251. In the Grip of Our Highest Priority

 

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi?  Get used to him, fellow Americans.  We're in the grip of our highest priority.

I know, it's pretty hard to take, a dictator telling John Kerry one day that he's on the path to progressive government and the next day letting his  kangaroo court sentence journalists to jail for doing nothing the public will be told about, but you've got to understand: this all follows logically from America's priorities, as confirmed by its Secretary of State.  It differs from other plays on those priorities only in that this dictator (I use the de-euphemized term) is a little smarter than other players and a little quicker to take advantage of them.

The priority here is the survival of Israel.  That makes us favor governments who let us exercise that priority over governments who don't, or possibly won't.  Mubarak's and el-Sisi's  governments let us; Morsi's government possibly wouldn't.  We favor the dictators over the democratically elected president because our ideals of democracy have a lower priority than our commitment to the survival of Israel.

When our number one commitment was the containment of communism we subordinated our democratic and humane ideals in the same way.  Smart dictators played this to their advantage.  They knew that, whatever our idealistic talk, we would have to stomach their abominations. 

Not that we wouldn't be allowed to relieve our indigestion from time to time.  In an Arab Spring, when pressure for democracy builds up worldwide, we, the leader, may have to expel a dictator or two, but the smart ones know that this is temporary.  The dictator, Mubarak, will be back with a new name, el-Sisi.

And the smarter he is the more he will squeeze out of us, materially and psychologically.  He will get money, he will get arms, and, maybe best of all, he will get flattering rhetoric.  The dictator will, judging by what our Secretary of State said about el-Sisi yesterday, give him "a very strong sense of his commitment" to "a re-evaluation of human rights legislation" and "re-evaluation of the judicial process" (NYT 6-23-14), or something like that.

If the dictator is exceptionally smart he will know how to play on American fear of being culturally intolerant.  When he uses the iron fist he will say, "Look at us with Egyptian eyes" and "don't apply your culture, your regimes, your development"  (NYT 6-24-14)

And he will be able to get away with that.  You know why? Because he knows how firmly we are attached to our priorities, and how rigorously, how rationally, we, in our Western way, make deductions from this one.  With that knowledge he can squeeze us to the last drop.  "Complaining are you?  Well, do you want protection in the Sinai or don't you?" He's already seen that our attachment was strong enough to bear such things when, on the occasion of his coup we refused to deny his aircraft spare parts, the action that could have defeated that coup.  He knew he had us.

I know of nothing that describes his so far successful dismissal of our ideals better than the vulgar expression used by CIA realpoliticians to dismiss idealists during the Viet Nam War.  The idealists thought we should win minds and hearts and elections first, before we used our overwhelming military force.  "When you've got 'em by the balls," said the realists, "their hearts and minds will follow."  Well, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has us by the balls of our highest priority, and unless we, unthinkably, change that priority, we might as well get used to the squeezes.

250. To Arms, America, Against the Boko Haram!

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You know my kind.  Every time our president gestures toward action abroad we start yelling, "Hold back! Hold back!"  Well, it's time to change.  With these guys who, because little girls are trying to get a Western education, kidnap them and try to sell them, with these guys I say go all out. 

Sic the CIA on them, drop SEALs on them, grind them with your boots (there, on the ground), drone them, bomb them, make grease spots of them.  Anything to get those girls back.  And if you wipe out their culture in the process it's OK with me.

That's the passion of it.  Here's the reason: you can be a hero in the world's eyes and you've got nothing to lose. The deed can be done without any of the hazards of any of the other interventions we've feared or experienced. e

First, you're not going to get bogged down.  Not in Nigeria.  It's a friendly country.  And these guys have no constituency there, not any that counts.  Nigeria is nothing like Viet Nam or Iraq or Somalia or the Balkans.

Second, you're not going to get any flak from the American people.  On Twitter they're going nuts for action already. 

Third, you're not going to get any clucks from foreign heads of state.  Their people are out-twittering the Americans.  No intelligent leader is going to go against a Twitter-tide like the one moving now.

Fourth, and best of all, you're not going to get any flak from Congressmen.  Not any that won't take down their own planes.  Say you do all the stuff the opposing party loves to show shock at, like breaking your word and putting American boots on the ground.   Weren't those troops you sent there?  Did you lie about their presence?  Or did you simply rename them, as "advisers" and "trainers"?  Did you COVER UP?

"Yes, I did.  To save the girls.  And I did it the way you have to do such things these days," admits Obama, less tersely.

Can you picture a Republican getting huffy?  "Well, I certainly wouldn't have done such things."  Can't you hear the twitter?  "What kind of naive idealists speak for this party?  Are they afraid of dirtying their hands in a good cause? Do they think saving little girls is not good?"  Republicans, Republicans, will be coming off as wimps.  Heartless wimps.  They're not going to let that happen.

Of course you have to do this with the permission of the Nigerian government.  Will you get that permission in an open and upright manner?  Will you exceed its terms?  Will you cover up your maneuvers and excesses in dealing with them?  Maybe.  But have no fear.  When he's riding a Twitter-tide a politician can do practically anything.

If you're in doubt, picture the Congressional hearing.  "Did you get clear permission from the Nigerian government to do this?"

"Well, yes and no." 

"Aha," thinks the Congressman, "we've got a cover-up." 

Let him think it.  You need think only of the birds on Twitter: "Screw permission.  Get those girls."

249. Baseball and Life. Again.

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Last night Zack Cozart is on third in the ninth, score tied, two out.  The batter, Heisey, bunts.  Cozart doesn't go for home. He would probably have been thrown out.

Cozart is a man who doesn't know how to live.  If he had been such a man he would have understood that you don't make choices in life according to whether you will succeed or fail, that probability, but according to whether your chances of failure or success are better than those in your other choices. 

You can distinguish between players by whether they know how to live or not, and you can distinguish between spectators on the same grounds.  Say Cozart goes for home and gets thrown out.  "Idiot," says the fan ignorant of life.  "Everybody could see how slim his chances were."

The fan is like the historian who blames a general for entering a battle he clearly has a good chance of losing.  "He did the wrong thing."  Good historians, like good fans, look at all the options.  They know that you can't make a right-wrong call just by what you see, the results.  You have to imagine the things you can't see. 

OK, there's Cozart on third.  Let's make him a wiser Cozart, a philosopher.  He thinks through that section of life that lies ahead.  What will he do in each eventuality?  A bunt with two out is unlikely, but a good base runner will figure everything in — so that he doesn't have to hesitate when the moment comes.

  Wise man Cozart will crank in his chances of making it.  Say he figures that they are one in four.  That means, among other things, that three out of four times fans will be crying, "Idiot!"  But, being a philosopher, Cozart ignores the multitude.  He sees that his lot in life is to be standing on third with the winning run for a team that has had a terrible time scoring runs, and that the weakest hitters in that team's batting order, Soto and Barnhart, are coming up after him.  Say that he figures their chances of hitting him in, if he stays on third, are at best one in five.

Philosopher Cozart takes his lead at peace with himself.  Unless the ball is dumped in front of the catcher, or bunted hard at the pitcher, he will go.  Without hesitation.  A 25% chance is better than a 20% chance.  And if he's thrown out he will walk back to the dugout still at peace, knowing he did the right thing.  Whatever he's hearing from the stands.

As it played out, Cozart remained at third, the next batter struck out, and the Reds lost in the twelfth inning a game they could have won in the ninth.  The bunt was perfect, the third baseman was surprised, and the Boston announcers thought that Cozart had a very good chance of making it.

If the Reds miss the playoffs by one game we'll remember this.  It's the pain of being a baseball fan who sees his team playing for him, giving him success or failure.  And who does that fan want out there?  Only philosophers.  One Zack Cozart and there goes the whole season.

248. "Check your privilege"

 
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How put-downs change!  Especially in political discussions.  In the forties, in the student joints around Tulane, a big one was, "Are you home?"  It suggested that you hadn't been following the train of argument.  "Is your brain in gear?  Are you keeping up with the rest of us?"  There you were, the only one too dumb to see that Socialist contradictions could only lead to....

In our decade, in the joints around Princeton, the big one, apparently, is "Check your privilege" (see NYT 5-3-14).  It suggests that you look into your attitudes.  Are your statements tainted by your class or race status?  There you are, too biased to be trusted.

I know how easy it is to read great sea-changes in a little flotsam washed up on shore but here I think we've got something.  Princeton has given us a clue to what happened, what most deeply happened, in American college classrooms in the decades leading up to ours: the ideal of objectivity was replaced.  By an ideal of goodness.  It was better to be morally upright than to be intellectually sound.  Facts became less important than attitudes.  If there are sea-changes in education, that's a sea-change.

Students get their notions of what's cool, intellectually, from their profs, and in 1946 the profs behind the coolest intellectuals at Tulane, those from New York, were not far to seek.  They were Morris Cohen, of CCNY, and Ernest Nagel, graduate of CCNY (who went on to Columbia), authors of the textbook Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method.  If you wanted to dispute the finer points of cool, the justification for a put-down, you could go through that book:

  Bob says, "That's just what you'd expect a plantation-owner to say." 

"Whoa," says Nathan.  "Definitely not cool.  Look, here it is.  Argumentum ad hominem. "

As a matter of fact, there was a plantation owner (or member of a plantation-owning family) among the arguing leftists at Tulane, Al Maund, whose radical novel, The Big Boxcar, I notice, has just been reprinted by the University of Illinois Press.  I can imagine trying to put him down in the 2014 way.  Remember, you're idealizing the proletariat, so it would come out as, "Check your lack of privilege."  Say that to an Old Leftist who has just nailed down the case against Norman Thomas's social program and your irrelevance silences the table.  Who cares about Al's proletarian credentials?  Anybody home up there?

Who are the profs behind the students who argue politics today, as at Princeton?  I can't identify their persons but I have already (in Post 97) categorized them.  They're in a class with the Smothers brother who, to the statement, "Your shirttail is out," replied, "Why do you hate me?"  They put attitude ahead of fact.  What your words show about you — your values, your politics — is more important than what they refer to.  Measure a prof's distance from Tom Smothers and you've measured, inversely, his responsibility for today's undergraduate cool.

It doesn't have to be a prof, though.  Consider Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.  She (see Post 207) gives you the easiest measurement you could make.  She blesses a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she is different.  Ignoring the fact that the woman is a fortune-teller and a vessel of demons, a person we disapprove of, a person presented for our disapproval, she turns our disapproval into a moral deficiency, making it part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That's about as close to Tom "Attitude is All" Smothers as you can get.

Schori has a better justification for her position than profs do, though.  She's a Christian preacher, and Christian preachers, moving out from the Sermon on the Mount, are bound to put values ahead of facts.  The kingdom of God is within you.  That's her tradition.  The prof's tradition, up to now, has been to put facts ahead of attitudes.

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So, no sea-change up in the pulpit.  But a sea-change at the lectern.  And the interesting thing is, we're winding up with very much the same thing, judging by the behavior of the audience.  How did it happen, in a few decades, that pulpit and lectern drew so close to each other?  How did we reach the point where, sometimes, we have a hard time distinguishing a prof from a preacher?  Culture warriors on the right have been asking that question for some time, and here we see what they're talking about.

247. A Dream of World Peace

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For peace in the world human beings need to develop a gentler, less grasping nature, right?  A deeper love of their fellow man.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their brothers.

Well, that certainly would do it.  But not, I think, as well as its opposite, development of a more grasping nature, a more intelligently grasping nature.  A deeper love of money.   A recognition that all men, not just men of their tribe or nation, are their trading partners.

We have a wonderful illustration of this at the moment, with John Kerry bristling in the face of Vladimir Putin and half the foreign ministers in the European Union saying, "Hey, wait a minute.  We do business with Russia!" 

How different from the Cold War when nobody did business with Russia, and everybody could cheer our foreign ministers on.  When Russia, doing business with nobody, faced no deterrent other than what was in our silos. 

It's the great discovery of our time, that economic sanctions work.  Do them right (we're learning) and they change the behavior of nations (South Africa, Myanmar, Serbia, Iran).   The very threat of them changes behavior.   And the more dependent economies become on trade with other economies the better sanctions will work.  It's possible now to dream of economies so interdependent that war will be unthinkable. 

And it all depends on the profit motive.  The good sin, greed.  Anger becomes the bad sin.  People sore enough at other people to make war against them are put in their place.  "What are you trying to do, strangle the golden goose?"  Foreign ideological systems, evil empires, become golden geese.  As China now is.   As we are to China.  "Launch against suppliers like that? Bomb that kind of market?"

Of course there are problems.  We've got these angry cries for justice.  Rage against oppression.  Zeal for liberation.  High ideals in general.  "Life should be better than this.  Why stick in the old mud?  Why not the best?"  Somebody is always trying to break out, or secede, or realize their independent destiny. 

Well, that's anger.  And, if you're going to have peace, it's got to give way to greed. 

The trouble is, anger is so much easier to romanticize than greed.  Nobody was angrier at England than the Highland chiefs, and nobody fared better in English literature.  Freedom-loving, brave-hearted, mountain-air-breathing fighters for Scottish independence, that's what Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, and Ossian saw. 

And what did the Lowland merchants see, when they looked up from their ledgers?  A lot of crazy, illiterate, innumerate warlords unfit for civilized life.  Wreckers of the organized state.  Wreckers of the balance sheet.  And so at war with each other that they'd never be able to rule the independent state they bagpiped about.

And the descendants of those merchants, like me, what do they see?  I see desert warlords.  With more vegetation around them.  Same clan crap.  Same violence.  And same weakness confronting a country, like England, that knows how to organize its violence.  Go the angry Highlanders' way and you'll get one foolish, uncomprehending (of enemy capabilities, of new weapons, of logistics) war after another.  The wars will be multiple because angry romantics are so bad at learning from experience.   (What they're good at is repeating a failed rising.  You know, 1698, Bonnie Dundee, getting their asses shot off; 1715, Bobbin' John Mar, getting more shot off; 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, getting a record number shot off.)

Well, that's anger for you.  Greed now.  Down in the Lowlands it has our merchants casting a beady eye on their 1707 accounts.  Red ink getting redder.  Go with the Highlanders — liberty, honor, pride, Scottishness, self-determination, independence — and you're on your uppers.  Go against them, join with Britain, and you're in clover.  You've got a line under your losses, a big black line.  You've got a market for 50% of your exports.  And you're hooked into a system that's going someplace.

Was it ever going someplace!  Wealth from all over the world was, in the next 200 years, going to roll into industrializing England at an astonishing rate.  And the Scots would play a big part in it, far out of proportion to their numbers.  But best of all, for the point here, they were at peace with the British.  More than at peace.  They were snuggling in bed with them.  Pockets bulging.  And that's the way it's been, ever since the commercial side won and joined Scotland to England to make what was at the time "the greatest free trade area in the world."

There it is, the road to world peace, seen when we first got on it.  The one paved with gold.  A road like those in heaven, a road like the one Mammon admired so, before he fell.

What a problem, though, getting a Peace Through Lucre campaign going.  Peace Through Might is so far ahead.  They've got the uniforms and the ribbons and the statues, they've got the ceremonies, the carrier decks, the slogans, they've got the models, the Caesars, and oh Lord the rewards, the final prizes, the Pax this and the Pax that, beginning with the Pax Romana.

What do we money people have?  Right now the example of Scotland.  Joined maybe by Switzerland.  Those banks.  On the outside maybe a Scandinavian country or two.  And the prize, the terminus?  Can there be a Pax Caledonia?

We're where William James was in 1906. He was trying to find an equivalent in the moral sphere to all the heart-lift in the military sphere, the "manliness," the "cohesiveness," the "tenacity," the "health and vigor," the sight of human nature "at its highest dynamic."  We're trying to find an equivalent in the commercial sphere.  God help us.

And it's got to be competitive, this equivalent to the  "strong life."  And we, classed among James's "clerks and teachers," are going to have to build it out of books and diagrams and blackboard demonstrations.  The wimp life.  Ending in a vision of what?  For James, a "pleasure economy."  Everybody peacefully enjoying the world's material comforts.  

There's so much to be said against that.  “It is the preoccupation with possessions," Bertrand Russell warns us, "that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”  And he's only at the end of a long line.  "Things," said Goethe, make us their "slaves."  They get in the saddle and "ride mankind" (Emerson).  What else can you say after Jesus said, "Love of money is the root of all evil"?  What good does it do you to "gain the whole world and lose your own soul?"

So greed, to nobody's surprise, is going to be a hard sell.  And there's not much to recommend our usual tricks.  We (or our PR people) can rename some of our functionaries.  We can make the people in charge of a "financial sector" into "theater commanders."  We can encourage colorful nicknames for those commanders (SEC Chairman, Treasury Secretary, World Bank President), something to match "Bull" and "Stonewall."  We might even have a "Light Horse Harry," or an "Iron Duke."  For the lower bureaucrats we could find names with more animal force, like poilu ("the hairy ones") or "Rough Riders." But none of that is going to get us very far.

Maybe greed is an impossible sell.  People know a bad bargain when they see one.   They'll certainly be suspicious of this one.  You give up spirituality and freedom and honor and vigor and nobility and justice and equality, all your great causes, all your high ideals, and all you get is peace.

And even if you get peace you're still not home.  You've got to fix up your vocabulary.  How are you going to use the word "moral"?  You've got world peace, something everybody has longed for, something that, for some, appears as "mankind's greatest good."  And what name will you give to those who brought it to you?  To their motives?  To their characters?  To their souls?  Remember, you're looking at Wall Street.

Oh, it's so hard to call those guys "moral."   They may be smart and shrewd and realistic and foresighted and yes, with the help of their kind in the State Department, they may be socially responsible, making the world's interest their interest, but are they really moral? 

It's the pain of questions like that that makes us realize that there is a prior question: Do I really care?  Do I have to have a higher compliment-word?  Why aren't "smart" and "prudent" and "realistic" and "foresighted" and "socially responsible" good enough?  What, here, is the difference between somebody who has all those virtues and somebody who is "moral"?

As far as I'm concerned, I'm ready to put "moral" in a class with "art" and "philosopher," words that cast auras, words that we can drop from our vocabulary without much loss.

246. What Fails When Friendship with Socrates Fails.

 
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Well, that's a sad story (Post 245, below), students given their freedom to subordinate everything to their search for the good life and then using that freedom to walk away from those who could help them most, Socrates and his friends. 

Does anybody have any doubt that the students of Barbara Herrnstein Smith have walked away?  Does everybody see that when you trust your tendencies or inclinations or linguistic competence (as the theory of Stanley Fish has you doing), rather than the logic Socrates trusts, you have walked away, mentally?  His friends can no longer be your friends.  They will, to be blunt, find your life not worth living.

How much do you lose when you lose friendship with Socrates?  "Your best chance to be a philosopher," I hear, and approve.  But I wouldn't put it that way.  I'd put the horse before the cart and say you lose your best chance to be an adult.  And I'd define "adult" through my definition of "child": one who, whatever his age, hasn't learned to check his thinking.  Hasn't learned to be careful.  The white grown-up who jumps to conclusions about the behavior of blacks is a child.  The white grown-up who studies crime statistics before entering a neighborhood is an adult.  The grown-up of any color who judges which is a child and which is an adult just by their behavior (staying out of or going into the neighborhood) is a child.

Stick around Socrates and you learn to study, and test, and not jump to conclusions.  Simple, but it's not common among children.  Socrates' students are children learning how to think.  Before the twentieth century Nietzsche said, "Asia has not yet learned how to think."  It has now, but the learning is uneven.  The Iranian who learns engineering in the U.S. and then tells a journalist that Allah will raise mountains to intercept any American air strike hasn't learned how to think.  He's gotten the product of the scientific method but as for the method, he doesn't get it.

There in that Athenian circle, there is the germ of the scientific method, organized common sense tested by experience, the miracle grain of the West.  Walk away from the Athenian circle and you have walked away from the West.  There's a loss for you, the whole West.

The trouble is, it's so hard to stay, as Euthyphro discovered.  You remember Euthyphro, the fellow whose intuition told him all he needed to know about piety, and who found questions about it painful?  The fellow who thought he heard his mother calling when Socrates wanted to continue questioning?  What he found hard about staying is what freshmen in college find hard.  There they are, already anxious, as children everywhere are, about whether they can make it as adults, and then there they are in the middle of this bunch of adults, these carefully speaking, closely listening creatures ready to dismiss you in four months if you don't catch on. 

Those adults aren't "philosophers," they're just teachers.  But there they are, through the tradition coming down from Socrates through Plato's Academy to today's university, friends of Socrates.  And no matter what they teach, they're teaching thinking. 

That's not easy, learning to produce what won't be credited to you as thought until it passes the teacher's tests, and for some it's going to be a struggle.  That makes the dropout inviting.  But for all it's a strain, and that makes the vacation or the binge inviting.  No more of that rigor.  Oh, how good childhood looks!  Oh how happy Euthyphro must have been!  Oh how welcome a theory like Stanley Fish's is!

With Fish's permit in hand you can walk away, but can you walk away without being disapproved of?  Yes!  You can act as if you're walking across.  To another culture or society, at the same level.  If it's a primitive one, with fewer recorded crimes, you can even claim you're moving up.  If it's located at a geographical or historical distance you can imagine its virtues more easily.  It's best, though, to find one at a philosophical distance, with a model that can be exchanged for that of Socrates — an Indian guru, say, or a Buddha.  That will give you the deepest justification for a dropout.

You'll get a lot of in-house help if you take this option.  Western literature is full of noble dropouts (or never-joined), making your move downward feel like a move upward.  Everybody knows or has been taught that Huck Finn's move out (to the territories) is a move up (from Midwestern "sivilization').  Nobody wants Holden Caulfield to join a society full of phonies. 

If you take this route, though, you'll have to deal with Herman Melville.   He's rough on romantic primitives, and he doesn't mind threatening children with pain.  When R. M. Hare says to a student, "You cannot say, on pain of contradiction, that..." Melville's right with him.  He'd pain the draft-rioters of 1863, those children, without reservation.  Who has reservations?  The Romantics who gave America its faith: "that man is naturally good, and more, is Nature's Roman, never to be scourged."  For Melville it's good to have a citizen fear the pain of physical injury and for Hare its good to have a student fear the pain of embarrassment. 

 There's a definition of adulthood (rationality) for you: capacity to be embarrassed by a self-contradiction.   If you're going to hang onto it, though, you're going to have to be careful not to misread Emerson ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds") or Whitman ("Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself").  Take them to be referring to the assertion of A and not-A and, with excuse in hand, you'll soon be feeling no pain.  Take them to be referring only to a change of mind and you're no longer covered.  Your nerves are still live for the tutor's plucking.

That's the hard life inside the Socratic-Western academic circle.  Students live it so that they can become adults.  They can decline to live it for many more reasons than the one above but the biggest one in America has been that they think they already are adults.  I mean, way before they had "linguistic competence" and "behavioral tendencies," those guarantees of adulthood, they had their "American youth" title.  That very often, by itself, let children think they were adults.

We know how this happens generally, and it starts out very much to our credit.  We love and encourage.   Then we overdo it.  It's a problem for all parents.  You praise a child so that he will think well of himself, not lose heart, and (the whole idea) keep going.  You over-praise, though, and he will think he's already arrived.

There's where America comes in.  It's the land of over-praised youth.  But at some times more than others.  A time when uneducated immigrants are counting on that next generation to haul them out of the mass is certainly going to produce some high-end encouragement.  It's ambition, and pride, but still, at bottom, love.  These are children, after all.  And, when it works, awe.  "Oogh, the things that boy knows."

In any case, that's what made America famous for youth-worship.  If you could graph it you'd probably see a peak in the years after World War II.  The immigrant awe hasn't worn off and the soldier who has lost his own youth is home to raise a new generation.  What a generation!  These things are hard to gauge, but going by what I heard from elders addressing graduates at Ohio University in those years this was the brightest, best, highest-scoring, soundest-thinking group of young people ever to arrive in our midst.  If you had wanted to make children think they were already adults you couldn't have given them higher praise.  The Commencement podium was an altar to them.

245. Postmodern Theorists: Disappointing Friends of Socrates

 
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Socrates, facing death, asked his friends to punish his sons for him if they thought they knew something when they didn't.  And that, it occurred to me after I began to understand their work, is what Jacques Derrida and other French postmodernists were doing, punishing us academic followers of Socrates for thinking our knowledge was more solid than it was.  Because the language we expressed it in wasn't as solid as we thought it was.  So there they were, friends of Socrates, and therefore friends of ours.  Though hard to understand and hell to keep company with, they had an undeniable attraction.

Easier to understand and with a more admissible attraction were the American postmodernists like Stanley Fish.  He was bound to appeal to academic traditionalists like me because, though I was slow to discover it, we shared a common foundation.  That's a wonderful thing to find when everybody you know is either a foundationalist or an anti-foundationalist, and firing across the gap.

What Fish made his ultimate appeal to — his supporting ground, his settler of disagreements, his final philosopher, his supreme court, that is, his foundation — was a group of human beings.  He called his group an "interpretive community," I called mine "educated gentlemen."  Neither one of us felt a need to appeal past them to anything deeper, like a "reality."  There we were, philosophical friends.

And sure enough, just as in daily life, one attraction opens your eyes to others.  In the Derrideans deconstructing philosophical work I could see 1940s semanticists dissecting propaganda releases.  It was all rhetorical analysis, showing what the orator or sophist was up to, with Derrida just operating at a higher level, on more imposing figures.  He wasn't going as far beyond the New Critics as his young admirers thought he was, but he was going a distance that can be admired.

Eyes opened, I could see something more in Stanley Fish, something that would let us take him with us right into the heart of the Socratic enterprise.  He put the response of the reader ahead of literary form, ahead of biography, ahead of history.   The student who tested everybody by what they taught him about the good life was free to dismiss scholars and critics.  This postmodernist was not just licensing the student of the sixties, he was liberating the follower of Socrates.  

Ah, another claim for liberation.  Meaning another vagueness.  To avoid the vagueness let's look closely into one of today's classrooms.  A Milton course.  We've got a student who, following Socrates, is making the usual measurement: "How much does this contribute to the good life?"  He reads Comus and gets nothing.  It's a turkey, a bore.  Too much high-minded instruction, too much spectacle and pageantry, too elegant.  The scholar his teacher refers him to does what historical scholars customarily do for ignorant minds: fills them with knowledge of time and place.   The times expected elegance, the occasion called for high-minded instruction (the sponsor of the play wanted his participating children to learn the classical virtues), and the aristocratic audience loved pageantry.  The critic his teacher refers him to tells him that he must understand that this is a masque, a genre in which you always get spectacle.  But the student inspired by Socrates and fortified by Stanley Fish says, "I live in different times, I'm not a child, I'm not an aristocrat, and masques do nothing for me."  He is the five-year-old speaking to his parents in the old New Yorker cartoon:  "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it." 

There's not much philosophical weight there, as in most cases there won't be, but look what happens when that student comes to Paradise Lost.  He sees Christ portrayed as a military leader and throws the book across the room.  The knowledgeable academics his teacher refers him to tell him that before he judges anything, from a corkscrew to a cathedral, he ought to ask what it's for.   ­Paradise Lost is an epic, and epics display heroic warfare.  So, now that he's knowledgeable he ought to quiet down and accept Christ as the military leader he has to be in an epic. 

The follower of Socrates says nothing doing.  A God like that doesn't fit into the vision of the good religious life that he has so far put together.  He thinks that Christ carrying a sword, and angels clad in armor, and spirits getting wounded, and heroic military action itself, are all spinach, and he says the hell with them.

And that's reader-response, and that's the Socratic enterprise, and there's Plato giving his blessing and Stanley Fish issuing his license.  Peace with Fish and peace with Barbara Herrnstein Smith who spoke for Fish in the Modern Language Association (see note).  Peace in the postmodern world. 

Can it last?  Let's answer with a thought experiment.  Let's construct a student out of Fish's theory (you can do this yourself now, using Post #240) and put him right into Socrates' circle.  See how he'll do. 

Suppose we choose the circle of gentlemen gathering around Socrates as his execution approaches.  Crito arrives first on the supposed date.  Let's lower our student into his place.  "No," Socrates says to him, "we shouldn't accept popular opinion — which is that his friends should help him escape — but should follow 'the best course that reason offers.'" 

Will the Smith Crito agree?  Let us assume that it is his "behavioral tendency" (Smith, Post #240) to do so.  They proceed to inquire into the course of reason, beginning with a principle that they have established in earlier discussions: that one should never willingly do wrong under any circumstances.  Plato-Crito, after prompting, agrees to what this proposition entails: that one should not even "do wrong when one is wronged"; it can't be right to "do an injury in retaliation" — though "most people" believe that it can.  Once it is demonstrated to him, Plato-Crito is held by logical implication.  Smith-Crito is held by whatever makes an inclination recurrent.  Assume that the inclination holds, and he agrees to what the logic requires.

Then from Socrates:  "Ought one to fulfill all one's agreements, provided they are right?" or is one free to break them?  Plato-Crito, held by his bond, agrees; we'll assume that Smith-Crito, held by his, agrees.  Socrates then asks Plato-Crito to "consider the logical consequences." If Socrates, a victim feeling injured, escapes from prison, his defiance of the Laws of Athens is going to injure them, and this will be contrary to his principle and to his agreement, made when he first accepted their benefits (like his education) and confirmed when he lived contentedly in the city up to his seventieth year. 

Then the crunch.  Socrates believes he should hold to this agreement, and, a victim not of laws but of men, accept death.   Plato-Crito, seeing he's bound by the argument, agrees.  Our eyes are on Smith-Crito.  Is he going to accept the logical consequences and agree with Socrates?  If he doesn't he's unfit for the circle.  Nobody will trust him.

If, on the other hand, he accepts and agrees, might they trust him?  We can't say, but Smith, in a statement following her description of the natural inclinations that assure us of student rationality, gives us a clue.  She's explaining relativism, the philosophy that justifies her replacement of norms, standards, and other "external" (objective) forces with internal (subjective) forces:

At the most general theoretical level the relativism exhibited by this study is not a "position," not a "conviction," and not a set of "claims" about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason, value, and so forth — really are.  It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste....

In our time that is what Smith's opponents have to concede to her in philosophical debate, a conceptual style (with a concomitant irrelevance of logic) and in ancient Athens that is what Socrates' friends will have to trust in the newcomer, a taste.

With this, Smith-Crito (or, in light of the note, Fish-Crito) is revealed to us as a Euthyphro, the fellow who, when Socrates asks him to state his beliefs in a way that lets them be analyzed and connected, says, "If that's how you want your answer, Socrates, that's how I will give it."  Some people want beliefs stated one way, some want them another way.  The company he has wandered into seems to have a taste for logic.  Taste, style, who knows what the next one will be?  Well, go with the community you're in.  It's all relative. 

Smith-Crito's unfitness will be revealed to the company as Euthyphro's unfitness first by his confident assertions and then by his reluctance to test them.  Something internal has shown Euthyphro exactly what piety is so there's no need for him to examine it seriously, though he is willing to play a game.  When Socrates goes on too long with his questioning he tires of the game and thinks he hears his mother calling ("I just remembered I have appointment somewhere") and so leaves the field.

And I will be going on too long if I lay out all that is obvious here.   If Smith-Crito's behavioral tendencies and recurring inclinations have him taking the same steps logic demands the number of times we assumed he would be taking them he is going to be the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World.  In a realistic thought experiment he is at some point going to light up the chamber with an absurdity, and we are going to laugh ourselves out of the laboratory.  That's the way it is with naturals.

But in the real world it's going to be sad.  Bring this fellow into that Milton class, give him the freedom Stanley Fish gives him, and how is he going to use it?  He sees a Christ that doesn't fit the picture he has loved, and made the center of his life, the mild, loving Jesus.  He is uncomfortable with a God whose offended majesty won't be satisfied until he gets a blood sacrifice.  And, unless it comes naturally, he can't sharpen his words to state his problem, order them to clarify it, multiply them to refine it, take some steps to solve it, cooperate with others in testing those steps, and, if they're solid, go on to the next ones.  In other words, he's unfit for systemic examination.  Genuine care with belief.

Smith-Euthyphro shows us how our promising friendship with Stanley Fish (and any other postmodern theorists who replace objective norms and standards with something internal) has to end: with a complete break.  His friend can't be our friend.  To us the life he lives is not worth living.

Note: To gauge the extent to which Smith speaks for Fish you might turn to Fish's remarks about her at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ruHdZfrSfg_

I take their affinity to be close enough to make Smith-Euthyphro into Fish-Euthyphro in every appearance above.