324. Wonderful, Wonderful Western Civilization

Well, I can't tell you exactly what lets me come out with that "wonderful" but I can tell you what, after living through most of the century regarded as history's least wonderful (20 million killed in World War I, 60 million in World War II), makes it easier: lying on the floor with my feet up on the couch giving my back a treatment and falling asleep to whatever comes up on the random play of 74 pieces recorded on five CDs by the best musicians in the world.  One day the New Leipzig Bach Collegium doing  Pachelbel, another day the Orchestre National de France doing Bizet.

In the past only nobles and the richest merchants could be soothed as I am.  Think what it took: musicians trained and on call and supported between calls, calls to a special chamber, worked in by the palace architect to be close to the ailing king, but not too close, so that he could sleep while the musicians played on, piece after practiced piece until assured that the king was indeed asleep, then off to their stations awaiting the next call.  Me, I push a button and get the Budapest Strings and drift off.  If I wake there's Chopin, and on and on.  The CDs cost about $12 each and the player $32.95.

The historian Steven Radelet, in The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (Simon and Schuster, 2015) "reckons that the past quarter century has seen the greatest advances in material well-being in the history of mankind," according to Richard N. Cooper, reviewing the book in the latest Foreign Affairs (1/2-16).  And my wife and I, adding all that we have seen since our childhood in the thirties — the great surge after World War II, the steady climb through the seventies and eighties, the tremendous surge since — would certainly testify to that reckoning.  Wealth passed from having a long automobile in the garage to having a second boat in the Caribbean.

But that's not the right measure.  The right measure is the advance in medicine that lets you see the ceiling fixture as you listen to Brahms on your back twenty years after the age at which you would have once gone blind and become unable to read your periodicals and share your thoughts instantly with your colleagues — and, along with pictures and funnies, your children and grandchildren.  Children and grandchildren, I might add, able to work in travels to different parts of the world within days of each other — South Africa, Languedoc, China, Central America, Viet Nam, anywhere in Europe or North America — and text their reactions, with photos and sometimes their own live faces, at any time.  None will die of small pox or be wasted by tuberculosis or be crippled by polio.

That lets me say "wonderful" and then Socrates makes me say "Western" since without him I don't think we'd have the scientific method — the step by step testing and building of reliable belief — that distinguishes this civilization from others.  And gives us our kind of universities, "academies."  (More on this in post 246, a little more in 154  and 245.)

No, imperialism and racism and genocides and arrogance don't (except in the eyes of those ignorant of world history) distinguish us.  Crimes (except in the eyes of those playing for the guilt advantage) don't distinguish us.  Cruelty to the weak doesn't distinguish us.  (Cruelty to the weak is a mark of the strong (us) and it may become criminal but it doesn't become a distinction until the weak display what they are capable of when they become strong.)

What's distinctive in us is our development of the instruments of criminality, or, I should say, our development of instruments among which those of criminality will necessarily be included.  Instruments are morally neutral, but that's so hard to remember when you're looking at the effect of cluster bombs, or nuclear weapons, or gas chambers.  These may have some culpability as temptations, and suggest a Satanic presence, but if they do it's the same one that cuts out cancers. 

This is not to say that there's no difference between the admiral lying off shore sending six-pounders through a native village and Albert Schweitzer bending over an operating table.  It's to say that instruments, cannon or scalpel, are not the proper objects of moral judgment.  Purposes are, choices are.  Which is to say that the African chief unable to use cannon or scalpel cannot (yet) be used for purposes of moral comparison, nor can his civilization.

All right, the admiral is happily taking part in a rapacious colonial takeover.  Though we cannot, looking at a world history full of such crimes, make a confident moral comparison, we can pronounce a confident moral judgment.  That stinks.  

But, maybe because we are Westerners, we have to submit to questioning by Socrates.  "Exactly what stinks?  The takeover?  Totally?"  We're off examining what Socrates is always forcing examination of, two-valued moral judgment.  It stinks or it doesn't.  Here one whiff and you've got it.  Ah yes,  imperialism.  At other times it will be a whiff of racism, or communism, or sexism.  Nazism fixed whiff-judgment for our century.  Oh ho, collaboration!  Adolf Hitler probably did more to encourage two-valued moral judgment than anybody in history.

But back to Socrates.  He's just asked, "Does the government set up by those engaged in the rapacious colonial takeover stink?"  And, looking at the British, we can't say Yes, stinks.  Not without saying Yes about the native "governments" their government replaced and most of those that would replace it.  Not without saying that efficiency, and order, and effort for the common good stink.  So yes, Socrates, the British had a superior ability to organize a government.  And the fact that they cited that ability to justify their takeovers does not negate the government's superiority or reduce its benefits.

And there, exhibited by the British example, is something that I think will hold up as a distinction of Western civilization: superior ability to organize a government, with a superior infrastructure following.  You know, a government that will work and keep on working as other governments, rising in other civilizations, do not.   A recent OpEd in the Times ("Why the Post Office Makes America Great," 1-3-16) by an immigrant from Turkey makes me think we've got something here.  One feature of her new society sums it all up for her: reliable mail service.  She marvels.  Imagine, standardized rates!  "You could just slap a stamp on your letter, drop it in a mailbox, and it would go to its destination."  Add packages and you see how Amazon and eBay are enabled.  "Dependable infrastructure," says Zeynep Tufekci,  "is magical not just because it works, but also because it allows innovation to thrive, including much of the Internet-based economy that has grown in the last decade."  I, looking at my grandchildren, one working out a dance, another composing music for an orchestra, would add that it allows creativity to thrive.

The thing about good, working infrastructure, Tufekci reminds us, is that it's boring.  "We get used to it and forget what a gift it truly is."  As, I would add, we get used to the other gifts of science and Socrates (oh so many posts here  — 84, 103, 107, 110, 120, 154), worked out over time.  You have to pinch yourself to see it or, like Tufekci, be newly arrived. 

I don't have to pinch myself because, looking at the ceiling fixture with this great sense of well-being, I am well aware of the gifts of science and rationality.   Without them no such well-being.  Why have I even bothered to make something of them, and argue for their importance?  Why haven't I just gone to sleep?

Because I have heard so many voices — of the Plato who made Socrates his mouthpiece, of world-scorning Christian saints, of German Idealists, of American Transcendentalists, of the great Emerson, of, oh, my own Sunday School teacher — cautioning me.  All delivering one message: your well-being, old man, is only material well-being.  The greater well-being is spiritual.  Your ceiling is very low. 

In my chastened state I turn my head away from the fixture. There at the side is the CD player, and further on the laptop.  Now I hear the most cutting voices of all, from the philosophers of my own century: “It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly" (Bertrand Russell), and "Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology" (Martin Heidegger).

By now, though, I've learned to do some chastising myself.  "Hold on, you philosophers.  How sure are you of that word 'spiritual'?  Are you confident that it does not apply to the state my fourteen-year-old grandson is in when he hears the notes he dreamed coming out, on his composer's app, in the harmony he hoped for?  Oh, that's esthetic, you say.  Are you sure, sirs, that you can distinguish the esthetic from the spiritual?  Are you sure the word 'heavenly' is all wrong for that harmony?  If you are not, then maybe we can go on to your words 'free' and 'noble.'"

Note:  The words "spirit" and "spiritual" are discussed in Post 89.

323. Poem about How Hip-Hop Messes with Your Head

You've been looking and looking for something you could confidently call "barbaric" so you could make your point about civilization, that it needs a conception of the opposite,  and you've been wondering and wondering what hip-hop was, another gift from black culture like jazz or something darker, and you're terribly lost and then you hear "I ain't fuckin' wit' you you nigga bitch" and all becomes clear, it's "barbaric," dark as hell, and you've got hip-hop pegged and are about to draw the great lesson for our time that we can't let love you know of other races no matter how brotherly interfere with the advance of civilization when wham along comes this musical "Hamilton" that looks like maybe the peak of American civilization and it's put on by all kinds of people old-time Americans have had trouble loving and what are they doing but a better job of celebrating American civilization than anybody so far and godalmighty they're doing it in hip hop!

322. Poem about a Shit Storm of Emotion

which is what, according to Jenna Laurenzo, you feel when you're just coming out, and JamesMichael Nichols, Deputy Gay Voices Editor of the Huffington Post, says sure "the first time you hook up with someone of the same sex can be daunting" and I say I'll bet, thinking I'm such a long way from my Sunday School and then I watch Jenna's nine-minute movie and wow I'm feeling my own shit storm and maybe believe what Nichols said that it's "the beginning of a whole new way of being in the world" which with me would be a universe but the movie shows what Jenna claimed, the "universality " of some emotions, and I can understand shit storms of emotions a lot better than I can understand new ways of being-in-the-world in an authentic Heideggerian way but jeez did they have to put it that way to a guy used to "gales of passion" with Werther laughing and crying and falling on his knees and bedewing Charlotte's feet with a thousand tears or Grushenka covering her face with her hands, throwing herself onto the sofa, and sobbing like a child in front of Alyosha Karamatsov I mean that's my world and I'm not ready for Ahab going what apeshit when he sights the whale.

But seriously let's try to take Heidegger seriously and take "whole new way of being in the world" to include an expansion of your world like when you hear your father say "I don't want to embarrass Art by asking him; he can't do it and he doesn't want to turn me down" and you suddenly see a world peopled by creatures to whom embarrassing a friend is bad, not just smoking and drinking and swearing, or like when your Sunday School teacher asks if you love your brother why are you talking to him that way and you see creatures who hold themselves to their own premises and you're supposed to be one of them and again suddenly it's a much bigger world so I'm not such a long way from my Sunday School but still a way since expanding pleasures is not the same as expanding good though equally authentic and the question remains authentic what?

Note: The Nichols piece, with the movie, is found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/girl-night-stand

321. "Anecdotal," "Statistical," and the Force of Christian Love.

I know.  I know.  Anecdotal evidence is lousy evidence, taking you into a thicket of crappy fallacies — misleading vividness, hasty generalization, cherry picking, confirmation bias — and subject, oh so subject, to the availability heuristic.  Your logic teacher and your composition teacher will be all over you on it.  But lordy, it does work.  Oratorically, that is.

It worked that way on editors of the New York Times when they selected for the OpEd page a piece by black astrophysicist Jedidah C. Isler (12-17-15).  Their selection makes vivid the pain of a brilliant scholar reminded by Supreme Court justices of the supposed limitations of her race when right there, in front of everybody at her schools (and reading the OpEd piece) is an individual of possibly unlimited ability (Ph. D. at an Ivy League school, postdoc at Vanderbilt).

I can understand and sympathize with that anecdotal working until I get to Isler's general observation: "obviously black students march into classrooms all over this country and blow physical concepts out of the water."  Then the statistics kick in:  "In 2009, African-Americans [12 percent of the population] received 1 percent of degrees in science technologies, and 4 percent of degrees in math and statistics. Out of 5,048 PhDs awarded in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, 89 went to African-Americans – less than 2 percent" (Huffpost Education, 10-24-11).

Anecdotes are good at showing us personal pain, statistics are good at showing us a national problem.  Anecdotes getting us to feel our fellow citizens' pain are needed to motivate us to do something about the problem, statistics are necessary to solve it, showing us what is working and what isn't.  They are most trustworthy in the hands of "academics" in the sense I have been plugging in this blog: followers of Socrates, multivocal testers, loving truth more than anything else.  Here that's scientists, following the method worked out, and remaining as objective (or, if preferred, "impartial," "disinterested") as they can.  Experience has shown that their way of thinking — statistical, analytical — gets more trustworthy results than the way of partisans and advocates.

We are living at a moment when black pain is most vividly before us, on television in the white police brutalities that have been exposed in such quick succession, and in books like Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, eloquent cries of pain and, sometimes, defiance.  And that vividness, so helpful in motivating us, is, more and more, holding us back in solving our problems.

You could see it first fifty years ago, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report on problems in black culture that, statistical and analytical, presenting facts and making careful conjectures about them, made a good start.  The reluctance verging on outrage with which the academy took up the problems, or, more precisely,  failed to take them up, can best be explained, I think, by unwillingness to cause pain, pain to a group so long pained, and pained by the group to which academics belonged.

Behind this unwillingness I see, even in those longest liberated from Christian belief, residual Christian love, the thing that, with the help of affluence, broke through in the Enlightenment (Post 308).

Christian love is one strong puppy; lose control of it and it will chew up your mind.  The head of the Episcopal Church in the U. S. lost control of it (momentarily we all hope) and brought every intellectual enemy of her religion his blackboard case.  The fortune teller in Acts 16:16-34 is different from us, her sermon went, but we must learn to love everybody who's different from us, without discrimination.  So, necessarily, love fortune-tellers without discriminating between them and prophets.  There goes distinction-making, a fundamental operation of the intellect, the one all rational human beings — including the embattled prophets trying to distinguish themselves from seers — depend on.  The congregation's mind is in shreds.  There's Nietzsche saying, "See!"

Put just a little of that into a university department and you don't make any progress solving the problem.  In sociology departments you don't even address it.  Fear of using hurtful language, everybody understands that, but fear of mentioning hurtful facts?  Sociology went forty years under "self-imposed censorship...on the subject of black culture" under that fear, fear, one presumes, of hurtful facts, hurtful statistics, hurtful analysis.  Orlando Patterson noticed this odd restriction (in The Cultural Matrix), and Thomas Chatterton Williams picked up on it (London Review, 12-3-15), but they, black thinkers both, are in the minority.

So much in the minority that when they ask a question in the old, free academic way it's like bells in the night.  "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?" (Williams).  There it is, the question timid whites have been circling for forty or more years, the question everybody needs to get to.  Damn the hurt.

And damn the love, the Christian love?  No, just keep control of that puppy.  There's a dangerous, tigerish force in it, a force that has to be managed carefully.  Aristotle, that pagan, shows the way.  He says that anyone can be charitable — that is, show love — "but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy."  You've got to use your head, and distinguish.

It's interesting to me that the rector in the Episcopal church I now attend, Lupton Abshire, quoted those very words in his sermon last Sunday.  What better occasion for a chorus on Christian love?  Merry Christmas!

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.