Bianca Steele

In This Week's Papers: Copley, March, Mehanna, Bellafante, and Roiphe

My daughter now has a tricycle, a helmet, and summer clothes that will still fit her in September.  She also has a promise that we will plant some flowers in front of the house, something I’ve never actually tried to do (I did plant some bulbs about ten years ago, but only some of them came up).  And being between landscapers, I’ve pruned one of a small number of flowering shrubs (a PJM rhododendron, which grows well in this climate, setting its buds before winter and blooming just after the forsythias do, but which isn’t in the standard plant books).  I have all the tools now, from the little snippers through the lopper and the saw, and I’ve almost become comfortable enough with the pruning to no longer fear I’m going to kill the thing, but not quite.  So finding the flowers will be next.

Copley as a British Painter

This article about John Singleton Copley in the Boston Globe is interesting, because it argues that Copley—who has numerous sites around Boston named for him, as a Revolutionary-era hero, and whose paintings, along with those of Gilbert Stuart, form the backbone of the Boston MFA’s eighteenth-century American collection (which is well worth seeing)—didn’t see himself as “American” at all.  He sided with the British Tories, the Loyalists; hated and feared the revolutionary movement; and moved to England to escape the war, spending the rest of his life painting portraits of members English aristocracy and royalty.

His American paintings, though, have an explicitly (little-r) republican, even a Puritan, air to them.  The backgrounds are simple, usually dark brown.  The men depicted wear plain clothes, the costumes of their everyday working life, and hold the implements of their work (often pens and books).  The women’s dress is also relatively plain, compared with European subjects (especially the English princesses who sat for the painters late works), and behind them Copley painted the branches of flowering trees.

It would be easy to conclude that the artist admired such simplicity.  He could have painted his subjects in the traditional style, in a more ornate fashion that might appeal to the art collectors of Europe.  Benjamin Rush—himself a solid advocate of independence and self-governance, along with the education of women—did, in fact, paint in that style, as when he depicted his wife and child using the form of a Madonna by Raphael.  The simplicity, even drabness, of Copley’s American portraits looks like a statement, but it may have only been a matter of the sitters’ own preferences.

Freedom of Speech and the Study of Other Cultures

A professor of political science at Yale, Andrew March, has an op-ed about the Tarek Mehanna case in today’s New York Times.  Mehanna was sentenced earlier this month for materially supporting a terrorist group, mostly on the basis of his online activities publishing translations of Al Qaeda propaganda and defending Al Qaeda online.  There’s no question, as this article about Mehanna’s behavior at his sentencing hearing shows, that he did intend to give Al Qaeda material support and that he did intend to support their self-declared “war” against the United States.

What concerns March is that there seems to be little difference between what he does professionally and what in Mehanna’s case is considered a crime.  Both engaged in discussion to further the knowledge of a group that the US government has declared a terrorist organization.  There is the matter of intention: March’s for pure knowledge, Mehanna’s for proselytization—and presumably the latter was more intent on insistently promoting sympathetic understanding among his correspondents than March insists on.  However, it remains the case that the case involves an unprecedented criminalization of speech.  In fact, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in another case, himself held that material support did not encompass speech, unless there were explicit coordination from the group supported, which did not exist in Mehanna’s case.  March seems to worry that studying certain topics might become too dangerous for anyone without a kind of license to do so, in the form of a university post or similar professional position.

Even worse, however, in March’s opinion, is that the prosecutors used even Mehanna’s penchant for hiking as an example of his engaging in terrorist activities.  He had translated an Arabic text describing physical fitness as an alternate means of participating in jihad.  March argues that the intention behind the text is to deflect would be terrorists into peaceful community-building.  Yet the list of activities gave prosecutors an opening to describe Mehanna as spending nearly all his time on “jihad,” even when he was apparently innocently working out or talking about working out.  Imagining that this could happen to you—that somebody could twist all your actions around in order to cast an evil light on them, simply on the basis of an unrelated statement—would be infuriating for anyone.  But in the context of the court case, it doesn’t strike me as so worrying.  Prosecutors most likely engage in overstatement all the time.  Their job is to persuade a jury to vote to convict—not to find ultimate truth or be fair to everybody who might someday exercise.  Nobody’s criminalizing hiking.

Is Katie Roiphe Searching for a Female Midlife Judd Apatow?

There’s a new sexy novel for housewives out, by a woman in England, that is the new hot topic of conversation among feminist journalists and bloggers (or was, before Girls went on the air).  One of these, inevitably, was the ubiquitous Katie Roiphe—as Ginia Bellafante points out in the Sunday New York Times.  There’s always something to criticize in Roiphe’s “what’s the matter with women today?” pieces, and what Bellafante points out in this one is that Roiphe—once again—“suggests that career women . . . long to be sexually dominated” and to break out of the feminism-driven self-controlled, competent lives they’ve come to lead.

What I thought was interesting, and what Bellafante doesn’t ask, is, “why sex?”  She interprets Roiphe as wrongly believing that career women still (as they did in the 1990s) fear associating themselves with the label “feminism,” and she interprets sex fantasies like these as stemming from a feeling that “sexual abjection [is] the penalty the culture exacts on the average-looking woman for the offense of her averageness.”  But the novelist herself thinks the book is popular because most women actually don’t look for ultra-masculine, dominating behavior from a potential husband or boyfriend; they want someone who will help do the dishes, who will pull his own weight around the house.  She is English, of course, and they do things differently over there, but she does have a point.  As much as twelve year olds love Twilight, most twenty- and thirty-somethings are not in mourning for those fantasies, nor even for the fact that they’ve given them up.

So why does Roiphe keep returning to the subject, as Ginia Bellafante complains?  She seems to want to insert sex into every situation.  To me, this seems strange.  True, there is a cultural obsession with sexlessness and with the idea that for certain groups of people, in order to be fully adult, sexlessness is something they have to get over.  So we have bromances and we have movies by Judd Apatow—for teenage boys who apparently wouldn’t know marriage existed unless a movie showed them the world beyond the Playstation, and therefore would necessarily remain eternal children on their parents’ couch, with no interests beyond the Fritos bag and no interest in getting a job.  But why would we expect to see a parallel narrative for women?  Much less for middle-aged women near the peak of their professional careers?

Anonymous and Oxfordianism

The reviews are pretty well unanimous that Anonymous is a silly film.  If you’ve missed seeing them, the plot involves the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays, but rather acted as a front man for a nobleman, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, because the reputation of a nobleman would be harmed if his name had been attached to plays produced for a commercial audience.  There are several different people offered as “candidates” (as those interested in the controversy call them) for the “authorship” of the “works.”  Over the centuries, these have included Francis Bacon (a lawyer and scholar, one of the founders of both modern science and modern philosophy) , Christopher Marlowe (a playwright exactly William Shakespeare’s age, who was killed young under dubious, slightly sketchy circumstances), and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is the candidate put forward here.  “Oxfordians” are said to include some prominent Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and Michael York, as well as several North American literature professors.

There seem to be two or maybe three kinds of issues that concern people who become convinced that “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.”  (Here is a link to a discussion thread at an “Oxfordian” site, answering the question, “Why I became an Oxfordian.”)  First, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was a middle-class boy who attended state-run schools, and stopped attending them in his early teens—while the plays are considered masterworks of the English language, worthy of study by the most learned of people, and with considered allusions not only to high-level political events and to the best theoretical knowledge of the times, but to ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well.  People have even found in them apparent allusions to esoteric mysteries of the sort that it’s supposed only a scholar like Bacon could be familiar with.  Second, it can appear that the connection between the standard biographies and the available source materials sometimes fail to sustain skeptical scrutiny.  Third, some readers and playgoers report that the plays opened up a deeper meaning to them, culturally and emotionally, once they began thinking of them in terms of the works of a specific human being who is emphatically not William Shakespeare.

I have some sympathy with the second of these.  It actually is not the case that there are no source materials documenting William Shakespeare’s life.  The Riverside edition of Shakespeare, for example, lists all of these and excerpts some, and so does this site (which is maintained by people who find the very idea of “alternate authorship candidates” to be pernicious and anti-intellectual).  These few facts, however, are not enough to build a 400-page biography on.  Biographies of Shakespeare, like biographies of most historical figures of the early modern period (even kings and queens), include a large portion of conjecture and literary reconstruction.  Moreover, throughout the centuries, English and American writers have interwoven their fancies with facts, often producing deeply influential portraits that by now have become part of the culture, as much as the exact words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies.  James Shapiro (in 1599), no less than Virginia Woolf (in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own), builds literary theories on the basis of a Shakespeare who was presented at court, and even had a room at the castle in which to write.  The skeptical or scientifically-minded student, who may try to investigate the history as if it were, say, a crime still unrecognized and unknown to the police, can quickly become frustrated.

There are good histories that take account of what we know about the history of the period, often by English scholars of the history of the theatre, with full scholarly apparatus.  These even examine practices of collaboration, and of “borrowing” that today we might consider plagiarism.  They are, unfortunately, quite expensive, and they are not necessarily intended to affect the literary discourse, but they are not hard to find and they are not hard to read.  This is far from the conspiracy theory some “Oxfordians” imagine.

The first and third objections, though, are silly, and I think they are connected.  The reason people put Oxford forward as the probable author of “Shakespeare” isn’t just that their interpretation of these canonical works—unlike the accepted interpretation—is that they put forward a strongly aristocratic, Catholic, anti-Reformation point of view, which requires the playwright to have been a Catholic aristocrat who hobnobbed with the Queen’s Catholic opponents. 

It’s also that they want everything they see in the plays (and also in the poems: the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece) to have been available to the playwright, fully, and consciously.  The idea that someone who studied Latin in grammar school, but didn’t graduate from college, could allude, as an adult, to Terence and Virgil and Seneca, doesn’t seem possible to them.  The idea that ideas were shared among playwrights, that knowledge of politics was shared among men in coffeehouses, similarly, doesn’t seem possible.

They want to be able to attribute real knowledge to the playwright, to use him as an authority, and they can’t do it if he didn’t quite know what he was talking about, himself.  This is not the way skilled readers encounter literature.  Playwrights (like novelists and poets) write from a subjective, partial, emotional perspective—they don’t get Ph.D.-level knowledge of a subject so they can invent stories that embody scientific or theoretical truths.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was a large amount of amateur scholarship being produced about Shakespeare.  Among lawyers, this sometimes took the form of displaying the depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of law, and then arguing that this meant that the author of the play in question must have been trained in the law.  Physicians, similarly, argued that he was a physician.  This scholarship doesn’t hold up well.  Others went to great lengths to find an actual historical figure who seemed to fit the idea the plays gave them of the author, and they came up with Edward de Vere: a youngish, fairly low-level member of the court, raised in a kind of orphanage run by William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, Elizabeth’s chief minister, specifically for parentless young aristocrats, married unhappily to Burleigh’s own daughter, flirting with Catholicism in the face of Elizabeth’s excommunication by Rome, always complaining about how he was treated and how much money he was being allotted by his betters.

To some extent, I think, the Oxfordian narrative embodies a particular kind of confusion about how imaginative literature is written, and it could be interesting for that reason.  There have been literary fronts in history (see The Front), and at times literature has been used politically (as Clare Asquith notes, applying her experiences with the arts of the former Soviet Union to the situation of Elizabethan England).  There is a lot of collaboration—huge teams of writers on Hollywood television shows, unnamed script doctors and collaborators on Hollywood films, novel factories that “touch up” stories drafted by the named author—that often goes unrecognized.  There are interesting new-historical questions about “social energies” that are harnessed by great writers, but not literally created by those writers ab ovo—and there are interesting cultural questions about where those social energies really do originate, and how they do.

I somehow have a feeling that Anonymous, from the creator of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, will itself say nothing particularly interesting about those questions.  But since—as more than one reviewer suggested might be necessary to make sense of the plot—I already have some sense of the differences between the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Leicester, and the Earl of Southampton—I will probably watch it anyway.  If you don’t, you may prefer reading James Shapiro’s recent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?.  Or watch HBO’s miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, and learn what those differences are.

Does Economic Value Derive from Demand or Difficulty?

This, from about a week ago, probably will only be meaningful for those who already know about the roots of current “libertarian” thinking in the writings of the mid-twentieth century economists, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek (apparently non-libertarian conservatives are also influenced by them), and in fact I don’t know enough about economics myself to understand all of it, but I thought these paragraphs from economics professor Brad de Long were interesting:

The point of view underlying von Mises's—and von Hayek, and Marx, and Ron Paul—complaint against Fiat money in general and monetary management of the business cycle in particular is this: that value comes from human sweat and toil, not from being clever. Thus it is fine for money to have value if it is 100% backed by gold dug from the earth by sweat and machines and muscles (even if there is no state of the possible future world in which people actually want to exchange their pieces of paper for the gold that supposedly backs it). But it is not fine for money to have value simply because it is useful for buying things. There is, von Mises—and Marx, and von Hayek, and Ron Paul—think, something profoundly wrong on an economic and on a moral level with procedures that create value that is not backed by, in Marx's case, human labor, and in von Mises's and von Hayek's case human entrepreneurial ingenuity. And in its scarier moments this train of thought slides over to: "good German engineers (and workers); bad Jewish financiers".

Note that this does not just apply to fiat money produced by a government.

This applies to all financial market asset valuations in excess of capital cost of production (or perhaps the value of the inventions of the gigantic Krell-like brain of John Galt). They are, to von Mises, all cheats.

This (which, as de Long points out, also applies to Marx’s labor theory of value), does say that because “value comes from human sweat and toil,” the price of edible dandelion roots foraged from a meadow should always be less than the price of a big boulder that was dug out of my yard so a sewer line could be put in place.  It doesn’t, however, imply that it is somehow cheating to ask a neighbor or friend for help, even with trivial things like opening a package or fastening a necklace, which would just be silly.  Though I’m not sure why “value comes . . . not from being clever” isn’t supposed to remove the real value from “the inventions . . . of John Galt.”

But I thought of this again when I read, recently, an essay by Martha Nussbaum, a professor of philosophy, law, and religion, on the objectification and harassment of women on the Internet (in The Offensive Internet, a volume she co-edited).  She discusses

the tendency of some societies to define the ideal adult as self-sufficient, independent, lacking in deep needs with respect to others.  In many societies, such pictures are held out to young people—but far more often to males than to females.  The idea of the "real man" as someone who is never weak, never dependent, always in control, is a very common feature of developmental patterns in countless societies, but certainly in ours, which so strongly valorizes the lone cowboy who can provide for himself without the help of any others. 

Even though, even taken to an extreme, the point of view Brad de Long attributes to people like Marx and Ron Paul and Ludwig von Mises applies only to economic theory, not to the details of ordinary people’s mundane lives, it does sound as though this economic theory supports—since Ayn Rand has already been brought into the discussion—what her novels’ villains condemn as “rugged individualism,” and what Nussbaum suggests is, in some places and at some times, considered appropriate for all men but for no women.

Angels with Dirty Faces

In an episode last Tuesday, titled “Occupy Hollywood,” critic Garen Daley was interviewed by Callie Crossley on NPR about “the history of social movements through American cinema.”  I’d like to listen to the episode again, but I wonder about some of his choices.  Talking about Angels with Dirty Faces, which at one time was my absolute favorite old-time movie, Daley claims that what made the story acceptable to an audience, as a film with a good message, was the happy ending.  My recollection is that the final scene of Angels with Dirty Faces has James Cagney being executed, in the electric chair.  That doesn’t seem like a happy ending.  I suppose what he has in mind is the fact that Cagney goes out, not defying death and Society, but crying for his mother and asking whoever’s out there listening for forgiveness—not because he really repented, arguably, but because he wants the Dead End Kids listening, who look up to him, to abandon their own lives of crime.  That moment is, assuredly, a heartwarming one, which affirms the meaning of the film for the audience leaving the theater.  But to call it, not even tragic, but “happy,” to me seems peculiar.

Is Changing Rules by "Nudging" People Undemocratic?

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler wrote a well known book called Nudge (not “noodge”), arguing that various social policy should be set up in a way that “nudges” people towards doing things that policymakers thing they should do.  For example, if policymakers think more people should invest in 401K plans, employers should be required to make 401K contributions a default.  People would have to opt out of their employer’s 401K plan if they didn’t want to make contributions, rather than (as now) having to opt in if they did want it.  It does make sense to arrange defaults appropriately, both to decrease the amount of work people have to do (human resources workers as well as employees), and to encourage or discourage certain actions (modifying a thermostat to encourage energy savings, might be another example, or setting printer defaults to minimize paper use).

On the other hand, the way Sunstein and Thaler discuss “nudging” can sound a bit nanny-state-ish.  Henry Farrell, a political science professor, and Cosma Shalizi, a professor of statistics, have written an article in the New Scientist (via Crooked Timber) criticizing their views.  I agree with their argument, but there is, I think, a problem with the “nudge” theory that I have never seen addressed.  Farrell and Shalizi write:

…[T]he key problem with “nudge” style paternalism [is] presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions.

Nor will they ever be able to.  “Nudging” is nonverbal.  It doesn’t give people the ability to understand their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to discuss their situation better.  It doesn’t give people the ability to provide the nudgers with extra feedback.

Worse, it lessens people’s ability to deal with the real world.  Before the nudge was implemented, people were at least somewhat able to discuss policies, like compensation, on their merits.  Afterwards, everything ordinary people suggest will mess up the nudging part of the policy.

Anyone who’s worked in a reasonably large organization will recognize what’s likely to happen next: any suggestion for improvement will be met with objections along the lines of: that’s not what’s really at stake here.  But it is what’s really at stake!

It would become impossible to discuss or decide anything except at the topmost levels.  There, presumably, are personnel who know how to discuss both aspects of policy and can take account of nudging as well as ordinary practices.  But before the nudge, those people delegated a lot of that work to lower-level personnel, who afterward will have slipped out of the loop.  And the nudge, in the first place, was implemented by people outside the organization, not those within it.  So how this could possibly work is far from clear.  What’s more likely is total sclerosis, as nothing changes significantly at a policy level, and things either fall apart or rules are modified surreptitiously and unofficially, day to day.

The idea of the “nudge” seems, on paper, to presuppose that organizations work by choosing (or falling into) a set of rules that define every decision ahead of time, at a very detailed level.  If this were literally true, then, we would expect to find a group of architects, highly educated, well aware of everything that needs to be known (practically, theoretically, politically, strategically), who think about policy; and also a group of workers who don’t think about any of this at all.  For the latter group of people, presumably, it would be an exaggeration to say that they do what they’re told or that they make decisions by applying rules; they would have to make decisions unconsciously on the basis of rules they’ve somehow internalized but can’t actually articulate.  Yet their rules could be changed—by the nudge—on a fairly short timescale.  But that isn’t much like what really happens, and isn’t especially plausible.

Most people, most of the time, are a combination of the former and latter groups.  “Nudging,” as Farrell and Shalizi show, is undemocratic because it makes it more difficult for them to carry out the former functions.  But more than that, it seems to assume an extremely implausible picture of society.

(Now if I could only nudge my three year old to sleep past 6:30 AM now that we’ve moved the clocks back an hour.)

A Long Way to Go to Get to a Post about Philip Roth

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time.  I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now.

(Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be:  More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle.  And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years.  There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.)

So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned all the clothes.  And how I wasted most of a day trying to research new washers and dryers online, figuring it might be time to replace the 1975-era washing machine too (which works perfectly well except that the “warm” water is better described as “cool,” and probably isn’t very efficient, and is so old and low-tech it just plain looks silly), only to discover that the question of the modern high-efficiency washer is a highly vexed one, and give up and decide to buy the simplest dryer I could find—only to learn that the online description of its dimensions was off by just enough that it wouldn’t fit through the door. 

Or I could blog about how, at just about this time last year, and the year before, right after my daughter’s birthday party, I got sick, and how I ended up being sick almost continually last year from November until almost May—though this time I got sick two weeks before the party, and since then so far I seem okay.  Or my attempts to determine whether the sore throat I’ve been waking up with every morning is from a cold, allergies, or acid reflux.  Though it does appear to be the last of these (it can be preempted using Pepcid), and so far I’m not sick, just tired from pre-party cleaning and from swimming in my daughter’s swim class to the deep end of the pool with her, for the first time in half a year and ve-e-ery slowly.

I could write about the movie Howl, and whether it is somehow cheating to have the original Ginsberg poem’s imagery displayed for you on a screen so you can understand the metaphors without doing the thinking for yourself—and whether it is actually possible to read all the words of the Neal Cassady section of the poem without having them read for you as a voiceover to a cartoon.

But I will blog, fairly briefly, about modern literature, and women in modern literature.

One of the novels I value most these days is American Pastoral, by Philip Roth.  The plot of the novel involves a successful Jewish-American businessman whose daughter, in the political turmoil of the 1960s, joins up with the Weathermen and bombs the local post office, killing the owner of the grocery store in which the PO’s located.  She disappears, and twenty years later, he finds her living a life of squalor in a slumland squat, doing a kind of penance and renunciation through a form of Jainism (involving the refusal to do violence to any living thing) which she has worked out for herself through reading and introspection.  Most of the novel consists of her father’s tortured attempts to work out what—in America, in his own parenting, in the belief systems of the other adults who helped her over the years—possibly could have resulted in both her crime and her unacceptable religious beliefs.  He rakes over her situation with the utmost of empathy of which he’s capable, but ultimately he fails to comprehend the path she chose.  He condemns her along with the society that made her that way, even as he is too much of a conformist to stand apart from society in any real way.

It’s the painstaking and thoughtful recreation of the emotional dilemmas faced by the girl and her father, the novelist’s willingness to implicate the father’s own beliefs and his way of life in actions he repudiates, and the selection of both male and female characters to illustrate various modes of being in the society he depicts, that I find appealing.  The moral, if there is any, isn’t on the surface, any more than it is in any other novel—there are some obvious “morals,” if a reader had to have them, like don’t commit murder, or don’t trust in wealth to preserve your family from misfortune, but the question of what could have helped these characters more isn’t answered—and I don’t assume that I would agree in full with Philip Roth’s take on their lives if I knew it.  (In fact, although I’ve been tempted to see these painstaking moments of empathy with female characters as a refutation of the broadly accepted notion of Roth’s general misogyny, I’ve ultimately concluded that they’re overwhelmed by the rest of his writing, that moments is all they are.)

But when I declared, on Internet discussion forums, that American Pastoral, along with The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, were my favorites among all Roth’s novels, I was told, by male participants, in no uncertain terms, that I was wrong.  Roth’s best novels are those, like Sabbath’s Theater, they said, that foreground the male id and the issues (in our society and given the realities of aging) that surround exuberant male sexuality.  There was no discussion, there was no admission that a preference for one novel over another may largely involve subjective factors, there was only a flat statement that I was wrong.  There was no explanation.  The idea may have been that those novels are more characteristic of Roth’s writing—maybe given the long view of his work as a whole, maybe given the idea of Roth as essentially a novelist of exuberantly aggressive sexuality and rebellion—and maybe because they took those apparently more characteristic novels as a condemnation of the author, or maybe because they equated characteristic with best.  The idea may have been that those themes always make for better literature, or the idea may have been that those novels are better because they are less political.  The idea may have been that those novels spoke well for the men making the claim, a subjective claim, if surreptitiously so.  Whatever the underlying reasons, if I tried to give reasons for my preference, their response was to insist that no possible reason could cause them to change their minds.

It seemed as if they were claiming that they could speak for the entire literary world, and that no alternative was possible.  They did not seem to envision the possibility of discussion about the merits of one novel over another, or of one way of writing novels over another.  They seemed, on the contrary, thoroughly invested in the concept of modern literature as the self-expression of a callow young man whose interests are eternally opposed to the needs of “the community”—entire shelves of novels the reader could take or leave depending on whether that character’s interests aligned with her own, but with which she could not dispute.

Maybe they were right.  Or maybe they just didn’t understand.

The Social Network: Baby, You're a Rich Man, Too

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person.  But it actually raises some much weirder questions.  The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper.  The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs.  Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it?

This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives.  This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle that put itself in its path: and all of those obstacles arose from the will of others’ opposing themselves to him (usually by telling him there’s something he should pay closer attention to).  Actually, there are no real obstacles.  He and his friends tell a few friends about “The Facebook,” and they tell a few friends, and so on and so on and so on.  On campus after campus, within a couple of weeks of students’ getting access to the site, it is the biggest thing since pitchers of beer.  The coding goes smoothly, and everything just falls into place.  There are no technical challenges that require hard work and thinking even from a programming genius.  There are no unforeseen hardware failures, no power outages that make prearranged deadlines impossible.  There is nothing Mark Zuckerberg got wrong—except the rule that one should never stomp on the little people on his way up the ladder.

The only problem Zuckerberg has is that he doesn’t know an algorithm to create an absolute ranking of a large group of competitors on the basis of a limited number of real competitions between selected pairs of them.  He has to ask his friend Eduardo Saverin for that information.  We do see him in an Operating Systems class, in which he solves a complex calculation, involving addressing theory, on the spur of the moment (Zuckerberg’s actual Harvard OS professor has written up some of his reminiscences, with reference to The Social Network, here and here).  But there is no sense, in the film, that memorizing theory and doing quick mental math is not enough to create a successful computer application, much less a distributed application.  Admittedly, a focus on technical issues would be boring.  But the filmmakers suggest that Zuckerberg’s accomplishment lay in finding an opportunity and making sure he was the only one who profited from it: the near equivalent of climbing onto a speeding train and pushing those already riding it over the side.

It was not necessary, moreover, to hinge the film on the bizarre personality (as portrayed in the film) of Sean Parker.  (He is described in the film as the founder of Napster, though according to Wikipedia his real involvement is questionable.[1])  Parker, as depicted, and presumably as can be shown through publicly available documentation, is a flake.  He has a history, not only of being unable to work with colleagues, but of fallouts with police, over cocaine use and underage girls.  He appears to be paranoid and (in the words of Saverin in the film) delusional—which is not so surprising if the allegations about cocaine are true.  He does have contacts in the business world that Zuckerberg and Saverin lack.  His intuition that Facebook could have an even bigger impact—on something—than Napster had, on music sales, turned out to be right.  Saverin’s apparent feeling that what they had was just an ordinary dot-com business success turned out to be wrong.  Yet the narrative is set up as Zuckerberg’s choice—between remaining on the East Coast, finishing college, and being ordinary—and breaking into the big time in California, turning himself into a superstar.  Saverin remains committed to the first of those choices, while Parker tempts Zuckerberg towards the second one.

The problem is that the film does not successfully distinguish Parker’s way of life from his business and technical ability.  There is a relentless focus on the way having lots of money gives men the wherewithal to form private all-male clubs and party, to stay out all night drinking and taking drugs and getting hot women to take off their clothes and dance with one another.  At Harvard, this is the province of the final clubs, like the Porcellian, to which Zuckerberg’s nemeses the Winklevoss twins belong.  Mundane fraternities like AEP[2] only have lame-looking mixers, and people like Mark Zuckerberg—because of their aggressively ambitious personalities, the film suggests—will never be accepted into those people’s clubs.  In California, on the contrary, a smart guy with lots of ambition has the chance to become Sean Parker.  You can write code in your rented house and party with college girls at the same time.[3]  You can get hot women who wouldn’t have looked at you twice before you were rich.[4]  There is no real sense of irony in the film’s idea, expressed by the Beatles’ song that plays over the film’s final shot, that Mark Zuckerberg is now “one of the beautiful people.”

And Parker’s personality is certainly typical California.  The drugs, the partying, the contempt for the East Coast as old and stodgy, the idea that nothing of any importance is going on anyplace else.  The identification of expertise with knowing the right people and being willing to play them, of creativity and intelligence with business sense and aggression.  Parker is Zuckerberg’s Paul Simon to Saverin’s Woody Allen (with Mark Zuckerberg, then, as Annie Hall, if rather more successful than she will ever be).  And he behaves, and talks, in a manner more frequently associated with Simon’s and Allen’s generation (or with Sorkin’s) than with that of today’s young people.  There is no apparent irony in this, either.  The idea seems to be that California tech executives and Hollywood stars are the same—and better than everybody else—and, not least, just because they are free enough and rich enough to party.  At least the filmmakers don’t seem to have cared to do some research and find out whether they and their subjects are different.

Which raises the question: Are the filmmakers capable of understanding success as anything deeper than money, fame, and personality, as anything more important than the ability to gain access to a kind of secret society where drugs and free love are the rule?  Is joining a men’s club (a gentlemen’s club in the real meaning of the phrase) what “making it” means?  Are rich people better than the rest of us, really, only because they know how to party?[5]  It’s as strange as if “the music of the night,” promised by the phantom of the opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of that name, were only what could be heard from a ladies’ room stall at Studio 54.

(For more, here is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, by Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien.)

[1] It’s interesting that the MP3 format used by Napster is, technically, a very poor format.  Its great advantage is its simplicity.  It is easy to program to.  I’ve wondered whether this is an example of technical lock-in as a result of nontechnical path dependence, something that is far from rare (Sony Betamax is widely regarded as superior to VHS), but in this case arose because the only broadly available application for downloadable audio files was created not only by amateurs, but by student amateurs.

[2] At Columbia, for what it’s worth, AEP renamed itself as TEP when it decided to become coed and admit women, not just as “little sisters.”  Does Harvard have any coeducational fraternities?

[3] Was the racist garbage about how perfect Asian women are for Jewish men really necessary?  And while the male characters were cast to resemble more or less plausible college students (as opposed to, say, characters on The Practice), the women looked like Victoria Secret models more than like Boston undergraduates.  There are plenty of good-looking women in Harvard Yard.  Couldn’t a little effort have been made to find out how they dress? 

And what was up with the BU girlfriend, Erica’s, beret?  Did dating Zuckerberg upset her so much she decided to become Orthodox?

[4] Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, goes by too quickly, but especially in the first scene, he definitely nails a certain sort of man and the way he talks to women.  Believe me, they are not all geniuses.

[5] Do they think poor people don’t party?

P.S.: It's been pointed out to me--by my husband, who has a Facebook account, which he signed up for initially for distributing baby pictures--that it's ironic I would be writing a post about The Social Network when I don't use Facebook myself (except when he shows me his account, so I can see my relatives' pictures, or updates from female acquaintances of his who cook much fancier than I do). 

Rebecca Traister: "Ladies, We Have a Problem"

In a piece in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine, Salon regular Rebecca Traister considers the wisdom of the SlutWalk movement in the context of recent rape scandals like those involving Lara Logan and Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  She begins by attacking the triviality, the futility, and the vulgarity, of “stripping down to skivvies and calling ourselves sluts,” as a means to changing the terms of the political discourse concerning rape—given how much of the culture does still, twenty years after Anita Hill testified before Congress, blame victims for provoking their attacks by dressing or behaving improperly.

The style Traister disparages is a style that was more prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s than it is now.  Then, during marches protesters often adopted a provocative appearance, particularly an appearance that was personally—as opposed to politically—provocative.  Groups like ACT UP were criticized by outsiders to the movement, and also from those within the movement who preferred to remain socially respectable.  The movement’s successes, however, which include increasing numbers of states legalizing same-sex marriage, and the end of the military’s policy prohibiting service by homosexuals, arguably was the work of the activist groups more than that of conservatives who distanced themselves from the movement because they couldn’t abide the nonconformism of some of its members.

I don’t think “slut” is a word that can be reappropriated by feminists the way “queer” was reappropriated in past decades by activists in some LGBT movements.  For this to work, for me, “slut” would have to be a word that was regularly applied to a much larger range of styles and behavior than I think it is.  But maybe there are women who feel otherwise.  Maybe they feel comfortable calling themselves “sluts,” maybe even when they are dressed in ways I (and probably Traister) would consider totally appropriate.  I don’t see any reason to think that’s the case here, though.  The point of the protest is not to encourage young girls to see themselves as “sluts.”  The point is to show up people who overuse the word “slut” as ridiculous.

Rebecca Traister does not think women should parade around in public in their underwear.  She is happy to agree that a woman who dresses like that looks like a slut.  She does admit, at the end of her essay, that extreme measures might be necessary if we want to “upend” the assumptions so frequently implicit in press accounts of rapes like those she cites.  The essay does end with four paragraphs—beginning, “None of us can know the veracity of any of these women’s claims.  But the standard response . . . is still [as David Brock wrote of Anita Hill] that she is a little but nutty and a little bit slutty”—in which the author wonders whether her own argument will be convincing.

But she really seems not to understand why the protesters are dressing like that.  It isn’t because they think going around out of doors in only underwear should be normal.  It isn’t because they think the category “slutty” shouldn’t exist—even if they don’t like the word “slutty” itself, they recognize that some ways of dressing are sexual, and some are excessively sexual (whether just according to social, situational norms, or because they are literally too provocative).  It isn’t because they want to change people’s opinions about what it’s normal to wear.  They are being—politically—provocative.  They want to draw attention to an issue: women do not deserve to be raped no matter what they wear.  Really, this should be obvious.  When a woman is said to be dressed “like a slut,” the chances that she is wearing only Wonderbra and Spanx is pretty low.

It is unfortunate that Traister feels the need to turn this around.  She seems to be willing to approach this topic from only one point of view.  She makes sure to reassert both her belief that there are proper ways to dress, and also her willingness to condemn women who do otherwise.  She makes the centerpiece of her essay the argument that women who dress “sluttily,” in the name of feminist issues, are doing harm to their own interests.  She makes this argument from within feminism, advising the presumably younger women in these protests for their own good.  She doesn’t say where she herself would draw the line.  She does imply, though—by her focus on the term “slut” and the inadvisability of trying to reappropriate it—that there are younger women who she would say look like “sluts,” who defend their style with feminist arguments, who she thinks should behave differently.  And this has the effect of suggesting that feminists, especially, should be more concerned about obeying even rather conservative social norms than with methods of gaining political success that might require them to appear undignified.

I don’t like the practice of reading people out of a movement for being “incorrect,” or insufficiently radical, or taking the wrong position on arbitrary litmus-test concerns.  In my opinion, Rebecca Traister has the right to call herself a feminist, and to criticize other feminists, as she likes and thinks best.  But using a political movement, the ultimate goals of which she appears to support, as a hook on which to hang an argument about how women like herself (non-activists) ought to dress if they want to defend themselves from sexual and verbal violence, doesn’t seem to have the purpose of advancing the cause.

Reconsidering Pauline Kael

Via Arts & Letters Daily, the often very readable Open Letters Monthly offers an appreciation of the late film critic Pauline Kael.  One commenter (Belinda Gomez) notes, “Far too often, she’s a fan girl, not an actual critic. Her knowledge of film was wide but shallow.”  That may be the case.  But Kael’s were reviews that a beginning filmgoer could use, to work her way into the way knowledgeable moviegoers think.  The reviewer notes that the way Kael thought was not the way academic film critics think (there were few serious film critics even existing at the time, though, I think), but I don’t see why this should be reason to ignore her writing and opinions, even as judged by academic standards.  If academic criticism explains how a culture views a work of art, then academic criticism must take into account the views of that culture’s best critics (possibly, making an empirical study of what they wrote).  If, on the other hand, academic criticism ignores the best internal critics a culture has to offer, it raises the question, on whose views academic criticism is based.  (Even if it gives what Thomas Nagel called “The View from Nowhere,” one would like to know what that view is and who can tell us about it.)

Auntie Mame on Hollywood Boulevard and the Female Peter Fonda

In today’s New York Times Magazine, Carina Chocano has a piece explaining why and how her possessing an undergraduate degree in cultural studies, in fact, ill-prepared her to understand actual popular culture.  She focuses on two movies from 1990 and 1991, respectively, Pretty Woman and Thelma and Louise, and she makes a lot of sense, though I disagree on a few points.  I think she leans more heavily on the political question than those movies can bear.

What Chocano calls Vivian’s (Julia Roberts’ character in the first of the films) denial of being a fallen woman is actually a true innocence.  She (unlike her roommate, whom she tries, eventually successfully, to save) is really a good girl, fallen in with the wrong crowd and with few choices available to her (in part because her roommate is stealing her money, making a mockery of her attempts at prudence).  She is shown to be more moral than any of the wealthy men, or the servant class who caters to them.  She simply doesn’t know how to behave.  She is Auntie Mame—a few decades younger—as the hooker with a heart of gold.  She is perfect wife material—just marred a tiny bit by the excesses of popular culture.  (Moreover, her perfection is the only thing that keeps the women in the audience from suspecting that in a few years she will be just as mean as the Rodeo Drive sales clerks whose treatment of her made every single one of them cringe.)

The movie was released in 1990, as Chocano points out, but it was produced in the days of Madonna, who sang about how much better her Wall Street boyfriends liked her than their uptown fiancées and wives.  But not all the young women in the clubs were artistes.  Hollywood blockbusters aren’t usually known for their nuanced characterization, but it can be enlightening to pay attention, not only to the beautiful people on the screen, but to some of the passing bits of dialogue that seem almost inserted just to have something to fill out a scene—especially if they all tend in the same direction.  Looked at this way, the story of Pretty Woman is, in essence: Hard-partying club girl is wooed by the boringest, but richest, guy on campus, and finds her inner fuzzy-slipper wearing suburbanite.  The easy equation of “club girl” with “prostitute” seems dubious, admittedly, until you realize that Pretty Woman isn’t Vivian’s story, but Edward’s.  (Even as Vivian’s story, as Chocano says, it’s the story of her accepting a life as his living female accessory.)  He has two choices, romantically: a woman from his own social circle, or someone who chugs champagne straight from the bottle and hangs out with lowlifes downtown.  This is how he sees the situation.

The brilliance of Pretty Woman is that his story can apply to anyone.  Successful businessman looking to have a little fun slumming, old letch fascinated by the customs of young girls these days, or head-in-the-books college student who thinks girly girls are stupid: any one of these can see himself in the story of the man who leaves the bitchy ice princess for a “real” woman.  On the contrary, the story of Vivian is reduced to a generic plotline about the girl who accepts the proposal of a man who is actually coldhearted, though powerful: a merely clever reworking of the Cinderella story, the real innovation in which is its appeal to the male half of the audience.

It’s hard to understand how Chocano thought either her rejection of the overt message of Pretty Woman, or her delight in the transgressiveness of Thelma and Louise, augured any imminent change in the nature of society.  She is surely correct that “Thelma’s transformation is about evolving from chattel to free agent” (the opposite of the path taken by Vivian in the other movie); this is a common theme in Ridley Scott’s films, from Blade Runner to Body of Lies.  She is also right that the two women’s “solution” turned out to be a dead end, and that that fact ought to have been obvious from the film itself on its initial release.

However, Scott’s recycling of the American genre of the road movie can’t disguise the fact that the stories he tells are not American ones.  As such, they are irrelevant to American society, and Chocano cannot really use them to make arguments explaining what did and didn’t happen in the United States in the twenty or so years since Thelma and Louise appeared.  Ridley Scott loves to make films in which naïve American men free themselves from their corporate and military-industrial overlords, and Thelma and Louise can be seen as a female version of the same narrative (or even—interestingly—as initiating the freedom of the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is chasing them).  But the idea that most men are, initially, chattel, is a European one.  The whole point of the road movie, on the contrary, is that we don’t need Europe; because we have the Painted Desert.  Moreover, Thelma and Louise don’t become gangsters, and they don’t become revolutionaries—rather, they engage in the kind of happy-go-lucky, wild-and-crazy fun and games that movies about young men have made a staple for decades.

To a woman, under thirty, watching the movie for the first time, this onscreen gender switch was exhilarating.  Chocano argues that the film has dated, because many of us women no longer hope for the kind of transformative social change that Ridley Scott seemed to have been predicting.  I would disagree, to the extent that I doubt Ridley Scott was predicting anything of the kind.  His movies are fantasies, imposing European social fantasies onto the freer seeming American character and landscape.  Kind of the way Edward Lewis imposes his fantasies onto the lovely Vivian, as a matter of fact. 

A Little Cognitive Dissonance

I am looking at peppy young people in leggings and mufflers singing a song by Green Day.

The Secret Philosophy of the Postmodern Novelist

The New Republic has given Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, one of its first negative reviews (behind firewall, I haven’t read it or the novel, only the New Yorker excerpts).  Not that there’s any reason to give Franzen the utmost in kid-glove treatment—though I’m increasingly fond of The Corrections, it is not perfect by any means, and is often very annoying.  The interesting thing is that, a few days later, Adam Kirsch, TNR’s poetry critic, chimed in to defend neoconservatism from Franzen’s insulting portrayal.  Of course, The New Republic has long leant towards neoconservatism itself on many issues.  Not content to defend the politics of his own magazine, however, Kirsch goes on to defend the late philosopher Leo Strauss from charges, more or less, that he agreed with Plato:

“Not many of the millions of readers of Freedom will also have been readers of The Nation or the London Review of Books during the Bush years. But those who were will immediately recognize this passage as an allusion to Leo Strauss—who was alleged, in these circles, to be the secret mastermind of belligerent neoconservatism.

It was Strauss who allegedly taught that “the philosopher” had the right and duty to lie to the public in the service of a greater good, and who used Platonic myths to undermine democracy. It’s not necessary to reargue here the falsity of this understanding of Strauss—who, in fact, wrote about the way free-thinking and rationalist philosophers throughout history used occult writing to outwit the religious taboos of their time.”

Kirsch is wrong.  Strauss (like his disciple, Allan Bloom) held that philosophers have both an esoteric and an exoteric teaching.  The esoteric teaching is specifically hidden from everyone other than philosophers.  The esoteric teaching is different from the exoteric teaching, and the exoteric teaching is, in turn, deliberately intended by the writer as the message that’s to be conveyed to laypeople who read the book.  The purpose of the dual meaning is to keep most people from knowing what the philosophers are saying, because most people—not to mention the authorities—would not want the philosophers’ real beliefs to be widely shared.  (In fact, in the places and times Strauss was most interested in, the authorities might arrest a philosopher who was too clear about his message.)

Strauss wanted to insist that moral truth is always and everywhere the same, yet philosophers in different times and places have disagreed about the nature of moral truth.  To defuse relativism, Strauss developed a theory that explained away the appearance that philosophers have always been relativists (or “historicists”): “Plato and Aristotle (and their medieval followers as well) often concealed their own thought by accommodating themselves to the opinions of their contemporaries....  Thus was born Strauss’s famous doctrine of ‘esoteric teaching,’ his conviction that philosophical texts can contain hidden meanings reserved for an elite readership that knows truly how to read.” *

In other words: The contents of a philosophy text are not reliable evidence of what the author believed.  What the writer believed is, it follows, the esoteric teaching understood by the true philosopher, who has been educated in a philosophical way.  Only philosophers and scholars of philosophy understand what the texts that constitute the history of philosophy really mean.  People who have read only the primary texts—unless they are themselves philosophers, or at least scholars of philosophy—cannot know.  As Larmore says, Strauss’s aim here is to deny that we should take seriously things like Aristotle’s defense of the morality of slavery, because truth doesn’t change, and we know that slavery is wrong.

The same thing presumably applies to books published today.  That is, if a philosopher named Lenny Ostrich writes a book, he will have the intention that philosophers will use his book as evidence of the truth, and everybody else will use his book as evidence of a lie.  If this isn’t lying, I don’t know what would count.  (Obviously, other thinkers have held a similar idea.  For example, Marxism possesses a variety of theories about social and psychological mechanisms that almost make it impossible not to lie to one group of people or another.)  This is something entirely different from writing a book that is simply “difficult,” an evaluation that includes nonphilosophical works like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as Werner Heisenberg’s Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.

This doesn’t mean that philosophers should write propaganda.**  A philosophy text is not a political act, and its intended audience is philosophers and students of philosophy.  The Straussian idea, on this view, is simply that what philosophers do is nobody’s business but their own (in a way, it’s a kind of hypertrophied zeal for academic freedom).  It isn’t that philosophers ought to have a political project in which they enlist nonphilosophers by misleading them about the nature of philosophy.  But it does include the project of misleading nonphilosophers (not least about the nature of philosophy), and the possibility of someone having a this project like this one should seem at least a little troubling now that education is so widely available (and not least to a journalist like Kirsch).  Five hundred years ago, a writer might want to mislead a few priests and university dons, who wouldn’t want even philosophers to read potentially subversive books: a few people, who had the learning and the time to study deeply, could learn the truth—the others would remain as they were.  These days, the same writer would be misleading large numbers of people (many of whom already nominally agree with him) who had been led to believe what he wrote was important, and who might mistake his untruths for useful information.

And worse: Strauss was a scholar of political philosophy, and his neoconservative disciples have not been scholars but rather practitioners of politics.  They seem to have taken the lesson that philosophy hides, specifically, truths about the world of government and politics.  Moreover, they mostly seem committed to the idea that they themselves belong to the elite that knows all the secrets about this world (if not that they themselves are “philosophers”).  Such a person might well conclude that part of their job is to lie to everybody else about what’s “really going on” behind the scenes.  (Admittedly, their beliefs may have no effect on their actions; most liars don’t need a fancy theory to tell them it’s all right to lie.)

It’s not an uninteresting theory.  And if true, it would make some of TNR’s own writers quite a bit more interesting than they would ordinarily be.  It might even be helpful for interpreting the postmodern novel.

* My quotation is from Charles Larmore’s 1989 essay on Strauss, which was published in The New Republic and reprinted in The Morals of Modernity.

** And it obviously doesn’t turn propagandists into philosophers, either.

Forster, Trilling, Kazin, and Draper

In the course of reviewing a new biography of E.M. Forster, Colm Toibin answers a question I’d wondered about: Did Lionel Trilling know Forster was gay?  As Toibin points out, it doesn’t matter:

"Trilling had enough to write about, including the drama in Forster’s work between freedom and restriction, between the spiritual and the material, between England and its empire, and between one class and another in Forster’s own world. These conflicts were substantial enough for Trilling not to need to know that they also operated as metaphors and systems of disguise, that their power in Forster’s fiction was nourished by his secret sexuality.”

But he says the answer is no.

Trilling is one of a triumvirate of mid-century American critics recommended, in Walking Out in the Evening, by the Frank Langella character.  He assumes that the graduate student writing a dissertation on his novels has never heard of either Trilling, or Edmund Wilson, or Alfred Kazin.  This sounded implausible to me.  Maybe not, since my local library has only two books by Kazin, one of them a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories that he edited (and the other on religion).  Anyway, Andrew Seal has a brief review of Kazin’s On Native Grounds here.

Season premiere of Mad Men was last night, and Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, is on today’s Fresh Air.  He confirmed that Don Draper is, in a sense, pretending to be someone he's not: to be the kind of executive Dick Whitman thinks Draper would be.  We’ll see how that plays out in the fourth season.  Draper has gone from being a rising star, but a protégé, of a second-rate firm, to being a principal at a firm that right now is still just struggling to get out of the basement.  He’s losing the false uprightness of the white-shoe executive he probably could never have succeeded in appearing to be, and letting his inner maverick out.  From now on, if the first episode of the season is any guide, his campaigns will be honest about what the companies he represents really are selling, even if the results are crude.  And he intends to be recognized as the genius he is.  He is breaking the barriers that constricted what was permitted to be said.

It’s always difficult for me to avoid seeing Don through Peggy’s eyes, and to ask what it would be like to work for him.  He gave her a break, but now she seems to have come into her own.  It isn’t obvious that anyone will allude to her origins as a secretary from Queens, and her lack of a college degree, ever again.  And she may be beginning to become annoyed with Don.  The saying, “no man is a hero to his valet,” may apply here.  We, the audience, know that Don Draper really is the real thing: his campaigns are groundbreaking, and Peggy of all people knows that they are his.  In previous seasons, Don has been teased for being a “gray flannel suit man”: a managerial, executive type, not really creative.  His willingness to stick with Sterling, Cooper, rather than moving on to a more high-powered, business-oriented firm, suggested that he really identified with that old-fashioned idea of the firm, and so did the way he kept his copywriting staff in line.  Maybe now that his name is on the door he’s willing to show his true colors.

Marketing: These Kids Today With Their Happy Meals and Their Fancy Shoes

Joanna Weiss’s Boston Globe op-ed today relates an interesting anecdote about college classroom interactions.  “Notre Dame University marketing professor Carol Phillips says that when her students brag that they aren’t susceptible to advertising, she points to their shoes, their hats, and their computers.  And she tells them that marketing isn’t limited to ads; it’s packaging, store placement, associations.”  Presumably, Phillips asks them to reflect on how many of them are wearing fashionable and pricey consumer products.  It is helpful to have pointed out that advertising and marketing are much broader than just the obvious persuasive rhetoric of commercials and magazine advertisements (which kids, in increasing numbers, learn to deflate in English composition and consumer education classes).  Marketing encompasses the entire range of activities that go to produce everything that sits between consumers and manufacturers, giving the former an idea of what is being sold and how the seller would like it to be envisioned.  This is important information about how our economy works, and kids are too often resistant to new information because they feel that it violates some core belief or some core emotional aspect of their identity.  But if Phillips means to imply that there is no difference between the persuasive, deceptive nature of advertising rhetoric and the fact that commercial marketing information is the discursive ocean we swim in—or that the kids’ feeling that they have learned to discount the former is false—she is incorrect.  They are young and inexperienced, and they need to learn what she is teaching them about the nature of our society, but there is a core of truth to their sense that they have been made immune to advertising.

There is also, it seems, an unfortunate consequence to thinking this way.  Joanna Weiss illustrates this with a quotation from a group that is agitating against including toys in children’s meals at fast food restaurants.  Weiss writes, “One anti-Ronald McDonald polemic, issued by a group called Corporate Accountability International, says McDonald’s ‘undermines parental values’ and creates ‘a fundamental restructuring of the family dynamic.’ The evidence: ‘Every time a parent has to say no to a child, it’s another let down, another way that a parent has to feel bad about not making that child happy.’”  They seem to believe the restaurant chain has a responsibility to create children’s desires, to arrange our culture so that parents won’t have to make their children feel bad by telling them no.  I really don’t understand this at all.  If parents’ values include children’s not eating cheeseburgers every day, they won’t buy the product the fast food chains sell.  Trying to persuade the chains that consumerism is bad—which is what the complaint about McDonald's influence on “parental values” and “the family dynamic” amounts to—seems like a waste of time.  I don't think it's unreasonable to wonder whether apparently futile campaigns like this one are fueled by overly grandiose claims about the capacity of marketing to structure society more than in its most obviously consumer-oriented aspects.

It's 1900, and Our Future's So Bright, We Gotta Wear Shades

On the second page of his history of the first five decades of the twentieth century (The Big Change), Frederick Lewis Allen quotes from a biography of J.P. Morgan written by his son-in-law, Herbert Livingston Satterlee, presumably lamenting the end of the age of “good society”: on the first day of 1900, “New York was still a friendly, neighborly city and was a pleasant place in which to live.”

As Allen points out, the biographer’s definition of “people” must have included only the very well off, people like him, people with whom he and his family might have socialized.  He does not include the poor, for whom life in New York City was not especially “pleasant” at all: whose children might die without “society” ever noticing.  Allen explains why.  The publishing world of the time, including the higher class of magazines (by which Allen himself had been employed for about forty years by the time he wrote this book), was interested only in the doings of the very, very rich—men like J.P. Morgan—and in a culture suited to them.  A leftish or postmodern English professor might tell you that has always been the case, equally in 1900, in 1950, and 2010.  Publishing, like any cultural entity in a society, serves the interests of the ruling class: in other words, the rich (in Allen’s words, “the elect”): an extreme oversimplification that needs many caveats and special cases in order to be accurate, but a useful overarching theory for many critical purposes.  The age was, in Allen’s words, “complacent,” so its literature and its journalism followed rules designed to ensure they would appeal to a complacent audience.

But it would not be fair to describe those poor immigrants (doubly victimized by “European tyranny” and “American indifference,” Van Wyck Brooks wrote in The Confident Years, which Allen quotes further down on the same page) whose children accidentally drowned in the ditch behind their tenement as themselves “complacent.”  The failure of the Populist and farmers’ movements did not reflect on them in any way.  No more could the word be used in an accurate description of the muckraking journalists and naturalist novelists who were beginning to do their work around the same time.  Or of a union activist like Eugene Debs (“[a] friendly and merciful man with an insecure grasp of logic”), whom Allen describes next.  Elaborating on these counterexamples to his own argument, Allen sticks to those very same rules, restricting journalistic interest in “humanity” to the upper class, except when enumerating the results of that class’s failures of compassion.

(The pattern is continued in succeeding chapters.  We learn that the big cities as well as the tiny villages were smaller in 1900 than they would be about fifty years later, and we learn that Los Angeles then had a population of about 100,000, Dallas and Houston both less than 45,000.  We learn that the tallest building in Manhattan had a total of twenty-nine stories.  But no data is given for any smaller towns, which indeed did change in size during the period—though in a way that would be difficult to characterize without statistical analysis and a fair degree of work.  Chelmsford, Massachusetts, for example, a small town outside of Lowell—and probably very much the kind of place Allen had in mind when he promised his readers an explanation the changes in “the American way of life” that had occurred since their childhoods—had a population of less than 4000 in 1900, of just under 10,000 in 1950, and of about 34,000 in 2000.  The change that had already taken place in towns like Chelmsford would have affected many more readers of a book like this than the building of the Empire State Building or the change in character of the big western cities.  But the picture Allen paints of then-present day 1952 is as idealized and lacking in important detail as the image of 1900 he takes to be the starting point of the majority of his readers.)

Yet, by “complacent,” Frederick Lewis Allen means to imply that nobody at all anticipated what the United States would look like fifty years later, and this is certainly correct.  Both Debs, contemplating his presidential run, or Morgan, actually not yet contemplating the formation of U.S. Steel, would have been shocked and astonished by the America actually brought into being by “a combination of varied and often warring forces” neither was able to anticipate.  Morgan “contemplated . . . a bright future” with the rest of “the well born and well endowed”; Debs contemplated something different; yet both (in this respect) were wrong—presumably, because both failed to see something that would turn out to have been important.