbing out the ball mark before the judge can see it.  But you've got to be careful locating poles.  A penthouse owner who puts plastic flamingos on his lawn plot has made a polar switch.  Tacky played with becomes classy.

Our minds won't give up polarizing, though.  There will always be Muhammad Ali after his TKO of Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title, shouting, "I am the greatest! I'm the greatest thing that ever lived."  We line up a hundred champions opposite that one, the most recent champ, I suppose, being Manny Pacquaio with his "He gave me a good fight" after clubbing Tim Bradley for the welterweight title.

Old professors like to think that the past is full of class and the present full of tack.  Ancient Greece is loaded with class.  And then some kid asks, "What's the difference between Muhammad Ali and that braggart Odysseus in Homer?"  Like the kid who wanted to know the difference between the posse comitatus in Beowulf and a Los Angeles street gang.  Class and tack vary with time.  Everything's a social construction.  (You  can see it's hard to argue against social construction, or social relativism, when a category like this is at issue.  Classy and tacky so steadily pronounce judgments on behavior within the tribe.)

Class would seem to have little to do with morality.  The philanderer John Kennedy was immoral but was thought to have a lot of class.  That's by the standards of his time.  Knowledge that he shared a mistress with a gangster would probably deprive him of the compliment now.   Is it classy of a reporter to cover up the mistress thing?  Then but not now?   Do you believe in journalistic relativism?

Is incitement to tack tacky?  College men shouting "Show us your boobs!" at a college woman at a party window are in the dean's eyes clearly tacky, as is the woman when she obliges them, everybody maxing out.  Is Howard Cosell tacky for encouraging, and profiting from, Muhammad Ali's tackiness?  If he's already tacky?  If he's in the tackiness-selling business?

Does tackiness rub off?  Is Princess Diana stained by her association with Simone Simmons, the "natural healer and clairvoyant... a global psychic and personality" (according to her agent, Tony Clayman Promotions) with whom the princess spent eight hours at a time on the phone, and with whom in 2005 she was, said Simmons, "still communicating"?  Had Diana already been tacky?  In an early interview (Bashir) I'd say she holds to class but defaults to tack; in a late one (Simmons) tack keeps coming up on its own.  But that's just my judgment.  Whoever judges now, though, has that movie Queen Elizabeth standing  before them, offering her yardstick.

"Yes, the royal yardstick," say the constructionists, and down goes another eternal standard.  In their midst you hunger for signs of permanent value, anything to throw up against relativism.  Is it a sign that on the net, though there are debates about the tackiness of  70's and 80's and 90's music, there's no debate about posting on Facebook "I know 97% of you won’t repost this, but my real friends will”?  Wearing a translucent blouse and a black bra goes unchallenged as tacky.

To satisfy our lingering essentialism there doesn't have to be any eternal, absolute Idea of Tack, there just has to be in human nature something consistent, some sense of class that persists.  There's this on one of the teen forums:  "Classy is not about clothes, makeup, hairstyles, accessories.  It is not about being posh, or wealthy.....A classy girl is kind, gentle, sweet, empathetic, caring.  She is giving, loving... she is a good person. She has good manners and is a very pleasant person to know. She is a good friend."  Where did that sixteen-year-old get that?  It got more approval than any of the other offerings.

285. Theorists, Novelists, and Poor, Struggling Teachers

When I, as a professor of English, first became acquainted with postmodern ways of reading I immediately wanted to find the right set of passages from the toughest epistemologists I knew so that I could show, by impeccable step-by-step reasoning, that the theory of knowledge supporting this new method was unsound.  When Zoë Heller, as an English major, first became acquainted with it she wanted to "lie down in a darkened room and cry."

It's such a sad, sweet story the novelist tells in last week's New York Times Book Review (3-15-15) — coming out of high school and going through her early college years believing that "authors were actual people" who wrote works you tried to explain to a demanding teacher, then discovering that she'd been laboring under a "bourgeois delusion."  Reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play."  You certainly never read an author for his message.

That kind of reading gets its come-uppance in her essay when she reports that the college essays she wrote displaying her expertise at it turned out, on mature review, to be "infinitely duller and cruder than any of my naive high school efforts to figure out what authors actually meant."  Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, she has moved back to her prepoststructuralist position.  "Whatever embarrassment attached to re-embracing the old bourgeois delusions was far outweighed by relief." 

Heller tells us that her disenchantment with reading as creative play is paralleled by that of  Zadie Smith, whose "doubts about the readerly freedoms bestowed by poststructuralist theory set in around the time she became a novelist."

Statements about reading by successful writers have a lot of force in English departments, and I was delighted to see these writers employing it in support of the old way, my way, of teaching.  How hard it had been to hold to that way through the years of poststructuralism's triumph.  Now here was the old counterforce, resurgent.  Go Heller, go Smith.  Sock it to 'em.

But then, in mid-cheer, I had to stop.  The memory of somebody I had taught in my old-fashioned way kicked in.  Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Voice of the independent American Scholar, promoter of Man Thinking, scourge of obedient thinkers.  They'd be socking it to him!

There he was, right in the middle of the canon, an author my students had to read in the traditional way.  "Do you understand his message?" I had asked them.  "Do you buy it?  Are you willing to live by it?"  And what was his message?  Freedom!  "Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, 'without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.'"  The American Scholar took everything he read on his own terms.  "I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system."

Houston, we've got a problem.  Our targets the poststructuralists were working as hard as Emerson to keep people from becoming satellites.  Look at what Heller disparages, their belief that reading was "not an act of exegesis but a kind of creative, semi-erotic play."  Take out the disparagement and what have you got?  Man Thinking, the self-reliant American Scholar.  Nothing's going to keep him from playing with a text.

Where did Heller run into poststructuralist reading, I mean really run into it, as opposed to hearing about it?  Same place she would have run into Emerson's Man Thinking, Columbia University.  She had come there after education at Haverstock School and Oxford.  From what I know of Oxford education in the eighties nothing in it would have softened her up for poststructuralism.  I doubt that Smith's education at Cambridge would have softened her either. 

So welcome to America, Britishers.  Over here there is "creative reading as well as creative writing."  And to do it you have to trust yourself, as Emerson exhorts Americans to do in "Self-Reliance."  There are no holy texts.  "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."  Socrates will be proud of you.

This tells me that, after I have given up on the impossible question ("How can I make sure my students get Emerson's message of freedom without infringing on their freedom?") I, side-by-side with my fellow-American though maybe over-eager poststructuralists, have to let those free-readers into my class.  They get in on Emerson's pass.

But that throws me into an impossibility.  I just can't teach my lower-level courses at Ohio University with poststructuralists in the room. In Freshman English I have to curb freedom every three minutes. You cannot play, creatively, with the subject-verb-complement structure of the English sentence.  You cannot, if you are to remain teachable, play with anything established by convention or agreement.  You cannot play with the rules of logic.  You are not free to make any inferences you please.   Tell me you are free, as some up-to-date students have told me, and I will go into a dark room and weep.

Yet I want play.  Especially in  the interpretation-of-poetry course, where every new imagination is encouraged to exercise itself.

What I need is a warning in the Course Catalogue that will give me only teachable students.  A fatwa from the head of the English Department.  "You cannot play with the walls around your playground.  In a work of literature what's given you in declarative sentences — the physical set-up, the time-frame, the evidence given you for your own inference-making, the rules of inference-making — is your reality, and it's as hard as concrete."

For my poststructuralist colleagues a petition.  "Please don't write as if these walls did not exist."  That's the way the founding poststructuralists, the French, wrote, and the way American relativists following them wrote.  Only a careful, statement-by-statement display would make sure of it but I think that if you made a quick survey, or maybe just looked at Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Contingencies of Value, you would see what caused us the teachers, and them the literary theorists, so much trouble: they did not make clear that the relativism they advocated was cultural and esthetic, not epistemic.  The first two relativisms you can get away with; the last will bring a ton of bricks down on top of you.  Alan Sokal's load.  (That's "get away with" in front of scientists and analytic philosophers, not continental philosophers who, in the eyes of the former, will let you get away with murder.)

It's those analytic philosophers who give me now the most exhilarating and finally most depressing thoughts.  First the exhilaration.  Emerson, I realize, has nothing to fear from their analysis!  Emerson, the man people quote when they deprecate logic ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds").  He separated the epistemic from the cultural and the esthetic, and gave it its due.  The teaching of "elements," the "indispensable office" of colleges, was outside of everything he gave freedom to, as were "history and exact science," which the scholar "must learn by laborious reading."  The old walls.  (His statement, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, was outside them too — for readers who paid close enough attention to see that the consistency he was referring to was temporal, not logical.)

That is exhilarating, isn't it?  The American ex-preacher doing just the thing all these Europe-sucking intellectuals failed to do.  Ask why they failed, though, and you're on the road to depression.  When you give the obvious answer, inattention (they didn't notice science standing there, demanding its due), you can't stop with the intellectuals, you have to go on to the teachers, who didn't notice that they had nothing to worry about.  Why make a big fuss, a science war, a culture war, over poststructuralist freedom?  Just notice the right passages in Emerson, read them to the intellectuals, and get on with your business.

76, "Reasonable doubt"

A man can't be executed in the United States unless a jury finds him guilty of a capital crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." That tells us that his living or dying is going to depend on what his jurors take the word "reasonable" to mean.

What's to guide them? The word "beyond" suggests that there's a line. Up to it, reasonable; past it, no. How unrealistic. We're in the human world, not geometry class.

Law dictionaries pretend to help. A few tell us that "beyond a reasonable doubt" means "moral certainty." Oh yes, that's where you find clear lines, in morality. All us jurors are going to know when answers to moral questions are certain.

There's no escape. We're stuck with individual differences. Everybody's stuck. If you do away with juries and go with a judge (or a lord, or an apparatchik) you're stuck with his individual difference.

And aren't we, in philosophy class, stuck with relativism? There's no absolute, no objective judgment, no line-drawing machine. You use words that make it sound as if there is such a thing but my, look where they leave you. "Preponderance of the evidence." "Preponderance": superiority in weight. You look to see which side the balance falls on. Yes, and who's doing the weighing? And how heavy is each thing that goes into the pan? Weights are assigned, not discovered.

Even the expression that supports all this, there in the Constitution, "due process," is infected by subjectivity. "Due": owed. What does a man having coming to him? You can specify the procedures in legal statute and establish them in court practice but still, might he deserve more? or less? We differ, friend.

The more we are convinced of our differences, though, the closer we come to that most dangerous of convictions: that everything in the moral sphere is subjective, or relative. Though possibly true, that belief is dangerous because it invites a slide into two really destructive convictions, that one moral belief is as good as an another, and that there is no good guidance.

You have to leave it to experience to counter the first belief, which it usually does soon enough, but to counter the second all you have to do is look at a Supreme Court opinion on the very expression we're most worried about, "beyond a reasonable doubt." In 1970 the Court said (in re Winship) that this standard of proof is grounded on "a fundamental value determination of our society." There you are, juror. Find out what values your society has determined to be fundamental and apply them to the case before you.

The values are many and about some there may be respectable differences but about the one that brought forth the Court's opinion there is, I think, likely to be difference only among those who haven't learned it. It's that "it is far worse to convict an innocent man than to let a guilty man go free."

That's easy guidance. Hard guidance is guidance in society's values that are not so clear or are still at issue. Here's where teachers come in. Let them get young citizens' values straightened out in school, say in civics class, before they get to a jury room. Get them started, at least, on the meaning of words like "reasonable" and "due."

75. What a Teacher Substitutes for Reality

Why do teachers have to find a substitute for reality? Because relativists have taken it away from them. (See Post #73.) No more real world, no more objective truth. Only representations and constructions.

What can they substitute? I, dealing in words, suggest "resistance." It's a word they can use without claiming any of that knowledge they're not supposed to have. All they claim to know is that there's something out there that has to be overcome before a student, or anybody, can reach his goals.

That's their expertise. Want to fly a kite? Run with it into the wind. Tie the bridle this way. Want to design kites? Here are the laws of aerodynamics. Want to read poems? Start by construing the sentences.

They don't need a name for the something out there that makes all this necessary. All they need is consistency in the resistance it offers. It does no good to teach kite-flying if aerodynamics varies from day to day.

Do they need to know why there is consistency? It doesn't appear so, yet such knowledge would be helpful — in the way that knowing why there is consistency in an aerodynamic resistance would be helpful (it lets you generalize at a higher level). But in teaching you always have to think about time constraints. Can we acquire this in a quarter? Ask that question about what's ultimately behind the consistency, or ultimately behind anything, and experience, university-wide, tells you no.

The criterion of helpfulness reduces the discussion-time for many subjects (metaphysics, theology) in our utilitarian courses. And it removes from the discussion those relativists who think that their choice of a representation or construction is unconstrained by reality — to use the old word for resistances. Those who think one representation of reality is as good as another are outside the circle. There's no point in their taking the course.

Note: I see that leaves me with a definition of reality. It's what relativists have to measure their representations and constructions against.

73. Attention to Words as a Response to Relativism

Oh those conversations in the eighties and nineties. You could hear Richard Rorty quoted ("Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences") in half the disciplines in the humanities. In the English Department the appeals were to Jacques Derrida ("There are only differences") and Chaim Perelman ("There are only audiences") — in addition to Rorty. Imply a claim for objective truth and you'd get one of them. Then you're in a troubling philosophical argument — and all you wanted to do, usually, was clear up a few problems in the Interpretation of Poetry course.

Get into trouble often enough and you'll figure out a way to get out. Here's my way. Say you're a scientist. You're accused of believing in the existence of a real world that can be objectively known. You say, "No, I just believe in the existence of a group of people who call each other 'scientists.' I take 'scientist' to be a compliment-word and I want them to apply it to me.

"What do I do to get the compliment? The same things I have been doing to discover objective reality. I examine nature, declare what I have discovered in a journal, and wait for the compliment. If readers of the journal, replicating my examination, get the same results I got I get the compliment. They were persuaded. That's all I'm doing, persuading people. Just as Aristotle's orator did.

"Except that there's a difference in our audiences. Mine isn't persuaded until the needles on their dials are in the same place I reported my needles to be. There's my rhetoric. When I work day and night in my lab I don't say I'm seeking the truth about the world, I say I'm working on a speech, the only kind that will persuade these people."

The scientist has something quieting to say, then, to each relativist. To Rorty: "With 'scientist' I merely take your compliment a step further, from sentence to sentence-maker." To Derrida: "I too deal only in difference; here it's the difference between language that gets me the compliment and language that doesn't." To Perelman: "I never go beyond the needs of my audience."

That's a scientist's response but it's not so different from mine. In my poetry class my audience needs reports on how English speakers form sentences and give meanings to words. Those reports they get from me, drawing on grammar book and dictionary. Without them they, with relatively little experience in the reading of English, can't construe sentences, the first operation in the reading of a poem.

It's to satisfy this need that I try to keep relativists quiet. Half my work is the work of a scientist, providing reports which, if believed, will allow my audience to proceed to the really rewarding part of their work, letting their imaginations go where the poet points them. In the first half of the job relativistic statements of the type we heard in the last century, are inadmissible. They are admissible in the second half, where differences in what's imagined are all the fun.

Keeping the two straight is one of the hardest jobs in the English classroom, if not in all of the humanities. You can convince beginning students — natural, self-protecting subjectivists — that scientific standards govern part of poetry-reading but it takes a lot of class time. Quarters are too short, life is too short, to allow relativists to lengthen it.