May 12, 2005
Update your addresses: Easily Distracted is now at http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke.
April 6, 2005
Slow blogging for now, both because I'm horribly overwhelmed with work and because I'm slogging away at a transfer of this blog to WordPress, which involves some drudgery AND a learning curve.
April 6, 2005
God Doesn't Do Feeding Tubes
The day before Terri Schiavo died, I happened to hear Randall Terry on NPR talking about the case. He said (I’m paraphrasing here) that it was important to keep Schiavo alive because there might be medical technologies coming any day which would restore her consciousness or improve her condition.
I’ve been rolling that around in my head a lot, because it seems to reflect something really odd in the attitude of the many of the most strident activists who demanded that Schiavo retain her feeding tube. “Err on the side of life,” they said. But most of them also spoke of the mystery of God’s will. This is the keystone of the official Catholic theology on these subjects, that human beings should not contravene God’s will by deciding for ourselves who lives and who dies, by making the hour of our deaths a matter of human contrivance. It’s why the Catholic Church’s attention to these matters is philosophically coherent, and American evangelicals who came along for the ride in the Schiavo case appear so manipulative or self-serving in contrast.
Even the Catholic argument is problematic when it comes up against the fact that the preservation of life in any of these contexts always involves the active agency of human beings. The only really consistent implementation of the implications of the argument for “culture of life” as it has appeared in recent months is found in those forms of Christianity whose adherents refuse all medical interventions whatsoever. That is true submission to the will of God, as it appears in such a characterization. As soon as you open the door a crack to allow that God wishes us to contrive our own ways and means of protecting life, of healing the sick, of staving off death—as soon as you stand behind feeding tubes, breathing machines, and so on, not to mention surgical intervention, artificial limbs, organ transplants, antibiotics, as soon as you stand like Randall Terry and say, “New medical technologies are just around the corner,” you’ve long since accepted that human beings contrive on matters of life and death, that the mystery of God’s plan for each of us runs straight through the will of human society.
God does not put feeding tubes in people. He does not hook them to breathing machines. He does not do CAT scans. He does not diagnose. He does not invent new medical technologies. If these are God’s will, then God Himself does not err on the side of life, God Himself chooses death, for not all the things which may yet exist to save our lives exist now, and they did not exist yesterday. A century ago there was no feeding tube: Terri Schiavo would have died a long time ago.
A feeding tube, a machine, a new medical technology: these are human things, human decisions, as surely as the human decision to unplug the machine or withdraw the tube. You cannot say that it is human intervention to pull the tube and forget it was human intervention to insert it. You cannot see God in one decision and absent him in the next. You cannot say it is God’s will that Terri Schiavo live another ten years so that human beings might invent a technology which will restore her to a fuller life. That technology is ours to invent, and it is ours to wrestle with the questions of life and death that this technology affects.
There is more. How can those who tell us to choose life at all costs—who demand that we intervene with all the medical technology, all the knowledge, at our command without any thought to the cost of such intervention—then show no perceptible interest in supporting the maintenance of life and health on a day-to-day basis? Why aren’t they out there with equal fervor for health care reform? For preventive medicine? For supporting medical and scientific research that would lead to the “new technologies” that Randall Terry expects?
God does not put in the feeding tube, and he provides none of that. Human beings do. If they demand that human beings put a tube in someone, how can they not demand that human beings do all the other things that they can do to sustain and nurture life?
If you start by conceding the moral and practical difficulty that life and death present to human beings, you can’t be called to account when you don’t have all the answers, when you’re not found with equal fervor in every possible moment and site that should demand your attention given your expressed views. If you start by categorizing everyone who disagrees with you as evil, by demanding that any judge or official or person who fails to bow to your will be removed or censured, then any break in the consistency of your alleged convictions glares like a neon light.
I don’t doubt the genuine depth of feeling among many people about Schiavo, or for that matter, about the illness and death of Pope John Paul II, who also had his life extended through medical intervention. I do doubt the authenticity of feeling among the political leaders, the organized activists, the shrill and mean-spirited who took every opportunity to arrogantly flog their supreme religiosity, to boast over the branches. I don’t think they gave a damn about Schiavo and I don’t think they care much about “the culture of life” either. They were just flexing their political muscles, just testing their weapons, just seeing what they could get away with.
March 22, 2005
Shame
How we can know when it’s too late for public reason, too late for the kind of thing I do. When has the clock reached midnight?
Let me drag in an argument I’ve made in a forthcoming article about Thabo Mbeki, the African Union, and the possibilities for change in postcolonial African states. Among other things, I argue that a key consideration in fighting an oppressive system or regime is whether that system can be shamed in any way, whether there is a ghostly, residual presence of some sense of obligation or inhibition, some hidden commitment inside the regime’s architecture that makes it vulnerable. The problem I’m grappling with is, “Under which historical circumstances do the rulers of a particular system, or the elites who support the rulers, concede to the inevitability of change and reform?” Because it does happen.
Two of the examples I give in the article are late colonial British officials in Africa and white rulers and citizens in the waning years of apartheid in South Africa. In both cases, I argue, it was possible to shame them, to force them to leave an opening for reform when the gap between the conceptual underpinnings of their rule and the reality of it was overwhelmingly hammered home. I don’t mean to undercut the brutality of either set of rulers, their inhumanity, but both groups had made certain kinds of rhetorical and conceptual commitments at the base of their authority that opened up a kind of hemophilia in their rule, a slow bleeding wound. Both systems left artifacts lying around within their architecture of authoirty that could be used against them. Gandhi’s challenge to the British in India is another such instance, and much of the civil rights movement in the United States another. Such tactics work only against a system which is still capable of feeling shame, which can be called out in terms of the gap between what it says it is and what it actually is.
The contrast I observe in the article is with certain postcolonial regimes in Africa. There’s no reservoir of shame left in certain kinds of autocracies: Idi Amin, Sani Abacha, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Omar Bongo: it doesn’t do any good to protest non-violently in the streets, or write polemics, or embarrass them at diplomatic functions. There is no restraint left, no sense of nagging chagrin or worry. Attempts to shame those regimes by their own citizens usually end in their gulags or in flight into exile, though sometimes the pot boils over into uprising, the kind of uprising where there are only two conclusions: the autocrat or the crowds dead, because there is no restraint in between. Attempts by outsiders to shame these rulers end in raucous laughter or in perhaps in ghastly pantomimes of official concern if sufficient pressure is brought to bear by other governments.
So where are we right now in the United States on the shame-o-meter? Let’s just say that I think the reservoirs of shame are draining awfully fast towards zero, and the case of Terry Schiavo is a pretty good dipstick for measuring that evaporation. Like a lot of commentators, I don’t especially have a fixed opinion about the case itself—not the kind of opinion that expresses itself as policy of any kind. There are reasons to have sympathy for any of the people caught at the center of the case, or little sympathy for any of them. Reasons to feel a connection to Terry Schiavo, reasons to feel that she’s got nothing to do with my own life. I could see why her parents might want to keep her alive, and wonder why her husband just doesn’t let them. I could see why her husband might try to honor what he understood as her wishes, and wonder why her parents are putting everyone in their family through hell about that honest desire. I see darker motives for all of them, but in any event, it’s just another human story in a world full of them, as interesting or uninteresting as any. As a pure kibitizer, my instinct would be to keep her alive: what does it hurt, if she's in a persistently vegetative state and her wishes on that subject were expressed in at least potentially ambiguous ways?
I don’t see any reason for a policymaker to take a position either way on what should happen, because the law the state policymakers created at the point before this happened was that spouses should get to make the decision. You might change that law, and cite this case as a reason for that. Maybe you should have to have a living will for your wishes to be legally binding. Fine. I’m not opposed to that. Keep someone alive unless they’ve written a legally meaningful statement about their wishes. Don’t leave it up to spouses or parents: you could make a case for that.
But that’s not what’s happening here either. The United States Congress is concerning itself with micromanaging the resolution of a single individual case. It’s the opposite of the problem I wrote about in “The Idiot God”. There I was complaining about the state’s lack of knowledge of the fine-grained texture of lived experience. Here I’m complaining that the state is intervening from the top in an intensely fine-grained and individual case. Why? Because the party in power is trying to suck up to a minority constituency of Americans who voted for the party, without any shame at all about it. They're not even pretending there's a general policy question here.
If they had shame, they’d be embarrassed, chagrined, mortified that the highest legislative body in the country and the President of the United States can find the time to have a special Sunday session and work out high-level compromises to save a single life, any single life. How about all the other people who died last week who could have been saved? What about the people who don’t have quality health care who died or were hurt? Why not have a Sunday session to help them pay their bills? Why not have a Sunday session to help a man who’s losing his house, help a woman who can’t buy her medications, help a child who can’t get enough food to eat? What makes Terry Schiavo Citizen Number 1, the sleeping princess whom the King has decreed shall receive every benevolence in his power to grant? It isn’t even a serendipity that the King’s eyes happened to alight on her as he passed by. Serendipity I could deal with: if the President happens to read a letter from some poor schmuck and it touches his heartstrings and he wants to quietly do something, he tells an aide to look into it, he puts a twenty in a White House envelope and sends it on, ok, it happens. Serendipity wouldn’t be shameful.
This is, and it’s being done so brazenly that I think it suggests that the point of ultimate shamelessness is fast approaching. When it does, if it already has, then there really will be very little for anyone to do besides mockery and silence, besides accept our second-class citizenship in a country owned and operated by plutocrats for the religious right.
The one hope here is that it appears a significant majority of Americans, based on a new poll, seem to recognize just how shameful Congressional involvement is in this case, just how much it is motivated by an indecent politics rather than a decent humanitarianism.
Of course, keep in mind that Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy complains that the poll makes "biased" statements which, uh, happen to be true in its questions, such as "doctors say she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible". Give me a break. Should the poll question read, "There's a few doctors here and there who have a theory that she has no consciousness and her condition is irreversible. On the other hand, her parents think she smiles at them, and some religious people think that the Rapture could be tomorrow and Terry will awake and rise to Heaven. A truck-driver from Virginia who looked at her photo in the newspaper says that he thinks she looks aware. Some evolutionary psychologists say consciousness is an illusion anyway. A Buddhist in southern Asia who has never heard of the case observes in response to it that all life is suffering. A couple of comedians last night made jokes about her being a vegetable. So what do you think of this case?" I think, I hope, that a strong majority does see what the story here really is: the shamelessness of the Congress and the President. Because they're only going to find their sense of shame again if we force them to.
March 18, 2005
Volokh's Bloodlust
I am going to gingerly attempt to be one of about three people to not simply condemn Eugene Volokh’s now-infamous “bloodlust” post.
You could defend Volokh a bit simply by confessing to an emotional connection to his post, by saying that it’s perfectly understandable that one should feel a brief moment of sympathy with the brutality of the Iranian victims towards their victimizer. But Volokh is very clear that he’s not just giving vent to an embarrassing impulse: he appears to be utterly serious about admiring the model of jurisprudence this case. So it would be condescending to just pat him on the head and say, “There, there, we’ve all felt that way from time to time.”
You could instead suggest that maybe Volokh is giving voice to a form of popular sentiment, to an everyday vision of of justice, criminality and punishment that burbles underneath our other ideas about jurisprudence. A decent proportion of American popular culture, for example, contains or endorses similarly retributive ideas about ultimate justice. I remember watching the first Robocop in a movie theater in Baltimore, and much of the audience simply ignored Paul Verhoeven’s ironic tone to cheer on the ultraviolent punishment dealt to criminals in the climax.
Retributive justice doesn’t just crop up in popular culture as a straightforwardly right-wing idea, either. There are plenty of both light and serious entertainments that feature protagonists who struggle with or are conflicted by the appeal of a retributive solution to criminality and evil. There are plenty of thoughtful writers and artists who pause to dwell on the desire for retributive justice without self-righteously condemning that desire as barbaric or shameful.
Certainly I have known many people on the left who have at times ambivalently accepted, justified, or at least looked away from the exercise of retributive justice in popular struggles: necklacing in apartheid South Africa, for example. Like some of Volokh’s critics, I wonder if Volokh understands fully that his endorsement of this particular case would make it difficult for him to condemn similar exercises of popular justice in other contexts, but that could be said also about anyone who has at any time accepted the possibility that justice can be achieved outside of strict forms of constitutional due process and the forbidding of cruel and unusual punishment.
I’m guessing that we all in some fashion situationally or circumstantially accept that “poetic justice” might legitimately exist in the real world as well as in our fictions and entertainments. I’m also guessing that in some fashion most of us recognize that there is a retributive strain woven into liberal democratic systems of crime and punishment. We also sometimes try to put a convicted criminal in direct contact with his victims: we may not let them beat or stab the person who did them harm, but we do allow the families of victims an opportunity to emotionally assault a criminal, to try and make the criminal feel the anguish and suffering of the people his actions have harmed. Yes, there’s a huge difference between that and the Iranian case, but there’s still a kind of conceptual kinship, a moment where we try to peel the intervening layer of state mechanisms away and create a direct human confrontation between victim and victimizer.
I think the most intricate reaction I have to Volokh’s piece involves the complex genesis of modern liberal-democratic jurisprudence, and some troubling doubts I have about its relationship to the long history of human consciousness and personhood. I’m not entirely certain that some of those who are attacking Volokh recognize the implicit commitments embedded within their attack. If they do, fine, but I want to be sure that what is implicit become explicit at some point.
A historian who studies European societies from the late medieval era to the present has to be uncomfortably aware of just how different the fundamental conception of justice, crime and punishment were in the not-too-distant past. Michel Foucault is far from the only one to have noticed this fact. Hangings in England and elsewhere appear to have been unselfconscious forms of popular spectacle and entertainment in the not too distant past. You can look and look for the haunted conscience of modern subjectivity in those crowds and never find it; instead what you see are many people gathered to watch hangings the way we might gather to watch a 4th of July parade. Many rural communities throughout Europe into the early modern period tried and punished domestic and wild animals for committing crimes against property or crimes of violence. Many people, both elites and commoners, appeared by our standards to be indifferent to certain kinds of pain and suffering on the part of others.
The cultural and social specifics on such issues were often very different in non-Western societies before 1750, but the relative alienness of those pasts to liberal-democratic sensibilities in the present day is often equally pronounced. We’re accustomed to shuddering in horror at the prevalence of human sacrifice in some of large-scale pre-Columbian societies, but it’s fairly clear that our moral understanding of such practices didn’t exist within those historical worlds. It’s fairly clear that it took the violence and destructiveness of the Atlantic slave trade to turn the practice of kinship slavery in West and Equatorial African societies into a moral issue instead of an ordinary part of social practice.
I’m not saying here that because modern ethical frameworks did not exist in the past that we cannot judge those past societies as immoral. But I am saying that to judge commits one to a narrative of progress, to an acceptance of the present as superior to the past. The crowds who gathered at hangings in England before 1750 were not barbaric or savage within their own context. They can only become so from within our own contemporary frame of mind, our own understanding of human progress. To successfully curl our lips in disgust at the past in this respect means not just that we accept that we are different than they, but better.
That has some tricky implications when it’s brought into the framework of the case that Volokh cited, because here we are dealing not with the past, but with two different framings of the present. I hasten to say that the Iranian case cited is not “backward”: in its own way, it’s as modern as we are. The world lives in simultaneous modernity now. But it is different, and it’s a form of difference that I think at least some of those condemning Volokh might otherwise show extraordinary wariness about judging or attacking. Nobody among those to attack Volokh is quite saying, “Those Muslim barbarians!”: they’re very carefully keeping their eyes on Volokh himself. But you almost can’t attack Volokh in this case without committing to a vision of human progress that suggests the Iranian judicial system and even the ordinary Iranians who participated are in some way barbaric.
The whole discussion has a strange ironic cast to it. Volokh almost sounds like a parody of the classic cultural relativist—make no judgments about the Other, in fact, romantically admire the Other for having a better, older, more elementally human way of living socially. Volokh's strongest critics sound like the classic arch-defenders of the Western tradition: the Other in this case is a barbarian, backward, savage; the sooner that the forces of progress and reason can bring this savagery to heel, the better.
Of course, as the really good discussion at Unfogged suggests, the idea of Volokh or anyone else choosing to just embrace a completely different paradigm about violence and justice, to change fundamental social and political norms like a fashion statement, is wrong-headed long before you get to the matter of whether it’s desirable. Volokh in this sense is just as silly as counterculturalist environmentalists who think everyone should live like hunter-gatherers: whether or not that's a good idea, the proposition fails because it's not possible to scribble over the fundamentals of the social order in order to live some other idealized way of life, not at that scale.
So ultimately I don’t disagree with the strong criticism of Volokh, but I do think that both the Iranian case that drew his attention and his uncharacteristically volatile admiration for that case are more complicated than they look at first sight.
March 17, 2005
Fighting For the Equality of Banality?
Dahlia Lithwick has a good column that takes on the recent debate about women writers and newspaper op-ed pages. Bloggers have had their own version of the same debate recently, and it presaged some of the charges and counter-charges being made now about op-ed pages.
Lithwick makes the point that female op-ed writers have felt obligated to say something about the issue, but that men evidently don’t, and that the issue can’t be resolved until the men feel that same obligation. You could say the same about the debate over blogs and gender: almost every blog I know written by a woman had something to say about the issue when it came up, while many male-authored blogs didn’t say anything, including my own.
But Lithwick ends up answering her own question, “Why don’t the men respond?” in ways that I think she scarcely notices. By noticing male absence and female presence, she preemptively identifies male absence as a problem, a symptom, as having an assigned meaning. She begins to make guesses about why men don’t respond, all of which in some fashion assert that non-response as a failure or inadequacy, even when she's sympathetic to what she sees as the reason for that failure (for example, fear of being the target of politically correct ire).
I think that’s a very deep problem with this recurrent debate. I’ve written before about why I find Deborah Tannen and Tannen-ite arguments so frustrating and this is a large part of what is frustrating about them. They preemptively circumscribe the possible answers that a male listener can make to some accusations about exclusion or suppression of female voices, they reductively compress answers that might try to assert the complexity or range of the problem into simple statements of evasion, complicity or shame.
Once Lithwick has put it the way that she has, the choices of response narrow enormously. You can either say, “Look, there’s no pattern at all” and expect a scornful reply, and rightfully so. The pattern, whether we’re talking blogs or op-eds, is real. It exists. Or you can say, “It’s because women writers can’t or don’t want to write op-eds the way they have to be written”, and expect equal scorn, and again rightfully so. Kevin Drum got his drubbings pretty justifiably because he asserted that women don’t write certain kinds of blogs, when demonstrably they do write them. Or you can say, "You're right, I was afraid of speaking up"--but notice that Lithwick hasn't tried to imagine or create space for what legitimate thing a male op-ed writer might want to say that would make them afraid of the response they'll get.
What you can’t say is, “I think you’re asking the wrong questions.” Or “Sometimes what you’re talking about is a problem, and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes women op-ed writers are being excluded, other times what they’ve written just sucks: there isn’t a generalization that covers all cases.”
Most importantly, what gets shoved aside is a prior conversation about the nature of an op-ed page (or a blog) that scrupulously doesn’t yet bring gender into the picture. I think it’s fair to say that at least some of those who want more female voices or more diversity also want op-ed pages to be different from what they are, to not only change the representation but the content. It’s equally apparent that some of the female critics don’t want those op-ed pages to change one iota in their tone or composition, just to have a better balance between men and women.
Tannen’s paradigm, when it creeps into these discussions, tends to pin everyone to Tanner’s ultimately stereotypical, high-toned version of Mars and Venus. Tannen observes those conversational or argumentative differences as matter of sociological or ethnographic fact, and to some extent they are, but tends to suggest—and her followers even more so—that those differences ought to be that way, and the “female” style ought to displace the “male” one because it’s morally or socially preferable.
If the question, “What should a mainstream newspaper’s op-ed page looks like?” or for that matter, “What’s the kind of blogging I like best or want to link to?” precedes the complaint about gender and representation, if it doesn’t presume a certain answer to the problem of gender, then suddenly almost everyone is freed from the script. Kevin Drum doesn’t have to make the incorrect assertion, “There aren’t any women writing the kind of blogs that I link to”; he can say, “These are the kind of blogs I link to” and then be forced to struggle to define what those kinds of blogs are. One of the things he can say, if he wants, is that he only links to blogs that have an already-existing pre-eminence. Yes, I know where that answer’s going to cause a problem in gender terms, but the point is to defer that problem to the next conversation, to not presume that problem in advance, to give everyone a chance to talk about why they have a particular aesthetic without having to already defend that preference as one which causes a diversity problem, or to presume that men will have one preference and women another.
In the context of blogging, for example, I want to be able to say, “I don’t enjoy blogs that are more like livejournals or diaries for the most part” before I have to deal with the question of what that means in gendered terms. I want to say, “I don’t enjoy simple news aggregators either,” and “I don’t enjoy single-note ideological blogs” before anyone guesses about what that means for the gender composition of my preferences.
In the context of op-eds, male editors and writers should be able to say, “But I like op-ed pages just the way they are in terms of the kinds of content they feature” before someone says, “So you just like to read what men have to say, eh?”
When we get these discussions in the right order, there’s a much better chance that we’ll find out that some women op-ed writers also want op-ed pages to read just as they do now, and some don’t. We might find that men also divide along those lines: maybe there are men who want to write op-eds or men who want to read columns that are fundamentally unlike what is typically found there now.
The inevitably messy question of what makes a columnist (or blogger) “good”, which is a question that can only be answered in interesting ways if the people answering it are allowed to be brutally honest about what they think makes a columnist or blogger “bad” as well. Let me ask it this way: if I find the kind of stuff that your average pundit tied to the Democratic or Republican Party has to offer a load of banal crap—I pretty much feel the way Jon Stewart does on this issue—then it’s hard to know why I should fight for Susan Estrich to publish the same kind of banal party-line punditry on op-ed pages as the men already publish. I’m not sure what exactly that accomplishes beyond a sort of so-what equity. I think that equity is a good thing, sure, but it’s not where I want to spend my energies, fighting so that some women can publish the same amount and kind of crap as some men. If subverting the dominant link hierarchy means linking to a female Instapundit, well, pardon me if I think that’s not exactly a triumph worth investing lots of labor in achieving.
Sure, the point that many made in reply to Kevin Drum is apt: there’s already many female Instapundits, and if you like Instapundit, maybe you ought to be linking to them. Why don’t you?
But we already know the story about power laws and blogging, and there’s a version of that with op-eds, too. What gets up there first reproduces itself over time, a fact which is not without implications in gendered terms, given historical patterns of male dominance. However. If it’s worth spending time fighting the power (law), I’d rather spend that time to find what interests me, whomever the author might be, than trying to laboriously sift and sort to get a 50-50 balance of men and women saying the same old stuff. In fact, to satisfy my interest in different content, I almost think I have to be indifferent to the question of gender equity: I just need to go where I like, to what I like. It may turn out that’s by women, it may turn out that’s by men, but if I assume in advance that it has to be by women, I’m going to pre-purchase a Tannenite bill of stereotypical goods, I’m going to force myself to ignore some of the things that catch my eye because they’re written by the wrong kind of person, because the first and last goal is numerical parity.
March 16, 2005
Calling Patrick Nielsen Hayden
There’s been quite a few revivified “space operas” in recent years that I’ve really enjoyed, many of them playing around in some of the same kinds of conceptual spaces, in futures where the definition and meaning of “humanity” has become quite plastic. Some of them read a bit like “Book of the New Sun meets E.E. Doc Smith”, such as John Wright’s great series that begins with The Golden Age.
One of these series I quite liked was by Tony Daniel: the two books published are Metaplanetary and Superluminal. It wasn’t the absolutely greatest work of its kind that I’ve ever read, but it was extremely enjoyable, with an infectiously page-turning narrative, some interesting ideas, some strong characters. I’ve been looking at Amazon for a while wondering when the next volume was coming out. Today I decided to google “Tony Daniel” and I found out that the next volume is never coming out, because his publisher decided to cancel it.
I don’t quite understand why an SF publisher would stop short of finishing a three-part series, even if the sales weren’t stellar on the first two parts. Why not go the distance? Some SF series which start in a rather unheralded way gain steam over time and eventually pay off pretty handsomely.
I think this is the most disappointing series cancellation I’ve come across. I was also pretty frustrated when Patrick Adkins’ excellent retelling of Greek mythology, focusing on the untold stories of the Titans that preceded Zeus, was cancelled, but I could understand that a bit better: it was a pretty boutique series, and by the third volume, Adkins was starting to get into territory where he was going to be retelling stories we already have heard rather than filling in a story only known in its outlines, a harder act to pull off.
I turned up a bit of evidence that another series I sort of liked, though this one was a bit cheesier, The Journeys of McGill Feighan, by Kevin O’Donnell, might actually be about to start up again after a really long hiatus. I just found out that a long-interrupted series by Pamela Sargent on the terraforming of Venus that I thought was decent enough was actually completed in 2002, which I didn’t realize—now the third book is already out of print!
There’s also old series where I occasionally mournfully snoop around to see if somehow there was another volume that I never saw—Sterling Lanier’s two Hiero books, for example.
I really wish somebody would make sure that Daniel’s series isn’t one of those series that people have to snuffle around looking for a conclusion to for the next two decades. Somebody give that man a contract, please. I promise to buy two copies. I want to see how it all turns out. Isn’t there some karmic principle that says that if Robert Jordan can continue his quest to destroy the remaining trees on planet Earth as long as there are still people dumb enough to buy his crimes against language and narrative, then a tightly plotted, entertaining SF trilogies should at least get to go the distance?
March 16, 2005
On the Other Side of the Screen
One of the things I was afraid of when I had a child was that everything I’d previously said about childhood and children was going to be contradicted. I’d had a couple of people predict that, in fact, that I’d change the way I thought about television, commercialism, and so on.
So far, not happening, and I don’t feel that’s taking any close-mindedness on my part. Yes, ok, I do see in a new light how difficult the advice to monitor what your child sees can be. For example, I really find the Sci-Fi Channel’s promotional bumpers very irritating, because you can be watching something largely innocent with your four-year old and then the promotional bumper comes on that plugs a horror movie with pretty explicit footage. Walk away from the TV at the wrong moment and you might have a problem. Yes, ok, I am impressed at how seductive some commercial tie-ins can be. Emma was walking through the grocery store with me and every time she saw some character she knew on a cereal box or other product, she wanted it.
But come on, these are not such difficult challenges. I just pointed out to my four-year old that we already tried Frosted Flakes once before and she didn’t like them, and she wouldn't like them any better just because the characters from Robots were on the back. Or I just tell her point blank that she’s not getting X, Y or Z. And she’s pretty good at censoring her own input: if something frightens her, she looks away and asks me to change the channel or skip the scene.
What I’m more pleased about is that Emma makes me feel even more confident about my more general claims on the innate “interpretative intelligence” of many children, more certain that most advocacy groups concerned about children’s media consumption flatly misunderstand children and underestimate their abilities.
We were watching Sesame Street a few days ago and a segment I remember from long ago came on where Ernie frets to Bert that he doesn’t feel special in any way. Bert enthusiastically reassures Ernie about his special individuality. It’s actually a kind of role-reversal: Ernie is uncharacteristically morose and depressed, Bert uncharacteristically enthusiastic and expressive. Ernie then turns to the camera and reassures the audience that yes, they too are also special. He instructs them to run their fingers through their own hair to feel how special their hair is.
So ok, I run my fingers through my hair. Emma looks at me curiously. “What are you doing, Dad?” I reply, “Ernie said to run fingers through your hair.”
She looks at me incredulously. “Dad, he’s not talking to us. He’s talking to someone we can’t see on his side of the screen.” Considering how often children’s TV shows try to showily interact with the audience, I shouldn’t have been surprised that she had a worked out interpretation of what was happening when they did so. But I was surprised, and delighted, even if I felt like the village idiot.
Then the segment ended and Emma turned to me. “Dad, I think Ernie was just pretending he didn’t feel special. I don’t think he really felt that way at all.” That’s not the first time that she’s smelled out the hidden agenda in a kid’s show without any prompting from me, but I was still impressed.
I honestly don’t think that this is because she’s smart (though she is and yeah I’m proud of her). I think it’s because so many well-intentioned children’s shows are much more obviously manipulative in their intent than the producers of those shows or their parental devotees tend to think. I think many kids have a nearly instinctive nose for manipulation, and most of them have an equally innate suspicion of it.
Good for them.
March 16, 2005
Tinpot
The New York Times story in last Sunday’s newspaper about the Bush Administration’s production of canned television “news” reports is bad news, and sensible people of all ideological stripes should be worried about it.
One of the first things you notice when you travel to most of postcolonial Africa is the creepily amateurish and cheesy way that official propaganda operates in the officially dominated public sphere. I don’t think it looks that way just to outsiders: just about every local I got to know, from the guys at the local bar to colleagues at the University of Zimbabwe, found most of this propaganda laughable and obvious. If the government was able to manipulate people successfully, it was usually way through mechanisms and channels way off the public stage, away from the masks of power. The more tinpot the autocrat, the more tinpotted his attempts to control his image. Occasionally there have been autocrats with a certain style, with the grand vulgarity that Achille Mbembe has written about: Mobutu had a craft about his obscene grandiosity. Occasionally you get dictators with a gift for signifying the insanity of unconstrained power: Sani Abacha’s sunglasses, Idi Amin’s deliberate absurdities, Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s performative cannibalism. But it’s all tinpot, even the relatively bland stuff like putting the head of state’s portrait in every nook and cranny of public space or using the state-run media for banally crude repetitions of everyday official falsehoods.
That’s the way I feel about the Bush Administration’s media efforts. Before I get to any grand concerns about the nature of “objectivity” or “bias” in the media or the expansion of federal authority, I just feel a more visceral, emotional disgust at this shift. Sure, the US government has always made propaganda of some sort or another, and sure, most Presidential Administrations since 1960 have had complicatedly collusive relations with the press at times, but this just feels different. Whatever larger issues it raises, it first and foremost seems to lack class. To be tinpot. To make the United States feel less like a place that is unlike everywhere else in the world.
And that is a practical problem that goes well beyond my own discomfort. The Bush Administration continues to flail around about trying to improve the image of the United States abroad, particularly in the Arab world, now turning to Karen Hughes as the latest in a spectacularly inept selection of personnel and strategies for coming to grips with that problem.
You want to know how to improve America’s image abroad? To sell our policies? You want to know how the Bush Administration should promote its policy objectives, whether domestic or foreign? Here’s a different solution: don’t produce canned news reports. Prepare a digest of articles about a particular issue from ten major media outlets across the ideological spectrum, from National Review to The Nation. For extra credit, throw in some blog entries. Release it to the world. Do it every week on every major initiative. Put together a package of major American voices on political questions and send them on a tour. Send Juan Cole, Paul Berman, Leon Wiesieltier, James Fallows, Katha Pollitt, Fareed Zakaria and Paul Wolfowitz abroad as a group to talk about the war in Iraq, doing panel discussions and individual lectures.
Do the same for any major initiative, even domestic ones. Collate what we already have to say as a nation and people and make that digest available for any who seek it.
That’s the opposite of tinpot. It’s what officially dominated public spheres in autocratic societies don’t do. It’s what a government unafraid of the freedom and diversity of its own citizens would do, should do.
Failing that, stay out of the business of manufacturing news. It’s not as if there is any shortage of media support for the Bush Administration: why manufacture news when there’s Fox? Once upon a time, when the United States government blasted the United Nations’ truly horrible plans for a New World Information Order, it was pretty easy to do so in a principled way that carried credibility and authority. Now I wonder. Stay out of the business of making puff-piece “news” about controversial policies not just because it’s a dangerous intrusion of the federal government into alarming terrain but also because it lacks class, at a time when the success of American policy abroad right now depends being a class act.
March 15, 2005
Ecoutez et Repetez Beep
If anyone asks me if I can speak French, I tell them I can still do dialogues from my high school ALM textbook, the ones where we used to listen to the dialogues on a tape loop and repeat them at the sound of the tone. My rather dotty high school French teacher would generally react roughly the same whether we collectively mumbled or precisely reproduced the French on the tape, unless you were dumb enough to say “Pair-ehs” instead of “Paree”.
“Michel, Anne, vous travaillez? Euh, non, nous regardons la television. Pourquoi?”
“Il est laid, ce bebe! Eh, doucement, c’est moi!”
Very useful stuff, that.
Scott McLemee writes about recent claims that the lecture is vanishing from the armamentarium of academics, and I can’t help but think in part that the essay by Stanley Solomon that McLemee is reacting to assumes that what people in education departments say about pedagogy is in fact what is actually happening pedagogically in university classrooms. This seems a bad assumption to me: I sometimes feel that the scholarship written by specialists in education on pedagogy exists in a separate, parallel dimension, as if it were about a university in a Borges story. The assumptions of such scholarship, and its prevailing statements about what is or is not a best practice, at least have an oblique relationship to everyday teaching practice in most departments and by most professors.
In practical terms, I suspect almost every academic lectures, even at the smallest liberal arts college where discussions are considered the pedagogical norm. I prefer discussion formats but there are plenty of times where I lecture, and even classes that I design substantially around lectures.
If lecturing has gotten a bad name, it’s because there are some consistent flaws in the way that some professors do it. First, and obviously, some professors are just hopelessly boring in their lectures, whether or not the content of the lecture is well-constructed. This is not a personal judgment: I think almost anyone can learn not to be horribly boring. Faculty are boring when they stick too tightly to a pre-written text: you can’t be interesting if you’re just reading something aloud, and in any event, I think reading a pre-written lecture sometimes suggests that you don’t really have a confident command of the material. Faculty are boring when they ramble disjointedly about nothing in particular: that’s the opposite problem from just reading a fully written lecture. Faculty are boring when they don’t communicate or connect with their audience, when the lecture is not constructed to and for the students in the room, but someone else entirely.
A lecture like that is very much like my old high school French class, and it deserves to be slagged on. Yes, there were and probably still are academics who commit those sins. No, there's no reason to mourn if that kind of lecture, which really serves no use, disappears.
I think an even more common problem is the failure to make a strategic decision about why and how to lecture within the overall plan of a course. Some professors schedule lectures simply to schedule lectures, and then look to fill the preordained calendar with things to say. My rule of thumb is, if there’s a good, compact, and usefully engaging reading that covers background material well, I’m glad to assign it and to use that as my method for delivering that content. In modern African history, I don’t feel for the most part that there is any textbook that serves that purpose in a way that I am comfortable with. So I take on that job myself. It would be a mistake to just get up and just repeat what an assigned reading had said, but that’s what a lot of academics do.
It’s also a mistake not to call upon what you’ve said in lecture later in the course, either to expect to see it used on exams or papers, or to carry it through into discussion. That too is an issue: lectures that just seem to hang out there in isolation, never being put into any kind of practice, an ordeal for their own sake.
Probably you can overcorrect for these problems. There’s a boundary where being engaging starts to slip into a contentless song-and-dance routine, where entertainment erodes education. There’s some usefulness to repeating and emphasizing what was said in the readings. There are topics which you feel obligated to cover in a lecture that are hard, for intrinsic reasons, to connect to the rest of the content.
And yes, some people really are just extraordinarily gifted at lecturing, not to be imitated by the rest of us. One of my colleagues here in Political Science is pretty famous with generations of Swarthmore undergrads for his lecturing skills. I’ve never forgotten some of the material I learned from lectures by Bruce Masters at Wesleyan University, where I was an undergraduate: he just had a way of compressing immense amounts of detail into highly memorable, well-organized, entertaining packages.
I actually suspect that the real problem out there is not that the lecture is disappearing, but that most faculty have no idea how to manage discussions so that they don’t just turn into meandering bull sessions or self-confirming smugness. I think that’s a much harder pedagogical nut to crack than the placement and delivery of lectures.
March 9, 2005
At the Checkpoint
This week the bad David Brooks ambled out and degraded the intelligence of his readers. I’ve come to have an appreciation for Brooks when he’s on his game: he can do a good job being both entertaining and interesting as well as provocative. But his love poem to Paul Wolfowitz is the other David Brooks, the one given to intellectual sloth and bogus generalizations.
Wolfowitz’s most ardent critics are not and have never been the “infantile left”, if by that Brooks means the antiwar faction that tends to be most strongly drawn to the views of Michael Moore et al. Wolfowitz actually plays a small role in Fahrenheit, albeit a memorable one visually. For the antiwar movement that Brooks gestures towards, the neoconservative argument about Iraq is a mere smoke screen for something deeper, something prior: the expansion of American economic and geopolitical hegemony, US interests in Middle Eastern oil, the Bush family fortune, and so on. Even anti-Zionist critics tend to see neocon arguments about democracy in the Middle East as a mere distraction from a “real” agenda, namely, the support of Israel.
So Brooks wants to play gallant knight and rescue his fair damsel from these dragons, but in so doing just re-enacts the same sick, sad, dull tableaux that the neoconservatives in power and their ardent groupies like Christopher Hitchens and Michael Totten have been replaying over and over again since the drums of war started pounding. It’s a shadowplay that lets them avoid the elephant in the room, namely, a substantial, thoughtful, deeply intellectual disagreement about the historical genesis of liberal democracy in the world.
Wolfowitz is interesting. I agree with that. He’s also a genuine intellectual.. He has a theory about liberal democracy and its relationship to 21st Century humanity, a theory that other thinkers have done even more interesting and passionate elaborations of. He’s in the middle of a test of his theory. These are all true: I've long said that I think it’s a mistake to just cast all this aside and go looking for the “real” motive, like oil or graft or Zionism. It’s a curious paradox: one of the most anti-intellectual Presidents in the last century has subcontracted out his foreign policy, the center piece of his Presidency, to intellectuals.
Now it does occur to me, somewhat bitterly, that I thought we’d learned a lesson about this with Vietnam, that allowing intellectuals to test grand geopolitical theories without some common sense checks and balances, not to mention some healthy pluralism and skepticism within the circles of power, is a really bad idea.More importantly, though, if Brooks wants to write a hagiography of Wolfowitz, he’s got to ask an intellectual’s question about his favored intellectual. Namely, how well has his grand geopolitical experiment gone so far?
I think there’s a few interesting things out there in the last month or so that a Wolfowitz defender can legitimately say are intriguing, promising: the Iraqi elections, the political news out of Egypt and Lebanon. These are developments that even his critics have to pause and be thoughtful about, particularly the Iraqi elections. I don't share the extreme hostility of Juan Cole and others towards those elections: I think something genuine and meaningful happened. I think there are long-term developments that are also promising for Wolfowitz and his defenders. For one, it’s clear that the Iraqi insurgency (I think insurgencies, plural), whatever it is, is not an authentically popular revolutionary movement with genuine aspirations to gaining national power or controlling the state, that instead it is a kind of gangster nihilism. That can only be slightly encouraging, however, since the United States and its Iraqi clients have for the most part failed to establish themselves as the overwhelmingly preferable alternative. Iraqis drawn to neither, or trying to pursue the renovation of their society in serious ways while refusing to bow either to intimidation or to become compliant clients, have very slim reeds at which to grasp.
The criticism of Wolfowitz has always come from much more powerfully serious thinkers and activists who question the generality of his theories and models and the specificity of his understanding of the region he’s experimenting with. The defenders of the war in Iraq, and Wolfowitz in specific, usually refuse to engage with this criticism at all. If they do, they’ll gloss it, carelessly, as amoral “realism” (as David Adesnik did to Matthew Yglesias this week).
What’s at stake here is both an abstract theory but also a quite empirical argument about how and when liberal democracy has taken hold in the world, and what actually defines “liberal democracy”. What's at stake here is also a principled argument about the conditionalities and realities of interventionism, one that asks in all seriousness that the pro-interventionists explain how they know which injustices require the immense cost and suffering of an intervention and which do not. Here it’s not just that Wolfowitz’ theory is up against a very strongly detailed, intellectually meticulous, and wide-ranging opposition, but also that Wolfowitz and his defenders are prone to a kind of horribly sloppy, contemptibly instrumental tendency to grab at any shred of evidence supporting their theories and complete ignore anything else. I have complained about this tendency before, and I’ll do so again, I’m sure. It offends me, mortally, deeply, profoundly. Nothing offends me more about the war, in fact, than the blunt instrumentalism and rationalizations, the evasions, the diversions. I'm a skeptic even about the best-practices argument for the war, but I'd be a much happier man now if I saw more examples of people making that best-practices argument.
Take Lebanon, for example. The neocon argument allegedly has always been premised on arguing that the achievement of freedom is the more important litmus test of the Bush approach than the narrow or exclusive establishment of democratic mechanisms for the selection of national and local leaders. Freedom of speech, of assembly, of conviction, the rule of law were to be the benchmarks. I think that’s actually a very sound insight. Outside pressure on postcolonial African states in the 1980s and 1990s was obsessively focused on getting multiparty democratic elections scheduled, without considering the far more important problem of political liberalization. The consequence of that, in part, was fair multiparty elections in states like Zambia that merely replaced the old corrupt autocrat with a new corrupt autocrat, the old ruling party with a new one.
Now in Lebanon suddenly the whole project of the neocons has taken an abrupt turn into much more conventional kinds of formulations about sovereignity and self-determination, that what is important for Lebanon is to get Syrian troops out, that the absence of Syria equals the achievement of democracy. Sorry, how so? If you’re really interested in the spread of liberalism, e.g., freedom, then you ought to be just as excited by a half-million people in the streets peacefully demonstrating for Syrian presence, even if you don’t like what they have to say. But evidently it’s more important to poke Syria in the eye and play certain kinds of power-politics, to move the yardstick of what constitutes “democracy” to “whatever George Bush wants”. When people say what you like, they’re heroically free. When they disagree with you, they’re lackeys and stooges. (Christopher Hitchens is especially fond of this formula). Remind me: who are the amoral realists here? Remind me also: how can we, of all the actors on the global stage, afford to make an argument that sovereignity alone is the simple key to political liberalization, given what we’re trying to do in Iraq?
The criticism of Wolfowitz has come most strongly from scholars and intellectuals who protest that liberal practices and democratic norms grow from the bottom-up, in organic ways, within the complex histories and cultures of a given society. If you believe that, than the screaming ignorance of Wolfowitz and most of the Iraq war planners about Iraq itself and its surrounding region becomes an issue. It’s only irrelevant if Wolfowitz’s faith in the simple universality of all modern human subjectivity is warranted, if all people everywhere not only yearn equally for liberal democracy, but have exactly the same highly specific working model of liberal democracy in mind when they so yearn. So Brooks is lazy, even contemptible, in absenting the real challenge to Wolfowttz from his panegyric. I think there’s plenty of interesting developments on the ground in the last month that a more honest defender of Wolfowitz and the neocon vision of the Iraq War can point to and suggest that perhaps the neocons had some things right after all—but not if that requires an echo chamber or strawmen in order to be said with confidence.
There’s another direction where I wish that Wolfowitz’s defenders took him more seriously, where I wish that Wolfowitz and the other neocons inside the Administration took themselves more seriously. We have one problem that the defenders of the war who share the neocon vision continue to lazily evade the real debate. We have another problem that the actual implementation of the vision comes pre-equipped with a crippling set of double standards that amount to a thorough form of self-sabotage. Even if you grant that the war’s aims are based on a serious and credible intellectual premise, you’d have to be worried about how badly that premise is operationalized.
This week’s news about the shooting of an Italian intelligence agent at a US-manned barricade is a good example. For months now, both Iraqis and observers have been talking about a pattern of reckless military aggression at checkpoints. They have often been met with overwrought, hysteric condemnation from pro-war pundits and bloggers, with accusations that showing concern over such incidents is just a tactic in a conspiratorial attempt to weaken the war effort. Hitchens hit the low note perfectly when he declared that the US can only lose in Iraq if it defeats itself, with the clear suggestion that any and all criticism of the war effort is a form of treason. Sorry, but that’s got it exactly opposite. If the war really is following the most generously constructed version of the neocon argument, it is absolutely crucial to treat every Iraqi citizen with the same presumptive respect as the US Constitution instructs the US government to treat its own citizens.
The whole point of the occupation is to demonstrate the virtues of the rule of law, to move Iraqis from subjugation to autocracy to a society in which their rights-bearing humanity is fully recognized by the state. I’m absolutely in sympathy with the soldiers at those checkpoints, with their legitimate anxieties and fearfulness, facing the very real possibility of death from suicide bombing. They’re not monsters when they shoot quickly at any possible threat. But at the same time, if you hand the men and women on those dangerous, deadly firing lines a ready-made alibi, if you don’t have meaningful oversight or a demand for restraint, even saints in time are going to pre-emptively open fire on anything that even vaguely concerns them, and more orphans and even allies are going to tumble out of the back of cars coated in the blood of their loved ones and associates. And afterwards, they're going to say that the car was speeding, or failed to respond to commands, when very possibly the car and its inhabitants were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. If the uncritical, unthinking defenders of the war habitually froth at the mouth every time this happens and cry "Rally round our troops, boys!", presumptively believe that whatever the Pentagon is serving up today must be true, they're turning their backs on their own declared war objectives. The Iraqis are owed the same oversight, diligence and skepticism about authority that we would demand for ourselves.
If there is anyone who ought to be deeply, gravely concerned about unwarranted shootings at checkpoints, accidental deaths of civilians, torture in US prisons, killings of surrendered prisoners, it’s the advocates of the war, at least the ones who believe in the Wolfowitz vision as it is represented by Brooks, Hitchens and others. They ought to be concerned for very functional reasons, because failures of these kinds are effectively losses on the battlefield as grave and serious as Bull Run or Gazala. They ought to be concerned also for philosophical reasons, the same way I would be concerned if the police started busting down the doors in my own neighborhood for what seemed flimsy reasons and then hauling away some of my neighbors without any real due process.
Wolfowitz and his defenders want to convince us that humanity is united by its universal thirst for liberal democratic freedoms, well then, how can they possibly fail to react to injustice or error in Iraq with anything less than the grave and persistent concern they might exhibit in a domestic US context? Where’s the genuine regret, the mourning, the persistent and authentic sympathy? I don’t mean some bullshit one-liner you toss off before moving on to slam Michael Moore again for three or four paragraphs, I mean the kind of consistent attention and depth of compassion that signals that you take the humanity and more signally the rights of Iraqis as seriously as you take the humanity of your neighbors. Only when you’ve got that concern credibly in place, as a fundamental part of your political and moral vision, do you get to mournfully accept that some innocents must die in the struggle to achieve freedom.
The Wolfowitzian defenders of the war want to skip Go and collect $200.00 on this one, go straight to the day two centuries hence when the innocent dead recede safely into the bloody haze of anonymous tragedy. Sorry, but this is not on offer, least of all for them. If they can’t find the time, emotion and intellectual rigor to be as consumed by the case of a blameless mother and father turned into gore and sprayed on their children as they are by what Sean Penn had to say about the war last week, then their entire argument about the war is nothing more than the high-minded veneer of a more bestial and reasonless fury. If Brooks or anyone else wants to rise to toast Paul Wolfowitz, then they’ll have to live up to the vision they attribute to him, and meet the real problems and failures of that vision honestly and seriously.
March 3, 2005
Down In the Dumps
Wealth Bondage has a wonderfully expressed post, "How to Write Like a Liberal Sack of Garbage", that I found through The Weblog. It’s the kind of critique that leaves me at a loss, though. Vastly more interesting and intelligent and ambivalent than the usual dog-bites-man drama of radical anger at perceived liberal wussiness, but it leaves me in the same place, half-Jimmy Cagney dancing on top of the burning gas tanks screaming “Top of the world, Ma!”, defiant at the accuser; half Jimmy Stewart with a startled, sleepy innocence saying “Gosh, gee-willikers, what’s all the fuss about?” Maybe the right thing is Travis Bickle: you talking to me? You talking to me? Or Groucho Marx, knowing that to be kicked out of the club is far better than to be admitted to it.
In any event, here’s what I posted in the comments thread at Wealth Bondage:
I'm sorry, I missed the part where the virile alternative to liberal eunuchry and mounting the Cross with hammer in hand was laid out. If it just comes down to what gives you pleasure--letting id take pen in hand, and glorious glossililalia shouted freely to no one save the others huddled in the miserable pews, venom shared among poison congregants against the new ruling scum and liberals too cowardly to just give up and join the defeated in their justifiable rages--then I'll stick with what gives me pleasure, which is the pursuit of public reason and the hope that decency is widely distributed if slow to rise to the surface when it is under assault. Because then it just comes down to which circle jerk you want to join: yours or the liberals, and I suppose I rather prefer to wank where I'm used to the other wankers.
If on the other hand you think you've got a better hand to play against the Horowitz types, I think I missed that part of the entry. I got to the dump part but you sort of just left me there in the garbage with everybody else who followed the piper's tune. I suppose it's better to huddle in loving com-misery amidst the garbage than to actually be garbage like Horowitz, but it doesn't seem to actually rise to anything resembling a "plan" with the usual feature of a plan, the promise of superior accomplishment of some shared objective. Since most of the bill of particulars laid against the oh-so-reasonable liberals is that they're foredoomed to failure, the implication is that you’ve got a better mousetrap in mind. If not, then we're back to deciding which circle to jerk in, and that's just a matter of taste. De gustibus non est disputandum.
To continue on this theme, I know it seems a hopelessly prosaic, uncool, crude response to the poetics of the original essay to ask, “So you got a better idea?” But that’s a big part of it for me. For eighteen billion reasons, at least two or three of them pretty good ones, I simply don’t buy that Coulter, Limbaugh, Horowitz and others succeed in the public sphere merely because of power, merely because of domination, merely because of false consciousness, or whatever analytic alibi is being peddled this week. I don’t deny that power is present, that domination plays a role, that the culture industry exists, that some people have a clearly false understanding of the world and their place within it. But the bad propagandists and conspirators of the populist right also succeed because they sometimes hit a persuasive note, understand the architecture of popular consciousness, reach people where they live. Stuart Hall tried to get the British left to understand this under the assault of Thatcherism, that it doesn’t do any good to go whining off about the media or the corporations or evil old Maggie while you wait around for your own favored Godot, the hidden king-figure of the true and righteous masses that you think lies slumbering six fathoms deep in the social landscape and needs only hear the right notes on the ideological horn to awake and arise. It does even less good to descend into the self-confirming doominess of the postwar Frankfurt School, to take consolation in the purity and righteousness and fury of our own thought while agreeing in dismay that the masses are asses and that we hate television.
So if you take it as a given that Coulter, Horowitz and so on are indecent, destructive, and malevolently instrumental, that they have no interest in genuine communication or democratic discourse, that they intend to use the public sphere as a tool to destroy democratic practice and all their enemies in the process, that nevertheless doesn’t mean that you have to accept an account of their effectiveness that removes them from history and turns them into superhuman demons gifted with inexplicable powers. If they connect, however imperfectly, with some audiences, that is not merely a consequence of having web pages or access to Fox News. It is also because some of what they say is heard by some mass audiences as having some truth value.
I write as a liberal sack of garbage not because I think that I am writing to Gentlemen and Ladies on the other side, and thinking they accord me the same respect. I write it because the only way to win a rigged game is to play fair and hope that the onlookers will eventually notice who cheats and who does not. I write as a sack of garbage because I believe first that you cannot take arms against a vast sea of your fellow humans and either hope or wish to win. Because I think you have to listen for what your enemies say to find out what among their statements makes some fractured sense to the larger audiences drawn to them, and figure out how to rescue those accidental honesties and make them respectable, real ones. I think you can only do that with your cards on the table: the game is not being played against Coulter or Horowitz, but with an eye to the spectators. Setting out to win that game of sympathies with a conscious will to lie, to hide the cards, to match cheat for cheat, is a bad idea both because it obscures the ultimate purpose of struggle and because it actually hands another weapon to the cheaters. The spectators are watching: if we start to match them lie for lie, cheat for cheat, cheap shot for cheap shot, we walk right into the caricature that’s been drawn of us. I write as I do because I’m hoping to connect with popular veins of consciousness and knowledge that are very different from mine on terms of mutual toleration, possibly even respect, to persuade others with a certain humility of ambition and affect without losing sight of my faith in the rightness and soundness of my views. The Happy Tutor suggests in a response to my criticism that yes indeedy, the thing to do is to lie, to match every lie with a lie. I just can’t do that. I don’t think I ought to, either.
In the comments at Wealth Bondage, Turbulent Velvet suggests that I’m being kind of uncool by taking it all so seriously, or seeing myself as one of the targets of the original essay. To some extent, this is a demonstration of the basic difference here between preferred kinds of public language that the Happy Tutor’s essay is concerned with. Me, the sack of garbage who tries to communicate plainly, ploddingly earnestly, in good faith, naïve and pompous at the same time; on the other hand, the clever, ingenious, subversive voice full of double-meanings and ciphers that can score wounds and then plausibly deny that any wounding was meant. The square and the hip, the establishment and the subversive. Summing it up that way just makes you want to open a big can of Kumbuya-ya, to think of the conversation as just one of those accidental misunderstandings that happen when two superheroes meet up, or just one more episode in the long marital quarrel between liberals and the left. Kiss and make-up.
But as Turbulent Velvet observes I seem perfectly happy with the thought that I’m not on the left any longer, if still a "liberal" of the kind the Happy Tutor describes. Significantly for me that’s because I have absolutely zero desire to be reminded to join the team, to wait until it’s the right time to talk about those questions which people on the left have deemed unwise to talk about. Shut up about Ward Churchill, etc.: it’s not yet time, you’re helping the bad guys. Smells like team spirit. To be honest, I don’t care about any of that and I think the only way to not getting to care about any of that is to not worry about whether you’re “left”. It’s not why I write; it’s not what I write. I write what I like, what I feel compelled to write, what I think is true but also what happens to draw my interest.
But it’s also that I doubt very much the strategic instincts of some of the left, both for deep structural and highly contingent reasons, and as much in the case of the Happy Tutor’s essay as any other. I recognize the left, broadly speaking, as sharing my sense of the dangers of the present moment, so I care very much what people on the left think, both for personal and strategic reasons. I mean, no matter what, it's the old neighborhood, you know? In its just-kidding-you-liberal-pussies way, the Happy Tutor’s essay suggests that the earnest liberal tribunes of public reason suck first and foremost because they’re going to lose the battle against the populist right and in the most humiliating way. That’s what makes me grab the essay by its lapels and say, “So what’s your great idea, motherfucker?”, at which point it dissolves into totally great, seductive, beautiful prose that is roughly as prescriptively useful as Negri ahd Hardt calling the Multitude to some nebulously teleological barricades. As I observe later in the comments thread:
It frustrates me that this is seen as a dialectical honey pot and thus a triumph because I, a bear, have earnestly wandered into the trap, where the children can stick Piggy's head on a stick and howl in delight and yet also say, "What, me worry? Do you think we really meant to criticize?" It's an old kind of pomo kung-fu and I confess to grevious weariness with it even while appreciating its wit, its inventiveness, its rhetorical and tactical brilliance. Thus goes my entire professional life, I suppose: unable to indulge the stupidities of crude anti-postmodernism, unable to tolerate the cul-de-sac hipness of the painfully pomo. Forgive me my passing annoyance; I'll go back to playing the part of Gomer Pyle, and the sophisticates can get back to lounging about in their bathrobes and smoking their pipes.
Still, what the Tutor offers is certainly better than listening to umpteen million less interesting leftists tell me about the fabulous efficacy of Michael Moore at mobilizing the masses and how all we need is one, two, a thousand Fahrenheits. Even so, it doesn’t convince me that my own sense of the road ahead--both privately felt and publically counseled--is lacking and I should just kick back and let someone else drive for a while.
March 1, 2005
Impersonation
Scott McLemee writes about the recent revelation that Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, thought for a while to be a 19th Century African-American author, turns out to have been white. Over at Crooked Timber, the discussion has been about what this says about historicist literary criticism, that a mediocre author is interesting when she’s black and boring when she’s white. I don’t think it reveals anything especially horrible about historicism except for perhaps that it tends to have a bit of a threadbare functionalism in the way it reads and understands culture, that it reduces literature to the status of document. (Isn’t that what the discipline of history is for?) It’s also a bit frustrating that some historicism amounts to little more than a multicultural salvage project, to get “one more” person of a particular identity onto the list of “author”. This seems to me to just miss the more interesting problem of the historically changing nature of authorship and culture to a quest for “more voices”, as if we have to correct past injustices and silences by reading the cultural order of our own day into the past.
McLemee has some more interesting insights in his piece. For one, how much scholarship rests on the transmission of facts which, when you trace them back, tend to decompose into mere hints, suggestions or dubious interpretations at their point of origin. When I taught a class on a single primary text a few years back, some of the students were a bit unnerved at how weak some of the received wisdom or conventional scholarly understanding of the text actually seemed when we got into the specific close reading of it. This is one reason why academics make a big deal out of questions of precision and craftwork, because a tremendous amount of knowledge production actually relies on trust.
I think there’s another issue floating around in here that strikes me as important, if somewhat tangential. Some observers ask cynically how it is possible to read a novel in a new way simply because you think its author is black, to find nuance that you then say is not there once you’re back to thinking the author is white again. I think that says something very interesting not about the gullibility of literary critics but about how easy it is for many of us to convincingly simulate or represent the voices of other identities.
Periodically there have been enormous controversies over works commonly taken to be authored by people of color that turn out probably to have been written by whites. The Education of Little Tree is one of the best known examples, but there are many others. In fact, the entire modern global history of “identity” is absolutely loaded with people who capably perform or simulate an identity other than their "natural" one for their entire lives. Impersonation is as basic a fact of ethnic, racial, gender, religious and other identities as is “authenticity”.
I think there are a lot of things you can take away from this fact. One of them is that anyone who tries to enforce and regulate claims of authenticity in the domain of culture and representation ought to be regarded with suspicion. That’s the obvious lesson. The more subtle one might be that it is far more possible for people to empathetically and intellectually understand the experiences of others than our received wisdom about race, gender and other identities assumes, that a white American through intellect, will and emotional insight can credibly imagine what it is like to be a black American, that a woman can credibly imagine what it is like to be male, and so on. The govering metaphor I like to apply to this capacity is one of translation: that we can translate the experiences of others, sometimes through impersonation, sometimes just through intellectual inquiry.
Accepting—even embracing—impersonation as a possibility would be unsettling to the kind of historicist literary criticism that looks to textual content for final or fixed clues about the social identity of an author, that assumes a white man couldn’t convincingly act the part of a Native American or that Shakespeare couldn’t sound highly educated if he weren’t himself so. There’s a pretty good argument to be made that the central adaptive purpose of human intelligence in the course of its early evolution was the ability to imagine what’s going on inside the consciousness of another human or animal: we shouldn’t be surprised when we find black authors who sound white or white authors able to simulate blackness. It’s an ability that we prize in authors and artists some of the time: I suppose I think we should prize it all the time.
Perhaps that’s the problem with historicist literary criticism: by borrowing the often dour obsession of historians with the factual reliability of the archive, some historicist critics miss the point that their central job is to understand fiction. And even here, the insight you can take away from those fictions, from the capacity to make persuasive fictions about the inner voices who are not ourselves, is potentially a powerful historical insight, a fact about identity in the past. It's a bit of a cliche to stress the instability and mutability of identity, but far less so to grant the possibility that people often really, truly, deeply understand the inner terrain of other people's consciousness across race, class and gender lines.
February 24, 2005
The Loonatics Have Taken Over the Asylum
Please show your children this image of “Buzz Bunny”, one of the characters from Warner Brothers’ upcoming “updating” of their classic animated cast. He’s the futuristic version of Bugs Bunny.
Let me know if the image “tests well” with your kids. Mine said, succinctly, “He’s really scary”. No prompting on my part, I promise.
Bugs Bunny, in any version, should never be “scary”. Nor do I particularly think he ought to have superpowers and fly around protecting a futuristic city. Warner Brothers has screwed the pooch before with attempts to cash in on Bugs and Co., most notably in the film “Space Jam” and in their babyification of the characters in “Baby Looney Tunes”. This appears to me to be the biggest bomb of all, though.
This is the flip side of what is so bad about the state of contemporary intellectual property rights. Lots of observers have noted that it denies to current creators the ability to do what Disney did throughout the 20th Century, which is to revitalize old characters and stories that were in the public domain. What the current IP environment also does that is equally bad is that it condemns the current holders of valuable intellectual property to wallowing in squalid pigpens filled with their own droppings.
The WB’s kidvid offerings are struggling, consisting mostly as they do of commercial tie-ins, third-rate leftovers from Japan, and misguided but not entirely awful attempts to revisit old franchises (the current “Batman” series on WB). The two standout hits are “Teen Titans”, which I personally like a lot, and “Mucha Lucha!” which I like even more. The answer to the problem of a struggling line-up is (as it always is) originality. “Teen Titans” works because it borrows (rather than dull-wittedly imitates) a lot of the visual tropes of Japanese animation but also because it reworks some of the themes and narratives from the comics that inspired the series in entertaining ways. “Mucha Lucha” works because there’s never been anything like it before, and because it’s wildly inventive and entertaining in its own terms.
In contrast, I would say that the entire concept, from art to themes, of “Loonatics” betrays a near-total lack of understanding of the intellectual property it proposes to take advantage of. At that juncture, you either have to think that some uniquely untalented person has been given the assignment and has sold his bosses on his bad ideas, or that the bosses issued a commandment to do something, anything, with the intellectual property they had locked up in their vaults. Squeeze one more drop of cash out of it, go back into the played-out mine one more time.
That degrades whatever value the old properties have, not to mention rarely pays off in terms of the new series. The latest layer of content is what sometimes sells an interest in the deeper layers. A good Looney Tunes series or film might prompt a young person to want to view the DVD anthologies. A bad one might strangle that impulse at birth. It may also be that sometimes you can’t go home again. Maybe Bugs and Co. can never be redone, maybe their moment is over. Maybe we don’t need more cartoons about them, but instead new cartoons made with the same originality and passion that the best Looney Tunes cartoons were made in.
I’m agnostic about whether there ever can be new Looney Tunes, but I’m not about whether “Loonatics” is it. This series feels like a disastrous act of vandalism.
February 22, 2005
The Trouble With Larry
Most of what I have to say about Larry Summers has been said already by others. He is not a martyr to political correctness. Many of his critics were exaggerated or extreme in their reaction, but the speech he gave was really quite weak.
It’s perfectly ok to get up and say something like, “We have to remain open to a variety of explanations for the relative lack of women in the sciences, including genetic or innate differences between men and women”. But Summers didn’t say that: he went on to speculate that this was the correct hypothesis. The current state of knowledge on this subject suggests fairly strongly that this is not a good hypothesis. If you’re the president of Harvard, you ought to know that if you’re going to shoot your mouth off on the topic.
One thing that I think many observers have overlooked, however, is that the most inexcusable thing about Summers’ provocation is that even if he’s completely right in his hypothesis, it has nothing to do with the representation of women on the Harvard faculty.
Let’s ignore the large body of research that casts doubt on or hugely complicates the working hypothesis that men are somehow adaptively better at science and mathematics. Let’s assume that Summers’ hypothesis is valid. Even in the best case scenario for this kind of conjecture, we’re only talking about tendencies, not gender-based absolutes. Meaning that even if Summers’ hypothesis actually is the best explanation for the imbalance in the sciences, this imbalance should pose no difficulty for Harvard should Harvard judge it desirable to have more women on its science faculty.
Harvard is wealthy and powerful enough that should its president deem it to be a priority to staff its faculty with the most brilliant left-handed sociologists who cook a mean risotto and have surnames that start with the letter “M”, they could do so. Even if you wanted to be generous to the argument that affirmative action goals result in declining standards, it only applies to the average institution, to institutions which are presumed to lack the clout or financial power to compete for scarce goods and which therefore are presumed to have to lower their standards in order to achieve diversity.
None of this applies to Harvard, Even if genetic or innate differences mean that no more than 15% of the top scientists and mathematicians are women, Harvard could pay whatever was necessary to recruit from that 15% and achieve a faculty which had a 50-50 balance of men and women.
So not only is Summers’ hypothesis a poor one in light of available research, it isn’t an alibi or explanation for gender imbalances at Harvard. The only way Summers could account for that imbalance would be to say that in his opinion achieving gender balance is an unimportant objective, or at least not worth the trouble involved. Now that, if he said it, would be a much bolder and more provocative statement, and curiously enough, a more defensible one than what he actually had to say. What Summers actually said was dubious factually and intellectually, and it was a lousy explanation for the specific institutional problem he was attempting to grapple with. If Summers wanted to get up and say, “Look, I don’t actually care what the genesis of the imbalance between men and women in the sciences is: it is in my judgment too expensive and labor-intensive for one institution like Harvard to heroically compensate for it”, then at least he would have started a conversation that could shed more light than heat. If you want to make a critical reply to that statement, you actually have to either demonstrate that it’s not that expensive or difficult to do, or that for some reason achieving gender balance is such a pressingly important objective that it outweighs many other priorities that might exist in the process of hiring and tenuring. These are both useful claims to constantly revisit, revise and challenge even when you agree with them.
February 17, 2005
Misrecognitions and Mythologies
Like Amardeep Singh, I found recent reports about the mass visitation of Rastafarians to Ethiopia very interesting. It’s not the first time that the imagination of some in the African diaspora has come into collision with the historical reality of African societies.
There’s a deep history here, persistently characterized by what the literary scholar Ken Warren has called “misrecognitions”. The famous narrative of Olaudah Equiano, in which he claims to have be born an Igbo in what is now Nigeria (Vicent Carretta in 1999 suggested that Equiano may have in fact been born in North America) has a sequence that describes the genesis of these misrecognitions. Equiano goes from the specificity of his own community to a wider awareness of the multiplicity of the African societies around him to being a slave aboard a ship, where all that diversity and complexity were violently compressed into a new social identity. Africans did not cease remembering, knowing and practicing their cultures of origin in the middle passage, but in the iterations of their memory and the circulations of people and goods across the Atlantic, the historical evolution of specific African societies and the African diaspora were also disconnected from one another. The incorporation of “Yoruba” or “Igbo” or “Kongo” identities and practices into the African diaspora proceeded without immediate or direct reference to what “Yoruba” or “Igbo” or “Kongo” peoples were becoming within Africa itself.
By the 19th Century, and even more so the 20th, the African diaspora was completing the circuit back to Africa more often and with more and more autonomy. As travelers, pilgrims, investors, expatriates, missionaries, migrants and even colonizers, Africans in the diaspora came to African societies. Sometimes for a short while, sometimes for the whole of their lives. But Africa was rarely what they imagined it would be, and often, Africa disappointed. It disappointed because it was never home, and because Africans were largely disinterested in, bemused by or puzzled by the diasporic imagination of Africa.
This is still the case today. The Rastafarian gathering in Ethiopia was just one example out of many, where the vision of Africa held by some in the diaspora came into contact with the reality of a particular African society and its history, two ships passing awkwardly in the night. The veneration of a mythologized Haile Selassie by the Rastafarians bears very little resemblance to how Selassie is known and remembered by Ethiopians today.
This is a dynamic not especially unique to the African diaspora. Irish-Americans who travel to Ireland, even before the recent economic boom, do not find the Ireland that is known to them within American popular culture. Nor is this just a diasporic problem. Civil War re-enactors, for all the meticulousness of their attention to material history, can sometimes be remarkably disconnected from the cultural, social or intellectual realities of antebellum America. Virtually every popular understanding of history that you can think of tends to run aground on the reality of the past it imagines.
Historians have a generic and often rather dour professional antagonism to these kinds of disconnects, a primal urge to dispel such illusions. More signally, there is a fairly large body of scholarship that argues, with varying degrees of scholarly care and balance, that there are particular bundles of images, representations and constructions of societies and their histories that are essential to the maintenance of domination, oppression, racism and the like, and the wellspring of structured forms of identity that constrain or oppress the individuals who are saddled with such identities. To a very large extent, that argument derives from Edward Said’s Orientalism, the basic blueprint for such arguments.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these issues because next year I’m once again going to teach a course called “The Image of Africa”, about the intellectual and cultural history of how Africa has been represented by other societies, including by Africans in the diaspora. As I think on it, I realize how far I’ve moved in my own assumptions from Said’s blueprint. The first time I taught the class, it was largely an attempt to document an African version of “orientalism”, of the use of images of Africa in colonialism and racism. That first version of the course had a middle section on the diaspora, and it was there that I vested all the ambiguity of the course, all the sense of an openness or debatability about the questions the material raised.
Over time, some of the questions I raised in that section of the course started to escape into the wider context, both for my students and for myself. First, I began to really doubt Said’s understanding of the genesis of “orientalist” images: it was entirely a one-sided, top-down, highly instrumental process in his reading. Power knew what power needed, power commissioned the optimal set of representations that maximized and authorized its domination. Said himself began to back away from this later in Culture and Imperialism, and some of the most skilled and intelligent scholars who sought to expand Orientalism, like Timothy Mitchell, also complicated the model. But the core remained the same: orientalism bore no resemblance to the historical reality of the places it represented, and its content came entirely from “the West”.
Later, I began to wonder far more about the ways in which orientalist images and representations were understood to be straightforward contributors to racist or imperialist ideology. The functionalism of Said’s original analysis became more and more urgent, demanding, and simplistic. To some extent, critiques that followed in the model of Orientalism began to presume, with increasingly less and less explicit theorizing, that not only were such images incorporated into racism or colonialism but were explanatory or causal to it. Eventually, the scholarship decomposed into a narrative of activism and an off-the-shelf theory of cultural interpretation. At that point, the mirroring of the cultural right and cultural left matured. Though drawn t