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17 December 2004: Beyond an everyday attentiveness to providing for food, clothing, shelter, and recreation, economic self-interest has never seemed a very compelling force to me. Most people seem to pursue their ideas of success without much regard for the personal bottom line, and most people also strike me as not wanting to think very much about that line in the first place. I've known men who enjoyed turning profits well enough, but they always had, for me, the air of happy gardeners, delighted to see what seeds and soil turned up. The person who would abandon a job paying $150,000 for another paying $151,000 (other things being equal) must, I think, be extremely rare, and quite probably troubled.
So I don't expect dollars and cents to play much of a role in political calculations. When they appear to do so, it's a front for something else. When voters appear to get mad about taxes, for example, they're really angry about how they think their tax dollars are being spent - or upon whom - or about the arguable incompetence that would explain persistent tax hikes. In the right circumstances, people will happily pay high taxes. Westchester County, north of the City, contains more than few villages where high property taxes support excellent public schools. These school districts are cooperatives, effectually, for the parents of school-aged children. When your children have gone through the system, you can stay, if you like, but you can leave, too, and make room for a family like the one yours used to be.
A parent in one of these towns might very well argue that he is sending his children to good schools so that they will eventually win lucrative employment. But that is daydreaming, wishful thinking at best, and certainly not economic self-interest, narrowly conceived.
Free market economics are popular with Americans not because they benefit from them, but because free market economics militate against schemes for the redistribution of income, or welfare. When most people feel that their prosperity is in retreat, they are understandably unwilling to allow the government to appropriate any of their dwindling resources for the benefit of those less fortunate.
Anatol Lieven reviews Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? in the 2 December issue of the London Review of Books. (In England, the book has been published as What's the Matter with America? The review is behind the LRB's paywall). On the whole, Mr Lieven likes the book, but he faults it for its economic naivete - its faith in economic self-interest. The book is in one of my many piles, but I haven't read it yet, not least because I wonder if I've really got to. I did read an excerpt somewhere, and the gist of it was a bemused incredulity at the stupidity of poor Americans who vote for policies that will make them poorer while making rich Americans richer. Don't they get it, Mr Frank seems to be asking. No, they don't, Mr Lieven replies, because they're not paying attention to being richer or poorer.
They're paying attention to being respectable. This means holding on to middle-class status by holding on to middle-class values. Away from the cities and big towns, in places where anonymity is both unthinkable and unattainable, shadings of personal virtue are more salient than shadings of personal property. If you are a sufficiently nice person, then it does not much matter what kind of car you drive (so long as you keep it clean and in safe repair). If you have to work two jobs and not just one in order to afford any car, that is all right, and certainly not the government's fault. The important thing is to be perceived as a good person. And the surest kind of good person is a traditional person. People who put being interesting ahead of being good had better head for the cities.
I don't think that it's possible for a woman's life to be traditional and interesting (even if only to herself) until she's middle-aged. For anybody, living an interesting life requires some serious disregard for tradition, at least temporarily. For a woman, it's arguably untraditional to seek to live an interesting life or to be an interesting person. To the extent that "interesting" means something more challenging than taking the kids to Orlando, it is probably to be avoided. For middle-class tradition is rooted in family life, in assuming one's God-given family role and, with luck (or grace), carrying the family onward through marriage and parenthood. To be interesting, you have to conceive of your life apart from that of your family. Not as against your family, necessarily, but simply with independence.
Thomas Frank isn't wrong to point out that most Kansans are worse off than they used to be. Where he errs (and I say this hypothetically, not having read his book) is in failing to see that this impoverishment is the very force that has pushed them into Republican arms. For although the Republican leadership is widening the gulf between rich and poor, it is also the party that upholds tradition. Its message is not so much that the middle class is the most important element in American life as it is that being middle-class - professing middle-class values - is the defining American pursuit. So long as one is middle class, and so long as being middle-class is championed, then one need not fear falling out of good society altogether and into what Mr Lieven calls the proletariat.
We in the cities don't see any of this. "Tradition," when used in New York, usually refers to cultures rooted elsewhere, whether as close as New England or as distant as Fujian. Traditions that aren't merely decorative, traditions with the kind of teeth in them that, say, force young women into arranged marriages, are regrettable in our eyes, bad habits that might, it is hoped, be eventually outgrown. We don't find meaning in the dictates of dead people whose claim upon us is mere ancestry. "Family," among the New Yorkers of my acquaintance, is an elective institution, built up over years out of friendships. Siblings are more likely to be troublesome sources of grievance than otherwise. How many people have come here simply to get away from their families? Perhaps not as many as you'd think, but life in the city is certainly flavored by the impulse.
This makes Mr Lieven's assessment all the more chilling:
If Middle America continues to crumble, one of the essential pillars of American political stability and moderation will have gone; and dreams of destroying America's enemies abroad, 'taking back' America at home and restoring the old moral, cultural and social order might well become more powerful and more disturbing. Three factors are critical. First, Frank's conservative-voting Kansans, like most American workers, define themselves not as working-class but as middle-class. Second, religious belief and practice of a 'Protestantoid' kind is at the heart of their conception both of their own identity and of the good society. Third, as Frank writes (echoing the conservative historian Walter Russell Mead), the combination of religious, middle-class and nationalist values has created among these people a view of themselves as something like a Volk - the 'real' or 'true' American people, as Republican campaign rhetoric in the heartland has continually stressed.
Frank deals with all these issues vividly and with great insight, but like much of the left he can't rid himself of the traditional materialist belief that economic interests determine political behaviour, and that if they don't, they should.
Reading Mr Lieven's review, I began to wonder if the Republicans haven't created a perpetual-motion machine. So long as Republican policies keep exurban Americans in a state of social anxiety, they will be guaranteed the support of exurban Americans. How odd it is to be obliged to find comfort in the Bush Administration's overriding characteristic: incompetence.
10 December 2004: What will be the fallout, do you suppose, of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's Q&A in Kuwait the other day? When the very courageous Specialist Thomas Wilson asked the Secretary why his unit was so chronically short of armor and supplies, Mr Rumsfeld replied rather testily to the effect that things can't be perfect. But as anyone familiar with the planning for the Iraq war knows, the shortages referred to by Specialist Wilson are the inevitable result of Mr Rumsfeld's disregard for standard Army planning, which he thought too costly. Save dollars, lose lives. It's a grim calculus, and the sooner military families wake up to it, the sooner we'll see the end of Secretary Rumsfeld.
Or so you'd think. Although there have been isolated acts of protest - some reservists are resisting orders to return to Iraq; one or two have even sought asylum in Canada - there is as yet no general movement openly or forcefully critical of the Administration. Although the Iraq misadventure is being fought by a volunteer army, the volunteers come from the same relatively underprivileged sectors of American life that staffed our forces in Vietnam. But I sense that they do not regard the the current morass with simple patriotism. While most soldiers probably do believe that taking some kind of pre-emptive action against Saddam Hussein was necessary - they're soldiers, after all, not middle-aged eggheads living in Yorkville who are busy making blanquette de veau for a family dinner party - it's just possible that many of them see that there are good ways of prosecuting a war, and bad ways, and that the Administration has been doing almost everything wrong, from taking Ahmen Chalabi's nonsense on faith to - scrimping on armor and supplies. I hope that they're wondering why the world's most powerful military has bogged down in a war of attrition. A few of them, having spent some time on the ground in Iraq, may even have good ideas about blocking terrorism.
I haven't spent any time whatsoever among military people, and I've reason to believe that my observations might sound condescending. Let me very bluntly state that they are not meant to be. My admiration for our soldiers is quite deep, not least because they're volunteers. Being the liberal that I am, I have no objection to exploiting the military as a machine of upward mobility; after all, that's how we've staffed our airlines from the start. But although a stint in the Army exposes one to an elevated risk of death and injury, that assumption of risk doesn't justify throwing inadequately armed young people into harm's way. Forcing defenseless soldiers to choose between death from the enemy and death from the officers was Stalin's response to Hitler, and it still sounds gruesome. But Stalin could claim reasons of state that are altogether missing from the Administration's portfolio.
As Andrew Sullivan says, "This is not knee-jerk anti-war sentiment. This is knee-jerk pro-war sentiment." I disagree with Mr Sullivan about the warrant for this war, but, now that it is wearing through its second year, I can see no warrant, either, for fighting it ineptly, and at unnecessary cost to our soldiers.
3 December 2004: Ever since the election, I have been teasing out aspects of a prevailing social persuasion that is very different from my own. I call it a persuasion because I suspect that its religious claims are spurious, and its hostility to reflection and self-awareness make it utterly unphilosophical. I've decided that it is a mistake to label this persuasion "the patriarchy," but I haven't come up with anything better. Is there a myth about a man who would fall apart if he ever looked at himself in the mirror? In a conflation of the Narcissus and Medusa stories, our unlucky hero, upon seeing his own face, would turn to stone. If there were such a myth, this character's name would make the ideal label for what I've been thinking about.
In an article about John Travolta in today's Times, Caryn James writes of Mr Travolta's "religion," Scientology, that it considers "psychiatry and psychology to be evil." Some would say that this explains that flatness of many of Mr Travolta's performances - and those of his "coreligionist," Tom Cruise, as well. But forget about acting. Psychiatry and psychology have done more to undermine the myth of male supremacy than any other intellectual developments. They have exposed macho behavior as a bluff. I don't mean that tough guys don't really want to fight. The bluff is their pretense that fighting is so meaningful that it overcomes the pain of mayhem and death. But psychiatry and psychology have revealed that it is fear that motivates aggression. Tough guys fight because they're afraid not to.
When I started seeing a psychiatrist, in sixth grade, it was a family secret, a potential disgrace. (My adoptive parents didn't know what to do with me, and I didn't know what to do with life, and my sessions with Dr K-, aside from giving me a chance to talk about myself without being interrupted, accomplished nothing.) To an extent, of course, seeking psychiatric help sounded the alarm of significant emotional instability (the word was "mental" - itself a clue to this country's anti-intellectual posture). This was permissible in women, but in a man, even in a boy, it signaled the worst possible character defect that didn't involve outright criminality: lack of self-confidence. To be unsure of oneself was the cardinal failing. (I was actually all too sure of myself as a child. I was sure that I would never, ever fit in, and I was sure that I didn't want to, either. Only when it became necessary to make a place for myself in the world did I question this, and healthy self-doubt didn't take root until I was well into my thirties.) And then there was sex. Weren't psychiatrists thought to grill their patients endlessly about sex?
Surely one of the most interesting differences between men and women today is that women seem to have no trouble at all discussing their sex lives with other women. I've even overheard such conversations myself, in circumstances suggesting that my eavesdropping was neither unnoticed nor objectionable. Men, on the other hand... Sadly, it is very much the case that the fool who divulges his sex life to another man can be sure of winning that man's instant contempt. In order to talk about your sex life, you have to know something about it; you have to think about sex when you are not actually having sex. You have to look into the mirror.
26 November 2003: Before the public conversation about religion in America boils over, I'd like to suggest some clarifications. It has been clear to me, since the election, that some important words are being bandied about without much sense of precision. I suggest that the following clarifications articulate the wellsprings of American political virtue.
Faith. Everything that we do is prompted by faith of some kind. We trust the bank where we cash our paychecks. Our faith in an airliner may not be total, but it's strong enough to get us on board. We believe in concepts, such as truth and justice, that we have neither seen nor felt. Perhaps the majority of human beings alive at this moment believe in a reality that lies beyond mortal life, whether it is a blissful paradise, a fiery hell, or something more neutral. I myself have faith in the meaning of the universe, but I am quite sure that I will never know anything about it, and so many people would say that I have no faith at all. I certainly do not profess a faith.
Religion. The root of this word is the same as that of ligament; religions tie people together. There is no such thing as a private or personal religion - all religions are public. As a matter of convention, it is silly to speak of a religion whose focus is neither a creator of the universe nor the nature of an afterlife. Religion is the bond uniting people with the same focus of this kind; religion articulates the bond by prescribing the creeds and rules of conduct that constitute orthodoxy. It is possible to be a person of faith who subscribes to no religion, and it is also possible to be a religious person without faith. The barrier that conceals an individual's faith from public view can be breached only by the faith of another, as when someone claims to know by divine guidance (an object of faith) that someone else's religious observances are insincere. It is correct to speak of the combination of religious acts and religious witness as a profession of faith.
Politics. Political activity is a cooperation of different groups that is founded upon the understanding - I avoid the word 'belief' here - that the virtue of individuals and the groups that they constitute is not determined by religious profession. Theocratic and ideological regimes, which reject the possibility that goodness can coexist with heterodoxy, are by definition incapable of supporting overt political activity. It is possible and permissible for people engaging in politics to believe that those with other religious views are certain to be judged evil by God and damned to eternal torment. What is neither possible nor permissible is for people to refuse to engage in political activity with those whose religious differences may damn them. Such refusal signals the end of politics and the beginning of tyranny.
Democracy. Modern democracy is political self-government that refuses to privilege any constituent individuals or groups. Laws and procedures apply in the same way and with the same force to all, and are not tempered to the alleged superiority - even that of numbers - of anyone. The influence of privilege signals the end of democracy and the beginning of oligarchy.
19 November 2003: We are all sitting, waiting, aren't we, for President Bush to commit an outrage, to attempt some breach of governmental nicety (or worse) that will signal the correctness of our mistrust. There - see what he just tried to do? A call to arms.
I won't be surprised if such an outrage never occurs. If it does, it's very likely to arise from a Supreme Court nomination, from another Robert Bork duel in the sun; only, this time, the other side will shoot first. But Supreme Court nominations simply don't register among most Americans. (Question: is it 'condescending' of 'East Coast liberal's to 'lecture' the 'heartland' about the importance of the president's power to fill Supreme Court vacancies?) I will say one thing for the President: he's not a grandstander. How can I say that, you ask, of Mr 'Mission Accomplished'? What needs to be understood about that gesture is that it was impressive simply because it could be done. Whether or not the 'mission' had been 'accomplished,' George W. Bush was powerful enough to deck himself out in a flight suit, command a helicopter, and make an appearance on the deck of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln, complete with banner. Forget the war; Mr Bush could make his victory walk happen. That's why he's still the President. Cosmopolitan people will have a hard time understanding this, because an essential part of our intellectual makeup involves forgetting the states of mind that respond to displays of power.
The other day, I happened upon a posting at Fly Bottle that quoted the following observation of Andrew Sullivan's: "Americans tend to believe that talent needs no apology." I couldn't agree less. Sure, from a class-ridden English viewpoint, it's obvious that nobody holds Harrison Ford's skills as a carpenter (which supported him during a very lean youth) against him; nobody says, "Oh, pooh on you, you didn't go to Groton and Harvard; we 'in' types are going to exclude you." I know that that's exactly what happens within some circles in Europe, and I know that it really doesn't happen here. But, by that very token, when Andrew Sullivan uses the word 'talented,' what he means is 'unprivileged.' The merely talented find acceptance here. Except: if their talent happens to be intellectual. In my comment on Mr Sullivan's observation, I wrote that, in my experience, there is no place in America (including Canada and Mexico) where intellectual talent is openly welcomed. We distrust thinkers - and thinking - in the New World.
And if you look at Academia, you see why. The middle-aged professors of today may contribute generously to liberal causes, but it was the professoriate that undermined liberal authority, not William F. Buckley or the VRWC.
Who knows what the President is going to do. I don't worry about it much, because the people who think he's simply the most dreadful president ever nearly carried a majority in the recent vote, and what unifies all of them is a deep dislike of incompetent bullies. They'll be on the lookout for malodorous presidential imbroglios, and I have to say that, after the Sinclair Broadcasting fiasco, I repose a lot of confidence in the Blogosphere.
But you don't need me, at this point, to remind you that the President has been perpetrating overlookable outrages from the beginning of his first administration.
Beginning with the vetoed Kyoto Accords. A president against environmental health?
He's been reelected.
5 November 2004: Wednesday was a really bad day for most of the people I know. I myself was almost happy. Not that Mr Bush won the election, certainly; that's very bad news for the United States, and probably for the rest of the world as well. But for me it was simply bad news. What tended to elate me as the day wore on was the virtual sound of millions of Americans waking up and seeing the President for what he is.
Four years ago, I felt like Chicken Little. I've often wondered how it is that I called Dubya's performance so quickly; I don't spend much time at the racetrack of politics. My recognition was quicker than quick; it was instantaneous. I knew what kind of president he'd be when he was just the Governor of Texas. How? Well, I was an unpopular kid in grade school. Even then, I was somewhat unusual - my third-grade teacher wrote in my yearbook that he hoped I'd grow up to be a writer, and I hated sports. Bo-ring! (And a lot of hard work, too. This is fun?) I was always so tall that no one ever picked a fight with me, but verbal abuse was another matter - I suppose, thinking about it, that there was a measure of curiosity about how I'd fight back, but I never did. But I certainly learned to recognize bullies at a distance, and there is absolutely nothing that George W. Bush could say or do that would induce me to reclassify him. I can tell without having to be in the same room, for example, that his odious habit of conferring nicknames on everyone is just a smirky way of belittling others - the bully's ruling passion.
But no one I knew seemed to see this four years ago. Amazingly, the line about 'compassionate conservatism' actually went down! Respectable newsmen opined that the new president would govern on the understanding that his slight margin of victory (negative, in fact) mandated a moderate, centrist Administration. Then they were surprised by the nominations of people like John Ashcroft and Gale Norton for Cabinet posts. They praised Mr Bush's utterly opportunistic response to the attacks of 9/11. They supported his Oedipal adventure in Iraq.
That's all changed now, so I'm happy. Very happy - about that. I'm sorry that so many bad things had to happen in order to rouse my friends and neighbors. Now they know, too, that the sky is falling.
Many of them are also beginning to realize that a majority of Americans voted for Mr Bush so that they could continue sleeping. That's what he promised them, anyway.
As I said, almost happy.
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My first act on Wednesday morning was to write a letter to my friend, Susan Babcock. Like so many people who wrote to me yesterday, I began with an expression of grief. At a certain point, I realized that had said everything that I had to say about the election (for the moment, to be sure), and I was about to send the letter when I thought of writing to another friend, Judy Muncy. Looking at the letter that I'd just finished writing, I saw that, while written for Susan's ear, it was completely impersonal. Writers may like to write, but they also like to make their work go as far as it can, so instead of sending the letter to Susan, I sent to everyone on my Daily Blague mailing list. The letter ended with the hope that I'd know by Friday whether or not Senator Kerry had really lost the election. Before long, of course, the Senator conceded, so I deleted that last sentence and published the letter here. I'm going to keep it here for a while, not so much because I think it's important or unusually perceptive, but because the writing of it was such a relief and such a comfort that I felt protected by its aura for the rest of the day. Never before has writing had this magical effect. Writing has often made me feel very good, but yesterday's letter made me feel safe. I only wish that the feeling of safety were not, like all magical effects, an illusion.
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3 November 2004: It feels like the long-awaited death of a beloved friend. That friend would be liberal justice.
As the Bush Entourage fills upcoming Supreme Court vacancies, half a century of progressive social development will come to an end, and, what’s more, much of the ground gained will be lost in the reactionary snap. I am glad that I began to ponder, a few weeks ago, the mystery of support for Bush, because when I heard Andrew Kohut, on NPR, mention that those who voted for the President told his exit pollsters that they were very concerned about ‘morality,’ I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t quite thought my way that far, but I was ready to make the final step. The very fact that ‘morality’ was used to describe ancient attitudes about sexuality makes me feel that I’m living in an Islamic theocracy. Americans in the heartland have not been on the bus for a long time: they don’t like feminism, they don’t like homosexuality, and I suspect that they don’t like interracial marriage, either – but then again neither do most blacks. They still believe, in short, in the patriarchy.
Forget Iraq, the draft, the deficit, the scandals, the economy, the outsourcing, and healthcare. Those are all very minor issues in comparison with the patriarchy: government by a hierarchy of males, self-proclaimed members of the superior gender. We ought to have deduced this from the way the Right hammered away at Kerry’s ‘vacillation,’ his ‘flip-flopping.’ Real men never change their minds. But real men are rarely candid, and either can’t or won’t explain their positions. So we had to figure it out for ourselves.
What’s my problem? I’m a married man enjoying a quiet life. Well, it’s like happiness. Just as happiness is a kind of concentration that dims the sense of self, so is the sadness that I’m feeling: a concentration on a lost worldview (or at least an extremely imperiled one) that makes me forget that I, personally, have little or nothing at stake. Except, of course, my freedom of speech. I hate patriarchy and won’t stop saying so. But now that I have a better idea of what so bitterly divides this country, it’s hard to be optimistic. Just as millions voted for Kerry just to vote against Bush, even more millions, it appears, voted for Bush in order to vote against ideas like mine.
29 October 2004: By this time next week, if we're lucky, the presidential election will be behind us. I'm not optimistic about that, but I'm not without hope, either. As to the outcome of the election, I find that I can't really think about it. It's as though I were scheduled for a crucial exam - a biopsy, say - and weren't going to find out whether I were going to live or die until Wednesday. I continue to be amazed that so many voices in the Blogosphere continue to treat Messrs Kerry and Bush as not-terribly different figures. To me, they're not comparable in any meaningful way, distant cousins though they may be. Mr Kerry has his faults, and is far from the most appealing of candidates - although I must say that I came rather to like, or at any rate to admire, him in the debates - but Mr Bush heads a team of radical reactionaries that has "carjacked" the Republican Party; its dream is to restore the age of the Robber Barons, and its incompetence ought to be obvious to everyone. Why isn't it?
Perhaps it is; perhaps there are many voters to whom incompetence doesn't really matter. Better to be firm and manly, principled and resolute, than to be - what? Right? Capable? Sensible? Prudent? These voters forget, I think, that the President of the United States is not the lone lawman of Hollywood legend, but the pilot of the most redoubtable and complex ship of state ever afloat. Or perhaps they're yielding to wishful thinking. We're a young country, but it's characteristic of the young to wax nostalgic over an always-simpler past, and the tug exerted by the fancy of a simpler America seems to be very strong, particularly for men who regret and resist the fading of patriarchal ways of doing things. I prefer a progressive outlook, if only because I believe in the truth of the Humpty-Dumpty rhyme (it is unchallenged by history), but outlook is less important to me than responsibility, and I am appalled by the cavalier insouciance of the Bush Entourage. The damage that has already been done will take years to repair. The damage that another four years of the same will almost certainly cause might very well destroy the United States. (Between the deficit and our dependence on foreign energy sources, the nation is already living beyond its means, and the wake-up will be ruder the longer it's put off.)
So I am not thinking about the election itself. I'm simply hoping that it's over when I return to this page next Friday.
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22 October 2004: Until very recently, I thought that critical thinking was a skill possessed by all educated people. As a statement about the present, I still do, but two books that I've just read, Dead From the Waist Down and Reformation, have convinced me that critical thinking was developed - invented - in the Renaissance-Reformation, between 1450 and 1650. Before that development, there was no critical thinking, not even by the smartest people. This is not to say that ancient Romans believed everything they heard. But it is true that they tended to believe anything plausible. It was this tendency that inspired the great forgeries of the seventh and eighth centuries, such as the "Donation of Constantine." In the absence of a standard of rough-and-ready credulity that rejected only the extraordinary, such forgeries would never have been taken seriously. There seems to have been a general idea that if there ought to be a document attesting to something, but such a document couldn't be found, then it was all right to - produce it. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.
Sadly (so to speak), there are no incontestably Divine manuscripts. By the fifteenth century, the pileup of self-serving charters was a stinking scandal, and with the revival of Greek learning in the West after the fall of Constantinople (1453), the utter lack of Scriptural authority for such keystones of faith as Purgatory fostered a climate of doubt. Over the next several centuries, what we call scholarship - it has nothing at all to do with the medieval theorizing commonly called 'scholasticism' - would be worked out in this new and pragmatic atmosphere. Anyone who has ever written a college term paper requiring footnotes will understand that while there is no theory of scholarship, there is always a purpose. The purpose of scholarship is to make your work so easy to refute - by showing, for example, that the texts that you cite don't exist, or don't say what you claim they say - that you will do everything you can to make your work irrefutable. It is a kind of transparency that's supposed to keep everybody honest.
(Transparency? How can a system requiring such arduous review - nothing could be more laborious than going through all the footnotes in a treatise, or repeating all the experiments in a study - be called 'transparent'? The story of Hendrik Schön, of Bell Labs, is but one of several recent stories about scholars and scientists who got away with 'murder' for rather a long time. It's clear that we've become too complacent about scholarship.)
Although most educated people are not scholars, they are taught by scholars. With the rise of secular education - the scholarly training of students regardless of their intent to pursue academic careers - the political, professional, and executive worlds came to be dominated by people schooled in the principles of scholarship, principles that have come to be called, collectively, 'critical thinking.' Nobody is taught critical thinking as such. There are no courses, and there are no texts. (Correction: such courses and texts that exist are designed to study critical thinking, not to teach it. Think meta!) Students just pick it up. The children of professional people may very well develop the habit of critical thinking long before they reach university. It is possible to become a critical thinker without any higher education at all. Difficult, but possible. (And inadvisable: without higher education, one is likely to be so unevenly informed that the occasional slip back into 'plausible' thinking becomes inevitable.)
Senator Kerry's controversial reference to a hypothetical 'global test' in the first of this season's debates made me wonder if the candidate hadn't meant to say 'sniff test' instead, but been advised against such an earthy term. Sniff tests are, of course, exercises in critical thinking. They're so called because all it takes is a glance to show that something that has flunked a sniff test can't be what it claims to be. When movie stars claim to be philosophers, for example, their statements flunk the sniff test, for any number of reasons. (Enumerating and assessing these reasons would be an interesting way of anatomizing critical thinking at work). Without supporting evidence such remarks are not going to be taken seriously. Sniff tests are proof that critical thinking has taken root not just in many minds but in many families and other environments. That they're so quick, almost immediate, suggests that the habit of critical thinking can become as reflexive as the habit of driving a car.
But just as nobody is born knowing how to drive in traffic, so nobody is born with a command of critical thinking. It has to be learned. Which means that it has to be taught. Here's why I think that critical thinking is the raison d'être of education:
In classical political theory (which prevailed until the Reformation), democracies were bad because entrusting government to uneducated people was seen as a recipe for disaster. To be an educated person, you had to learn very specific skill sets (these gelled into the 'seven liberal arts' toward the end of classical antiquity), which you then employed in the direction of affairs. There may have been elements of critical thinking here, but they were far outweighed by what I'll call the ideology of authority. Whatever Aristotle said about anything, it was held to be self-evident for hundreds of years, before critical thinkers showed how credulous - incapable of critical thinking - Aristotle really was. You went to school to learn who the authorities were, and thereafter you invoked them. Unschooled people, ignorant of the proper authorities and likely to believe anybody plausible, could only be expected to yield to demagogues - false leaders who amass followers by making sweet and impossible promises.
The Reformation took another look at democracy. While no reforming sect encouraged the criticism of its own doctrines, the increased literacy nurtured by the belief that every man must read Scripture for himself fostered a critical outlook about everything else. (This is one reason why, having questioned the Pope's authority, the protestant sects multiplied in waves of intramural dispute.) The Founders of the United States trusted in this critical outlook. They shared a free-market view of ideas: in the absence of constraints, the best ideas would prevail. This was a working hypothesis, to be sure, not a belief, and the Constitution was designed to assure that the worst ideas would have a hard time prevailing. But in the Founders' day, it was all but taken for granted that anyone with the power to vote would exercise that power, and that elections would reflect consensus. For most of this country's history - the runup to the Civil War is the only outstanding exception - that expectation has been borne out.
The legacy of the Age of Ideology - the Twentieth Century - has done much to damage the prestige of critical thinking, not because critical thinking was instrumental in supporting totalitarian regimes but because critical thinking tarnishes the glittering allure of faith-based regimes. We in America always thought that ideology could never take root here, because of our liberal traditions. More complacency! The end of the Cold War has unleashed energies formerly focused on containing the Soviet Union, and intoxicated patriarchal conservatives everywhere that, with Communism defeated, America can and ought to put its own house in order. Their idea of 'order' is, regrettably, authoritarian and ideological. Critical thinking, to many, is unpatriotic.
In short, without a population of critical thinkers, we have no more reason to believe in democracy than Plato did.
LINKS:
15 October 2004: The death of Jacques Derrida the other day has prompted an enlightening wave of comment in print and on the Internet. I still don't know where to put "Derrida" among the philosophers whom I studied in school, but I've learned not to dismiss the man himself as an obfuscator. The patches of his writing that I've come across are perfectly opaque to me, and the brief guide to his thought that I struggled through a few years ago left me feeling like a golden retriever, enthusiastic but clueless. But what I've read this week has led me to suspect that I don't 'get' philosophy itself at all.
To the extent that philosophy is the more or less systematic search for certainties, for fundamental principles upon which to organize the perception of the world, I am now old and shameless enough to admit that I don't see the point of the exercise. I don't feel a need for certainties of that kind. While I would like to be certain that my apartment is safe, that my computers are reliable, and that I don't have to worry about food or health care - just to name three very everyday concerns that, with luck, I can take for granted - I know from experience that certainty on those fronts is unavailable. Perhaps Aristotle would say that I'm preoccupied by "contingency," his term for the accidental/inessential. And I would agree. That's where I live, in contingency.
To the extent that philosophy is an inquiry into the impalpable, I conclude that seekers will find what they want to find. That's why I'm an agnostic materialist. I don't know that God doesn't exist, and I don't assume that my life has no purpose. But I've never seen or felt or in any way experienced so much as a suggestion of God or a hint about purpose. (I myself have plenty of purposes, but that's something else altogether.) So I don't give them much thought. In fact, I only think about them when I see what thinking about them has done to other people. When I hear someone say, "I couldn't live in a world where God did not exist," I feel lucky somehow. That's not one of my problems. I feel a little guilty, too, because the free ride that I'm getting. The world that I live in wouldn't exist if millions of my neighbors and millions or their ancestors didn't believe and hadn't believed that God expects us to try to be good. (I take God's part on that one.) And I would not want to live in a world without Messiah or The Saint Matthew Passion, works obviously inspired by firm belief. So I try to treat other people's faith with the deepest respect - most of the time, a counsel of silence.
To the extent that philosophy purports to explain the meaning of life, I'm very impatient with it. To ponder "the meaning of life" is an adolescent activity that serves as a placeholder for the meaningful things that only adults can do. For teenagers, life has no meaning - yet. Old enough to think ahead but too young to have much useful experience, and, not coincidentally, longing to be taken seriously - to be given, so to speak, the keys to the car - adolescents naturally and understandably ask, "What's the point?" Just as naturally and understandably, they think that there's something defective about older people, occupied by children and careers, who not only can't answer the question but don't seem to see the point of asking it. It's hard for me to find this aspect of youthfulness endearing.
The fact that happy, healthy, and prosperous people tend not to take much interest in philosophy tells me not that such people are shallow or unintelligent or that such indifference is proof of man's fallen nature but rather that we should all be doing whatever we can to make everybody as happy, healthy, and prosperous as possible. How to go about that is the object of my philosophy.
All of which may explain why everything that I've read this week about the uncertainty that Derrida is said to have postulated has always been so perfectly clear to me that I wonder what the fuss is all about.
For 8 October 2004 press here.
1 October 2004: Like all Americans, I was glad that Fafblog's hilarious time-machine-aided retrospection of the debate turned out to be faulty: we did not have to look at a naked, 'emperor's new clothes,' president. It's true that I didn't check up on the post-debate responses of Actual Christ Matthews or Actual Tim Russert, but I was happy with CNN's post-party coverage until my nephew told me to check out Comedy Central. Thanks to that tip, I saw John Stewart for the first time, and I wondered if he had not absolutely commended eighty percent of the under-thirty vote to Kerry.
Much to my surprise, the debate made a Kerry supporter out of me. I'd tuned in for damage control, to make sure that I knew the worst. If Kerry was going to screw things, up, I wanted to witness his missteps at first hand. But Kerry surprised me by not making any. He was relaxed, confident, competent, and deliberate. The president, meanwhile, seemed to suffer from the Curse of Gore: wasn't 'petulant' the word that bedeviled the vice president in 2000? And had Bush ever so closely resembled the cartoon image that Tom Batchell has been perfecting in The New Yorker for years?
All I can think of, however, is Richard Strauss's Elektra. That opera comes to mind not so much because I like to think that Dubya is going to get the Klytemnästra treatment (gratifying as that would be) from his 'nearest and dearest,' but because, like the heroine, I am overcome, after this first debate, by a peculiar happiness. I have been drained by satisfaction; I am happily spent.
It has been four years...
24 September 2004: How I missed it, I don't know, but when I came across a reference to Andrew Card's remark, likening the United States to a ten year-old child in need of protection, in the current issue of The New Yorker, I almost dropped the magazine in disbelief. (Then I Googled it, just to be sure.) Oh, the disbelief had nothing to do with the remark's having been made: the Administration is certainly incompetent enough to reveal the contents of its id. No, what I had trouble believing was that the America I grew up in had been so flattened that this stark derogation of Enlightenment principles could stand as acceptable political discourse. (About a month ago, similar outrage was excited by the legislative philosophy of New York State Senator Joseph L. Bruno.)
What bothers me deeply about Mr Card's outlandish proposition is that it is foundational, not factional, in nature. Political operatives like the Chief of Staff ought to stick to factional arguments: our programs are better than the opposition's, and that sort of thing. Most of the Administration's factional assertions have been dubious to incredible, but it is not in the nature of political parties to stick to the truth, and grown-up voters assess what comes out of the White House with critical minds. But the Bush Administration is unlike all earlier administrations, at least in living memory, in that it overtly circumscribes factional statements with foundational ones. Is the United States really like to a pre-adolescent child? If the Founding Fathers had genuinely believed this, I am sure that they would have instituted an oligarchy ruled by, at the very least, a meritocratic elite. As it was, they regarded the run of their fellow men as adults. This is not to say that adults never make mistakes, or always see things clearly. But they can think for themselves in a way that is not expected of ten year-old children.
The Bush Administration's attacks on America's traditions have usually sounded variations on the theme of "Trust me!" Children have to trust their parents, because their understanding is so limited, but healthy adults are expected to be able to distinguish the reliable from the doubtful. To the extent that many Americans have trusted the Administration, they have indeed acted like ten year-olds (or worse), and this may warrant the president's cynicism. Of course, the Administration isn't asking for trust. It's insisting that, because it's trustworthy (because, in the absence of a track record, it says that it's trustworthy), any and all attempts to check up on it are unpatriotic. This is a manner of rewriting the Constitution, or perhaps of quietly discarding it. To my great chagrin, the bluff seems to convince half of my countrymen.
Committed to ideology, the Bush Administration long ago demonstrated an unwillingness to temper its judgment with the candid assessment of unforeseen developments. Ideology denies the possibility of the unforeseen; that's what makes it so attractive to people uncomfortable with doubt and uncertainty. The Administration is thus incapable of saying anything that would surprise regular listeners. For this very reason, it is incapable of telling the truth. If I hear the president announce that Earth is the third planet from the Sun, I'm going to wonder - and this is not cynicism on my part - what aspect of his reactionary program prompted the announcement. I'm going to be pretty sure that he has been nowhere near a telescope! The coincidence of his statement with scientific observation will have been purely accidental. A broken clock, after all, tells the correct time twice a day.
Even ten year-olds know that.
17 September 2004: One of the customer reviews of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, posted on Amazon, ends, depressingly, "the understanding and compromise and patience of days gone by is fraying, even if it is still usually reached, and the end of civil peace may be approaching." Having just finished the novel - it is actually a one-act play shorn of stage directions - I think I know what pushed the reviewer to such a gloomy conclusion.
In Checkpoint, two old high-school friends meet, for the first time in several years, in a hotel room in Washington, D.C., near the White House. Within a minute or two, Jay, a guy-on-the-edge, announces his intention to assassinate George W. Bush. Ben, who has driven some distance in response to what he believed was Jay's cry-for-help phone call, says everything he can think of to persuade Jay that assassination is not the answer to the Bush problem, but Jay is beyond reason. He has screwed up his life, and murdering the man responsible for the war in Iraq looks like a heroic exit move. One certainly shares the dream of seeing the end of what the clever lawyer who runs Fair Shot calls the current "campaignistration." But of course the more Jay carries on, the more one sees that Ben is right. Assassination solves nothing. "Tumblewad," as Jay calls the president, is not responsible for the war in Iraq. We may hold him accountable, yes. But responsibility for the war lies with the American public, which for one reason or another did not make a sufficient objection to the pre-emptive invasion. We all failed. Those of us who were fairly sure that the misadventure would play out as it has failed to convince people who were confident of success - if we knew any. That we couldn't help but fail, because of the surge of fundamentalism in this country, doesn't transform the failure into something else.
According to David Brooks, there's a civil war already underway in this country, but it's being fought without physical violence by opposing elites. I think that's correct. There has been no violence because the two armies are deep in huddles, talking only to themselves, their backs to each other. How long will that go on? Follow the links on whichever side you like, from Andrew Sullivan or from Josh Marshall. Whichever way you go, you're sure to get yourself worked up. Then what? Sooner or later, someone is going to realize, as Jay does, that reading inflammatory blogs doesn't accomplish anything. Which is the great thing about reading: it's safe. But when you're as worked up as Jay is, you want action.
How long can people who loathe Mr Bush continue to live and work alongside those who admire him? For four more years? This would be the place to respond in kind to Dick Cheney's insidious libel that a vote for Kerry is a vote for terrorism, but I'll stop short of explicit stooping. I was about to say that nobody hates Mr Kerry the way millions hate Mr Bush (millions in this city alone), but rigid righters would remind me that they had to put up with someone they detested for eight years, so stop whining.
It ought to be noted that Mr Baker has not published a blueprint for terrorism. Jay's schemes for offing the president fall seriously short of the realistic. Nor is Jay a very convincing terrorist. But at some point, after more or less blood is shed, the powerful in Washington of all parties are going to have to accept responsibility for unleashing terrorism on a peaceful world. That's something that the American public had nothing to do with.
10 September 2004: Although New York survived the Republican Convention far better than many people feared, I was glad to be away from the disruptions, even though the odds are that I should have remained close to home, and possibly never left Yorkville. Then again... But the brouhaha here wasn't the only thing I escaped. Because our host has decided that the Internet isn't for her, and there are only two phone jacks in her house (forget high-speed availability), one behind the wall phone in the kitchen and the other behind her night table; getting online was not really practical. Nor did I see the Times. I was really unplugged, and it was strangely wonderful.
The week's rest may explain why, the closer we get to the election, the more resigned I am to what would have sent me wailing into the streets as recently as six months ago. I'm sorry that it has taken so many people so long to grasp the mendaciousness of the Bush Administration, and I wish that the elections were taking place in four months, not two, but I'm confident that a chorus of critical minds has been awakened and will soon be pummeling the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists, in case you're wondering, are people who have made up their minds never to change their minds about anything of importance again. Imagine an automobile that's on cruise control but whose driver has passed out. Fundamentalists are that reckless.
Because it's harder than ever for most people to imagine shutting down their minds, the fundamentalist power surge took the country by surprise. It has been suggested that the French Revolution, initially rather civil, soured into terror because most French people were too moderate to imagine such an outcome; I hope that we won't have to go that far down the road. But it's a mistake to think that fundamentalists aren't intelligent. Robespierre was a fiercely intelligent fundamentalist. What we need to do in this country is to detach the fundamentalists from the mass of not-very-intelligent people whom they have learned to seduce (and abandon). These people want to be led, and liberals have to get over their squeamishness about leadership.
(Preliminarily, we need to work toward a world in which sex lives become truly private. This side of firmly-policed boundaries regarding violence and youth (which shield the defenseless not so much from inappropriate sexual activity as from the abuse of power), consensual sex is nobody's business. I know perfectly well why it's taking a while for everyone to agree with this proposition, but I'm optimistic about the collapse of patriarchy - it's as extinct as the power to enslave thousands for the construction of pyramids, and all that's left is its malodorousness. Paradoxically, private life for public figures will resume when sex life ceases to be secret. Secrets are always interesting, at least until we know what they are. But if the only thing that's interesting about another person's sex life is that we don't know what it is, then perhaps curiosity will die a natural death.)
Leadership, in case you're wondering, is the art of honestly persuading people to accept bad news and to agree to deal with it in some constructive way. A leader uses polls to find out what constituents don't want to hear, so that he or she can tell it to them. I don't see many leaders on the scene, but I cherish the ideal.
27 August 2004: The most important intellectual problem on the horizon today is the identification of workable limits to the extent of the free market. That free markets produce great (if occasional) harm along with great good has never been in question; until the Industrial Revolution the harm was deemed greater than any conceivable good. Machinery and extractive energy opened up the promise of hitherto inconceivable good, and a variety of social experiments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries pointed to the conclusion that outside interference with markets rarely yielded the intended results and often yielded horrific ones. In our time, the free market has been exalted as the model of exchange among human beings.
One problem with free market theory occurred to me the other day: the operation that it posits is fundamentally negative. In a free market, with prices following laws of supply and demand, any individual can decide at any moment that a proposed exchange is unsatisfactory, and withdraw from market. Prices deemed excessively high deter buyers; prices deemed excessively low deter producers - who are, of course, buyers in their turn. Thus the market in any particular good or service is always approaching the unacceptable. This mechanism might be thought of as the gravity of human resistance; in a free market, resistance acts as the core of the earth does on physical bodies. Participants in a free market are barraged with an implicit question: How much can you take before you walk away? The ethos of the market, moreover, encourages them to take as little as they can get away with having to take.
Sometimes it seems that free market theory is the only ethos governing social exchange these days. This can't be right, but alternative codes have certainly lost their vitality.
Let's grant that there are conditions in which free market operation is largely, even wholly, beneficial. Let us also grant, on the strength of a single example, that there are conditions in which free market operation is wholly malignant. In family relationships, the freedom of choice required for free market operation is lacking, and it is for that reason that parents are wrong to favor some children over others in any gross or capricious way. Parenthood requires a submission to the uncontrollable that free market operation does not recognize. Between these extremes lies an enormous range of human interactions of greatly varying degrees of liquidity.
By liquidity I mean the exchange of goods or services for full or partial compensation in money; free choice is an important element. It seems fair to presume that the beneficence of free market operation increases as a given exchange approaches total liquidity, which occurs when a seller's consideration consists comprehensively of cash, while the buyer gets everything for which payment has been made. But there is no frontier at which free market operation ceases altogether to be beneficial and becomes altogether malignant. Therefore it is fruitless to rely on distinctions between conditions in which conditions in which free market operation is appropriate and those where it is not. I have posited extremes of which such a distinction is true, but they are extremes, and not particularly expansive extremes. The distinction to be made is far more manifold; it is really an infinite series of distinctions that human judgment can only approximate. In any given set of circumstances, to what extent does free market operation require surveillance or regulation? This question implies another: what constitutes the best means of surveillance and regulation?
For the moment, I assume that the second question must be answered first, because in order to be effective, regulation - I will speak simply of regulation from now on - must constitute an aspect of free market operation. Rather than positing a free market operation that is always the same, and that is subjected to outside interference - a classic example of outside interference would be the laws that used to ban commercial activity on the Sabbath - I want to envision regulation that so closely fits the meeting of given circumstances with free market operation that it may be considered organic to free market operation.
In other words, I want to imagine a positive force that would counter what I have called the gravity of human resistance. Consider a physical object in space. I can arrest its fall by obstructing its path, or I can alter its trajectory by creating a force field, as for example with magnets. The use of countervailing forces does not interfere with the operation of gravity; rather, it transforms it.
I assume, again for the moment, that I'm looking for more than one countervailing force.
If you think that I am going to find them here and now, you must have a few bottles of snake oil in your medicine cabinet. But I will venture to suggest that as the gravity of human resistance posits a universe of autonomous individuals, so there exist a gravity of human sympathy, which links us all indirectly, and a gravity of wisdom, which links us all collectively to the results of our forebears' curiosity. If either of these forces sounds fanciful, I ask you to consider the tremendous role that loyalty (a form of sympathy surely) plays in political and commercial corruption, and the oppressive weight of sacred traditions (a souring of wisdom).
Perhaps it would be best to assume that each of these three forces (resistance, sympathy, and wisdom) develops a positive polarity in the presence of the others. Perhaps it would better still to drop the metaphor of polarity, and to say that resistance, sympathy, and wisdom, each capable of making life worse when operating in isolation, becomes a force for good when obliged to come to terms with the others.
20 August 2004: Most of the time, I write about books with two assumptions in mind: first, that most of my readers are too busy to do the same, and, second, that the only way to inspire somebody to buy and read a book is to make it sound irresistible, something that can be done only by expressing an enviable delight. Today, however, I am going to be more direct, and urge you all to buy this book. Hey, it's cartoons.
I've loved the work of Tom Tomorrow ever since I came across it in the pages of The New York Times - very occasionally. What a delight to see his Y2K nightmare in The New Yorker on the eve of the last century's greatest nonevent - and what a delight to read it again, in all its splendid gorgeous color, in the pages of The Great Big Book of Tom Tomorrow (St. Martin's Griffin, 2003). The book arrived yesterday, and I've been trying not to O.D. (For anyone who needs a little reminder, or a get-acquainted session, with Tom's work, simply click on the 'Republican Matrix' link to the left, under Web Fun.) But overdosing might not be a danger. At a certain point, it's the desire to close the book that becomes irresistible. Too much message! A few hours later, though, and it's safe to pick up again.
Along with a preface and a brief but choice collection of early work, there are three chapters in The Great Big Book, 'The Reign of King George the First,' 'The Tabloid Presidency,' and 'Hell in a Handbasket.' As a political cartoonist, Tom Tomorrow is an equal-opportunity offender. As someone who started out satirizing (and undermining) the ethic of commercial hegemony and endless consumption, he also finds other aspects of the incumbent administration to dwell upon, and surely his representations of the Vice President boasts an astonishing degree of verisimilitude! But Public Figures are not Tom's real target. Most of his four-panel cartoons are framed in one way or another as mass entertainments, usually as broadcast television. The design elements come from the old-timey advertising that Dan Perkins (Mr Tomorrow to you) says obsessed him in his early twenties. His medium, in short, is media, and his subject is us, media's dupes. That's what makes the repetition of certain figures from pane to pane so funny. It ought to be anything but, but the utter lack of visual variation shows up the utter inanity of what's in the text balloons overhead. Mr Perkins (b. 1961) isn't old enough to remember the Bettys and Biffs of print ads and TV spots in the Fifties, but I am, and his spoofs resonate very powerfully with the simpering fraudulence of their promises. For reasons best left to discussion somewhere else, the middle classes of the United States were overtaken, during the Eisenhower years, by a craving for mind control. Just to be sure they'd be ready for it when it took over, many Americans gave up critical thinking for almost an entire decade.
Except when they stubbed their toes and thought they were alone and, quite earthshakingly to propinquitous innocents, cursed. Tom's work transmits the selfsame shock.
It may be the bleakest expression of optimism that you've heard since the media assured us that the Supreme Court-appointed President would be a moderate, but the difference between the Fifties and now is that there's a lot more critical thinking going on in this modern world. Joke! There I go, imitating Biff. Close the book, RJ.
No, buy the book. All profits go directly into the author's and publisher's pockets. What could be more amurkin?
13 August 2004: Whether or not I will ever get through Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton remains unclear. The book is characterized by two qualities that don't work at all well together. First, it seeks to refute what the author clearly regards as a tradition of calumny against Hamilton. Second, it takes an almost microscopic view of Hamilton's doings. Harangued again and again into sharing Mr Chernow's admiration for his subject, the reader begins almost to dislike Hamilton. I came to the book prepared to like the man; I have always considered myself a Hamiltonian, and not a Jeffersonian. At the same time, I can understand why Hamilton's easily-bruised temperament and pseudo-aristocratic postures would dampen his popularity among leading Americans. If it hadn't been for Washington's unswerving patronage, Hamilton would probably not be remembered today outside academia, and his peers were only too aware of this much-resented advantage. Mr Chernow's advocacy only deepens the image of a man who would have had a very hard time of it making his own way.
So one day a few weeks ago, casting about for some solid nonfiction but allergic to the idea of more trumpet-blowing, I picked out a book that I'd bought when it came out but promptly decided would be too grim to read. This would be Connie Bruck's When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent into Power and Influence (Random House, 2003). ... for the write-up of this book that what followed became, click here.
6 August 2004: The other day, I had a mildly Proustian experience when a chance turn of phrase took me back to high school. Someone was writing that Fox News "flatters the prejudices" of its viewers. Prejudices. This was a word from the past. There was a time, at least in my socio-economic niche, when the simple statement, "You're prejudiced," was shorthand for this: "Even though you don't know any Negroes, you think that they're inferior. This is a rearguard idea. It is both stupid and bad of you to think this way." (In the town where I grew up, "Jews" could be substituted for "Negroes".) To be prejudiced was to have very specific negative views, views that were targets of the progressive, forward-looking activism that sought to end segregation in America. In effect, adolescent peer pressure made a particular prejudice uncool. Hey, whatever works.
Then what happened? Along came the structuralists, the post-structuralists, the deconstructionists and the bourgeoisie-hating mob of leftist academics. According to them, we were all "prejudiced." Our minds are full of unexamined and irrational ideas that influence our decisions, and to say that one prejudice is better than another is itself to express a prejudice. Like so many of the observations that would issue from the mandarin towers, this one was more fatuous than correct. Insisting on the same value for all prejudices and allowing none to be "privileged" is rather like arguing that because our gastrointestinal tract is riddled with helpful bacteria, all bacteria are beneficial. We may indeed all have our prejudices. But prejudices that stigmatize other people on the grounds of identity are unlike all other prejudices, and worse than most other prejudices, in their power to can pervert democracy, by turning it into mobocracy.
In effect, the left gave the right permission to be perniciously pig-headed.
Prejudices are usually unconscious, or nearly. You are unaware of a prejudice until it is pinched by experience. You think of yourself as a kind, open-hearted sort of person when suddenly the sight of, say, two other people holding hands - people of the same gender or of different races - makes you angry and disgusted. There are certainly those who believe that such behavior is wrong, because it offends against scriptural precepts, but in this country, as Martha C. Nussbaum has pointed out, a fear of shame and humiliation is more likely to underlie the prejudiced person's disapproval. The sight of two men kissing triggers anxieties in men who patrol their own sexuality for homosexual 'tendencies.' "If they have the right to kiss, then I have the right to kiss... there must be no such right!" It is dread, not virtue, that drives homophobia, for truly virtuous people, whatever their social views, don't worry about corrupting influences.
So-called identity politics always begins in the attempt to defy prejudicial stigmas. It drives conservatives crazy because nobody likes to be told that he's expressing a prejudice - just as nobody likes to be told that his tie clashes with his shirt - and because, having conceded that black skin does not per se mark someone as inferior, conservatives want to regard the whole civil rights thing as settled and done with. As if skin color were the only stigma. The right's seizure of what it thinks to be the high moral ground of 'colorblindness' is nothing but a patent denial of its own bristling prejudices. It wants us to believe that neither gender nor disability entitles anyone to special treatment because nobody harbors prejudice against them. This is obviously not true. I'm not quite sure why, but people on the right are incapable of concealing their longing for a world in which we all share their prejudices.
I try very hard not to be prejudiced against conservatives.
30 July 2004: Memo to voters: George W. Bush is the man whom Islamic terrorists want to see in the White House for another four years. "We are very keen that Bush does not lose the upcoming elections," wrote the self-styled associates of Al Qaida whose message was published in an Arabic newspaper published in London, shortly after the March 11 bombings in Madrid. Islamic Jihad is stimulated by the American President's "idiocy and religious fanaticism."§
There's nothing like dueling religious fanatics. Those who are violent in the name of an ideal regard practical, peaceable people with contempt, but they can respect bloody-minded adversaries, and perhaps even fear them. What Osama bin Laden and Dick Cheney share right down to their boots is a longing for increased polarization, a new kind of total war in which everybody is a warrior, and every place a battlefield - except, perhaps, for the fortified aeries from which they direct their forces into harm's way. This utterly adolescent fantasy, which can only become a malignancy if it is not excised from the developing mind, is certainly lethal, but it is also ridiculous, and the question about such men is not how they came to be the way they are but rather why more people don't laugh at them.
The answer as to Osama bin Laden is perhaps that his supporters are too hungry, too destitute, too hopeless for real laughter. I don't feel sorry for them, but I am convinced that the only way to eliminate them is to eliminate the conditions in which they flourish. Not an easy task, but one that requires the cooperation of authorities everywhere. Police authorities, for one, to gather intelligence. Financial and legal powerhouses, to husband prosperity. (American prosperity flows directly from its commercial laws, which are sensible for the most part, easily intelligible to those who rely on them, and largely uniform among the states. Have we ever made a concerted effort to export them?) And religious authorities, to expose and brand as fanatics all those who preach offensive violence. The task requires all the adult virtues: patience, the wisdom of experience, memory, and a lighthearted skepticism about bombastic visions.
The answer as to Dick Cheney is that too many Americans are manifestly uninterested in cultivating the adult virtues. A glance at the crowds who turn out for the candidates makes it clear that most people don't believe that appearances matter, but rather present themselves the way teenagers do, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The belief that sporting activities deserve serious attention (quite literally a contradiction in terms) has spread alarmingly ludicrous throughout the Western world, and the general notion that tournaments are more important than public affairs is patently rebellious. And the focus on youthfulness hampers, if it doesn't altogether preclude, the development of what used to be heralded as 'maturity.' Striving to impersonate eighteen or twenty year-olds necessarily entails assuming the immature understanding of death, which is that it doesn't really exist. What keeps Dick Cheney going, through four heart attacks and a bleak view of the world, must be that he's at the center of the action, man.
And of course there's the tendency of adolescence to regard anything that isn't adolescent as ridiculous. But adolescent laughter is usually spurious. Adult laughter is triggered by the flash of recognition (as is the adult response to tragedy), by an acute pulse of insight. Even in a crowded theatre, it begins as an individual activity. Teenagers laugh because they're nervous, or because their friends are laughing, or, as all these movies about nasty high-school girls remind us, to inflict pain and humiliation. I know lots of people who laugh at George Bush in this way, and fat lot of good it does. What I laugh at is the idea that political advertising is accurate or, in my case, effective. (Or broadcast news, for that matter.) I don't laugh at the idea that political advertising influences uncritical minds, because it's both unfunny and obvious, but anyone who tells me that nine-figure campaign expenses are compatible with democracy is going to hear a rude snort.
23 July 2004: James Surowiecki - How I'd love to pronounce his name correctly. In Polish, I believe, it would be soor-ahv-yet-ski, but what do I know? I don't even know how my own name would have been pronounced in Gaelic, just that it would probably have required a longer spelling - ahem, James Surowiecki writes one of the most compelling features of The New Yorker, usually the first thing that I read when the magazine arrives. The 'Financial Page' is always that, a page with a small drawing, and it always opens a door between the financial-commercial complex and the rest. Columns that I recall peculiarly clearly include his denunciation of the Air Force-Boeing lease deal, which I believe has fallen through, and the real problem with Long Term Capital Management. I wish that he would publish a collection. Properly dated, these reports would constitute an intriguing history of the the late bubble and its aftermath.
The latter issue appears in Mr Surowiecki's book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations. Where Malcolm Gladwell's similarly piquant book, The Tipping Point, studied influence, and the spread of ideas through a group of people, Wisdom illustrates a counterpoint: decisions made by groups consisting of people who have been influenced only somewhat, or not at all, by other people usually turn out to be the best decisions. Mr Surowiecki's title deliberately evokes that entertaining old tome, Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841 but still usually in print and always available. Mr Surowiecki doesn't come out and say so, but it's clear that he would have advised Mackay to substitute the word mobs for crowds. Just as chemists distinguish between compounds, the ingredients of which are bound into a single substance, and mixtures, in which the aggregates retain their structure and nothing new is formed, so Wisdom distinguished between mobs, which forge numbers of people into single-minded organisms that ruthlessly suppress antagonism, and crowds. All the people in a crowd remain distinctly individual, only peripherally aware of one another (if at all). They have their own perceptions, their own biases, and their own natural resources. Study after study demonstrates that crowds out-perform all but a very few - and sometimes none - of their constituents. Picture the rush-hour population of Grand Central Terminal's Main Concourse. It may look like a mob, but it's actually made up of people who are fairly close to unconscious of one another. Workday issues, what's for dinner, and the urgency of making a particularly train leave little room in most minds for paying attention to fellow passengers. According to The Wisdom of Crowds, this aggregate of individuals passing through the Concourse would produce an average guess as to the height of the famous ceiling that was more accurate than the individual guesses of all but a tiny handful of commuters (some of whom could be counted on to have memorized the figure from various publications). Very few people would come even close to the correct figure, but the averaged wild guesses of the thousands of people involved would, it seems, approach accuracy very closely.
One wants to know how this works, of course, but although Mr Surowiecki doesn't explore the mechanics underlying such strange-seeming wisdom, his book is too interesting for that to disappoint. Perhaps its enough to know that a group of independent, robotic computers are very good at simulating the behavior of human crowds, especially in market trading scenarios. What's important in The Wisdom of Crowds is the distinction, elegantly hammered home, between crowds and mobs. Not all mobs resemble the citizens of Paris during the French Revolution. Sometimes they're quite small - say, the advisers who partook in the discussions that led up to the Bay of Pigs invasion, or, for that matter, to the counsels of the current administration. Loyalty and single-mindedness turn out to be predictors of disaster when brought to bear on affairs of state. The word commonly used to describe the behavior of small mobs is 'groupthink,' and it appears in all meetings, large and small, whose members lack equal access to the floor. The willingness to defer to the head of a NASA team did much to doom the crew of the Columbia. Executives like Jeff Skilling and Dickie Grasso appear to have made mobs of the people around them.
The three characteristics that distinguish crowds from mobs are diversity, independence, and a carefully-structured, integrated decentralization. Diversity insures the vital range of mindsets; if a crowd is made up exclusively of trial lawyers, obstetricians, or rich Republicans, it will degenerate into a consensus-seeking mob. Remember, it's the average judgment that's the best, not the one that everybody is predisposed to agree on. (In other words, deliberative meetings - elections, legislatures, juries, meetings large and small - ought only very rarely to be called upon to ratify some decision already made elsewhere.) Independence is important for much the same reasons. It has been established that too much news, for example, clouds independent judgment and leads to less-successful outcomes. (Defining 'too much' is, of course, quite tricky.) Decentralization is required to insure the first two characteristics, but it must be structured in such a way as to prevent members of a decentralized unit from putting that unit's interests ahead of the parent's. This problem has been highlighted in spades by the intelligence failures attributable to a kind of professional constipation among CIA and FBI personnel - not to mention a complete disinclination of either agency's staff to share information with the other's. Both seem to have lost sight that the interests of the United States are paramount. We can hope that the reorganization of our intelligence apparatus, pursuant to recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report, will be informed by Mr Surowiecki's analysis.
That the ideas outlined in this book comport with the goals of democracy ought to be very clear; what makes The Wisdom of Crowds essential reading is its catalogue of the damage done by mobs, groupthinkers, and conceited CEOs who don't take advice. Democracy, after all, isn't desirable because it's a Good Thing. The older one gets, the more one is inclined to agree with Churchill's assessment: democracy is terrible, but it's not as bad as the alternatives. The problem with the alternatives is that they're very tempting, and it's no wonder that humanity tried them all out for several millennia before finally trying to make democracy work (and often failing). We all seem to believe that the smartest person in the room will come up with the best solution. Smart people often do, but no smart person is always right, and intelligence is usually more limited in scope than its possessor imagines. Ditto for big, strong guys: military regimes institute peace fairly easily, but they also have a tendency to decay into the kind of kleptocracy that blights Haiti, where the big guys sit around all day quietly making everybody else take care of them. Generations of hereditary monarchy suggest that breeding human intelligence remains painfully elusive.
Looking up from Mr Surowiecki's pages, one quickly sees what's wrong with the Bush Administration's yearning for consensus. It is both profoundly anti-democratic and inclined to miscalculation. The Administration's deeds and misdeeds follow from the principles that it professes to honor, and that is why some critical observers have worried from the start about where the Bush entourage would take us. It's a matter of politics, not policies: the Administration believes in the politics of mobs, which it rather foolishly believes it can control. The mobs are not out in the street rioting, but hypnotized by their televisions. But fewer and fewer appear to be watching the 'right' broadcasts. As the growing ABB (Anyone But Bush) movement indicates, the president and his friends may have stirred up a mob whose only thought is to get him out of the White House. That may be good for democracy in the long run, but it's not very democratic behavior.
16 July 2004: The New York Times has been running an interesting feature this week, the first in a series, apparently, of Great Summer Reads. Each day, a chapter or two of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby appears in its own fourteen-page section (exclusive of cover). By Sunday, the entire novel - admittedly not a very long one - will have appeared. I couldn't, on Monday, decide whether to bite; I have my own copy to read at any time. But the presentation in installments intrigued me, even though the story is familiar, and even though when I think 'Gatsby,' I see Jack Clayton's film adaptation of 1974. For that very reason, I thought I had better take another look at the text. There was and is, in addition, the charm of knowing that lots of other New Yorkers - how many, I can't help wondering - are doing the same.
Suspecting that there must be some abridgment involved, I pulled down my Scribner's edition and found that indeed there isn't. Then I read a Publisher's Note (written by Charles Scribner III himself) that disclosed a very interesting tidbit: year after year, Gatsby sales figures surpass the total sales of all editions during Fitzgerald's life. This reminded me that when I first read the book it was not quite a classic, but rather a very respected popular novel. Now it's a classic, acknowledged as a profoundly American story told with a fine grace that only lightly masks its grim propulsion and sordid settings. Book in hand, I had to resist a very powerful urge to read what the Times won't distribute until tomorrow, even though I know what's going to happen outside George Wilson's garage in Chapter VII.
I also wonder how much annotation it takes to make the novel intelligible to today's high-school students. They'll have to be told that there was no air-conditioning in 1925 (or 1922, the time of the novel), that most people didn't have cars, and that highways were all but unheard of. (Indeed, the Bronx River Parkway, the nation's first multi-lane, limited-access highway was inaugurated in 1925.) Students will probably already know about Prohibition, and about the rising stock market, but they will probably require a little backgrounding in the spiritual deflation that followed the Great War. They will almost certainly have no idea that the novel is set at a pivotal point in the history of respectability, hitherto regarded as a Good Thing, henceforth as a Bore. They won't know what 'vulgar' used to mean, at least until they understand that 'Trimalchio' shuts down his catering act as soon as he sees it through his beloved Daisy's disapproving eyes. That Daisy is a lady, while Myrtle is only a woman, may be a novel distinction.
All the contradictions of the period are present in The Great Gatsby. The heartland remains bucolic, while cities like New York produce a new kind of cacaphony, generated by unstopping motors, garish neon signs, and ubiquitous popular music. It was the age in which sophisticated paradoxes, once the specialty of Oscar Wilde, spouted from the likes of Jordan Baker, who says that she likes huge parties because it's possible to have some privacy at them. There is a sour cynicism running not beneath but alongside the braying fun, but there is also tremendous optimism about the possibility of getting rich. The only thing missing is the kitchen sink: Fitzgerald seems not to have noticed or taken any interest in the domestic revolution that was beginning to fill kitchens with "appliances."
I can understand why The Great Gatsby was not a runaway success - why, in fact, copies of the second print run were still unsold when Fitzgerald died. It paints a very unflattering picture of American life. Americans would have to triumph in World War II in order to have the self-confidence not to be knocked down by Fitzgerald's bleakness. They would have to be able to say, "that was then," so that by dismissing the age of flappers and gangsters they could regard Gatsby's end as tragic. In fact, it's pathetic: a grotesque accident, a black joke, altogether of its time.
I am reminded of the powerful denunciation of the time that appeared in my high-school American history text:
Disillusion and cynicism spread to almost every part of the social body, inducing both irresolution and irrationality. There was widespread distrust of reason, and as men lost faith in reason they almost ceased to use it. They lost faith, too, in many of those values that earlier generations had taken for granted, and lost even the capacity to believe in values. There were few grand ideas, but a sophisticated rejection of ideas; there was little faith, but a superstition masquerading as faith. For all its cascading energy the age was negative rather than affirmative, incontrovertible in repudiation but weak on affirmation. Never before had so many men known so many arguments for rejecting the heritage of the past; seldom has a generation bequeathed so little that was of permanent value and so much that was troublesome in the future.
- Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager: The Growth of the American Republic, 5th Ed. (Oxford, 1962), Vol. II, p. 653
That reads rather like an attack on all the -isms of the late last century. Perhaps we are still living in Gatsby's America.
9 July 2004: Permalinks - there, I've said it. Maybe you know what they are; maybe you don't. It depends upon whether you visit blogs regularly. If the term is new to you