345. "Bang Gang" Insouciance

What Stephen Holden finds remarkable about this movie showing teenagers doing group sex is its "shrugging attitude."  I notice that "Bang Gang" is French and I can see the shrug.  How many times in Paris, witnessing another incomprehensible street scene, have I seen the shoulders go up.  C'est la mani. Here, I suppose, C'est la jeunesse.

Our world leaders in insouciance they are, and I turn to them gratefully, especially when in doubt about my cool.  Should I show curiosity about that man in high heels?  Ah, there at the corner table, les épaules going up.  I'm as grateful as I was in Milan, seeing a gentiluomo cutting his spaghetti.

The opposite of "insouciance" would be "souciance" I suppose, but we don't have the word.  I could have used it when I tried to think of people opposite to the gang-bang shruggers.  Certainly my father would qualify.  I remember his being asked once to serve as a chaperone for a high-school weenie-roast.  My mother said he spent the whole evening chasing kids out of the woods and back to the campfire.  He was souciant.

It's a coinage to be pleased with.  You know it fills a gap in your vocabulary when you keep finding new fits for it.  I think of the boyfriend of the babysitter who thought my dad could be a chaperone.  He failed to use a condom (on some other weenie-roast, I suppose) and got her pregnant.  He was under-souciant.  Then he got souciant in their search for the baby after she, in her period of disgrace and despair, had given it up for birth-adoption, and they were finally married.  Then the long period you'd have to call "post-insouciance."  Not a shrug anywhere, even among observers.

The more you observe the world the more sockets you find the word fitting into.  WCTU people standing watch at saloon doors were super-souciant.  LGBT people detecting micro-aggressions are hyper-souciant.  Those fearing the uncool of super- or hyper-  become crypto-.  Contemporary professors with a weakness for Victorian values — or Platonic love, or Doric discipline — have to be crypto-souciant.

There was nothing crypto about my father, chasing couples out of the woods, and there is nothing crypto about my other opposite to the French shruggers, NYT columnist David Brooks, telling his readers to start talking as if people had souls.

That's a cry in another ballpark.  Maybe in another age.  Yet what's on the field is the same.  Say you're at a post-movie table in Cannes and the person next to you, Brooks, says, "You know, if public life were truly infused with the sense that people have souls, we would comfortably tell [young people] that sex is a fusion of loving souls and not just a physical act" (NYT 6-7-16).  What are your shoulders doing?  Where are the épaules of those around you?  What about Holden, whose cool in front of the sex scenes was itself pretty Gallic?  Can you even form a picture?

One thing our sense of incongruity shows is that Holden must be right in calling the insouciance of the movie's group-sex treatment "distinctively contemporary."  A few years ago in France the souciance of existentialists kept shoulders down.  "You are what you choose, and every choice counts."  So choose carefully.  You're constructing your essence. 

In the contemporary world, then, Sartre becomes one of the voices from the conservative past, where relations with Christians become more congenial.  If Sartre and Brooks, silenced at the table, meet in the washroom they'll make perfect sense to each other.   "The soul can be elevated and degraded at every second, even when you’re alone not hurting anybody," says Brooks.  "I hear existence constructing essence," says Sartre. "I'm with you."

Treating life as a series of choices, and seeing a choice in every moment, with nothing lost, is about as deeply souciant as you can get.  You're down there with St. Augustine ("Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow") and the saints who saw the crisis in every moment.  Not to mention the followers of Socrates, whose entire business was care of the soul.

Those are pretty heavy hitters, and if we can stay in the same ballpark I think they will win.  The thought momentarily cheers me, a longtime souciance fan, but then I think of what victory here might mean.  The end of insouciance?  Will I like that?

"Well," comes the voice of Socrates, "do you like the New York Times?  Would you like to remove the Arts section from it?  It's full of insouciance.  Hardly any in the Editorial section.  Will you be a one-section man?  Is that the good life?"

Oi, he's got me.  The very pieces that inspired this blog post, Holden's and Brooks's, appeared in the same issue!  Giving me pleasure, keeping me alive.  Giving me as good a life as I'm capable of.

344. There Goes the Gas out of "Populist"

We all know what a "populist" is, right?  Somebody who engages in revolts against elite establishments.  That's something to respect.

Then comes the morning after British populists have voted to get Britain out of the EU.  The pound is plunging, stock prices around the world are falling, and the world economy faces what a Bloomberg editor I know called "nuclear winter."

And there on the BBC (via Tara John, Time) is a dismayed Brexit voter: “I did not think that was going to happen, I didn’t think my vote was going to matter too much because I thought we were just going to remain."  And on Twitter, many like him: "Lol starting to regret my vote."  "Urm I think I kinda regret my vote, I had no real reason to pick what I did!!."  "I personally voted leave believing these lies and I regret it more than anything, I feel genuinely robbed of my vote."

And there was Stephen Collinson on CNN asking if British voters in revolt could be joined by American voters in revolt, as Donald Trump was asking them to.  Voters identified by the same word, "populist."

It's a day to redefine that word.  Except that the day comes in a year when calling a spade a spade reduces the number of your dinner invitations.  And in a place, a democracy, that must preserve respect for the common man.  So let's just say that "populist" means "a voter insufficiently supplied with clues."

343. Foucault on a Mountain

A letter:

I'll tell you, buddy, those are the last climbers I'll ever accept from that college.  Every traverse they've got to stop and talk it over with each other.  Thompson Steep, two of them with their heads together, looking at me, mumble mumble domination mumble mumble paternalism mumble mumble, ism, ism.

Cooper Spine it's worse.  Mumble, mumble, privileged status structure mumble mumble hegemonic masculinity mumble mumble. 

When they get to "the master gaze" at Jones Ledge I turn on them.  "Stop right here," I say.  "I know your trouble and it needs to be cleared up.  Start with that rock Alissa's foot is on.  It's a real rock.  Part of mountain reality.  And don't look off at the mountain-tops when I use the word 'reality,' Steven.  I'm not talking about what there's no foundation for, a world independent of our constructions.  I'm talking only about what we've got to take into account when we climb a mountain. Rocks that look like that will, according to my experience — and I will, regardless of any power I have, call this 'knowledge' — sometimes give way under you, in which case you will be left dangling on your rope or, if your companions have not believed me about fastening their picks, in a heap in the scrabble down below, along with the rest of us."  My gaze was on Alissa's foot.  It may have been an imperial gaze or a male gaze but it was a necessary gaze, since my failure to assess her foot's position could have kept us from getting to the top of the mountain, or back home, rather than down in the scrabble.

I was starting way back but I thought that while I was at it I might as well establish the essentials (woops, another hot word) — well, show them the foundational beliefs (oh my god, worse).  OK, what mountain-climbers postulate.  The simplest metaphysics in the world, as you and I know: that there's something unconstructed out there that keeps us from getting what we want just by willing it.  However we describe it we must conform our will to it.

I don't know whether it was really there or not but I see doubt in Steven's face.  "What do you mean must?"  So I take the opportunity to explain logical necessity (yes, I actually  used those words, "logical" and "necessity").  "Wanting the end entails wanting the means.  If you want the summit you want the steps toward it."

I left it to them to figure out the consequences of this for the other big word they had been using, "power."  Like that wanting the steps entails wanting knowledge of the steps, which, if you don't have it, requires a grant of power to the one you go to for help, me here but elsewhere any teacher.  The power (or "authority") to speak to you in the imperative voice: "Put your foot here, not there."

I did take the opportunity to point out that the tone of that imperative, or any other accidents of its utterance — the race, the gender, the history, the bourgeois origins, all extra-mountain power relationships — was, however lamentable, irrelevant to their goal, getting their live bodies to the summit.  Their goal, not mine.  We teachers at the clinic don't have a goal until students give us one.  "Long's Peak?  Check.  Here's how."

So all their suffering, all my insufferable exercise of authority, all their onerous obedience, all docility in their bodies, followed from their grant of power, which followed from their own desire.  They were doing this to themselves; they were their own oppressors.

I thought that given time to think (there's plenty of it on a mountain; so much is just plodding) they'd work out these consequences, but when we got to the next ledge only about half of them had.  And they are all such arguers there's no way they could stay out of a big one with the other half.  They tried to keep their voices down but I did hear the crusher that ended it:  "Better our bodies inscribed by him than by those sharp f---ing rocks down there!" That was Carla, and I thought she had them all convinced.

I even thought they'd had the mountain-flash we all wait for:  climbing is choices and choices are trade-offs.  Decide that all goals are mountains, all putting of means to ends is climbing, that climbing is 95% of life, and very few need to go to India.

But not so.  Though the Real Worlders (I'll call them) had won the argument, and nobody on the other side could refute them, a few were still putting their feet on rotten rock.  Deliberately.  Defiantly.

How could they be defying reason?  Why would educated people no longer listen to reason?  As the last plod went on I grew more excited.  Why, why, God tell me, why are they acting this way?   "And why are men in the upper-class suburbs of New York, dense with college graduates, pressing the button for Donald Trump?" suddenly came a voice from the mist.  "Why do rational men ever behave irrationally?" came an echoing voice, and another, and another.  We had reached the heights of the eternal mysteries.

Note for colleagues further out of touch than I am: In being guided by the French philosopher Michel Foucault the group above is special, but not extremely special.  By 2007 Foucault was the most often cited author in the humanities (Thomson Reuters), so influential that, according to one of his followers (Jared Silverman) his "concepts have permeated modern scholarship in such widespread ways that we can easily say of him what the poet W.H. Auden (1979) once said of Freud: that he is 'no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion.'"

If you know him only as one of those postmodernists who took down objectivity and the unitary self you need at least to check the Wikipedia entry, which will tell you that "Foucault's discussions on power and discourse have inspired many critical theorists, who believe that Foucault's analysis of power structures could aid the struggle against inequality. They claim that through discourse analysis, hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated."  Obviously you need to know more (or possibly you don't need to know more) than I can supply here.  However, a few of his widely quoted statements might help a little, at least with the mountain story:

Power is everywhere.  

Truth is...produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.  And it induces regular effects of power.  Each society has its regime of truth.

The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration.     

342. Too Soon, Hillary

Why the Great Political Adviser in the Sky would think he could get through to Hillary using a little academic blogger like me I don't know but last night I got this, with a Post It on it asking me to do what I could to get it to her.

"Stop!  Stop all attack ads.  You don't want to sink Trump now.  Wait till Republican Congressional candidates are on board.  After their convention squeezes them up the plank.  Then they go down with him.  That's your goal now, isn't it?  To have your party take both houses?

"Suggest you re-evaluate your earthly advisers.  It's Congress now, stupids.  Tip the power of your hand and you could lose your chance.  Keep the people who can visualize what the Grace ad would do in August.  That crippled child, that view of Trump mocking cripples.  Their guy, their captain.  What a torpedo!  You want that ship full, Hillary."

341. Oberlin and the Past

We meet at 11 p. m., and stay up till two o'clock in the morning doing work, and go to nine-o'clock class and do that over and over.  We don't sleep.....We're not even compensated financially....This institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.  Heard on the campus of Oberlin College by Nathan Heller, New Yorker, 5-30-16

Dear Gunner,

Congratulations on finding a decent place.   No such luck here.   The barracks they're putting up for vets (yep, same ones, no insulation) won't be ready until February and the townspeople have run out of attics.  Paul talked a lady into fixing up a place (I mean offered the last of his separation pay to fix up a place) in her basement, and with Fred's army cots and a couple of desks they found at Good Will they'll be in business.  The college was telling everybody no housing no chance but Paul said just give us the books, we'll take care of the rest. 

Not a sure thing, those books.  The college had to get the GI-Bill paper work from the government to the bookstores and you know the government but a guy in the administration told Paul he was going to cumshaw enough for the Shakespeare course so he was safe signing up.   "Why do you veterans insist on going to college in little towns?" the guy asks.  "Because that's where the education is," Paul says. 

Carl may have it easier.  By the time he gets out of rehab (about a year, they say) they'll have the Quonsets set up and the paper work down.  The lines ought to be a lot smaller.  The administrators here, the 4Fs who stayed home, are working really hard.  I have to hand it to them.  Who expected the GI Bill to let you enroll anyplace?

But we all had it easier than Brody.  You remember Don Brody, in Shelley's Raiders a year ahead of us?  By the time he got out, with his eyesight back, the housing was really locked up.  Zilch in every town with a college he wanted to go to.  So he and Kay said the hell with dreams we'll find an apartment and go to whatever college is within driving distance.  And they had to drive all the way to New Orleans before they found one!  "What's the college here?" says Don.  "Tulane," says Kay.  "University of my dreams," says Don.  Not exactly the way Pete got there but he was just as happy.  He cried at the first course he had that didn't wind up with missile trajectories.

Great for a while, Pete says, but too soon for a guy with Brody's problems.  The blindness, apparently, was mainly psychological and he needed more than Kay, good a nurse as she was.  (You knew he proposed to her while he was still blind?  "Wait'll you see me," she said.  He waited two more months, opened his eyes, said, "You're beautiful," and she said, "I'm yours."  That's the way he tells it.)  Wonderful, but two made it harder to find an apartment, and with his needs.  Then one day they up and leave.  "Just an interruption, " Kay told Pete.  "We'll be back.  He loves it."  Don worked on the student newspaper with Pete and Pete says he was certainly happy doing that.  Good too, for a poet.

You know you hear the Army is no place for poets but I found a lot of guys (well, three or four) who'd been in high-school clubs like ours.  Or who had a teacher like Mr. Dickerson, and made a sort of club.  Found out how lucky we were, so many of us, to be assigned to the same division, and have a library (ha, ha) to meet in.

OK, so who else is going to college and get to read more Poe and have T. S. Eliot explained?  Nobody besides you, me, and Pete this year but next year a bunch.  After they get their minds turned around.  It takes guys like Willie a while to realize that they actually have the chance, you know, and that the money is really there.  Nick knows but needs time, as usual, to get his shit together.  Bill realizes it, and is together, but he still has to get out of the machine shop.  (Has to bring his dad around.  His dad's the opposite of George's mother, such a pusher for college.  Now she just doesn't have to work.)

The guy who really lucked out was Irv.  Got everything Mr. Dickerson told him to try for, U. of Minnesota (no out-of-state problem whatsoever), Robert Penn Warren, and the very course itself, "Interpretation of Poetry."  Eighty-nine students in it and Warren let  him in.  ("Wear your bomber jacket," one of the locals told him.  "He can't close out a guy in a bomber jacket.")  And Irv is doing great.  Warren even read one of his papers to the class.  Ninety students and Warren reads all their essays himself.  Besides all the poems they give him.  And you know what?  The guy has only one eye!  Irv realized it the first time he sat in his office.  How lucky we are.

Hang in there,  
      Mike

340. Harvard's President and the War Between the Sexes

Punish university students for joining a private club?  That's a very big restriction of freedom.  How can President Drew Faust propose to do it at Harvard?  (See Post 339.)

It would have to be that joining one of those single-sex clubs will do harm to the university, to other students, or to the student's own education. That's all a university can be permitted to protect, and protection is, if we're still guided by John Stuart Mill, the only motive any of us is allowed as a justification for restricting freedom.

I have tried and tried and I am simply unable to see how joining one of these clubs  can harm the university or any of its students.  President Faust must have harm to the student's own education in mind.  Here that would clearly be education in acceptable ways to treat and speak of groups outside the longtime dominant group, white males.  For those who adhered to the old, unacceptable ways it would be re-education.

So Faust is conducting the proper business of schools, and Mill allows for it in the exception he makes for children and barbarians.  Such people have to be civilized and we give schoolteachers the power to restrict liberty until it's accomplished.  That's legitimate power.

Claim it for the president of Harvard, though, and I have to say wait a dog-boned minute.  Her restriction of the liberty of these students is justified, according to Mill, only if they're children or barbarians.  Is she taking Harvard men to be barbarians?  Possible case.  Children?  No, no, none at all.

Well, maybe she's abandoning Mill (as a guide; there's no question that in law Harvard can do what it wants to here).  Abandoning Mill in this manner, though some have done it, would at this point be very hard.  You can't remove in a day the support for the arguments (including hers) for liberty and tolerance we've been making all these years.  Not unilaterally, anyway.  I doubt that President Faust would do that, or want to.  Even if she hadn't noticed her slip from university president back to high-school principal. 

Puzzle over it long enough, cut through the sociological language, and maybe it will come to you, as it came to me: her actions are explained easily if you just see them as moves in a war.  With an enemy, and emotions, and all the escalations and descents and temptations that Clausewitz speaks of.  Here it's the old war between the sexes, and whether there was a peace or whether there was an armistice, she broke it.  And for the most common of reasons: one side goes past equality, the old maintainer of armistices, into preponderance of power, and is tempted to use it while they have it.  A few warrior types succumb to the temptation and boom, there goes the armistice.

Do you doubt that there's a war between the sexes?  Well, there's "The Wife of Bath's Tale" waiting for you to read, if you haven't already.  Or James Thurber's cartoons.  Do you think the weak don't build up resentment, and want revenge? There's Nietzsche, loaded, waiting for you.  And if you think the powerless who become powerful won't become intoxicated and play the old game you might try going back to your Foucault and reading again what he has to say about power, this time inverting it.

Taking it further, do you think that academics, searchers for truth, playing the power game (if they play it at all), wouldn't play to the crowd?  Do you think seekers of justice, the most pure, the women, wouldn't?  Adjust the frame on your Drew Faust picture.  You're at Harvard, the big arena.  Every articulate feminist will be watching.  In goes the sword, into the hump, between the horns.  Down goes the bull.  Give her an ear, comrades.

As you might guess, my juices are flowing.  But hell, didn't she start it?  Did she think no man would notice that denying scholarships and team captaincies to men who joined those clubs was a retributive act?  That men would just bear it?  That drawing pay from an Ivy League school made them wimps?  Forever?

I know the replies available to her, the big one being that the decorum and decency taught in lower schools have always been taught and enforced, though less directly, in colleges.  Once it was the D and D of Victorian times, now it's a different D and D.  Maybe better.  Maybe it's progress, which won't take place unless college presidents get behind it.  You can criticize it as "enforcing virtue the way the Puritans did" but the majority has always wanted to establish its kind of virtue.  By the test of what's allowed in mainstream publications the virtue called by its resisters "political correctness" now has majority backing.  It's the decorum and decency of our time.  It's what schools should encourage and if necessary enforce.  "I'm at Harvard and I'm enforcing it," can be her counterthrust.

I feel the weight behind it.  "Political correctness" keeps ethnic prejudice from getting started, and (the great lesson taught us by the Nazis) letting it start is a very dangerous thing to do.  She gets no resistance here.  Agreement and rejoicing rather.  (See my Post 319).

So I've got an irresistible opponent — until she locates herself, at Harvard.  There's where our quarrel is, over what kind of teaching and enforcing is justified at the university level.  And I am accusing her of taking us down in level to the high school and back in time to the nineteenth century. 

You punish one student in order to deter others, making them fear violation.  That's the way you spread virtue through a class of unruly boys in sixth-grade, in the room or out on the playground, where I have happily remembered barbarians being punished by enlightened women in the thirties, women, carriers of a higher civilization (Post 311).  The boys feared detention, in a corner, being deprived of bats and balls for a day.

What do the men of Harvard fear?  Look closely.  It's ridicule, satire, bites of wit from the more sophisticated, the cooler.  Nothing like the rod in the classroom, but a chiller here.  Just being thought uncool by the really cool.  Though it's incomprehensible at lower levels it's what the societies we consider most advanced, most enlightened, have counted on.  What men in a high civilization fear most is being put in a Dunciad, a Molière play, an Orwell novel.  On the local level a piece in the humor magazine or on the student op-ed, will do the job.  Satire and ridicule have worked well at this level for years.  But Drew Faust doesn't trust them.

I do, so my challenge is,  "Let our Popes and Swifts and Addisons do what your fiats do, Ms. Faust.  Trust them."  And my counter thrust: feel some fear yourself.  Beware a Juvenal, an Aristophanes.  In America beware a Holmes who decapitates moral bullies. The more you tremble at what you might find on Comedy Central the better you illustrate the superior force of educated disapproval.  Nobody is going to fire you, or deprive you of a grant.  That's not necessary at this level.

How do you avoid such cuts? By trusting the intelligence and sensitivity, the civilization, of your students, President Faust.  At the level of education they have already reached.  Even the men.

339. Keep Trump's Backlash Vote Going, Harvard

All of us puzzling over the great male flame for Donald Trump have some news from Harvard that we need to consider.  The college, according to an announcement by President Drew Faust, is going to punish students who join a single-sex club.  According to the Economist (5-14-16) she has the old all-male clubs in her sights.  Is this the gasoline?

Suppose you long ago recognized the misogyny in clubs like the Porcellian, suppose you're ashamed that Harvard did not admit women until 1977, suppose you're embarrassed still by the figures showing how many women report "non-consensual sexual contact" with club members.  You're sorry.  And then you read that any student who joins your club will "not be allowed to lead official campus groups or captain sports teams" or "be eligible for some scholarships."  

I'm thinking of the old boy who fears being called an old boy, or being associated with old boys, and who, though recognizing patriarchy's injustice to women, and genuinely regretting the misogyny,  still has a little old boy, or middle boy, or shit any kind of boy in him.  How much can he let women do to him?  All right, you got me down, and I said uncle, but God damn it do you have keep beating my head on the pavement?

That's the street educated, the scrapper, the Norman Mailer.  The pipe-smoker is saying, "What about freedom of association?  What about 'safe spaces' women want set aside for themselves?  What about black student centers, and those rooms where minorities could be 'culturally comfortable'?  What about the principles advanced in arguing for these things?  What about the logic that requires consistency between principles and practice?

That's a guess at what's in the minds of males at each end of the spectrum, and it could be wrong.  If it is, though, what is behind these astonishing vote totals for an obvious incompetent?