295. The use of the words "offended" and "frightened."

The trouble with my title words is that, like every bid for sympathy, people want to know your circumstances before they honor your bid.  Peggy Noonan finds out you said you were "frightened" in a Columbia classroom listening to a discussion of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and she'll knock you over with ridicule (WSJ, 5-23/24).  Jessica Valenti finds out you said it at a certain fraternity's party and she'll smother you with hugs (theguardian.com, 9-14-14).

The Columbia student newspaper wants hugs for its classroom listener, and defends her word.  Ovid "contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities."  This lets Noonan broaden her target to include the whole grievance-and-change faction that makes such bids.

The more we repeat and analyze these words the deeper we sink into the sands of subjectivity.  Here the subjectivity is double, a subjective report of a subjective state.  And then a judgment of the report (subjective) and of the state, and whether the judgment is shared.  So maybe triple.  But then there's that corrective report of the circumstances, it's sort of subjective too, isn't it?  So maybe quadruple.  Oi.

The more subjectivity there is the more grievances you're going to get.  I have a grievance against the language those students use.  Like "marginalizing identities." I, a dinosaur in the English Department, tell you I am "sickened" by those words.  They're jargon-words from the Women's and Afro-American Studies and Sociology departments.  Can I ask you to credit my nausea?  Not until I show you the evidence in classrooms and journals.  And even then there'll be a question of how many hugs I'm going to get.

After that there's the question of our varying acquaintance with the world and our sense of proportion.  Live awhile and you learn that every sound grievance-and-change movement has its silly side, as does every sound conservative resistance. All, being silly, are perfect targets for Noonan-type wit.  So you don't get too worked up about the silly-siders.  You see that going Noonan all the way wastes energy.  But you still have to keep your feel for the serious issues underneath, and the need for a sound stand.

The most serious issue I feel here is the changing of cultures.  (Can cultures be changed?  Of course.  Anglo-Saxon culture was changed from Semitic-unwelcoming to Semitic-welcoming in a very short time.)  And hurt feelings, which is what all our sympathy bids are about, can be a big obstacle to such change.  Avoid a statement of fact because the fact hurts feelings and you avoid the discussion and analysis necessary to make a change.

Suppose you want to say, "Black culture at this time fails to encourage black education."  Your support for that statement comes from scientific studies, work done by people who have stripped themselves, as far as any human being can strip himself or herself, of subjectivity.  But that statement of fact hurts feelings.  Do you keep your mouth shut? 

I suppose that if you want a hug badly enough you do.  But if you want to explore change, if you believe that a change here will benefit this minority culture (giving  those immersed in it better chances for a good job, say) and benefit every culture in the mix America is trying to manage, then you blow away the hug and speak the fact.  And any other fact relevant to the problem. 

Not that you're going to avoid giving offense, even with this understood.  Too many people have spoken neutral words with offensive intent, as aggressive anti-gay extremists spoke the word "homosexual," ruining it for neutral use.  Michigan State's guide to language expresses the common sense of it: "Speak of all members of the University community in relationship to the issues at hand...If you specify race or ethnic origin, be certain it is relevant."  Extend this to listeners: "If it's relevant to the issues at hand forget your ethnic sensitivities."

Oh how hard that is to do in a time of war, culture war.  Demonstrations of allegiance, reviews of grievances, visions and revisions of history, attacks on silliness, inculpations, exculpations, all those are so hard to resist when you're in combat.  And they're all so irrelevant. 

What brings us out of that?  For me it's a question, heard in the voice of a parent or an old prof: Do you want justification or do you want to solve a problem?  Which is more important to you, getting a hug, giving a knock, or finding a solution?

If it's the solution you go for then (if you'll excuse me one more time) English Composition becomes your guide.  From here on you try to avoid "Relevance?" in your margin.  Show how depressing (or inspiring) your history is, demonstrate your victimization (or your victoriousness), display your grief (or your confidence) and there it will appear, in red.

Relevance: the principle that representatives of Western culture, looking at Socrates, adhere to more thoroughly than anybody.  See it in Western science, see it in Western law.  Then forget it.   Westerners, Easterners, Northerners, and Southerners.  Look only at the model.  It's your guide through every argumentative essay and every public discussion.

Now you're looking at me, maybe as proud as Thomas Babington Macaulay of that model.  Maybe as humble as Uriah Heep.  Forget me.   Just follow the model.  Use the apparatus (Post 292) my predecessors have developed.  That is, if you want to avoid your old English teacher's marks in your margin.

112. Truth in Pictures.

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Bee Wilson, in the London Review of Books, says that Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress, made her photo albums for the normal reason: to "preserve and then display an idealized version of home life — aren't we happy!" And there in the selected photo (5 January, p. 27) are Adolf and Eva, Adolf pressing one child to his side and holding the other by the hand. Eva, squeezing the child's other hand, smiles down at her. All that's missing is the faithful dog.

At the time of the sample picture the Allies were taking Rome, landing in Normandy, and rolling toward Germany's eastern borders. Within a year Eva would fly to a besieged Berlin so that she could take poison and die with Adolf — after he had poisoned his beloved dog. At the time she made the album she must have known how far her and Hitler's life was from normal home life. She must have felt the stretch when she set up the picture (the children were a friend's; Hitler was dragooned). It's hard to imagine anybody saying, "Aren't we happy," with greater strain.

In one respect Eva's pictures of happy family life can easily be classed with the SS officer's pictures, taken in Germany's same grim hours, of happy garrison life at Auschwitz. The happiness in both of them looks heedless, unaware. We who look over the album-maker's shoulder know that.

What we don't know is the degree of strain with which the happiness is maintained, or displayed. At Auschwitz we (I at least) listen in vain for the voice that strains to say, "Aren't we happy?" They all just seem to be enjoying themselves, without stress. The photographer sees people who really are happy, and thinks his album presents the truth about them. He's happy.

This absence of strain gets to us every time we think of the gas chambers. How can these killers sing? Surely, the protecting mind says, they won't sing well. Bad people must sing badly. That's certainly what John Milton thought. Listen to his bad people and you'll hear "lean and flashy songs" grating on "scrannel pipes of wretched straw." Plato, Milton's guide, believed that if you're good you'll be happy, and if you're happy you'll be beautiful. For a long time many of us, among them my Sunday School teachers, believed the converse: if you're bad you'll be unhappy, and if you're unhappy you'll be ugly.

Now we have grown-up learning. We know that good, beautiful things can come out of bad, ugly people. Moral snakes can dance like angels. So we shouldn't be shocked when we hear heavenly music coming from Nazi killers — shouldn't, that is, if we really do believe what we have learned as grownups, and aren't clinging to any of the old belief. It's uncertainty about this that makes us want to test ourselves. Bring on the "Abendlied" for another try. How grown up am I? (My own answer: not sure.)

But Wilson, the LRB author, provokes a perhaps more interesting test. She shows us how Eva Braun's picture of the happy Hitler family is a lie and then, when she says it's told for the normal reason, to demonstrate domestic happiness, she puts it to all us family album makers: how big a lie are you telling?

I, myself, don't think I'm telling a very big one. Of course I pick the smiling faces and leave out the pouty ones, and I do work in the neater activities and select the classier decor. I've even staged some shots, though not going as far as Eva went. But on the whole my pictures tell the truth. We really are happy.

I hear, "Yes, that's what the maker of the SS album was saying. He thought his pictures told the truth." The voice is that of the observer looking over all our shoulders, and the test in it for us is in whether we let him get us down or not. If we collapse before his reminder of the subjectivity of all judgments we have failed. If we say "so what " we have passed. We're telling him that we can still discriminate among lies. Pictures might lie but words, like Bee Wilson's, can always correct them and bring us closer to the truth. There's no reason for a normal album-maker to lose confidence in his albums.