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.

305. Progress in Race Relations, Progress in Language

What Ta-Nehisi Coates says about what black males suffer in white America (quoted by David Brooks, NYT, 7-17) made me think of Socrates right away.  Coates and his fellows are clearly victims.  But they, like Socrates in prison, "are victims not of laws but of men."  And the distinction is important.

To right the injustice of victimization by laws you have to change the system, maybe the whole thing, starting with a society that makes laws like that.  The culture could be wrong.  Maybe you need a revolution.

To right the injustice of victimization by men you just have to change the men.  That's hard, but it's a lot easier than changing a whole society.   In Ferguson it could be as simple as getting whites out of the police force and getting blacks in.  The town was behind in having the ethnic make-up of the force reflect the make-up of the community.  (There had been a rapid change.)

That's physical change.  The more important change may be psychological, changing attitudes.  That's what Coates and a lot of other people, white and black, are trying to do.

Even before we start we know that change like this is going to be difficult.  On square one we had a lot of white people cruelly enslaving a lot of black people.  I mean really cruelly, worse than any slavery before.  They work them dawn to dusk, they break up their families, they don't let them form families, they let them learn nothing that doesn't make them agriculturally productive, they wipe out as much as they can of their native culture, which was agricultural.  It's a crime for them to learn to read. They are victims of the white people in every way, and this may be the worst way, the denial to them of education.  They know nothing of what's available to whites in their culture, none of the good and power-giving and life-enriching things that other cultures have adopted, things different from the cruel slavery thing, though that's part of this culture too. 

On square two blacks are freed from this slavery into the society of the white people, but they are not fully free, since there are many laws restricting them. Through many squares they remain victims of white people.  But over time the laws are changed until they step onto the square where we can say, with Socrates, that they are "victims not of laws but of men."  That's a square closer to our own but how many intervened or how many lie ahead is hard to say.  Anyway we're somewhere on that part of the board, and we're all together on the same square.

My colleagues in other departments — sociology, psychology, government, history, maybe philosophy — are all trying their hardest to determine just where we are, and where we should step next.  The help they offer varies with their training, which determines what they see when they look at the square.  What do I see?  I see a lot of people crowded together talking as persuasively as they can to change attitudes.  I'm in English, where we're trained to examine talk.

So, what needs attention?  Too much for here, but we can attend to one problem: the use of the word "deficient."  It's clearly the accurate word for the black's original condition with respect to these good and power-giving and life-enriching things whites have access to in their education but have denied blacks access to. But going forward it's a word nobody can use easily and confidently.  Recent black slaves can use it but it's difficult for them, being uneducated, to know what they are deficient in. Recent white enslavers know what that is, and can identify deficiency more easily, but the word is too close to "inferior" for them to be able, without discredit, to use it.  "Inferior" was used too often by whites in power contests (lawmaking, for one), making sure that blacks would lose.

 "Inferior," though discredited when it is used categorically ("My culture is superior to yours"), gains credit as soon as it is used conditionally ("My culture is superior to yours at preparing young people for hardship in a whaleboat").  Adoption of an end obliges us to discriminate among means, and where cultures are means — raising chances of landing a whale, or a spot at Harvard, or a job — to discriminate among them.  (I go through this in greater detail in Post 77.)  

The end here is more black young people in Harvard and other colleges.  Whatever it is that gets other young people there, whatever those other cultures have that improves their chances,  would-be helpful whites want to say that black culture is deficient in it.  That's the first step toward any sufficiency, an accurate statement of the deficiency.  

It's all very Socratic and scientific and the best way to solve the problem of Black education, but oh how hard it is to make that initial statement in the talk arena.  We're still too close to categorical "inferior" and all the feelings it provokes.

Better, most educated whites seem to agree, to play it safe.  They might try softeners ("challenged," "lacking in," "insufficient"), hoping they won't be seen through, but they never use the words "deficient" or "inferior" with respect to blacks.  And that's too bad because we're clearly on a square where black attitudes toward education need to be talked about accurately.  Along with all that contributes to those attitudes, in family or culture.  Any person who tries to do that now, though, apparently can't or won't use his most accurate words, not freely.  Let's hope we'll soon get to a square where he can.

304. Greece, Merkel, and Metaphysics

I have been told a hundred times in the last forty years that my fifties notions of what's real won't stand up.  And if fifties notions of reality won't stand up then fifties notions of society and gender and justice and language and human nature and progress won't stand up.    No metaphysical center, no foundation, no starting point for confident reasoning.  (The fact that the confidence was most often exhibited by white European males, though philosophically irrelevant, was no help.)  I lost my belief in a reality.

But it's been coming back.  Listening to statements by Alexis Tsipras during the financial crisis I found myself calling them "remote" and "distant."

"Austerity is not part of the European treaties; democracy and the principle of  popular sovereignty are."

"We are working hard for a deal without austerity, without the bailout which has destroyed Greece."

"The strong message of the Greek people will be that Greece will return (to) democracy,"

"We proved that even in the direst of times, democracy cannot be held to ransom, but remains a supreme value and means of resolution.  We showed that democracy won't be blackmailed."

What is that distant from?  I say "reality" and perk up my philosophical ears.  My friend, whose ears are flat, says, "What's the big philosophical deal?  Reality is a pile of money Greece needs and can't get without meeting the conditions of those in possession of it.  The face of reality is the face of Angela Merkel, stating the conditions.  That's obvious, and can be stated simply."

Well, you make a big philosophical deal when you can't end a philosophical pain you've been given and see something in  the world that might relieve it.  I listen to Angela Merkel and think, "Ah! A reality if there ever was one."  I go to Jacques Derrida and say, "I don't need a metaphysical center; I've got Angela Merkel."

Having an Angela Merkel is having a reliable report on something in your way, and can't change, and, if you want to satisfy your desires, have to deal with.  That something here is conditions of a contract, but it might as well be the conditions of what philosophers speak of as "the world."  It's what Derrida removed the center from, a removal which was for me like removing my belly button.  Painful.

At any rate we've got something in Tsipras's words that gives a sense of distance, and those words, we find, give a sense of greater distance than do the words of Yaris Vanouflakis, his finance minister ("Greece should simply announce that it is defaulting ... stick the finger to Germany and say 'you can now solve this problem by yourself'").  Being able to measure relative distance gives us confidence.  There must be something out there that we're measuring distance from.  What is it?  What better word than "reality"?  It means, as above, "something in your way, and can't change, and, if you want to satisfy your desires, have to deal with."  Like all of nature.

Human reality is less solid but we still compliment people or political philosophies for being "realistic" about it.  At the moment I'd give the highest compliment to the IMF people who after Greece had accepted Merkel's terms said they wouldn't accept them without giving Greece some relief on payment of the debt.  Their argument, in the good old peasant terms I hear, was that "you can't get blood out of a turnip," and Merkel's strict conditions were turning Greece into a turnip.  "Lighten up or you won't get anything at all."

That's a tickle, finding somebody more realistic than Merkel, unless you see a higher, or Machiavellian, realism in her.   Like: She goes to the head of the IMF and says, "Look, Christine, there's no way I can allow a Communist leader like Tsipras anything he can call a victory.  But we can't stand around watching all the suffering we're going to cause either, and I would like to get some blood out of this turnip.  So how about, after we sign the agreement, with Tsipras on his back, and all the other far-left parties noticing, you jump in with a nice humanitarian offer, we go along (showing our essential compassion), and everybody goes home happy."

"Just what I've been thinking," says Lagarde, and they bump fists.

303. Tackiness, Deeply Considered

 For some people "tacky" turns out to be a very handy word when they don't want to risk "immoral."  Say the subject of open marriage comes up.  Mutually agreed-upon adultery is to me, raised in the ancien (pre-sexual revolution) regime, immoral.  I want to call it that but, uncertain of the regimes I have survived into, I keep my mouth shut.  If only the word I discussed in my preceding post had occurred to me.  "No, it's only that I find open marriages — you know — tacky."  In what regime could that get you looks?

You may be stronger if you acknowledge that you are square.  But that could take a while.  A poet I knew, the most knowing square of my acquaintance, didn't gain his knowledge until he had what he called an epiphany under a couch in a faculty colleague's living room, where he was groping for his roll of Tums.  The colleague had just done a very cool thing: displayed on the floor nude photos of a student known to many of them in their classes.  (He was an amateur photographer.)  The poet had been bending over with the rest to look at them when his antacid rolled out of his shirt pocket.  He was on his knees, hands sifting the dust balls, when the epiphany came: "What's a person like me doing here?" 

What will be his word for that scene, the cool fellow laying out the pictures for the other cool fellows to enjoy, when he comments on it later?  He doesn't know how much cooler than he his audiences in the big city are, but he senses too sharp a gradient for him to call the behavior "immoral," or "base," or "shameful."  Not even "indecent" will do.  Then it comes to him.  "Well, I just found it too tacky for words."

For a poet searching for substitutes for the more judgmental words in his vocabulary "tacky" looks like pure gold.  And its finding opens a vein for the rest of us.  Down the list of sins and questionables we can run.  Masturbation goes as "undignified," group sex "unfocused," wife-swapping "ignoble," blue movies "down-market," and anal sex "unsanitary."  "Tacky" is so spot-on for lap-dancing — and God knows how many slick magazines (Cosmopolitan, Playboy) — that it remains.  All sex other than nature's one-bulb-one-socket arrangement becomes simply "inefficient."  Presence in cool conversations, life in cool societies, becomes so much easier.

This, working so hard for ease, is what you're forced to when there is no standard for behavior, no yardstick in Buckingham Palace, no meter-bar in Paris.   All you're left with after the ethical center is removed are rhetorical boosts and put-downs.   Knowing that, and prepared by the loss of Plato and God, we former essentialists find it in anything cross-cultural, or intersubjective, or just recurrent in history.

Finding it, this dependable recurrence, is not easy.  You'd think kiss-and-tell books, letting all the kisses hang out ("sex with the princess was fireworks"), would forever be tacky, since the word "cad" had hung in there so long, but kiss-and-tell books have been popular for so many decades now that one begins to wonder.  A society that eats up servants' accounts, including those by public servants, of the misbehavior observed during their time of service, is not going to disapprove of kiss-and-tell books.

Does the fact that there are synonyms for "tacky" in twenty-five languages point to something dependably cross-cultural?  I understand that there's a great synonym, or near-synonym, for "tacky" in Russian, "poshlost."  Vladimir Nabokov, in writing about it, put his finger on what's great about "tacky": in using it "we pass not only an aesthetic but also a moral judgment."  We bluenoses can smuggle the moral in under the esthetic.  (As if anyone were sure of the difference.)

Can we bear the amount of poshlost we'll get in a democracy, where every poshloser gets a vote?  Taste-democracy goes with vote-democracy (every seller of bad taste, every William Randolph Hearst, every capitalist able to influence Congress, will make sure of that) and America, and now pretty much the world, has to live with that fact.  The alternative is totalitarian rule. 

So, if we have to live with it we'd better learn how to handle it.  In our relativistic age that means learning the effective put-downs. 

"Like 'does your mother wear Army shoes?' after a vulgarism?" 

Maybe at one level (you've got to watch the levels here) that would do, but at most levels you've got to show more class.  Like on The Daily Show.  But it's a serious problem, handling tackiness, and we need models.  In my experience Dante's Virgil is the best model.  In the eighth circle of Hell Dante, you may remember, has lingered to enjoy some extreme tack: two louts abusing each other with scurrilous speech and obscene gestures.  Virgil, his guide, notes the slide into voyeurism and says, "Keep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you....The wish to hear such baseness is degrading."  He shames Dante, but not devastatingly.   When Dante wilts too far he says, "Less shame would wash away a greater fault than yours."  This is no revolver-on-the-dresser case.  But it's a case.  Everything's in proportion, and the point has been made.

"And you think Dante's Virgil can be a model for our time?"

Yes, at least as a reminding figure, if only standing behind us. In front of how many screens might we appropriately hear, "the wish to watch such baseness is degrading"?

"But Dante had such great advantages.  His Virgil had Rome and Greece behind him, the authority of their classics, their heroes, his readers already had an elevated conception of man, that creature made in God's image, a nobility that gave meaning to words like 'baseness' and 'degradation.'  As Sir Gawain, or Chaucer's Parson, or Castiglione's Courtier did a few years later.  What can today's poet count on, standing behind his reader, providing conceptions of man?  Biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, sexologists.  Kinsey, Masters, Johnson."

Right.  Neutral, or supposed neutral, presences.  Killing our hopes unless there's something inside us, a built-in sense of class, that persists, and holds out against the waves of tack science allows. 

"What evidence is there for that sense?"

Well, where did that letter by the teen in the forum come from?  You know, in the last post.  "Classy is not about clothes, makeup, hairstyles, accessories.  It is not about being posh, or wealthy.....A classy girl is a good person, a good friend."  I feel sure she hasn't been introduced to Plato's Idea of the Good, and it's not likely she has a Virgil or a Courtier in her sights.  So how did she come up with that letter?

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.

301. A Poem about Corporate Capitalism

It's so hard to understand you start seeing some men sweating digging ditches all day and coming home late to their kids and other men going off in nice cars and coming home early to their kids and you say it's not fair and then you hear to each according to his needs communism and you ask your dad what communism is and he says it's Louie across the street you could see him in his undershirt with his feet up on the railing with his pitcher of beer beside him it's Louie sitting there all day drinking beer and me going off to work and at the end of the day we both get the same amount of money and you say that's not fair and you go to college and some professors say your dad is wrong and some say he's right and they recommend authors to make it clear and those authors are all trying hard but you're still confused because though they go into great detail to make sure they've got the right and wrong of it they can't untangle you from the New England literature your grammar school started you with where you learned how much better spirituality was than materialism just like in church and this one author took you to a cabin he built by himself on a pond to prove it and then your father asks where the axe he used to build the cabin came from and you think of your friend who played the violin divinely and could fill the house with spiritual music because her father was a materialist and made enough capital to buy her lessons and you see you'll have to try harder and dig into the root of the problem which the best people tell you is the law that makes a corporation a person and some scholars tell you that's a bane and some tell you it's a blessing because taking a corporation as a person is what gave capitalism its great boost in our country and made us rich and able to afford lessons for our daughters who could fill the house with divine music and some said no you've got to look more closely and everybody was working very hard, oh my how hard, trying to decide just which of a natural person's rights a corporate person should have, and it wasn't ever easy because to get corporate personhood straight you had to get corporate capitalism straight and oh my god what a problem that was for a person like me who couldn't even get Piketty straight and was losing hope until a critic in the New York Times (7-3-15) showed he maybe had it in a nutshell knowing that for corporate capitalism "nothing matters that can't be quantified and monetized" sent me down to the Museum of Modern Art hoping that the artist, a conceptual artist, one whose deepest concerns, he said, were "continually rendered irrelevant by the pervasive powers of corporate capitalism," might be the helper I was looking for, the final one, the one who had worked the hardest, but alas, though I saw many interesting and provocative pictures I saw nothing that improved my grip on "corporate capitalism," though one, of the word "Diesel" all by itself in one of the frames, did, I think, show that she might be aware of my problem, or at least of the area in which it is found.