320. In Defense of Name-Calling

If anybody's interested in what postmodern theory can do to a guy my recent posts will show him.  Did you notice how careful I was being about just what bad name to call people?  Will it be "trash"?  Will it be "barbarian"?  Or would "uncivilized" do?

That was rhetoric, see, and I was being an orator.  Yes, one of those people.  Not a philosopher, as we followers of Socrates are supposed to be.  Disinterested searchers for truth.  Objective reporters of what we've found.  Please don't tell Simmias.

Not that I was attracted to oratory.  No, I was making the best of what Stanley Fish and sixteen sharpshooters from the Sorbonne had left me.  If language is "rhetoric all the way down," and my students believe that, and everybody at the dinner table believes that, and every intellectual in debate in America believes that, then all I can do is be the most effective orator I can be.  Like: "You know, these people are barbarians."  That ought to have some effect.  But godalmighty what?

It's easier to start with good names, like "civilized."  A compliment word, a eulogism, it gets its force from whatever desire my listener has to be complimented by me, which will be a compliment on membership in my tribe.  That's all.  No matching up with what God wants, or nature promotes, or history demonstrates .  No reference to what Matthew Arnold was sure of ("the best that has been thought and said in the world") or to what C.S. Lewis specified (in his list of the 118 very best).  Not a traditional foundation in sight.

It occurred to me once to illustrate this rhetorical force by showing how a minor-league player just brought up to the major leagues might respond to a eulogism, "Yankee."  It's a neutral word that was made into a compliment word by writers reporting on the success and distinctive behavior of players wearing the Yankee uniform.  When they said a second-year player had shown himself to be "a real Yankee" people knew what they meant.  Somebody like Tommy Henrich.

If you're a baseball fan you know what I mean.  If you're not you need a story.  Or two.  First, Waite Hoyt, the great pitcher on the Babe Ruth-Lou Gehrig teams of the twenties.  He, late in his career, was pitching for the Pirates against the Cardinals,  a team the Yankees had thrashed in the 1928 World Series.  As the game went on he got more and more abuse from the Cardinal bench.  Finally he walked over in front of the dugout and said, "Watch yourselves.  Go too far and I'll put my Yankee uniform on and scare you to death."

That's drawing on Yankee success.  The Steinbrenner story draws on Yankee character, which, though just as powerful, is less definable.  After a year as president and owner of the club a sportswriter observed that he was "no Yankee," and others took it up.  He wasn't living up to the pin-stripe standard.  I think it had something to do with dignity and reserve, what the leaders to Yankee success, like Gehrig and DiMaggio, had, and yes, the mid-level players, like Henrich. 

Whatever else the expression "real Yankee" suggested, and however much the rookie on the Yankee bench would love to hear it applied to him, and however much he would hate to hear "no Yankee," I want to make him into the student seated before the teacher who has no means to motivate him other than such words.  That teacher's words are "civilized" and "uncivilized," the words all his timid words — euphemistic, conciliatory, concessionary, tactful — drive toward, and all his bold words, like "barbaric," fall back to.  The civilization is Western (necessarily, since this teacher is incapable of teaching any other), and the model, the DiMaggio, is Socrates.  "Real academic," meaning faithful follower of Socrates, is equivalent to "civilized" but bolder, a eulogism suggesting quintessence.

Is all this necessary?  Or have I been so spooked by postmodern theory that I'm hallucinating a worldwide intellectual takeover?  That could be (a retirement home puts you rather out of touch) but in each week's mail delivery there seems to be a revenant who won't leave.  In the latest New York Review the late David Lindberg, "a distinguished historian of science," is quoted by Steven Weinberg as saying that

the proper measure of a philosophical system or a scientific theory is not the degree to which it anticipated modern thought, but its degree of success in treating the philosophical and scientific problems of its own day.

If modern thought in science is what has survived scientists' tests this has to be nonsense, and Weinberg, Nobel winner in physics, calls it so.  He also shows me that the issue is still alive.  Is it the postmodern depreciation of logic that's keeping such relativism going?  

I think a prepostmodern, and hope that a postpostmodern, academic would be able to follow Lindberg's statement to its logical end: that one claim to truth is as good as another.  Nonsense, as Weinberg says.  But delivered by a distinguished historian of science and accepted by the editors of the University of Chicago Press, no doubt on the advice of Lindberg's peers in the history of science.

I won't go into the implications of that for the German system that puts all one's peers into a compartment, where group nonsense becomes possible.  Where peer review becomes meaningless.

I'd rather indulge myself in a vision of the Anglo-Hellenic system, not fully imposed (that's too visionary), but introduced, or reintroduced, as a check.  I see Weinberg sitting in — as dean's representative, as a Paul Murphy — on some of the committees in my Department, English, in the eighties and nineties.  Right there, looking at a feminist critique of science, already published in a feminist journal, he tells us how nonsensical it is.  And saves us from embarrassment on the College Tenure Committee, where it becomes a document in evidence, and where our own scientists have to tell us, with collegial tact, without using the word "nonsense," that it is nonsense.

To a graduate thesis committee in my department Paul Murphy (many of my readers will remember him) said, "If this is acceptable then everything I've learned about scholarship is wrong," and denied the grant of the degree.  Steven Weinberg, with his "nonsense," is a Paul Murphy in spades.  But he's speaking in The New York Review.  The way Alan Sokal spoke in Le Nouvel Observateur.  Think of how much would have been accomplished for the academy, for public trust of professors, if both had been able to speak on our examination committees.  In every department.

I'm guessing that our graduate schools are still German enough to be silencing such voices, and I'm too far away, really, to credibly imagine anything, but I can imagine a baseball dugout.  No rookie hearing "bush league."  No idea of what a real Yankee is.  Nothing particular about a Yankee uniform.  No DiMaggio for a model.  Everybody free to go out on the field and think they're playing serious baseball — until they hear the boos.

319. Crazy PC on College Campuses? Rejoice and Be Glad.

All right, you're laughing at those silly college kids carrying political correctness into la-la land.  Me too.  And then I realize that, to be consistent with what I wrote in my last post, I have to want us all to rejoice.

What, you're not laughing at what's going on in universities now?  Maybe you're not up.  Let me refresh you, out of the September (2015) issue of The Atlantic:

* During the 2014–15 school year the deans and department chairs at ten University of California system schools were presented by administrators at faculty leader-training sessions with examples of microaggressions. The list of offensive statements included: “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”

* By some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American “Where were you born?,” because this implies that he or she is not a real American.

I hear laughter, but I'm not sure about the rejoicing.

* Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.

* Last year, at the University of St. Thomas, in Minnesota, an event called Hump Day, which would have allowed people to pet a camel, was abruptly canceled. Students had created a Facebook group where they protested the event for animal cruelty, for being a waste of money, and for being insensitive to people from the Middle East.  The group organizing the event announced on its Facebook page that the event would be canceled because the “program [was] dividing people and would make for an uncomfortable and possibly unsafe environment.”

Any rejoicing yet?  I don't hear it.  Well, let's try these.

* Last fall, Omar Mahmood, a student at the University of Michigan, wrote a satirical column for a conservative student publication, The Michigan Review, poking fun at what he saw as a campus tendency to perceive microaggressions in just about anything. Mahmood was also employed at the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily. The Daily’s editors said that the way Mahmood had “satirically mocked the experiences of fellow Daily contributors and minority communities on campus … created a conflict of interest.” The Daily terminated Mahmood after he described the incident to two Web sites, The College Fix and The Daily Caller. A group of women later vandalized Mahmood’s doorway with eggs, hot dogs, gum, and notes with messages such as “Everyone hates you, you violent prick.”

* At the University of Central Florida in 2013 Hyung-il Jung, an accounting instructor, was suspended after a student reported that Jung had made a threatening comment during a review session. Jung explained to the Orlando Sentinel that the material he was reviewing was difficult, and he’d noticed the pained look on students’ faces, so he made a joke. “It looks like you guys are being slowly suffocated by these questions,” he recalled saying. “Am I on a killing spree or what?”

After the student reported Jung’s comment, a group of nearly 20 others e-mailed the UCF administration explaining that the comment had clearly been made in jest. Nevertheless, UCF suspended Jung from all university duties and demanded that he obtain written certification from a mental-health professional that he was “not a threat to [himself] or to the university community” before he would be allowed to return to campus.

Well, if those examples, from "The Coddling of the American Mind," by Greg Lukianoff, a constitutional lawyer, and Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, don't test you, maybe this, by Caitlin Flanagan ("That's Not Funny," in the same issue) will.  She's summarizing the conditions student organizations set for stand-ups:

They wanted comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

And I want you to be glad for such a weirdo?  I can't believe it.  Yet I'm forced to.  Here's the paragraph from my last post that forces me:

In the eighteenth century Christian love, with the help of affluence, made its breakthrough.  Care for the widow and orphan became care for the imprisoned, the enslaved, the mentally ill, and the incapacitated, as well as for the closer loved ones.  The Age of Sensibility, but of rough categories.  Now love makes a leap.  Care for the lesser capacitated, the mentally fragile, the vulnerable, the marginal, the potentially oppressed, the incipiently persecuted.  The Age of Sensitivity, with finer categories.  Powering it is the vision of a slippery slope, with Auschwitz at the bottom.  The victims and their terrible victimizers.  You put yourself on it by demeaning, depreciating, dismissing people different from you. That's how our great-grandparents started, and that's how we could start.  Catch yourself early.

How early is too early?  Flanagan's imagined kid is way too early, but real cases are not far behind him, and my memory of the casual anti-semitism of my parents and their friends in the thirties, of their assumptions in business dealings, of their easy jokes, and of the resemblance of that to the more sophisticated anti-semitism of educated, literary Europe, tells me to err on the safe side.  Catch it early.  The slippery slope is not just a fallacy in logic; out in the world it's real.

318. Winning Trust in the Debate over Black Culture

It's the trust of the professor out in the public arena trying to talk about deficiencies in black culture that I'm worried about here — as at the end of my last post.  Let's make it the hardest case: he's male and white, in America a member of the tribe so distrusted, so justifiably distrusted, for so long.

Well, I hear my colleagues ask, what's wrong with the traditional academic way, speaking always in neutral (i.e., objective, scientific) language?  No color shading the nouns, no tendentiousness sliding into the verbs.  Not a hint of a distracting love for Socrates.  Do this so carefully that your audience, seeing that you're interested only in the truth, detaches you from your tribe and places you in the tribeless tribe.  Behold a professor!   A member of the tribe most worthy of each tribe's trust.

It's a way that once worked pretty well — possibly only in an Arcadian university of my dreams, I'll admit — but well enough to persuade administrators of American universities to grant (in 1940) iron-clad tenure to professors.  Teachers aspiring to speak this way could be trusted not to speak in a political way, for a tribe (and certainly not for the communist tribe, the feared one).  They needed the freedom ("academic") necessary to inquire and speak their way.  Secure tenure, as a guarantee of that freedom, was justified.

If you were the inquirer out in the world you described your method, reported your findings, and, if nobody detected tribal preference in the words you used (still possibly in Arcady), your findings were credited.  No orator's music, no sophist's twist, no play for the rhetorician's compliment; just the philosopher's slow march toward the truth.  As for the marcher, his identity as white, or male, or European, went unnoticed or, if noticed, was taken to be irrelevant.

To keep this going some universities, like mine, placed a College or University representative on each department committee granting a graduate degree.  His ears were those of Socrates, listening for departures from the academic way.  And he had the power of veto.  Knowledge of that out in the world gained the graduate trust when he spoke there.

So there's a first explanation of the loss of trust: universities no longer enforce adherence to the academic way.  There's nobody now to stand up, as classics professor Paul Murphy did at the end of an oral examination in my department , and say, "If this is acceptable then everything I've learned about scholarship is wrong."  Either the German notion of unquestioned competence within each department has prevailed over the Anglo-Hellenic notion of one university-wide, freely questioning dialogue or, in the view I'm urging here, love has prevailed over accuracy.

I might more successfully urge such a view if I had said, "Politics has prevailed over accuracy."  Then I could count on the reputation of sociology departments as advocates of positions on the left.  Or summon up memories of feminists plugging their cause before a class, and defending those plugs (as prioritized advocacy) in journals.  It's hard not to do that.

But it's easier if you see politics, or the strongly argued politics of our day, as love.  I see those who now give their cause priority over the academic cause doing so in the name of a Higher Love.  It's a commitment to people, human beings, deserving human beings, a gender, a race, loved warmly, and deservingly.  What an attractive alternative to the love of cold truth!

Another explanation of the loss of trust is the postmodern improvement in our powers of detection.  The "armed vision" of the New Critics became doubly and triply armed in deconstruction, which found few cloaks of objectivity impenetrable.  It is much easier now to see, and explain to  another, what a writer or speaker is "really saying."  And, for readers of Michel Foucault, that will nearly always be something useful to the stronger tribe.

For readers of Stanley Fish trust will come even more slowly.  If language is "rhetoric all the way down" then it's politics all the way down.  It's tribe all the way down. 

A third explanation is related to our difficulty in passing judgment on any group at all (see Post 315).  It was easy to pass judgment in the thirties, as my parents did.  But that was before the revelations of the Holocaust, the horrors of the judgment the Nazis so easily passed.  I see this as the great divide of my life, and of my time, with free judgment on one side and reluctant judgment on the other.

The next generations missed out on this, but oh what I can put on the blackboard.  "See how it starts?  Singling out a group.  Stereotyping them.  Demeaning them. Everywhere in Europe.  A build-up.  Then a Hitler to tap into the steam, get outrageous judgments to pass, and the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau follow."  Remember, children, how it starts.

In the eighteenth century Christian love, with the help of affluence, made its breakthrough.  Care for the widow and orphan became care for the imprisoned, the enslaved, the mentally ill, and the incapacitated, as well as for the close ones.  The Age of Sensibility, but of rough categories.  Now love makes a leap.  Care for the lesser capacitated, the mentally fragile, the vulnerable, the marginal, the potentially oppressed, the incipiently persecuted.  The Age of Sensitivity, with finer categories.  Powering it is the vision of a slippery slope, with Auschwitz at the bottom.  The victims and their terrible victimizers.  You put yourself on it by demeaning, degrading, depreciating people different from you.  Categorizing them, even.  Categorization is discrimination.  That's how our great-grandparents started, and that's how we could start.  Catch yourself early.

This, to me, looks like the deepest source of distrust.  It feeds fear in the dominated, the minority, the black, and fear in the dominator, the majority, the white, a fear of being victimized, and a fear of victimizing.  And now we have the means to justify those fears earlier than ever before.  The most objective-sounding professor, reporting facts that depreciate a minority group, that make it appear deficient, could be putting us on that slope.

317. An Unaskable: "How can whites speak to blacks about deficiencies in the black community?"

"How, at this time, can the need to speak accurately be reconciled with the need to speak lovingly?"  I put the question  that easy, general way because, like every other American white I know, I find the particular question, the useful question, the one with the payoff, so hard to come out with: "How can whites speak to blacks about deficiencies in the black community?"

"Well, how can anyone speak to anybody about their deficiencies?  It's a universal human problem."  Except this one's a killer. 

If you hear an outcry at that word "deficiencies" you'll know what I mean.  And if you follow the news, as of Ferguson and all the white police brutalities, and sense the black need for reassurance and comfort, you may well cry, "What a terrible time to bring this up!"  Still, since I can't believe there's no payoff for the particular in an answer to the general, and since I believe that accuracy is helpful, I will stick with it for a while.

 I think the problem of being both accurate and loving is often disguised, and never more so than by those who call speech sensitive to an ethnic group's feelings "political correctness."  By plucking "correct" from etiquette books they make the issue one of "propriety," trivialize the sensitivity, and in the process muddle the essential opposition between correctness (as accuracy) and love.

I use the capsule "love" not just because it is so forceful in Christian ethics, but because it is such a strong force in discussions of minority feelings, and has a history of force in the humanitarian movements following the Enlightenment.  By now it, recognized or not, is what enlightened atheists feel.

Also, in "force of love" I include "force of being expected to love."  Force direct and indirect, and both kinds are felt in Christian communities.  The second comes from knowing you have Christian listeners.  None is so stone-hearted that he won't feel that, the possibly more powerful force.

I have often thought that we learn in family life more than we realize about nationally and philosophically vexed questions.  Your dear brother talks too much.  Out in the world you see that it's hurting his future in a major way.  You're his brother, nobody is telling him, and you've got to speak.  But so much time has passed that it's really going to hurt him.  "All this time I was boring my friends and loved ones and didn't realize it!"  Do I need to know anything more about the vexation in the question, "How can I speak both accurately and lovingly?"

We need to speak accurately so that we can live in the world fruitfully and safely.  Solve the problems it gives us.  We need to speak lovingly because, well, that's the way we are, or even if we aren't, that's the way we're expected to be.

All right, say we believe that everybody in the U.S could live more fruitfully and safely if blacks were better educated, and we see a deficiency in black culture — not enough encouragement in the family, say, or not enough father-presence — and we want to discuss what we and several scholars reporting at academic conferences see.  Just as we might want to do with respect to Appalachian culture.  But that is so, so difficult in America now — at a forum, on a panel, in a letter column, at a dinner table, anyplace where "serious" people exchange ideas.  (Right-wing ranters aren't "serious.")

It's difficult because your calling the problem a "black" one is "prejudicial categorizing," even though responsible surveys divide performance in schools that way — white, black, Latino  You know what has to be addressed, the categorizing has already been done, the slice is on your plate, and you cannot, without fear of rebuke, carry it into the room for public consumption.

It's difficult because your word "deficient" triples your chances of rebuke, even though in your use it is not in the least a categorical slur (as it sometimes is) but a conditional designator.  If the end is to land whales then a culture that fails to prepare the young for hardship in a whale boat is "deficient" (see Post 305).

I'm suggesting that what impedes use of such words is Christian love, in our hearts or in our listeners.  A Christian will say, "My God, this is my brother, one I am supposed to love.  And I am going to wound him!  I, whose kind have already wounded him nearly unto death."  That, or something like it, is what will hold his hand, or the hand of anyone into whom popular Christian ethics has seeped.

If not that then the fear of Christian listeners.  The voice that rebukes: "You're not supposed to cause pain.  You're supposed to show love.  We expect to see it."

Christian listeners.  Where are they?  I see them at every point around the present table of educated discussion, once we recognize that Christian seepage.  Enlightened Western discussion.  In this country I think that now takes in the whole commentariat to the left of the ranting right.  Those, every agnostic and atheist included, are the listeners I felt the pressure coming from when I couldn't bring myself to identify the barbaric rappers (Post 311) as black.  I felt them when I thought of giving Atticus Finch's statement that blacks of the fifties were "still in their childhood as a people" (Post 306) a possible basis.

Wherever they are, and whatever their motives, these listeners speak for love, and anybody who wants to speak for truth (or, if that's too grand, "speak accurately") is going to sense their force on today's audiences.  If it wins, if it pulls them away, then our grandest poet was right:

Odor of blood when Christ was slain,

Made all Platonic tolerance vain,

And vain all Doric discipline.

If it loses then cool, rigorous philosophy wins, and gives us a solution to our problem which, so hateful in the solving, is useless in the world.  Or worse.  A divider of a house that must stand.

There are risks in a win either way but right now it appears to me that Christian love is the greater threat.  It's got such a large proportion of our intelligentsia behind it that rational analysis can hardly find its voice.  Not a voice that will be trusted, anyway.

316. "Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?"

I had, in my last post, justified "trash" as a shorthand judgment of a group of people.  Yes, it was hasty and inaccurate but under the constraints of daily life understandable and surely forgivable.  Judgments that are necessary — as to a parent obliged to warn — should not be condemned as signs of prejudice.  The word "bigots," as used by Harper Lee in Go Set a Watchman for the group she sees her father associating with is in the same class as "trash."  Both Lee and the parents are being as accurate as, under the circumstances, they can be.

I think it was accepted that calling people a bad name like "trash" would, as with any number of bad names — "barbarians," "savages," "racists," "primitives," "decadents" — hurt their reputation and, if they heard it, hurt their feelings.  Hurtful, but given the alternative, acceptable as a necessary price.  Forego it and you'll have a child descending into — whatever.  And you won't be any help to other parents, who, unable to make a study (no personal trip down to the Roller Rink), are guided by reputation.  Yes, "reputation," that gossip-stained, stereotype-making thing to which, in the hurly-burly of parenthood there is, as so often in the daily world, no alternative. 

In Norwood, a lily-white suburb, the Roller Rink was frequented by a white sub-group, kids who had "gone wild," children whose parents had let them go wild.  That is, parents who, it was assumed, weren't worried about a child getting, or getting another child, pregnant, and so not being able to go to college and having to settle for a job in the dime store.  Good parents identified the hazard with one word.

Now comes this seminarist with the question, "Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?"  You know, not a white sub-group but a real minority. 

That's moving the challenge into college.  "Adjust vocabulary as necessary.   At a minimum identify the forces at work.  Allow thirty minutes for the question."  In the street it's likely to be, "Why do you hold back your freely used bad name when you get to blacks?"  Which is exactly what I did in Post 311 when I couldn't bring myself to connect blacks with the gangsta rap I was calling "barbaric."  From further down the street I hear, "Why are you such a wimp?  Trash is trash."  An equal-opportunity human category.

I will begin at the lower end of the street.  "I am a wimp because I am a graduate of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Sunday School, the last place you could ever use derogatory words about a group."  Respect for every  human soul reigned in that Sunday School as respect for skill reigned on the ball field.  As, I think, it reigned, or came close, in other Norwood Sunday schools.  Children in Norwood, if they wanted their Sunday-school teachers to respect them, had to be careful not to hurt the weak and vulnerable.  They had to speak lovingly.

And why am I still unhappy after I hold back the bad name and have my Sunday school teachers thinking well of me? Because I am a graduate and postgraduate of an American university who wants his teachers there to respect him.  For that I have to speak accurately.  Trash is trash, shirt-tails are out, and hazards are hazards.  Determine it carefully, say it without fear or favor.

There's the mischief in the seminarist's question.  Minorities are weak and vulnerable.  Introduce them into the equation  and your calm at the blackboard is shattered.  How can I come out with the respect of both sets of my former teachers?

You can think of my problem as the problem of the American liberal but I think that's too confining.  It's the problem of a host of American citizens wanting the best for their country.  And it's worthy of debate by our most careful thinkers.  How, at this time, can the need to speak accurately be reconciled with the need to speak lovingly?

315. "Judgment" and "Prejudgment"

"Why is it so hard to pass judgment these days?  Use a name that's not neutral or complimentary and you get a rebuke."  That's a friend, retired from the Ohio University philosophy department, speaking a few weeks ago.

Then in a recent post (311) I was trying to draw a line between kinds of people.   When it got hopelessly tangled a younger friend broke in: "That'll teach you not to draw lines.  Why make judgments about people?  Why categorize them?"

That word "judgment."  The first friend takes it in the broad sense where synonyms jump out at you from any thesaurus: appraise, assess, evaluate, grade, rank, critique, etc.  Look at them and you see right away why he might be disturbed.  They state what we all do to make a success of our lives, materially and morally.  Followers of Socrates, if they do this carefully and well, have a chance at The Good Life.

Those words in the thesaurus may also suggest how the first friend becomes, at times, irritated.  While he's doing what the word means in his sense he hears "Judge not lest ye be judged."  From one of those people who conveniently take Jesus's rebuke of hypocritical judgment — you know, casting the mote out of your neighbor's eye without noticing the beam in your own (Matthew (7: 1-5)) — as a rebuke to judgments they don't like.  It's like "innocent until proven guilty," plucked from the legal code and slammed into a conversation.  Irritating as hell.

Then, before the poor geezer can even begin to point out that Jesus also rebuked failure to judge (Luke, 12:57), somebody calls him "judgmental."  He's a personality type whose bad action, as any student of psychology knows, has become a bad habit.  He's in a class with those church ladies who peer from behind window curtains and cut you down at church socials.

"Pay closer attention," he says. "Your preachers and your teachers are not saying what you think they are saying."  And then he gets a rebuke from somebody paying extremely close attention, one equipped with newer techniques, postmodern techniques.  They show him bias in what  he thought were his own most objective statements.  He's absolutely astonished.  "I mean, these guys can pick up attitudes in outer goddam space."

This explains the old man's irritation, but not much beyond that, I think.  The world has never been short of students carrying teachers' words beyond their meaning.   Nor of congregations doing the same, for a longer time, with the words of preachers and prophets.  Nor of people sensitive to minor slights, taking, like Robert Frost's conjectured bird, "everything said as personal to himself."  My friend ought to be used to it.  He's been a teacher.

More importantly, those responses that irritate him don't represent what my younger friend intends.  When she rebukes she means to rebuke intolerance, bias, callousness, inhumanity, insensitive stereotyping, hostile attitudes.  Heard in the judgment she hears.  And judgment to her is "judgment" in a special sense, where the only synonym is "prejudice," or prejudgment, forming "an adverse opinion before or without sufficient knowledge."

This friend is not so naive as to deny the need for appraisal and assessment ("judgment" in the broad sense) to those facing life's options, or the need to judge individuals.  It's judgment of groups of people that she wants to rebuke.

So, do we just have a simple misunderstanding, cleared up when each understands what the other means by "judgment"?  No, because she has put his judgment of groups of people under "prejudgment" and he wants it under the "judgment" necessary to those facing life's options.

Profiling Muslims at airport security is the case he is most likely to offer.   He is in favor of it because he has studied the religion, deduced from its teachings the behavior encouraged or allowed by it, compared the bomb-planting percentage of its followers with that of followers of other religions, figured the cost-risk against other options, and decided to support profiling.  Anybody who rebukes him for prejudice will get a counter-rebuke.  "Judice, man, judice.  Not pre-judice.  Pay attention."

As you might guess from my preceding posts I join my colleague in putting judgment of groups of people under "judgments necessary to those facing life's options."  The parents I knew in Norwood needed to warn their children about "bad company" at the Roller Rink — as a parent today might warn against heroin-tolerant partiers or, for that matter, racism-tolerant fraternities, like the one whose pledges sing N-word songs on their bus rides (Washington Post, 3-10-15).  In the novel that started this string of posts, Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman (see posts 306, 311), one glimpse of a white-supremacist magazine is enough for Jean Louise to judge the group of people her father is associating with.  If she has children with inclinations to attend the meetings her father goes to I think she will warn them as the parents of Norwood warned their children about the Norwood Roller Rink (Post 311).

Though she is not likely to be accused of prejudice (the opposite, in fact) she is, strictly speaking, guilty of it.  Hasty judgment.  She glimpses the magazine and judges her father.  Her shudder at the sight of her father associating with the "bigots" in the meeting hall is the same as the shudder the Norwood parent is trying to avoid when she warns her son against associating with the "trash" at the Roller Rink. (That's "strictly speaking," I know, but the unsettling differences between that and "speaking" are too much to get started on here.)

My old friend in the philosophy department has spent too much time in seminars not to hear questions coming thick and fast.  Are the "bigot" shudders and the "trash" shudders equivalent?  Morally equivalent?  Are the two words equally signs of hasty generalization?  Equally signs of prejudice?  Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?  And "prejudice," my heavens, define it as "an adverse opinion before or without sufficient knowledge," ask when knowledge is sufficient or when a generalization becomes hasty, and you'll never settle on an answer.  Which allows me my own guess: that ninety-nine percent of the judgments made in the world today could be classified as "hasty." 

As for rebukes to such judgments, I can't help seeing them in the light of an old Scottish saying: "A maiden's bairns are ae well-raised."  Visions of the perfect way she would raise children.  Her criticisms and rebukes represent a pre-motherhood judgment.  I see my old friend clearly now, as he confronts the postmodern academics plaguing him ("experience-ignoring liberals," "over-sensitive humanitarians").  "Yer a' maidens, ye are.  Get some bairns.  Ye'll find out."

314. Plato Was Right to Throw Poets Out of The Republic. Alas.

It has taken me 66 years but I finally realize that Plato was right about the place of poets in a republic and my New Critic masters were wrong. 

Yes, wrong, those critics and teachers who took on all the scientists and materialist philosophers in the university and proclaimed that no, poems were not sugar-coating applied to truth, they were Truth itself.  Not just Beauty.  If you weren't finding the pearls you hadn't been reading the poem closely enough.  Or you'd been listening to Plato.

I know, those critics have been taken down a notch or two.  The Church of Holy Art, with its altars to Donne and Eliot, has lost its worshippers, and there are no more priests teaching English courses.  But still, who could really be wise without reading novels and plays and poems?  Didn't the flame in Shelley's pages tell us as much about politics as the facts in Tocqueville's?

But now my attention has been called (NYT Book Review, 8-30-15) to Juliana Spahr, a poet who addresses issues every citizen of this republic needs to be concerned about — air pollution, the faults of capitalism, the relations of corporations to human beings.  Her latest book is apparently full of flame — about the BP oil spill, the dispersal of Occupy Wall Street protesters by police, the price of Brent crude, birds displaced from their flight path — and the poem the reviewer, Stephen Burt, finds most moving will give you an idea.  She is nursing her child.  "I hold out my hand/ I hand over/ and I pass on. . . . I hold out my hand and take engine oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me."  The reviewer, warmed to her causes, apparently speaks for a wide readership.

I think of the poem that first inflamed me, one by Robert Burns, recited by my Scottish highland grandmother:

'Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome tae yer gory bed,

Or tae victorie. . . .

'Lay the proud usurpers low,

Tyrants fall in every foe,

Liberty's in every blow! -

Let us do or dee.

That'll heat a kid up, I'll tell you.  But I cooled off.  At university when I got looking around for examples in history of forces that had worked successfully for peace I discovered that the force of commerce, channeled by Scottish lowlanders (my flame-resistant grandfather was a lowlander), had brought a remarkably long period of peace and prosperity to Scotland, once she had united with England.  And the biggest obstacles to peace were inflamed highlanders, magnifying (with the help of Walter Scott) their essentially street-gang warlords into splendidly patriotic Chiefs. 

And that's what sank Burns as an educator in politics: discovery of complexity, the play of different needs and forces and narratives and world-pictures against each other.  Always requiring trade-offs and compromises.  Burns was for kids. 

It's sort of like saying that in the end English Composition trumps Creative Writing.  What I think Mario Cuomo had in mind when he said, "You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose." 

And isn't that bound to be?  The poet accepts, for the sake of compression and effect, the vagueness that is the great sin in Composition.  "I  can't spend all day explaining."  Emerson speaks for all poets.

Here's Shelley in hottest flame:

Rough wind, that moanest loud

Grief too sad for song;

Wild wind, when sullen cloud

Knells all the night long;

Sad storm whose tears are vain,

Bare woods, whose branches strain,

Deep caves and dreary main,—

Wail, for the world's wrong!

And in vaguest mode.  To young Shelley opposite him the comp tutor says, sarcastically, "Can you think of anything less specific than 'the world's wrong'"?  In response Shelley can't say, "I'll leave specifics to the reader."  Not to this fellow.  He's in the business of getting young writers to make things easy for readers, to take care of them.

So don't expect Juliana Spahr to make clear the connection between engine-oil additive and the wrongs of our time.  That's for scholars, set (first by Plato) in academies to seek truth, sifting through all the needs and forces and narratives and world-pictures.  "Scholarly articles are truth and truth is scholarly articles."  Accept that, find it beautiful, and you are no longer a kid.

I know, that's sad.  But first things first.