Today I read 'The Case for Reparations' in The Atlantic. It is well-written, but far too many of its 15,000 words simply describe the injustices faced by black Americans, rather than argue the case for reparations as the only reasonable and right response to them. Here then are some of the problems that I believe inevitably undo any argument for reparations.
The impossibility of proper justification
Reparations would entail either 1) seizing money from businesses that profited from slavery, or 2) the disbursement of taxpayers' money by consenting governments. To preserve rule of law (circumstance 1) or democratic accountability (2), both actions would have to be justified by a standard of proof that is impossible to attain in judging a 150-400 year-old crime. That is, it is a burden of proof that historical research could not realistically bear - company X made a bundle from slavery, lost it in the Depression, and then built up a new fortune from scratch - how much do they have to pay? what about African-American Y who has suffered misfortune and injustice totally unrelated to race and slavery? Never mind the complex calculations, how to gather all that data?
The problem is in making a mixed argument - seeking a political and legal end using historical proofs. The historian cannot provide evidence strong enough to justify a legal decision to seize money, or a political decision to spend taxpayers' money (though I admit the last is debatable).
Reparation is thought justifiable as a form of redress, but it is also a punishment and one for which justification is no longer attainable. We could always disregard the question of justifiable punishment, and say we must pay reparations as a moral imperative, but doing so would damage rule of law and democratic accountability - given their historically proven value as defences against slavery and inequality, this would risk being self-defeating.
Money can't buy everything
Making a society pay for the sins of its ancestors is plainly absurd - if we have to take the rap for their crimes we should also get the credit for the good they did, so I deserve a medal at the very least for great-great-grandfather Hywel's bravery at Sebastopol (he didn't exist really). The reparation argument is saved from this absurdity because it says we should pay only for those crimes that still affect our society.
But this is another example of a muddled argument. Seeking restitution for a past wrong is not the same as reforming society, and I'm not sure the one segues into the other. In fact, this move takes the argument from the frying pan into the fire.
Consider that if the effects of crimes are monetized, the effects of good deeds should be also. So the reparation amount would have to be abated proportional to the positive things that have been done to mitigate the legacy of slavery, e.g. the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action. As the reparationist's entire argument is based on the premise that deeds can be translated into dollars, she would have to agree that it would be unjust for US taxpayers and companies to pay the full price of the crime of slavery, because at least some deeds have been carried out to reverse its effects.
But something strikes me as very wrong here. We would have to factor these reparatory deeds in to the reckoning, only so as to convert them into a reparatory monetary value - but isn't this last calculation redundant, overlooking the very real value the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action already have as reparations? As they already work towards the same end as reparations (justice for black America) why not continue this process and carry out further such actions in the future? Why bother with the extra monetary calculations?
To illustrate. Let's say a judge decided slavery warranted $100 trillion in reparations, but that the Civil Rights Act and affirmative action amounted to $5 trillion restitution each – after all, no one would deny that slaves in the 19th century lived worse lives than black Americans today. If that reduced the debt to $90 tn, then further acts of social justice would surely, eventually reduce the debt to $0. So on the reparationist's own terms, through social reform alone we could clear the debt of slavery, create a fairer society, and avoid entirely the problems of reparations detailed above. This would always be the better, most rational choice.
At this juncture we would surely feel that monetary reparation does not get at the heart of this matter. We intuitively want to take money out of the equation, I suggest, because paying off individuals as a solution to a social problem would be a mistake from the very start. Social dysfunction is remedied by social change (driven by e.g. law, as with the CRA), not by paying off for their troubles those afflicted by it, and leaving the dysfunction in place.
So as soon as the reparationist shifts the question - from restitution for a past crime to social reform in the present - cash payment becomes the wrong answer. It just doesn't answer the kind of problem that social injustice is - if the government tomorrow said it would tackle inner-city poverty by paying damages to poor families by way of apology, we'd think it not merely odd but incoherent, logically inconsistent. It would be, I think, a category mistake (there's a further argument to be made for why it is a category mistake, an argument that I perhaps misconceive, but I'll leave it for now - I think it's something to do with the fact that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to identify consistent moral agency across a society changing over time, but necessary if a claim for reparations is to be valid).
Complete redundancy
So slavery must be atoned for because of its enduring legacy, and to do that we must reform the society that it created. If I am right that this can really only be done by government action, education, better morality etc. then the reparationist's argument becomes indistinguishable from that of the liberal (and indeed the vast majority of reasonable people) who says that we should try to create a fairer and more fulfilling society for all its members.
So if that's where we end up, why bother with the case for reparations at all? For all the heat and noise generated by its rhetoric, the case for reparations, rationally conceived, proposes nothing that isn't proposed by everyday, vanilla-flavoured liberalism.
This does not exhaust the pro-reparation argument, but neither does it exhaust the anti-reparation argument. There is much more to be said and I'm open to challenges.
I'll cavil on the ninth part of a hair.
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Tuesday, 17 June 2014
Against critical theory
[This post was previously titled: Philosophy to the rescue? A credo, or something like it]
It’s time I stopped prevaricating and laid out some basic beliefs. So this one’s about what I think is wrong with the humanities (and therefore us graduates schooled in it), why I think philosophy could be a remedy, and why I have misgivings about my own remedy.
(I'm avoiding giving examples for brevity's sake, but will provide if challenged. Update - see here instead for an excellent, and highly amusing, close analysis of an example of theory talk).
To lay out where I stand in all this – I studied English lit. in a theory-heavy English department joint with classics in a traditional, ‘philological’ classics department. I also did some linguistics. Afterwards came a doctorate in classics, accompanied by a side-interest in philosophy that fed into my research; finally (and coincidentally) I ended up working as an administrator at the Philosophy Faculty in Oxford.
My conclusion from this petty odyssey in academia is as follows. Critical theory is:
Now this won’t do as an argument at all, but at least it gives you a taste of my strength of feeling on the matter. More delicately, then, here is my gripe on how we have been harmed by critical theory (a field in which, he huffed pompously and not a little defensively, I am reasonably well-versed and have achieved some success).
First, a large portion of recent generations of humanities graduates have been taught not only that clarity is dispensable, but also that lack of clarity is a likely sign of a greater intellect than their own at work.
How did we ever come to this pass? What tailspin into utter, abject debasement has led us to think that understanding one another is not important?
For it seems, how you say, clear that clarity is in fact vital and precious – like the leg-before-wicket rule in cricket, it allows your opponent a clean and fair shot at the argument you are presenting as a target. Now of course, of course, ‘fairness’ is merely a metaphysical construct that can easily be shown to contain fatal internal contradictions… But if we cannot get at each other’s arguments because they are locked away in opaque or nonsensical language, what are our chances of improving them or detecting and rejecting fallacies? And if academia isn’t the business of trying to make arguments better, then what is it?
This is to say nothing of the toxic, hierarchical notion that students should blame their own deficiencies for the bad arguments of their theoretical elders and betters. It gives a sense of what a stillborn turkey the theory industry really is – it offers an education integral to which is the student’s constant awareness that he is incapable of and unequal to what he is learning. Just as bad, an education that leaves the student feeling unable to tell whether or not an argument is sufficiently clear.
(I’m trying to keep it brief, but I’ve always thought that this degeneracy, this outrageous regressiveness in a supposedly progressive endeavour, is a result of the wider failure of the theory project: while the original theorists had sought to incorporate social-scientific method into literary studies (psychoanalysis, Marxist economics, linguistics) later theorists balked at the democratization implicit in scientific method – that is, the process in which an author’s ideas turn into paraphrasable theorems and principles and thereafter cease to belong to the author, no longer depending on his or her original formulation of them (how many physicists working right now have read Newton’s Principia I wonder, yet how many use his ideas in some form?). Not liking this at all, the post-structuralists retreated into a viciously regressive, oracular prose that resisted paraphrase or methodization - to study Derrida you need to sit at the very feet of the hierophant himself, or near as damn it. Dead as the author may be, the theory industry does a good job of keeping him alive and well.).
So the student of critical theory is punished into timidity, and like a bullied spouse assumes the faults must all be his or her own. It is also the timidity of the blind – being told that truth, falsity, and reason are naïve fictions to be disregarded is a bit like attending a terrifying dinner party governed by strict and totally arbitrary rules of etiquette – fumbling in the dark, with no sense of what the rules are, most would decide it’s best to say nothing at all. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what happens at most seminars.
The acolyte is stripped of her life-long tools of thought and argument (as I remember it, with a certain relish on the part of the lecturers), and given in their stead bad, shoddily expressed, and poorly reasoned maxims. Which explains those silent seminars - we all would avoid difficult questions and ambiguity if we no longer possessed means of arguing and reasoning our way to answers and resolution. Again - any academic discipline that causes its students to shun difficulty and ambiguity is not an academic discipline.
It is noticeable too how the initiate, stumbling blindly through total arbitrariness, tends to grab hold of anything apprehensible, indifferent to how the bit he has grasped belongs to the larger argument (if indeed there is one). In the absence of true understanding, and probably true reasoning too, he usually clings on to the injunctions and prohibitions of critical theory, in the manner of the medieval peasant who knows what heresy is even if he doesn't understand the theologians' arguments. This is the reason, I suggest, why the fervour with which many literature students reject authorial intention, say, is vastly greater than their actual understanding of those writers who rule it out and their putative reasons. Amidst all the babble and confusion, a retreat into a taboo mentality at least offers some security.
In fact, clinging on to whatever paltry certainties can be salvaged, and never abandoning them, is a vital survival tactic - say the wrong thing and the secret and mysterious workings of theory logic (the profound truth of which, like the words of a Sibyl, is confirmed by their obscurity) will show the student to be making the argument of an essentialist, or an intentionalist, or a capitalist, or a metaphysicalist – maybe even a Tory. Given that the danger of denunciation is ever-present and, in the absence of logic, always unpredictable, it is understandable why theorists and their students shun equivocation and exploratory argumentation in favour of reductiveness.
Indeed, one of the most boring things about theoretical interpretations of literature is that they so often come round to the same, safe conclusion whatever the text under interpretation. This is either because the theorist advances a theory that is true but only trivially so; or because a myopically reductive vision of the world inevitably makes the things in it look blurred and samey. Or both.
The bad news, if you ask me, is really quite bad. A significant portion of our highly educated young people have been schooled in theories that fail entirely to describe the lived experience of being a self-conscious, cognitively rich human being. To be human, the theorist tells us, is to be little more than economically determined, ideologically driven, intrinsically political trash.
These graduates also have an aversion to reasoned argument, and the inability to do it well when ventured. Theory seminars, in my experience (with the exception of a course taught by cultural theorist John Frow), were rather sorry and sterile affairs, largely because argument becomes impossible when your opponent can always disclaim any intention to say something true, when any potential shared premise can be rejected as arbitrary, and when the absence of clarity means that the very subject under discussion is not clear.
They are timid in confronting differences of degree, as opposed to absolute difference, and unsure in reasoning through their own intellectual ambivalence. Fatal is any complexity, but particularly moral/political complexity, that cannot be banished by oracular assertion. Acknowledgement of ambiguity and paradox is avoided – as above, speculative reasoning can only lead to further alienation, and possibly ideological deviancy and subsequent denunciation.
Another corollary is the continuing rude health of the absurd and harmful postmodern notion that the difference between the centre and the margin is a moral one. That is, the relativism that says our moral criteria should vary according to identity. Not only is this arbitrary and unreasonable (how is what-I-am organically linked to judgement of the rightness or wrongness of my actions?), toxic (know me by what I say and think, please), and self-defeating (isn’t it racists, reactionaries, and chauvinists who reduce us to what, not who we are?), it also tends to lead us to censure unfairly and oppress those at the centre, while mindlessly indulging those on the periphery.
The obsession with identity politics, despite its intellectual poverty, is lamentable. That something as important as gender equality is served by the thin and unthinking arguments of modern-day feminism is a howling outrage. And we can lay it right at the door of Kristeva, Irigary, Butler et al.
Given that these ex-students constitute a large portion of our intellectual and cultural elite, the question arises – come the day our way of living is seriously challenged, do we want them to be the ones to defend it and argue its value? Would they even be capable?
It might be objected (or more precisely, insinuated) that I’m clearly reading the Telegraph too much and making ‘England, summer of 1940’ an arbitrary focal point for all moral and political debate. But then the Second World War is already of moral and political relevance to critical theory, which after all was spawned by a generation of variously defeatist, dishonest, and downright treacherous French authors (though this is unfair to Paul De Man, the deconstructionist who spent the war penning elegant solutions to the ‘Jewish problem’, as he was in fact Belgian).
But there is good news! On the face of it, it feels callously wasteful and almost nihilistic to say that the solution lies in junking decades’ worth of research and writing. But it does lie there, and we should remember that academia is only valuable to us as long as it is able to turn on a dime and reject its mistakes. Alchemy is no more valid and grounded in truth for all the time and effort it swallowed up, and the academy’s willingness to turn its back on its mistakes is a reassuring sign of a lively resistance to dogma. So in the rejection of all those glossy tomes would be the consolation that we are not damned eternally by our errors.
If the problem with critical theory has always been that it ‘is inept philosophy applied to literature and culture’ (so Denis Dutton), is it possible that the remedy is again in philosophy, but this time philosophy done well. By ‘philosophy’ I mean, totally unapologetically, analytical philosophy – dry-as-dust, Anglo-American, ‘if p then q’ philosophy. And I emphatically do not mean the continental drek that helped get us in this mess in the first place.
Actually, by ‘philosophy’ I mean the kind of philosophy-lite that I dabble in myself and incorporate into my literary research. Here’s why I think it can stop the rot:
I am not saying that we should make all students into analytical philosophers. Rather, if we wish to theorize what we are doing, we are better looking to philosophy than critical theory. Now here are my misgivings:
And the main misgiving: it is almost certain that I am a little awestruck, and more than a little gauche in the presence of philosophers. Partly because for some time I’ve been a philosopher manqué, which became embarrassing when I started working in a philosophy faculty (fawning fan-boy). The epiphany was watching philosopher of mind Ted Honderich give a talk in Edinburgh around 2002 – the focus, mental acuity, commitment, and aggression of the Q&A that followed the talk were a revelation. They behaved as if something was actually at stake! It made it immediately obvious to me (or maybe even more obvious than before) that I had to abandon the flaccid sterility of critical theory. My original plan was to digress into linguistics, and then return to do a thesis in Eng. Lit. informed by proper rigorous method. Classics intervened, but I hope I ended doing something not too far off the original plan.
Finally, it is only fair that I say that Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, which I gave a bit of a slagging in a previous post, is actually excellent on the impostures of theorists, especially in the chapter of Walter Benjamin. Also, it’s probably clear that my picture of a theory-poisoned humanities undergrad resembles quite closely a certain type who writes for, comments on, and reads the Guardian. This foreshadows my next big post, which will be on the failure of the modern left.
It’s time I stopped prevaricating and laid out some basic beliefs. So this one’s about what I think is wrong with the humanities (and therefore us graduates schooled in it), why I think philosophy could be a remedy, and why I have misgivings about my own remedy.
(I'm avoiding giving examples for brevity's sake, but will provide if challenged. Update - see here instead for an excellent, and highly amusing, close analysis of an example of theory talk).
To lay out where I stand in all this – I studied English lit. in a theory-heavy English department joint with classics in a traditional, ‘philological’ classics department. I also did some linguistics. Afterwards came a doctorate in classics, accompanied by a side-interest in philosophy that fed into my research; finally (and coincidentally) I ended up working as an administrator at the Philosophy Faculty in Oxford.
My conclusion from this petty odyssey in academia is as follows. Critical theory is:
- drek
- junk
- cack
- and balls
Now this won’t do as an argument at all, but at least it gives you a taste of my strength of feeling on the matter. More delicately, then, here is my gripe on how we have been harmed by critical theory (a field in which, he huffed pompously and not a little defensively, I am reasonably well-versed and have achieved some success).
Ceci n'est pas un philosophe.
Leg before wicket and a fair shot
First, a large portion of recent generations of humanities graduates have been taught not only that clarity is dispensable, but also that lack of clarity is a likely sign of a greater intellect than their own at work.
How did we ever come to this pass? What tailspin into utter, abject debasement has led us to think that understanding one another is not important?
For it seems, how you say, clear that clarity is in fact vital and precious – like the leg-before-wicket rule in cricket, it allows your opponent a clean and fair shot at the argument you are presenting as a target. Now of course, of course, ‘fairness’ is merely a metaphysical construct that can easily be shown to contain fatal internal contradictions… But if we cannot get at each other’s arguments because they are locked away in opaque or nonsensical language, what are our chances of improving them or detecting and rejecting fallacies? And if academia isn’t the business of trying to make arguments better, then what is it?
This is to say nothing of the toxic, hierarchical notion that students should blame their own deficiencies for the bad arguments of their theoretical elders and betters. It gives a sense of what a stillborn turkey the theory industry really is – it offers an education integral to which is the student’s constant awareness that he is incapable of and unequal to what he is learning. Just as bad, an education that leaves the student feeling unable to tell whether or not an argument is sufficiently clear.
(I’m trying to keep it brief, but I’ve always thought that this degeneracy, this outrageous regressiveness in a supposedly progressive endeavour, is a result of the wider failure of the theory project: while the original theorists had sought to incorporate social-scientific method into literary studies (psychoanalysis, Marxist economics, linguistics) later theorists balked at the democratization implicit in scientific method – that is, the process in which an author’s ideas turn into paraphrasable theorems and principles and thereafter cease to belong to the author, no longer depending on his or her original formulation of them (how many physicists working right now have read Newton’s Principia I wonder, yet how many use his ideas in some form?). Not liking this at all, the post-structuralists retreated into a viciously regressive, oracular prose that resisted paraphrase or methodization - to study Derrida you need to sit at the very feet of the hierophant himself, or near as damn it. Dead as the author may be, the theory industry does a good job of keeping him alive and well.).
The timidity of the blind
So the student of critical theory is punished into timidity, and like a bullied spouse assumes the faults must all be his or her own. It is also the timidity of the blind – being told that truth, falsity, and reason are naïve fictions to be disregarded is a bit like attending a terrifying dinner party governed by strict and totally arbitrary rules of etiquette – fumbling in the dark, with no sense of what the rules are, most would decide it’s best to say nothing at all. Which, funnily enough, is exactly what happens at most seminars.
The acolyte is stripped of her life-long tools of thought and argument (as I remember it, with a certain relish on the part of the lecturers), and given in their stead bad, shoddily expressed, and poorly reasoned maxims. Which explains those silent seminars - we all would avoid difficult questions and ambiguity if we no longer possessed means of arguing and reasoning our way to answers and resolution. Again - any academic discipline that causes its students to shun difficulty and ambiguity is not an academic discipline.
It is noticeable too how the initiate, stumbling blindly through total arbitrariness, tends to grab hold of anything apprehensible, indifferent to how the bit he has grasped belongs to the larger argument (if indeed there is one). In the absence of true understanding, and probably true reasoning too, he usually clings on to the injunctions and prohibitions of critical theory, in the manner of the medieval peasant who knows what heresy is even if he doesn't understand the theologians' arguments. This is the reason, I suggest, why the fervour with which many literature students reject authorial intention, say, is vastly greater than their actual understanding of those writers who rule it out and their putative reasons. Amidst all the babble and confusion, a retreat into a taboo mentality at least offers some security.
In fact, clinging on to whatever paltry certainties can be salvaged, and never abandoning them, is a vital survival tactic - say the wrong thing and the secret and mysterious workings of theory logic (the profound truth of which, like the words of a Sibyl, is confirmed by their obscurity) will show the student to be making the argument of an essentialist, or an intentionalist, or a capitalist, or a metaphysicalist – maybe even a Tory. Given that the danger of denunciation is ever-present and, in the absence of logic, always unpredictable, it is understandable why theorists and their students shun equivocation and exploratory argumentation in favour of reductiveness.
Indeed, one of the most boring things about theoretical interpretations of literature is that they so often come round to the same, safe conclusion whatever the text under interpretation. This is either because the theorist advances a theory that is true but only trivially so; or because a myopically reductive vision of the world inevitably makes the things in it look blurred and samey. Or both.
The bad news
The bad news, if you ask me, is really quite bad. A significant portion of our highly educated young people have been schooled in theories that fail entirely to describe the lived experience of being a self-conscious, cognitively rich human being. To be human, the theorist tells us, is to be little more than economically determined, ideologically driven, intrinsically political trash.
These graduates also have an aversion to reasoned argument, and the inability to do it well when ventured. Theory seminars, in my experience (with the exception of a course taught by cultural theorist John Frow), were rather sorry and sterile affairs, largely because argument becomes impossible when your opponent can always disclaim any intention to say something true, when any potential shared premise can be rejected as arbitrary, and when the absence of clarity means that the very subject under discussion is not clear.
They are timid in confronting differences of degree, as opposed to absolute difference, and unsure in reasoning through their own intellectual ambivalence. Fatal is any complexity, but particularly moral/political complexity, that cannot be banished by oracular assertion. Acknowledgement of ambiguity and paradox is avoided – as above, speculative reasoning can only lead to further alienation, and possibly ideological deviancy and subsequent denunciation.
Another corollary is the continuing rude health of the absurd and harmful postmodern notion that the difference between the centre and the margin is a moral one. That is, the relativism that says our moral criteria should vary according to identity. Not only is this arbitrary and unreasonable (how is what-I-am organically linked to judgement of the rightness or wrongness of my actions?), toxic (know me by what I say and think, please), and self-defeating (isn’t it racists, reactionaries, and chauvinists who reduce us to what, not who we are?), it also tends to lead us to censure unfairly and oppress those at the centre, while mindlessly indulging those on the periphery.
The obsession with identity politics, despite its intellectual poverty, is lamentable. That something as important as gender equality is served by the thin and unthinking arguments of modern-day feminism is a howling outrage. And we can lay it right at the door of Kristeva, Irigary, Butler et al.
Given that these ex-students constitute a large portion of our intellectual and cultural elite, the question arises – come the day our way of living is seriously challenged, do we want them to be the ones to defend it and argue its value? Would they even be capable?
It might be objected (or more precisely, insinuated) that I’m clearly reading the Telegraph too much and making ‘England, summer of 1940’ an arbitrary focal point for all moral and political debate. But then the Second World War is already of moral and political relevance to critical theory, which after all was spawned by a generation of variously defeatist, dishonest, and downright treacherous French authors (though this is unfair to Paul De Man, the deconstructionist who spent the war penning elegant solutions to the ‘Jewish problem’, as he was in fact Belgian).
The good news
But there is good news! On the face of it, it feels callously wasteful and almost nihilistic to say that the solution lies in junking decades’ worth of research and writing. But it does lie there, and we should remember that academia is only valuable to us as long as it is able to turn on a dime and reject its mistakes. Alchemy is no more valid and grounded in truth for all the time and effort it swallowed up, and the academy’s willingness to turn its back on its mistakes is a reassuring sign of a lively resistance to dogma. So in the rejection of all those glossy tomes would be the consolation that we are not damned eternally by our errors.
If the problem with critical theory has always been that it ‘is inept philosophy applied to literature and culture’ (so Denis Dutton), is it possible that the remedy is again in philosophy, but this time philosophy done well. By ‘philosophy’ I mean, totally unapologetically, analytical philosophy – dry-as-dust, Anglo-American, ‘if p then q’ philosophy. And I emphatically do not mean the continental drek that helped get us in this mess in the first place.
Actually, by ‘philosophy’ I mean the kind of philosophy-lite that I dabble in myself and incorporate into my literary research. Here’s why I think it can stop the rot:
- It will teach us how to argue again;
- It will teach us to be properly reflective again;
- It thrives on difficulty and paradox;
- Beyond academia, it will give us the tools for moral debate needed in a post-religious society;
- Having rigour and method, it interfaces well with science (esp. maths & physics) – the future of the humanities looks dim without some reconciliation with the scientists taking place;
- More boldly - all academic pursuits taken to their highest level of abstraction turn into maths, physics, or philosophy. Why not give as many students as possible a head-start in making that climb if they want to try it?
I am not saying that we should make all students into analytical philosophers. Rather, if we wish to theorize what we are doing, we are better looking to philosophy than critical theory. Now here are my misgivings:
- My idea requires the cooperation of philosophers, and they may have no wish to ride to the rescue of the rest of the humanities;
- I almost certainly over-estimate the clarity of the analytical tradition – in fact, I know for myself that I do, and have been told as much by a philosopher working in the field . Philosophers have their own love of excessive technicality and jargon;
- I overlook the many others working in the humanities still uninfected by theory - those practising such rigorous skills as textual criticism, archival research, close analysis, and the like. I overlook them mainly because I find them less interesting, too atomistic, and also because they have little truck with the world of ideas (I'm a classicist - experto credite).
- The division between analytical and continental philosophy is not as hard and fast as I make out, and prominent philosophers of the former stripe are trying to reconcile the two.
And the main misgiving: it is almost certain that I am a little awestruck, and more than a little gauche in the presence of philosophers. Partly because for some time I’ve been a philosopher manqué, which became embarrassing when I started working in a philosophy faculty (fawning fan-boy). The epiphany was watching philosopher of mind Ted Honderich give a talk in Edinburgh around 2002 – the focus, mental acuity, commitment, and aggression of the Q&A that followed the talk were a revelation. They behaved as if something was actually at stake! It made it immediately obvious to me (or maybe even more obvious than before) that I had to abandon the flaccid sterility of critical theory. My original plan was to digress into linguistics, and then return to do a thesis in Eng. Lit. informed by proper rigorous method. Classics intervened, but I hope I ended doing something not too far off the original plan.
Finally, it is only fair that I say that Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia, which I gave a bit of a slagging in a previous post, is actually excellent on the impostures of theorists, especially in the chapter of Walter Benjamin. Also, it’s probably clear that my picture of a theory-poisoned humanities undergrad resembles quite closely a certain type who writes for, comments on, and reads the Guardian. This foreshadows my next big post, which will be on the failure of the modern left.
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
The Beatles, again
Actually, this post isn't about the Beatles as such, it just follows on from my earlier post about them - and the Moptops are probably a bit more grabbing as a prospect than the diffuse thought-piece that follows.
It will be unusually brief, however.
I said before that anyone would agree that the development of the Beatles' music was extraordinary and unprecedented and the rest, whatever his or her opinion of its quality.
When I wrote that, I was skirting round a more ambitious proposal I had in mind, which is this:
First of all - music isn't suited to memory. A patently absurd statement, on first view, given the ease with which melodies stick in our minds. But there are many good reasons to argue that music has poor memetic qualities. It isn't very portable, in the sense that it can't easily be adduced in forms of discourse by means of paraphrase or quotation and the like. The only way to experience a song is to hear it, in its single, irreducible form - a hummed version isn't the 'same' as the original to any great extent, and excerpting is unsatisfactory.
However, five different people could come up with five completely different ways of saying 'mid-era Beatles used a range of instrumentation' and 'late-era Beatles made extensive use of arpeggios' but they would still be telling the same story, to a considerable extent.
Moreover they could do it in written or spoken form. Music is not paraphrasable, or retellable, whereas a story of music is. If a musical canon is something constructed by discussing music, then entry into the canon must be easier for music that is more easily resolved into the stuff of discourse (the stuff of discourse being e.g. narratives, arguments, etc.).
Music has relatively little value as a mnemonic - there are of course jingles ('Remember, remember, the fifth of November') but the mnemonic element here is rhyme and metre, not melody. And the same is true, it is said, for the beginnings of poetry itself - it was a way of coding important information into an easily remembered form.
Narrative is much more amenable to transmission and discussion because, I suppose, of its semantic content which transcends the particularities of form - it can be scrambled and revamped, but still mean the same thing. Because of this, then, the big beasts of the musical canon are guaranteed their place not just because their melodies etc. were memorable, but because the collective story they made up is even more memorable. Narrative and argument are the same stuff history is made of - melody and harmony are not.
I'm not saying that the stories of band members, and what they did or didn't do with groupies/TV sets/red snappers etc., is what grants canonical status - but even then, it cant hurt.
Some (really not very convincing) examples:
It will be unusually brief, however.
I said before that anyone would agree that the development of the Beatles' music was extraordinary and unprecedented and the rest, whatever his or her opinion of its quality.
When I wrote that, I was skirting round a more ambitious proposal I had in mind, which is this:
music isn't in itself well-suited to being remembered, but narratives of the development of music are.
So the most solidly canonical musicians are anchored in wider popular and cultural memory more by the overall story of how their music progressed, than by the form and content of the music itself.
Acts with long and varied careers are more likely to have a historical development in their music, and this is one reason why bands the canon is made up of bands like the Beatles.Let me expand this a little bit more before you heave a weary sigh.
First of all - music isn't suited to memory. A patently absurd statement, on first view, given the ease with which melodies stick in our minds. But there are many good reasons to argue that music has poor memetic qualities. It isn't very portable, in the sense that it can't easily be adduced in forms of discourse by means of paraphrase or quotation and the like. The only way to experience a song is to hear it, in its single, irreducible form - a hummed version isn't the 'same' as the original to any great extent, and excerpting is unsatisfactory.
However, five different people could come up with five completely different ways of saying 'mid-era Beatles used a range of instrumentation' and 'late-era Beatles made extensive use of arpeggios' but they would still be telling the same story, to a considerable extent.
Moreover they could do it in written or spoken form. Music is not paraphrasable, or retellable, whereas a story of music is. If a musical canon is something constructed by discussing music, then entry into the canon must be easier for music that is more easily resolved into the stuff of discourse (the stuff of discourse being e.g. narratives, arguments, etc.).
Music has relatively little value as a mnemonic - there are of course jingles ('Remember, remember, the fifth of November') but the mnemonic element here is rhyme and metre, not melody. And the same is true, it is said, for the beginnings of poetry itself - it was a way of coding important information into an easily remembered form.
Narrative is much more amenable to transmission and discussion because, I suppose, of its semantic content which transcends the particularities of form - it can be scrambled and revamped, but still mean the same thing. Because of this, then, the big beasts of the musical canon are guaranteed their place not just because their melodies etc. were memorable, but because the collective story they made up is even more memorable. Narrative and argument are the same stuff history is made of - melody and harmony are not.
I'm not saying that the stories of band members, and what they did or didn't do with groupies/TV sets/red snappers etc., is what grants canonical status - but even then, it cant hurt.
Some (really not very convincing) examples:
Beatles (see earlier post)
Rolling Stones - Blues band, then go poppy, then invent their quintessential sound during the
1968-72 purple patch.
James Brown - invents funk 1965; invents it again in 1971.
Fleetwood Mac - start off all bluesy, then become all grown-up.
Pink Floyd - all psychadelic, until Syd goes mental.
David Bowie - etc.Is this a thing, or not?
Friday, 6 June 2014
Rise of China - a paper tiger?
This one's about China - the country, not the ceramics. I'll tell you my thoughts on earthenware another day.
A successful and not entirely unintimidating business figure told me the other day that the University of Oxford is wasting its time running an MBA programme. When China starts educating its business leaders, he said, they will do it their own way - the MBA will become yesterday's news.
Coincidentally, some friends posted Facebook updates also about China, specifically the Tiannamen Square massacre:
I didn't know the massacre was suppressed so fiercely, though it's hardly a surprise. Anyway, this contrast of China's supposedly gleaming future and the reality of its recent past and its present got me to thinking - specifically, it got me to thinking 'you already have some hastily jotted scraps on the rise of China - perhaps this is a way to squeeze some life out of them?'
So, having reached to the back of the cupboard and checked the sell-by date, here is my slightly stale offering. I'm not an economist, or a Sinologist, or a historian, so it's likely to be all very dubious.
A while ago I read a piece by Robert Peston, the BBC economics editor, on the possibility of a downturn in China. It's good - I recommend it. It is troubling that the arguments for China's inevitable rise to dominant world power status come from economists - in a way, it's natural that most predictions of the political and social future are made by those social scientists who have (or imagine they have) the most developed and mathematically sophisticated heuristic tools.
In another way, it is absurd - we would reject as incomplete and hopelessly reductive any history that tried to describe a country's past in solely economic terms, because we know of the many other factors that determine events (politics, religion, social change, culture, individuals and relations between individuals). Why, then, do we give so much weight to economists' predictions of the future when we know they are giving us nowhere near the whole story about what makes stuff happen?
Maybe it's because economics has enough maths in it to make its projection credible - or, less generously, because economics has enough empirical trappings and glamour to make us briefly forget that futurology is a mug's game. As any gambler / mug knows, you just might get away with it - even woefully wrong predictions become yesterday's news and disappear into kind obscurity once the big event has come to pass.
But I'm not really interested in this question. More important - is the prediction of China's rise to superpower status flawed because it is reductively economic? Should we listen to the economists, or are they selling us snake oil?
Consider the previous two world powers, the United Kingdom and the United States, and their ascent:
None of these things can be said of China at the moment, or even conceivably in the near future, apart from the last. It seems beyond doubt that for some time, even the foreseeable, the US will remain stronger, more inventive, and more stable than China. China will work harder and produce more - but is this enough?
I might be committing a fallacy here: namely by imaging that there is some Anglo-Saxon 'special path' that must be followed to achieve global leadership, whereas in fact the Anglo-American virtues 1-3 are merely incidental and not conditions of superpower status - really, all that makes a country top dog is number 4, productivity and growth.
But innovation, and with it a culture that allows and creates innovation, do seem like necessary conditions, namely:
Even if the exemplar of the previous two global powers did not exist, I think one would still conclude that radical extension of China's power would require these attributes - as it is, she has a sclerotic one-party system that doesn't allow its citizens to use the internet unsupervised, and a military not yet able to project power (into e.g. Africa).
Turning to America, it is undeniable that, though she may be a on a losing streak in various ways (economic, military), we are living in a new golden age of American innovation. China can boast nothing comparable to Silicon Valley, and we might also ask whether its current culture could produce anything even remotely similar. That is, a culture of innovation based on spontaneous creativity, daring to fail, and cheek.
Now for my final attempt to argue, perhaps tentatively, that certain non-economic factors are conditions of the global dominance that the UK and US achieved historically, and the dominance China could putatively achieve. Viz. the global leader's pre-eminent position among other nations is facilitated by relations of assent and imitation - in the first case, assent to its dominance in recognition of its achievements and the possible value of those achievements. Central to the relationship between Europe (Britain specifically) and India was the latter's sense that, though an ancient and advanced civilization, it had met a civilization more advanced than its own from which it could learn a lot - this is despite the moral backwardness of imperialism, and I certainly don't overlook the importance of brute coercion.
In the second case, the bonds of emulation - the adoption of religious, legal, and political institutions.
I think these two principles - assent and imitation - certainly apply to the British, American, Roman, and Islamic empires. If they do not apply to the Spanish and Mongol empires, then maybe that is proof I am right - dominance grounded only or mainly in coercion doesn't last long. It needs to be at least facilitated by affective bonds of emulation and assent (even admiration).
Frankly I fail to see what China has to offer that the world will want to imitate. Appreciate, yes. Buy, certainly. But imitate? The world will want to buy its products, but this does not translate into assent to its pre-eminence. When the Arab world flared up three years ago, people in Benghazi and Cairo were more likely to clamour for democracy than for Communism, or one-party rule, or Confucianism.
Even if I have completely failed to prove, contra the economists, that China's rise is not inevitable, there is always the fallback of arguing merely for what is preferable. I know which I prefer, and I don't need an economist to tell me why.
A successful and not entirely unintimidating business figure told me the other day that the University of Oxford is wasting its time running an MBA programme. When China starts educating its business leaders, he said, they will do it their own way - the MBA will become yesterday's news.
Coincidentally, some friends posted Facebook updates also about China, specifically the Tiannamen Square massacre:
I didn't know the massacre was suppressed so fiercely, though it's hardly a surprise. Anyway, this contrast of China's supposedly gleaming future and the reality of its recent past and its present got me to thinking - specifically, it got me to thinking 'you already have some hastily jotted scraps on the rise of China - perhaps this is a way to squeeze some life out of them?'
So, having reached to the back of the cupboard and checked the sell-by date, here is my slightly stale offering. I'm not an economist, or a Sinologist, or a historian, so it's likely to be all very dubious.
A while ago I read a piece by Robert Peston, the BBC economics editor, on the possibility of a downturn in China. It's good - I recommend it. It is troubling that the arguments for China's inevitable rise to dominant world power status come from economists - in a way, it's natural that most predictions of the political and social future are made by those social scientists who have (or imagine they have) the most developed and mathematically sophisticated heuristic tools.
In another way, it is absurd - we would reject as incomplete and hopelessly reductive any history that tried to describe a country's past in solely economic terms, because we know of the many other factors that determine events (politics, religion, social change, culture, individuals and relations between individuals). Why, then, do we give so much weight to economists' predictions of the future when we know they are giving us nowhere near the whole story about what makes stuff happen?
Maybe it's because economics has enough maths in it to make its projection credible - or, less generously, because economics has enough empirical trappings and glamour to make us briefly forget that futurology is a mug's game. As any gambler / mug knows, you just might get away with it - even woefully wrong predictions become yesterday's news and disappear into kind obscurity once the big event has come to pass.
But I'm not really interested in this question. More important - is the prediction of China's rise to superpower status flawed because it is reductively economic? Should we listen to the economists, or are they selling us snake oil?
Consider the previous two world powers, the United Kingdom and the United States, and their ascent:
- both were the world's foremost military nations;
- both led the world in technological development;
- both were among the world's most politically stable nations, and unquestionably the most politically innovative;
- both were leading trading and industrial nations;
None of these things can be said of China at the moment, or even conceivably in the near future, apart from the last. It seems beyond doubt that for some time, even the foreseeable, the US will remain stronger, more inventive, and more stable than China. China will work harder and produce more - but is this enough?
I might be committing a fallacy here: namely by imaging that there is some Anglo-Saxon 'special path' that must be followed to achieve global leadership, whereas in fact the Anglo-American virtues 1-3 are merely incidental and not conditions of superpower status - really, all that makes a country top dog is number 4, productivity and growth.
But innovation, and with it a culture that allows and creates innovation, do seem like necessary conditions, namely:
- enough political flexibility to adapt to the inevitable social changes (new demands and aspirations) caused by the increased wealth of being a wealthy industrialized nation;
- the research and development capability to create the military advantage needed to protect overseas investment and wealth-creation.
Even if the exemplar of the previous two global powers did not exist, I think one would still conclude that radical extension of China's power would require these attributes - as it is, she has a sclerotic one-party system that doesn't allow its citizens to use the internet unsupervised, and a military not yet able to project power (into e.g. Africa).
Turning to America, it is undeniable that, though she may be a on a losing streak in various ways (economic, military), we are living in a new golden age of American innovation. China can boast nothing comparable to Silicon Valley, and we might also ask whether its current culture could produce anything even remotely similar. That is, a culture of innovation based on spontaneous creativity, daring to fail, and cheek.
Now for my final attempt to argue, perhaps tentatively, that certain non-economic factors are conditions of the global dominance that the UK and US achieved historically, and the dominance China could putatively achieve. Viz. the global leader's pre-eminent position among other nations is facilitated by relations of assent and imitation - in the first case, assent to its dominance in recognition of its achievements and the possible value of those achievements. Central to the relationship between Europe (Britain specifically) and India was the latter's sense that, though an ancient and advanced civilization, it had met a civilization more advanced than its own from which it could learn a lot - this is despite the moral backwardness of imperialism, and I certainly don't overlook the importance of brute coercion.
In the second case, the bonds of emulation - the adoption of religious, legal, and political institutions.
I think these two principles - assent and imitation - certainly apply to the British, American, Roman, and Islamic empires. If they do not apply to the Spanish and Mongol empires, then maybe that is proof I am right - dominance grounded only or mainly in coercion doesn't last long. It needs to be at least facilitated by affective bonds of emulation and assent (even admiration).
Frankly I fail to see what China has to offer that the world will want to imitate. Appreciate, yes. Buy, certainly. But imitate? The world will want to buy its products, but this does not translate into assent to its pre-eminence. When the Arab world flared up three years ago, people in Benghazi and Cairo were more likely to clamour for democracy than for Communism, or one-party rule, or Confucianism.
Even if I have completely failed to prove, contra the economists, that China's rise is not inevitable, there is always the fallback of arguing merely for what is preferable. I know which I prefer, and I don't need an economist to tell me why.
Thursday, 29 May 2014
Review: Cultural Amnesia
I’ve recently been reading a book called Cultural
Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time. The author is a well-known
cultural commentator who, though you might already know him, I won’t name until
I’m done.
The book consists of the author (C) recalling a
lifetime of reading and, to a lesser extent, watching and listening: each
chapter approaches a different cultural figure by starting with a quotation
from one of his or her works and expanding out from there. Its stated theme is
the defence of humanism: that is, as I understand it, the belief that the free
life of the mind is best lived through the appreciation of culture, and that by
doing this we learn what is finest in human thought and achievement and also,
therefore, that human civilization is itself a fine thing that deserves
protection from what threatens it.
For C the biggest threat to civilization was the
totalitarian madness of the twentieth century. He writes extensively and
knowledgeably on pre-war German and Austria cultural life, and the sadness of
it all – the event that made so shiningly clear the value and dearness of
humanism was the same event that largely destroyed it in continental Europe,
and murdered its advocates.
Building up his argument slowly and discreetly
across the many portrait pieces, it is clear too that C attributes the
degeneracy of much modern continental philosophy and criticism to humanism’s
demise (also literal), in which a generation of writers and thinkers were
murdered in the death camps, and also to the bad faith, dishonesty, and
self-unease of many of those who survived. How could anyone in good conscience
defend humanism when they had shamefully collaborated with its Nazi
exterminators – even Sartre, the villain of this piece, had the decency to turn
his face away from what he betrayed, and seek sanctuary in deceitful
obscurantism.
All of this I agree with.
So, my purely hypothetical reader might ask, why
write about it merely to say that you like it and think it’s good? This is an
apt question – be patient, however, I’m just getting the good points out of the
way before I give it a good going over.
A good going over
First of all, it is clear that style is very
important to C: one of the major themes of the book is its narrative of how C
learned to become a writer by imitating great authors. I don’t think C is
particularly strong in analysing the technicalities of style, but there’s no
doubting that much of the book is very well written.
A problem is that C’s style doesn’t leave much room
for such trivialities as proof or argument. The grand gesture is everything:
‘In the long run, of course, there was
a cosmic joke: he [F Scott Fitzgerald] was a wise man. Great failure had made
him so. It takes a great artist to have a great failure’
Is this definitely true? William McGonagall had
great failures did he not? A bit of reasoning wouldn't go amiss here.
‘Hemingway took on board every
technique that Tolstoy ever devised.’
Did he? Every one ever?
‘Though the religious might hate to
hear it said, the West graduated from its nightmare only because religion
ceased to matter in any way except privately.’
A claim that bold will take more than assertion to
make it so.
‘an idea built into the English
language over centuries of comic richness is that learning and knowledge must
be kept in balance.’
This is a classic vague comment on language. How
'built into it'? Is it the case then that a careful study of, say, Turkish
syntax would yield an outline of the idea 'a successful modern Islamic state
attempts to reconcile the religious and the secular'? No, of course not, and
that isn't what C means. It's what his words entail, but all he’s
after is a styled semblance of knowledgeable authority, rather than reasoned argument
– therefore a vague gesture to the inner technicalities of the 'English
language', and his mysterious familiarity with them, suffices.
And again:
‘As a writer, in short, Sartre was
unable to escape history, because his use of language could not keep it out.’
Maybe if C would explain what he meant by this, his
sentence might mean something. Explanation, however, would cramp his style, and
so he doesn’t bother.
Aphorism
Granted I'm not so keen on this rather headlong
style - I find it slapdash and too many arguments are left unreasoned - but C's
tastes and ambitions are quite openly towards the aphoristic, and the book's
stated method of taking single quotations from writers and breaking out in new
directions naturally orients it towards the sententious. It also makes for an
amusing read (though if I'm honest, perhaps not as amusing as one would hope
from this writer).
Under scrutiny are the quotations of Louis
Armstrong, Albert Camus, Alfred Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Edward Gibbon, Edward
Said, Tacitus, Margaret Thatcher, Evelyn Waugh. These are admittedly the more
well-known subjects - some of the best chapters concern obscure (to me)
journalists and critics from early-20th century Germany and Austria, and the
book was largely worth reading for C's knowledge of and insight into these
writers.
But there are problems in understanding writers,
and especially systematic thinkers, via snippets of prose. I'm not really sure
how much scope there is for uncovering complexity or sustained argument in
‘quotations’, ‘cracks’, ‘remarks’, and 'phrases'.
‘[Wittgenstein] had things to say that
were as good as Hegel’s line about the owl of Minerva. He was the poet without
a context, the poet in the waste land.’
This is pretty thin stuff. And what does C mean by
‘line’? It’s an intriguing usage. It could be as in a line of poetry, given
that he’s treating philosophers as poets. It certainly means some sort of
structurally contained, circumscribed string of words. But whereas poetic
metre, musical rhythm, and theatre and film scripts all break up sentences into
patterns of lines, philosophy doesn’t. The ‘line’ is not really an organic unit
of philosophical discourse –arguments, hypotheses, premises are – and in saying
that it is, C betrays the shallowness
of his approach.
Throughout, what he takes from writers is their style,
the very surface of their writings:
‘writers can read a great deal, among
all the best exemplars, and still not take in the power to discriminate on
critical points of grammar, derivation, usage, punctuation and consistency of
metaphor.’
Fine, but what of truth, logical consistency, precision?
Given that an overwhelming theme of his book is the totalitarian assault on
truth and reason, why does C overlook the need for writers to argue honestly
and clearly and logically? He seems himself to realize that atomizing works
into lines might cause us to misunderstand them as a single cohesive whole,
saying that ‘ideally, nothing in a written work should show signs of wanting to
hive off and start another work’ – he says this, N.B., even though this entire book
is based on lines he has hived off to start another work.
What undoes him is his love of, and hankering
after, the aphoristic style. Reading and writing in lines, snippets, and
remarks distracts him from the altogether more important business of joining
remarks together to create higher-level discourses, such as arguments,
theories, and narratives.
Look at this as an example of the limitations of
the gnomic style:
‘The true political monster insists
that, apart from a few hand-picked satraps, there shall be no individuals
except himself. Everyone must be reminded, all the time, that solitude is all
there is: solitude in the sense of helpless loneliness, awaiting its
instructions from the leader’s voice.’
The rejoinder ‘solitude in the sense…’, where C
abandons the gnomic style (everyone, all the time, all there is) to clarify
what he actually means by ‘solitude’, is rather illustrative. An aphorism isn’t
enough, and sometimes we need to qualify or explain ourselves.
That is, we need an argument to be elaborated
enough such that we can determine the senses of the words contained in it. If I
screamed the word ‘SENSE!’ at you while standing at a bus stop, you would have
no clue what I meant, though if I expanded it to ‘HAVE SENSE!’ or ‘SENSE THE
WONDER!’ then we’d be getting somewhere. That is, our words need to be minimally
qualified or collocated to make sense, which forces on us a certain degree of
expatiation –because words often have
many senses and the sense cannot be clear in a stand-alone word.
C needs to define his terms, because that is what
one needs to do in making an argument – it is part of the boring and
unglamorous process of describing things as one thinks they are, or of
arranging one’s thoughts. And C cannot do it in a single aphorism above,
because its formal restrictions rule out such self-referential tidying up.
Which inevitably leads me to ask if a stylistic form that obstructs the
composition of decent arguments is any good – and indeed whether it will help
us to describe and debunk the fallacies, lies, and absurdities of the
ideologue.
Note too the following aphorism quoted approvingly
by C:
‘“A fanatic redoubles his effort when
he has forgotten his aim.”’
Very true – but note that the only thing that
differentiates it from a proverb is the fact it has a known author (I forget
who in this instance). Without authorship, it is a rather trivial truism. C
goes on to use this aphorism to show how difficult it supposedly is to
distinguish the author of one aphorism from another:
‘It is not so much that the memory
plays tricks: rather that, in this area of distilled truth, there is not all
that much difference between personalities.’
He is certainly on to something – it is true that
quoting authors in piecemeal small chunks makes them difficult to tell apart.
The reason, however, is probably not that aphorisms function at the level of searing
truth, where vestiges of personality are burnt away. No – far more likely is
that personality is evident at, again, a higher level of discourse than ‘points
of grammar, derivation, usage, punctuation and consistency of metaphor’. Much
more plausible is that writers make their mark through showing their thought
patterns and opinions and beliefs and interpretative tendencies – all of which usually
require more than a one-liner.
It should be no surprise if at this superficial
level writers are alike. Any writer, no matter how distinctive, could be
mistaken for any other when at his most trite or undeveloped . It is in
discourse, systems of thought, and argument that writers are distinctive. Distinctiveness
very often requires complexity, if only for purely combinatorial reasons.
Definition
C’s aphorisms – and I suppose aphorisms in general
– often impress the reader by using their brook-no-argument brevity to impose a
definition or axiom that would otherwise be dubious:
'That’s what history is: the story of
everything that needn’t have been like that.'
‘Their minds are alike, and one might
as well say their talents are alike: because in art the mind is the talent.’
‘any deeply felt philosophy is an
autobiographical novel.’
‘In London, Freud was still Vienna.’
Even if any one of these were true, we would still
have to say it was too reductive to be useful.
So why would we still assent to them (as I think we
sometimes do)?
Maybe it is force of personality (in the case of
this particular author), and also what might be called force of style. The
latter we could define as the purposeful use of rhythm and phrasing etc. to
disincline the reader from interrogating further what is said.
In the case of these definitions, where we are told
with quite grand certainty just what something ‘is’, there is a particular ‘disinclination’
that C is playing on – namely our own uncertainty over the meaning of the verb
‘to be’. While in one of its senses it functions as a kind of equals sign
(‘Eric Blair is George Orwell’, ‘the current Mayor of London is Boris Johnson’)
it can also mean, in weakened sense:
‘to be identical in function or essence
(though not in literal fact) with, to be as good as; to be the embodiment or expression
of’
(OED
‘be’ v. 10c)
And also:
‘To be the same in purport as; to
signify, amount to, mean’
(sense 11)
It’s fairly clear that ‘Freud was Vienna’ fits the
second sense, 10c. But I wouldn’t like to split the remaining three between the
other two senses. To state my credentials briefly, I carried out part of the
research on the OED entry for ‘be’ v.,
so I know how hard it can be to distinguish between these senses.
I think too that we are all of us fairly reluctant
to distinguish between the different senses of such a fundamental, important
(and difficult) word – after all, what if we look into the matter and confuse
ourselves? the word is too important for us and too prevalent to risk losing
our unexamined intuitions of its meaning. Whereas with some words we are
customarily used to checking the sense (‘funny haha or funny peculiar?’) we are
perhaps less inclined to ask in what sense C means that something ‘is’
something. When was the last time you asked in all seriousness ‘what do you
mean by “be”?’
So even though it can always be difficult to distinguish what ‘is’ means from one
sentence to the next, it is clear that to me C exploits our equivocation and
discomfort to prevent us from asking what he really means – specifically, from
asking the very tricky question of the mode in which he is speaking, whether he
is speaking with literal truthfulness or in a more complex and qualified way.
He thus evasively declines to commit himself to any
one way in which his definition is
true. It is not just that his chosen stylistic form precludes the defining of
terms – it actively evades it.
So, going by this instance at least, force of style
– or ‘the purposeful use of rhythm and phrasing etc. to disincline the reader
from interrogating further what is said’ – is really what we should call
‘rhetoric’. The use of stylistic tactics (delaying features, hurrying features,
plain shouting, etc.) to close down further interpretation and exploration, and
therefore to allow dishonest or at least problematic statements to escape
further scrutiny
Rhetoric
All of which I find unpleasant enough. Rhetoric is
essentially a bullying form of argument which arrogates its justification
through forcefulness and wrongfooting. But then we all know that rhetoric isn’t
very nice and why it isn’t, and saying so is rather trite.
More important is that it banjaxes, knackers, and
torpedoes the entire thrust of the book, which celebrates the humanistic
tradition as a strain of pithy, sententious rhetoric.
‘And one of those issues, by
implication, is the most troubling that faces the humanist heritage: how are we
to pass it on in its full complexity, and what can transmit that except style? [my italics]’
So the argument seems to go like this:
- The humanist tradition is constituted by style, and style is best exemplified by aphoristic rhetoric
- Humanism is the tradition that protects against the totalitarian and the ideologue
- Therefore we can counter totalitarianism by learning and cultivating rhetoric.
In sum, the argument is hopelessly flawed:
humanism, C claims, can save civilization from the destructive madness of
ideologues, but as he defines humanism as a deep care for the style and form
that writers give their language, he ends up committed to the absurd position
that we can protect civilization from the political ideologue (the Fascist, the
Islamist, the Maoist) by being good at rhetoric.
In fact, this is patently absurd. The totalitarian
and the ideologue both rely on rhetoric to pass off their absurdities – what
sort of purchase can we get by countering it with rhetoric? If the problem with
ideological language is its elision of untruths and also its unwarranted
forcefulness, we won’t get anywhere by substituting it with a critique that also
elides its reasoning under a similarly forceful, stylized bluster.
Or, put differently, we won’t be making a better
kind of argument – C wants to help us escape our past in which uncontrolled
brute power made 2 + 2 = 5, but wants to do so largely by presenting us with a
prettier alternative in which artifice and aesthetic say-so make 2 + 2 = 5
instead. This is to miss the point somewhat. We hate O’Brien for making 2 + 2 =
5 not because it damages fine language, but because it damages reason and logic
and common sense. These are the things humanism needs to salvage.
This has all been said already, and much more
cogently, by Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’. This is something C
knows well, noting precisely that he ‘analysed in detail [how] totalitarian
obsession distorts the logical element within language.’
In fact I suspect sometimes that C himself might be
aware that his notion of style as rhetoric veers far too close to the
ideologues he (rightly) attacks:
‘Vidal was at the height of his written
eloquence when he began to advance his thesis that the United States provoked
Imperial Japan into a war in the Pacific. The kind of proof he offered was on a
par with Hitler’s proof that Poland had provoked Germany into a war in 1939,
but the way he offered it was dazzling.’
C here praises Vidal for making the weak argument
seem strong – which is the ancient, and still valid, definition of sophistry.
Despite everything to commend in this book – the
wit and charm, the erudition, and the human feeling – it fails on its own
terms, and is too pushy, unreasoning, and superficial. It is unfortunate then
that the author is someone I have admired for some time, namely Clive James.
Doubly unfortunate that I’m putting the boot into a dying man. But he won’t
read this, and as at the moment I am considering whether I myself want to
become a writer, and if so a writer of what,
this has been an important exercise in identifying to myself a mode of writing
I very much do not wish to adopt.
The book is the story of James’s times and a
lifetime of reading, but perhaps James’s lifetime of writing is significant
too. His times and the way he has passed them have made him ill-equipped for
the ambitious task he sets himself here – it is the sad sight of a fine mind worn thin and superficial by too many years as a journalist.
Postscript:
errata
It is apparent throughout that James has an axe to
grind against professional academia, frequently denigrating it to the advantage
of journalism. Despite this he refers to his reader throughout as his
‘student’, whom he guides through the Republic of Letters. No journalist refers
to their reader as a student, but an academic certainly might – is James an
academic manqué, and a slightly embittered one at that?
Perhaps not, and he simply enjoys being
magisterial. Anyway, I thought I would stick up for the academics, being
vaguely of that background, by playing the tutor and flagging up the mistakes
in James’s ‘essays’ (I should say, only on those matters on which I can correct him – many of the figures he
writes about are unfamiliar to me).
‘“I have heard the chimes at midnight,”
says Falstaff’
should read ‘we have heard’
In the same chapter, he fails to pick up that
Thomas Browne’s ‘dreams out of the ivory gate’ is an unmistakeable allusion to
one of the most famous lines in Vergil (and all Latin poetry – Aeneid 6.893-6). Excusable, were it not
that elsewhere James with breezy confidence advances some, if not erroneous,
certainly rather wobbly ideas about Vergil.
Staying with Vergil, on Hazlitt’s line
‘Burke’s style was forked and playful
as the lightning, crested like the serpent.’
James says:
‘Possibly there was a crested serpent
somewhere in Shakespeare, and Hazlitt was making a subtle reference; or
Shakespeare might have had a crested servant, and Hazlitt was remembering a
sequence of sounds rather than a specific meaning.’
This is from Vergil again, this time the almost
equally famous killing of Laocoon and his sons by ‘Two Serpents rank’d abreast
… / Their flaming crests above the Waves they show’ (Dryden trans. Aeneid 2.270-2).
His claims that Edward Gibbon writes impenetrably
seem to me more a complaint about Latinizing early-modern prose as a whole –
not only does he greatly exaggerate the syntactic disorder of his writing, he
also fails to realize that Gibbon is using a well-worn stylistic figure called
zeugma (more specifically, syllepsis).
He misfires particularly badly on Milton:
‘[Hazlitt] found it hard, however, to
point out any phrase from Milton that looms and resonates like the clouded ruins
of a god.’
Only if Hazlitt was so remiss a reader as to miss a
famous simile from Paradise Lost Book
1:
'… his [Satan’s] form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd
Less then Arch Angel ruind, and th' excess
Of Glory obscur'd: As when the Sun new ris'n
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds
On half the Nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes Monarchs. Dark'n'd so, yet shon
Above them all th' Arch Angel.
Actually, has James even read the damn thing?
‘There has never been any real liking
for the poem’s story, however, because there isn’t one.’
He must have missed the bit about man’s first
disobedience and the loss of Eden and all that (which is strange, as it’s right
there in the first lines and there throughout – the title is also a hefty clue).
Last Miltonic fumble, and it’s a pearler:
‘I have a friend who studied Paradise
Lost at Oxford and has read it constantly ever since. But I have heard him
quote Milton only twice in all the years I have known him, whereas he quotes
Shakespeare all the time, and as naturally as breathing. There’s the
difference: Paradise Lost is unspeakable.’
Yes, and my mate Derek quotes it all the time. Even
if you’ve not agreed with a single word I’ve written so far, you must concede that
this is extraordinary guff.
Moving on:
‘the German reflexive verb: und der Nationalsozialismus mordete sie mir.
Murdered them for me’
This is not reflexive.
Finally:
‘the aim [Of Wittgenstein’s philosophy]
we can find summed up for him on his brass plate in Trinity College chapel in
Cambridge: Rationem ex vinculis orationis
vindicam esse.’
This is not the correct Latin quotation. In fact it isn’t
even Latin.
Wednesday, 28 May 2014
Republicanism vs. monarchism, again
It struck me recently, nearly two years after it happened, that at the 2012 London Olympics the Queen actually pretended to parachute out of a helicopter accompanied by James Bond.
Here's a picture. You don't need it, but it makes the page look more eventful.
Obviously it's a stuntman, not the Queen herself (nor is it Prince Edward having been bullied into it by his father, though that certainly crossed my mind).
Looking back on it, I'm amazed not only that such an obvious gimmick went down largely well with the public, but that the royal family risked it in the first place. Twenty, maybe ten years ago (whenever the annus horribilis was) this would have been unthinkable: just the idea of it would have been laughed off as a desperate and embarrassing attempt to ingratiate by a terminally out-of-touch dynasty, as happened with their disastrous appearance on 'It's a Royal Knockout'.
That the Queen got away with it, and more importantly gambled that she could get away with it, is further proof that republicans are faring terribly in the public debate about the monarchy and offer no meaningful resistance. Perhaps they are so assured of the unassailable moral and ideological rightness of their position, they feel no need to press their argument home - or perhaps they feel there isn't much of a public debate going on right now.
Both are gigantically wrong-headed. The royal family is constantly making the case for its own survival, not openly but indirectly (critics might say insidiously). It's perhaps no surprise that they're prevailing, given that dynasties exist only to ensure their own survival, and this one has been doing it for a thousand years. But republican complacency only makes that job easier.
Here's a picture. You don't need it, but it makes the page look more eventful.
Obviously it's a stuntman, not the Queen herself (nor is it Prince Edward having been bullied into it by his father, though that certainly crossed my mind).
Looking back on it, I'm amazed not only that such an obvious gimmick went down largely well with the public, but that the royal family risked it in the first place. Twenty, maybe ten years ago (whenever the annus horribilis was) this would have been unthinkable: just the idea of it would have been laughed off as a desperate and embarrassing attempt to ingratiate by a terminally out-of-touch dynasty, as happened with their disastrous appearance on 'It's a Royal Knockout'.
That the Queen got away with it, and more importantly gambled that she could get away with it, is further proof that republicans are faring terribly in the public debate about the monarchy and offer no meaningful resistance. Perhaps they are so assured of the unassailable moral and ideological rightness of their position, they feel no need to press their argument home - or perhaps they feel there isn't much of a public debate going on right now.
Both are gigantically wrong-headed. The royal family is constantly making the case for its own survival, not openly but indirectly (critics might say insidiously). It's perhaps no surprise that they're prevailing, given that dynasties exist only to ensure their own survival, and this one has been doing it for a thousand years. But republican complacency only makes that job easier.
Wednesday, 9 April 2014
Fort Hood and history
I hope it isn't too soon to grind on abstractly about this story (update: and this one), given that both are very real disasters.
The shooter was, apparently, a soldier suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Which got me thinking - why does this sort of craziness seem to happen in the United States more often than other developed countries? Which in turn led me to the improbable answer - because of historical exceptionalism and the denial of empire.
That is: if America faced up to its de facto imperial status, then the stresses of constant warfare, the projection of power, global responsibility, etc. would be both predictable and rationalizable. However, because America believes itself to be an exception to the historical pattern of empire, the consequences of its actual imperial position impact the national psyche as unexpected and irrational traumas.
And madness ensues.
Ok - it is probably bad taste to say that this is why the Fort Hood shooter did what he did, and so greet human disaster with mental masturbation. So I won't go that far. I will, however, point out the following.
Against historical exceptionalism, one can say that a nation's main advantage in conceiving itself historically is that it allows it to make the analogies that constitute self-recognition and understanding; and from that, to build heuristic models. If I can see by means of comparison that I am this or that type of power, I can also see what is likely to follow as consequences of being that type. We don't always need history to make analogies, but superpowers usually do as only one or two major superpowers exist at a time - you might need to go back a bit to find a useful comparison.
Imagine, for instance, that I didn't know I was middle class. My life wouldn't just be unpredictable, it would be a series of disjointed, unexplained, and terrifyingly odd consequences - why do they insist so urgently that I watch Scandinavian TV programmes? do they all imagine that food is so very interesting? who or what is Yotam Ottolenghi?
So one advantage of putting oneself in the right category, or of doing the semantics right at a national level, is that it turns events into entailments and so makes experience more predictable and less traumatic.
A further advantage is that it allows for cultural conditioning, including at the level of the individual. I think this is something America understood in its past specifically with regard to empire building - life on the frontier colonizing the West was hard and violent, and so this way of life was built up into the armature of the cowboy archetype. These discomforts were not anomalous or irrational, no matter that they felt so to the person undergoing them - they were entirely in place and more than that, the meaningful building blocks of a bigger cultural project. Trauma was made bearable.
The same goes, I have heard it said, for Australian 'mateness' - comradeship was necessary just to survive and expand in such a hostile environment, but the notion grew (or has grown) into a unifying idea of Australianness.
I do not at all see that the modern United States has anything to hand that could condition its national psyche for the reality of maintaining its foremost place in the world. The Davy Crockett type is now a mannerism and a fiction. And despite a much more warlike attitude since 9/11, there still seems to be a common feeling that the boys should be brought back home, and that having men fighting overseas is somehow un-American. But the world being such as it is, the trauma of constant warfare and violence is entirely congruous with being world superpower.
I am being simplistic here, I realize. The British empire, for instance, wasn't as automatically keen on fighting wars as one might assume - parliamentary debate in the 19th century could be surprisingly anti-war: it was costly to the Exchequer and bad for trade. But I’d be very surprised to hear that imperial Britain ever suffered a trauma like Vietnam - not just a trauma of lost life, but a trauma of irrationality ('why is this even happening?').
The notion that without these basically deceitful cultural accretions, war can be seen for what it is and therefore avoided is clearly untrue in this instance.
The notion that without these basically deceitful cultural accretions, war can be seen for what it is and therefore avoided is clearly untrue in this instance.
Consider Kipling's remarkable Recessional, written 1897 at the zenith of British imperial power to celebrate Victoria's diamond jubilee:
Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
The equivalent moment in the equivalent period of US history may well be George W. Bush in that jump suit, on that aircraft carrier (with that banner). America's decline, if it happens, will be long and slow (hopefully) - but I wonder if it has the psychological means, or even the will, to prepare for decline. The benefit of embracing empire is that decline becomes a corollary instead of a shock. It happened to Nineveh and Tyre, it happened to the Brits, and now it's happening to us.
Without this, the trauma will surely be more traumatic than it needs to be.
Without this, the trauma will surely be more traumatic than it needs to be.
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