388. Taste and Belief

In The Atlantic, October, 2017, the latest in do-it-yourself wedding vows: "I promise to be your greatest fan and your toughest adversary, your partner in crime and your consolation in disappointment," says the groom.  The bride replies, "I promise faithfulness, respect, and self-improvement.  I will not only celebrate your triumphs, I will love you all the more for your failures.  And I promise to never wear heels, so you won't look short."  (Esther Perel, "Why People in Happy Marriages Cheat.")

Well, we know that the great events of life, birth and marriage and death, are too much for any human being to handle in words, so we don't call it banality when a grieving young son says in his eulogy that his mother was "real special."  That call is for a teacher marking a composition theme.  It should be the same way, probably, with wedding vows.  Love trumps style.

But still, we can't lose our eye for banality.  And keeping traditional words, the best that the best writers of the past have been able to think up, keeping them in view is our best help.  If we don't fully realize how superficial and juvenile the above performance is — two children showing adults their advancement to serious magazines, and, still, their cuteness — we need to recall the traditional vows.  You all know them but, for old times' sake, I'll ask you to give them another read.  A slow one.  "In the Name of God, I take you [my bride] to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part."  That will bring the other great words to mind, "Cleave only unto her…,"  "…let no man put asunder."

Listen to these adults as a child in a pew and you say, "So this is what lies ahead — possible poverty filled with sickness, with death at the end."  It's like the first time you listen to Hamlet, his problems fading after he parts the curtain on the life ahead, a sea of troubles — "the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes."

People who do things in the name of God do them with a sure view of the dark realities of life; people who do them in their own name may or may not have a view of those realities.  In any case if you speak in the name of God you speak rich and tasteful words; in your own name you speak bare banalities.

But you can't speak "in the name of God" without revealing your credulousness.  That, today, is a mark of superstition.  You have not been enlightened by the Enlightenment.  You are benighted.  So a child in a pew hearing the hard truths of life in rich and tasteful language is growing up in darkness and a child who remains a child reading magazines selling self-improvement is growing up in light.

If you are content to see the big contest going on here as a contest between taste and belief, and you have lived long enough, you can't help wondering how things stand in that contest now.  There was a time, in my circle, when good taste didn't have a chance against belief.  If you didn't believe in the existence of God the most discriminating taste, the most sensitive style, the most comprehensive imagination got you nothing more than a more ornamented car to hell.  Then came a time when I had friends for whom belief in the non-existence of God scored you the same way, zero for taste, style, and imagination.  Nothing made up for an offense against reason.  Reason, we had decided in a dormitory bull session, was the key to enlightenment and civilization.  Doubting God was the mark of reason.

Where do my friends stand now?  Being out of touch with them I'll have to extrapolate from their last known position and personality.  Returning to the bull session I read aloud to them the two sets of vows.   Everybody takes the contemporary couple to be unbelievers.  

Philip, still militantly unbelieving, will swallow the juvenility because nothing, as before, makes up for credulousness.  It's a hard swallow, though, as he senses the improved taste of those around him. To lessen our disapproval he makes a face, showing what a struggle it is. 

Fred, loose at the beginning, is loosy-goosy now.  Neither taste nor theology matter that much.  He's got a lump on his neck he's worried about. 

Time has played a joke on Carl.  He was an easy believer, and in the dormitory was easily laughed out of his belief.   Now he waits to see which way the laughs are going and is stumped.  He sees that he's facing a serious issue, but not clearly.

For Livingston, an esthete into theology, the weight of God kept taste, alas, way down there.  God lost weight but taste did not rise.  He wanted to have them pulling together.  OK, let weightless "God" stand for "order in the universe."  Ah, he's in the ranks behind the heavy thinker who said,  "Without order in the universe there can be no order in daily life."  But does good taste depend on good ordering?  Liv has to look at Rob, who has nothing in order, in life or head, but has unerring taste.

Rob has a grip on one rule: don't look or sound like Looey, the low-class family friend his mother kept making fun of.

Will's girlfriend Margaret, with us now, started High Church and moved higher, taking her family with her.  She reads the made-up vows, points her finger down her throat, leans as if to throw up in a basin at her side, and goes on to more interesting things.  Her economy tells me not to make a big deal out of this.

Clarence, back from France, is the surprise.  He was an intense family fundamentalist and an intense college atheist, with never an opening for taste.  Only his roommate, perhaps, sensed the refinery below, building pressure.  Life with poets in Paris opened the valve.  "No, no," he says, "No, any belief as an alternative to what produced 'partner in crime.'"  Then he overdoes it. "I'll bow down to wooden poles.  I'll make phylacteries.  I'll wear hair shirts.  Anything to avoid 'self-improvement.'"

Korey, out for years and in a long relationship, so wants the serious blessings of society on his hoped-for ceremony that nothing but "till death" and "cleave" and "asunder" will do.  He says he'll start looking for a safe place if he gets called his partner's "greatest fan."

387. Poem: The Tin Woodman Lovers

Techbnicalo difficulties, technical difficulties, technical difficulties
see pist 2 see post 392  see post 392 see post 392

      Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

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Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

1. The

Who had no hearts just brains and a feeling for fun and a sense of what was fit but what they had big, what occurred to them bam, was that they were my god heartless, cold, while the rest of the world was warm, and warm was what made all the other lovers happy and everybody happy seeing them warm and happy and they thought my god suppose they catch us doing an unloving thing they'll see like through a crack that there's no heart in there no more than in the tin woodman so like the tin woodman they were very careful to do no unloving thing out in the world and even inside when they were making love which is so often an unloving animal thing with somebody unhappy they who knew that at that most revealing moment they were just animals there was never an unloving thing the other might see only a happy animal keeping another animal happy and they went through life inside and outside so circumspect in every act of love that nobody ever guessed, not even the other, that there was no heart in there.

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386. Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation is "the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture" but some call it  "cultural misappropriation" and see it as "a violation of the collective intellectual property rights of the originating culture" (Wikipedia).   Those who see it that way are now in power, moral power, enough to get defenders of appropriation in Canada fired from their jobs as editors (Malik, NYT 6-15-17). 

They have the kind of power liberals generally claim, and generally have had, and generally have not noticed how it's been leaking away as they extend their domain.  That they are now overextended is clear, at least to me, in the beating they have been taking on the frontiers of political correctness. Kenan Malik (an Indian now writing in Britain) administers one of them on yesterday's NYT Op-Ed page, where, as a defender of civilization, he puts up a formidable defense of appropriation.  I think that until those who call it "misappropriation" can distinguish what they're complaining about from what advances civilization they are going to take beatings like this.

Malik and the others don't need my help, and just quoting those who say you shouldn't paint a picture of a murdered black unless you're black may be enough, but they may appreciate Thomas Jefferson's help.  Here's something I found once while looking through arguments against broad readings of patent and copyright laws.  The arguments, mostly by judges, show great reluctance to interfere with the general expansion of anything found good — new ways of painting, or singing, or dancing, but especially new ways of thinking.  Claims of intellectual property rights had to be adjudicated within the strict limits of harm to the general good, which cultural advancement was taken to be.

Here's Jefferson , in a letter (those were the days) to Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.  Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

385. Poem: Justice

Should the fool suffer for his folly? never? always? sometimes? if it's sometimes when?  and it's not folly it's bad judgment but not always his bad judgment somebody else's sometimes the government's should he suffer for that? and sometimes the judgment was made a long time ago by somebody trying hard no not trying hard being selfish being mean they should suffer but no they can't but we can make their children feel bad.

384. Poem: Poets and Scholars

I became a poet because I could not be a scholar, to suggest deep thoughts rather than actually have them, unless you're Yeats maybe odor of blood when Christ was slain made all Platonic tolerance vain and vain all Doric discipline so deep, but maybe not: exactly how did the blood make the Greek things vain? Poets don't need to spell it out or back it up and when rulers are on the spot who are they going to turn to, get burned enough times and they'll turn to scholars we hope which I cannot be but if I have to be a poet I hope it's one like Yeats.

383. Feminist Philosophy and Critical Thinking

No, despite the understandable alarm in the Wall Street Journal (Jillian Jay Melchior, 5-9-17), critical thinking is not about to come to an end.  Because that thinking, as established now in Western academics, will always be more critical than any thinking that would end it.  You can't get any more critical than Socrates was and as long as we have people who take him as their model those people are going to beat the pants off of any challengers.

Not that they themselves will know their pants are off.  Feminist philosopher Nora Berenstein, who found that its "discursive transmisogynistic violence" made a particular critical analysis unacceptable, seems quite unaware that her pants are even in danger.  (See the Chronicle of Higher Education, 5-6-17)

The critical analysis she was attacking was made by Rebecca Tuvel, who, in the philosophy journal (feminist) Hypatia, pointed out that the treatment of transracials was, in liberal theory, inconsistent with the treatment of transgenders.  The outcry by feminist philosophers was so powerful it brought an apology from the editor and partial retraction of the article.  Yet Tuvel's was a standard analytical move, asking for a change in practice or a revision of the theory.  Or at least for deeper questioning and more analysis.  You need (again in standard practice) to do that before you step into the larger academic arena or you'll lose your pants, lose them to somebody more deeply critical than you are, somebody who has submitted his or her propositions to tougher tests.  These will be tests from every angle, even (sometimes especially) an enemy's angle.  That's the Socratic game.

If you look at the Socratic game as the academic game, as most of our predecessors in universities did, you can see that it's got minor leagues and major leagues.  In the minor leagues you get concessions for your handicaps —your youth, your provincialism, your state of training.  That's why the move up to the majors is so painful.  No more easy, bush-league ball.  And that, as I see it, is what Berenstein and the 500 or more academics who protested publication of Tuvel's article want to keep playing.  Which they can do, in journals of feminist philosophy, if they keep articles like Tuvel's out.  Just games among friends.

I have a message for those protesters which, coming from a male, can easily be dismissed.  But I'll deliver it anyway.  "These are the big leagues.  This is the way the game is played.  I know you can play it.  (I've seen women in mathematics and the sciences play men's asses off.)  So come on, get in the game, mix it up.  Don't worry about your pants.  Everybody loses them once in while.  That's the risk you take if you're ever going to win the pennant, that pennant, the Pennant of Fully Tested and Therefore Most Reliable Knowledge."

382. Getting Smart with Tolerance

Usually the newer an idea is the easier it is to get smart with it.  When the idea that environment rather than heredity might make people what they are was new the jokes ("So if a cat has kittens in an oven they'll come out biscuits, ha, ha") just burst out.  Everybody had known for a long time what readers of the Bible well knew, that a man "sowed his seed" in a woman, and the offspring, the crop, came out like him.  Abraham's seed would be like him, obedient to one God.  When the idea of environmental influence became familiar the jokes came harder.

The idea that we should be understanding and tolerant of people quite unlike us hasn't followed that pattern.  The longer it stays and the more extensively it gets elaborated the easier this idea is to get smart with.  Few could get smart with a relatively simple identity designated LGB (Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals); now, with an identity designated LGBTQIA, recognized soberly in church bulletins, everybody is getting smart.  And, with the prospect of LGBTQIAPK  (adding Polyamory and Kinky) recognized soberly in the contemporary culture magazine Role Reboot — sort of a church bulletin — smartness will be kicking in before the day is out ("Why the K?"  For men who have it for knotholes.  A splinter group.)

We've got to be careful with smartness, though.  The men in my town in the thirties were smart as whips about the Jews, and made jokes about their suspected habits that doubled you over.  (Mama, suspicious about the silence, with a Yiddish accent: "Abie, Rosie, what are you doing?"  "Fucking, Mama."  "That's nice, don't fight.")  Then Hitler rose to power, and you know what some of them said?  I heard them.  "Well, Hitler's a monster but I admire him for one thing, the way he's handled the Jews."  Only accidents of history differentiated them from Holocaust accommodators.

Times change so thoroughly you need a long life-span, maybe, to be able to recognize the threat in what looks normal. If you lived before my time you'd be able to report on the normality of anti-Semitism in the decades before the thirties.

But this is how atrocities and accommodation to them begin, in tribal or cultural normality, with casual slurs and easy jokes.  Demean people long enough and unthinkingly enough and it's easier, when the time of fear and crisis comes, to do the unthinkable.  Originally unthinkable.  Distantly unthinkable.

Changing cultural normality is what LGBTQIA people are trying to do, and it's a slow and painful business.  They're part of a generation, maybe three generations, in this business.   And we need a reminder about such generations: they get silly. They wave the banner of change too wildly.  Some people, when they're not wanting to hang the last king in the entrails of the last priest, are always wanting to change the names of the months, or do away with collars.

A professor I studied under long ago, Herbert Feigl (eulogized in the preceding post), shows how to take these people, usually young people, who go too far.  He's talking about changers of philosophy, but he might as well be talking changers of culture.  "A young and aggressive movement," he says,  

in its zeal to purge thought of confusions and superfluous entities naturally brandishes more destructive weapons than it requires for its genuinely constructive endeavor.

The lesson is, "Don't be distracted by the inevitable extremism or (in the case of culture) silliness, in a new movement.  Keep your eyes on the sane advancement."

In philosophy departments in the middle of the last century the reward was to be in on, early, the construction of the philosophy, analytical philosophy, that nearly every American and British department eventually found most fruitful.  A finding made by the undistracted.

The equivalent in culture, the building of a fruitful tolerance, offers a similar reward.  Only further in the future.

Note: The post on Herbert Feigl, 381, expanded, will appear in the Fall, 2017, issue of The Philosophical Forum.