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?

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.

What Does It Mean to Be Laid Off?

A post by Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber threatened to turn into a debate over the facts concerning layoffs and unemployment (see comments by kidneystones and subsequent discussion), but didn’t seem like an appropriate place to have this discussion.

The question arose, what does a layoff mean?  There were people (I don’t know who they are, how old they are, what they do for a living, or even what country they live in, as they were using the silly sort of pseudonym) who seemed to believe some kind of implausible things—as best I could determine (they weren’t all entirely clear), they seemed to include the beliefs that being laid off always marks the end of a worker’s or professional’s career, that a person’s skills deteriorate to the zero point almost immediately after a layoff, that new skills can only be acquired in a formal degree program and at the beginning of a career. 

Now, it’s true that if you are an experienced auto designer or engineer or manufacturing worker at one of Detroit’s Big Three auto manufacturers, and you lost your job in the recent unpleasantness, it is unlikely you will be able to get a similar job.  It isn’t impossible, because probably the Big Three will need to hire a small number of senior people over the next several years, and so will the foreign automakers who have plants in the United States, and your skills and personality and so on may well be a good match, but there will be so few of these jobs, especially if you don’t want to relocate, that this is not likely.  But the United States’ automobile industry has been stagnant for decades and is not likely to rejuvenate itself.  There are many other industries that taken together employ more people than the Big Three.  Firms in those industries have layoffs for all sorts of reasons: poor cash flow that requires expenses to be reduced, poor numbers generally that require quick action to restore confidence from the stock market, decisions to cancel products or get out of attempted lines of business that can most readily be taken by letting go all the people who worked on them, decisions to outsource that are accomplished in the same way.

The first company I worked for had layoffs almost every year for more than a decade, starting before I worked there and continuing after I voluntarily left.  The second-to-last company I worked at, before leaving to have a baby, laid off everyone involved with the product line I worked on, in a process taking nearly a year.  I survived the first round of layoffs, presumably because I was fairly new and my pay was lower than most of my colleagues’, then was let go three months later.  A small number of people were kept on for another six months, with a retention bonus if they stayed until their scheduled termination date.  The industry press for the next couple of years indicated that the layoffs there were continuing.  The first of those companies hung on for almost a decade after I left (that is, approximately fifteen years after the first layoffs), to be bought out by another big corporation.  The second is still around, having shifted out of a market in which it was in last place, with sales declining toward zero, and into a market where it had some hope of grabbing a toehold and the kind of market share that would permit it to survive (long enough, probably, to bought out by one of the big firms).  These were small-to-medium sized corporations, employing from several hundred people, in the latter case, to well over ten thousand (down to a few thousand by the end), in the former.

In between, there was at least one downturn (the one beginning, for the high tech industry, in early 2001) that lasted long enough that there were people out of work longer than they could afford to wait.  And that was before the mortgage crisis, so lots of people would probably not be able to wait as long as they might have before, if there were to be another downturn in this industry.  (BTW, I knew at the time that people were getting bid out of their price range on deals they felt they couldn’t turn down, but five percent or less down?  On a first house?)  But layoffs are a fairly normal thing for tech professionals, as they are for many other industries.  They aren’t desirable, and hopefully they don’t occur too many times in a person’s career, but they don’t necessarily signal the end of the world.  Layoffs are how firms shed workers they no longer need, releasing them, in a fairly inefficient way, back into the workforce.  Layoffs are also what happens when firms close locations, end lines of business, or fold altogether.  And in high tech, these things happen with some frequency.

One of the commenters at the Crooked Timber thread said s/he hoped s/he would know things were getting bad so s/he could get out before a layoff occurred.  But what if things were getting bad only a year after s/he had started a new job?  What if s/he had real responsibilities on a project and would face the question, “Why aren’t you staying to see things through?”  S/he says s/he would not take unemployment insurance (though it sounds like s/he might not understand the difference between UI and welfare), no matter what, because taking government money is a sign of shiftlessness.  S/he sounds like someone who would see excessive job-hopping as equally a sign of shiftlessness, so I’m not sure s/he would really be able to follow through if such a thing happened to him or her.

There may well be inefficiencies in the labor market, but given that there is in fact a labor market, and given the fairly widely understood facts about unemployment and hiring, expecting there to be zero unemployment in everybody’s history is pretty unrealistic.

Things are probably different in an economy or a market that is dominated by one, or maybe two or three, 800-pound gorillas, in every subset of the market—as opposed to being divided into several sub-markets, each with a handful of players.  In a one-firm economy, unlike with what we have now, rather than laying people off, they can be moved around—but leaving that one firm would be the equivalent of leaving the field entirely.  In that case, being laid off is less like belonging to a chess club and losing one game, and more like being expelled once and for all from a large building with only one entrance.  Of course, there are other differences, and there is a reason that innovation comes from smaller firms more often than from the giant conglomerates.

Feel free to add your experience or opinions in comments, about high tech or any other industry.

Roth, Pynchon, and Lethem as 9/11 Novelists

I was in New York City the week before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  There were some police on the streets, of course, but there always are police, and nobody thought anything of it.  The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium “evacuated” the stands, and the players returned to the safety of their locker rooms, for quite some time, but that was only because of the heavy rain, and the danger of lightning, and nobody thought anything of it.  Those days are over.  New York has changed, and the way tourists relate to the city when they visit it has changed.

D.G. Myers, now blogging for Commentary, has a long list of 9/11 novels.  Emily Rooney broadcast a shorter one including nonfiction books from Boston Steve Almond (video and a link to the text version of the list).  Most of them are ordinary “social novels,” about people who lived in New York in 2001 or are otherwise affected, in one way or another, by the events of that day.  Adam Kirsch, in the newish Jewish magazine The Tablet, has a different list of novels.  He argues, along with some of Myers’s Twitter followers, that The Plot against America should be considered among them, though Myers begs to differ.

I think Kirsch has a point.  What is most memorable about The Plot against America is, in part, the fear of the adults, and the way that a horrible political event seemed to license behavior that, under normal conditions, those adults would barely consider acceptable even from their children: the panic that event inspired.  And the fascist elements of the alternate society Roth imagines—which so scare the adult characters in the book—are, arguably, only an extension of the armed soldiers that appeared in airports and on city streets, and of the vigilance (and lessened concern for civil liberties) that seemed threatened by the emphasis on security implied by the words “after 9/11, everything is different.”  The novel just isn’t a plausible one in a world where 9/11 has not taken place.

Similarly, I would argue that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a 9/11 novel, at least in one chapter (the one that begins on page 149): in which the boy adventurers of the zeppelin Inconvenience fail to prevent a dangerous monster-enfolding meteorite from being brought into an unnamed city.  The details are different, but the reader’s knowledge of what’s being described will derive from the news stories about that day.

“This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety.  Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that ‘there would always be time,’ as citizens liked to put it.  But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed.  That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. . . .

“On the night in question, Hunter Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back, had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so overbright that his orbits and cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.”

Pynchon’s vision here is a kind of anti-9/11: what could have been and maybe should have been, in a Manhattan of the imagination, a nightmare worst case, differing in idiosyncratic but important particulars from reality.  And if there's a sense in which Against the Day might be a 9/11 novel, Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, surely is.  In Lethem’s novel, all of downtown is enveloped by a mysterious dark fog, which simply appeared one day and never left; and later, one of the characters becomes unreachable after his apartment building collapses, with no warning, leaving behind it only a deep pit and a police cordon.  Both Lethem and Pynchon foreground the emotionality and weirdness of living under a threat that is nearly incomprehensible, not only in its vastness and in the unforeseenness of what motivated it, but in its vagueness, though neither of them says anything that might unambiguously refer to a real historical event.

Hurricane Irene

We were lucky and lost power only for a few hours on Sunday, plus maybe five short outages of only a couple of minutes each.  Two or three big branches down in the backyard (attracting at least three cardinals to hop among them on Monday morning), a couple of smaller ones in the front, lots of twigs and leaves on the ground.  Some damage to the fence.  We put everything away except the barbecue, but neighbors who left things stacked by the side of their house, or left chairs and tables (I guess fairly heavy) outside, only had a couple things blow over.  The yellowjackets’ nest, unfortunately, wasn’t drowned.

The playground nearest our house was cleaned up very quickly; by Tuesday morning it was free of branches, there was fresh bark under all the play equipment, and even the annoying staircase that's impossible to walk on, unless there is fresh gravel between the railroad ties, had fresh gravel.  And the equipment was very clean.

Around the corner from our house, however, until this morning, the street was closed.  A tree had gone down, taking down some power lines, and knocking out the power.  A local online paper reported that the shopping center just off that road was affected and that the supermarket was running on generator power for a while.  The streets that were closed are pretty heavily used—around here there tend not to be that many streets that aren’t local-only—and traffic was being rerouted all the way to the other end of town and back.  At least some of the houses in the affected area got power back yesterday.  The road farther along is still closed.

In the north part of town, some people don’t expect their electricity to be back on until Saturday.  I was told a tree had gone down and caught fire in the street.  Schools are open, but at least one is on generator power.

The next town over, and there are very many people with no electricity.  It seems to depend in part on which company supplies your power.

At the supermarket, which evidently has power now, but the frozen-food section of which—between renovations and, I guess, people restocking—is a little depleted, I saw a car with two [1] stickers on it: One read “Remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous?”  Sure.  Must have been back before penicillin.  Curing syphilis by mercury poisoning—oh, the good old days.  The other read “Scott Brown Republican.”

[1] Actually there were many, many stickers on it.

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.

She Watches Horrible Video So You Won't Have To

You know what WikiLeaks is; Julian Assange is the leader of WikiLeaks; Bradley Manning is the army IT guy who is said to have leaked Julian Assange the State Department cable dump; Adrian Lamo is the person to whom Bradley Manning evidently confessed.  There is an incomplete documentary about Adrian Lamo, leaked to YouTube before Bradley Manning contacted Lamo, narrated by Kevin Spacey.  Maria Bustillos watches the video so you don’t have to.

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.

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.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, Ch. 2

Here is part two on Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided.  (Part one is here.)

Chapter two is a discussion of motivational literature and ideas, especially of those famous enough to be on Oprah.

A convention for motivational speakers: Ehrenreich is surprised by the mix of technical, commercial help and theoretical information that are offered, though it seems rather typical, and useful.  Her real concern is for the people at the convention, because they mostly are wannabes who will presumably be taken for a ride.  They lack experience addressing large audiences of the type they presumably will need to do, in order to become motivational speakers; they are not prepared to address audiences “of the size of” the convention.  They are hero-worshipping the people who run the convention and don’t realize that they aren’t really capable of reaching the top of the pyramid.  This is not the kind of place where people can attend seminars where they will learn things from teachers or purchase books from which they can learn.  It is a certain kind of emotional experience mixed with crass commerce.

Ehrenreich has to admit that there are advantages to being nice, and having a positive attitude, rather than being grumpy.  She seems to be ambivalent.  She’s trying to show why she dislikes it, why it’s troubling, why it can be pragmatically counterproductive. Still, this part of the book doesn’t really work for me.  Ehrenreich concedes that a workplace filled with happy people is more enjoyable for most people: we are one another’s “emotional wallpaper,” in her words, creating the environment within which each individual moves and acts.  But she has to work very hard to find a way to describe this that will not undermine her point, and she doesn’t always succeed.  She asks whether most people would prefer to work with “critical and challenging people or smiling yes-sayers”; but this is awfully close to “critical nay-sayers or people who smile at you”; and how much more persuasive would this have been if she’d written “people who challenge your assumptions or yes-men who, in Hamlet’s words, ‘smile and smile’”?

Her most vivid examples of the evils of the positive thinking mindset involve coercion imposed by employers—not unnaturally, given her leftist politics—she is appalled by the treatment people who work for others, especially for corporations, are compelled to put up with.  In Dale Carnegie’s day, a telephone operator could be compelled to behave as if she were really interested in the people she helped.  In our own time, one of her sources was never even able to discover what he’d said that had been so sarcastic he’d had to be let go.  William Whyte’s “Organization Man” was managed in industrial conditions similarly oppressive to those in the Soviet Union.  “What has changed, in the last few years, is that the advice to at least act in a positive way has taken on a harsher edge.  The penalty for nonconformity is going up, from the possibility of job loss and failure to social shunning and complete isolation.”

Here, again, I think she is going off-track: nobody has said that what’s criticized as “negativity” in the workplace has anything to do with getting rid of people who bring up bad news or who “provide unwelcome reality checks.”  This plays well into the example, which she brings up here, of the subprime mortgage fiasco (which was indeed caused in part by groupthink and reluctance to listen to the objections of naysayers to improbably optimistic plans), but there is no reason to believe problems of the laid-off workers she quoted on the previous few pages had anything to do with that kind of thing—with the idea that workers “are there only to nourish, praise, and affirm.”  She gives no reason to believe that this is a widespread or an increasing problem, only three widely separated data points of different categories (individual firings, current events, and motivational literature): this argument can have no practical or direct effect on the people she appears to be most concerned about (the workers), and can at best give people a reason (the recent financial disasters) to change the way they think (giving less credence to “positive thinking” literature).

Positive thinking writers advise people not to watch the news, because news stories are invariably “negative,” being about war and crime.  Ehrenreich notes that this may make people feel better about the world by giving them a false idea about how few problems there are in it.  Positive thinking drives the new media in which people are given “positive” news instead: happy-ending human-interest stories.  The refusal to pay attention to the news is “suggestive of a deep helplessness at the core of positive thinking.”  Is Ehrenreich thinking of “learned helplessness,” the theory that explains high rates of female depression by comparison with the lab mice who were shocked so frequently that they stopped trying to escape?  It doesn’t seem entirely apropos, though the psychologizing fits, for example with the idea that positive thinkers cannot handle the “terrifying” fact “that there may, in fact, be a ‘real world’ out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes,” which causes them to “withdraw” into a fantasy world. 

Ehrenreich would prefer they join a social or political movement, which I agree would be better than pretending problems don’t exist, and if they do, it is better for people on the other side of the world to suffer, because “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”  But the writers who remind people that they can’t prevent wars or earthquakes, even by sending money, joining a movement to persuade the public of the need for change, or lobbying their political representatives (the alternatives Ehrenreich offers) do have a point; the way these stories are covered really are disproportionate to their connection to most people’s lives.

The idea of people setting themselves up as life and career coaches originates in corporations hiring sports coaches as motivational speakers.

At the convention, the career coaches’ convention include pseudoscientific explanations of why their techniques work, and a claim that quantum mechanics supports the theory.  Ehrenreich’s motivation and her animus against these people shows through too transparently here; the quantum mechanics stuff is very silly and can have been included only in order to make them look ridiculous.  She tries to show the difference between the truly scientific (if popular) accounts of Murray Gell-man and Michael Shermer, and the self-help writers who pretend their free ranging speculations are based on real science, but the only point her material really supports is the mistakenness of applying ideas outside the boundaries within which they apply, and she tries to go farther than that.  I don't see what purpose is served by emphasizing so frequently that the connections positive thinking writers claim, between their theories and science, are not only slight but non-existent--most people with an interest in science already knew that, most people with an interest in positive thinking don't care about science, and the few who do are not going to be persuaded by her calling them "silly."

Brief Links

Matt Bucher has a facsimile of a marked-up student paper from one of the undergraduate classes David Foster Wallace taught in the late 1990s.  I learned something about both Cormac McCarthy and Frederic Jameson, but by the second or third page, the sight of the man’s handwriting was heartbreaking.

An excerpt from Elif Batuman’s memoir (h/t Language Log): She hated creative writing because it involved craft.  This is very strange.  She says herself that what she disliked about it is the focus on making something and perfecting it (not just on what’s often referred to as “narrow technique”).  I have never heard any literary person (much less a would-be novelist) disparage the relationship between an artist and their work in that way.  What are they teaching at Harvard nowadays?

Matthew Yglesias says Fight Club is a critique of a masculinity that’s hypertrophied to such an extent that it becomes mental illness, by way of more or less empathetically depicting people who have in fact veered into such mental illness.  Maybe.  Interpreting Fight Club as a critique depends on interpreting the (unnamed) Edward Norton character as the moral center of the film; which makes sense, as although the character is kind of a cipher, it is with him that we both begin and end the story.  On the other hand, there’s some reason to view the plot in psychohistorical terms, with Brad Pitt’s sociopathic leader Tyler Durden as merely an element of the Norton character’s psyche, in which case Yglesias’s interpretation kind of falls apart.  Then the film begins to look like a mostly sympathetic representation of Durden and his plan to (among other things) get everyone’s debts forgiven by blowing up the banks, from the point of view of a man who admires Durden but doesn’t have the guts to decide to follow him, just as Durden himself claims.  There’s nothing in the film that explicitly says all this is immoral—only the Norton character’s queasiness, which seems to be the same as the viewer’s.

The New Republic has moved a March 17 article I hadn’t seen, mentioning Bright-Sided, to the top of its online version.  The article, tagged “Marcus Aurelius, life coach,” is actually a review of books on Stoicism.  I’d recommend Martha C. Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions for those who’d like a densely written and long-winded account of the Stoic philosophy.

Today’s New York Times has a graphic illustrating recent wargaming at the Brookings Institution of a possible sneak attack by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites.  The write-up is by Kenneth Pollack, whose similar wargaming about Iraq was covered by the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago.

Also in the Times, the Museum of Modern Art announced its acquisition of the @ sign.  From now on, presumably, art books wishing to include representations of the symbol will need to obtain permissions.  They ought to be free, given that MOMA paid nothing for the right to control them, but can MOMA hold up publication of works they deem to interpret the symbol wrongly?

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided, Ch. 1

I don’t have time to write a short post about Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, so I am going to post some notes about each chapter as I read it.

Ehrenreich’s topic is the relentless optimism of Americans that’s been so frequently noted by foreigners, culminating in this decade’s blind plunge into war in Iraq.

She begins with her personal introduction to the culture of positivity, in the form of what she calls “breast cancer culture.”  Diagnosed with the disease, Ehrenreich used the Internet and other resources to find information and advice, often in the form of personal narratives posted on individuals’ blogs, or of discussion forums set up to mimic support groups.  What she found in those places was a relentless, almost bullying culture of positivity and optimism.  The focus on looking on the bright side (though presumably not the bullying) was mirrored in what she found in the “real world” of oncology clinics and treatments.  She was unable to find any support for her own feelings of outrage and helplessness, or for her frustration with the limited information and treatments that were available.

All this, on top of the well-known issue that in most cases of cancer more distress is caused by the treatment than by the disease itself, resulted in even more anguish for her:

[F]or all the helpful information [drawn from the first-person accounts], the more fellow victims I discovered and read, the greater my sense of isolation grew.  No one among the bloggers and book writers seemed to share my sense of outrage over the disease and the available treatments.  What causes it and why is it so common, especially in industrialized societies?  Why don’t we have treatments that distinguish between different forms of breast cancer or between cancer cells and normal dividing cells?  In the mainstream of breast cancer culture, there is very little anger, no mention of possible environmental causes, and few comments about the fact that in all but the more advanced, metastatized cases, it is the ‘treatments,’ not the disease, that cause the immediate illness and pain.

Ehrenreich is troubled by the frequency with which cancer patients whose stories she encountered actively embraced their illness as an unmitigated good.  She has no explanation for this fact, though she attempts to place it in context:

The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage—not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood.  Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalize the disease: the diagnosis may be disastrous, but there are those cunning pink rhinestone angel pins to buy and races to train for.  Even the heavy traffic in personal narratives and practical tips that I found so useful bears an implicit acceptance of the disease and the current clumsy and barbarous approaches to its treatment: you can get so busy comparing attractive head scarves that you forget to question whether chemotherapy is really going to be effective in your case.  Understood as a rite of passage, breast cancer resembles the initiation rites so exhaustively studied by Mircea Eliade.  First there is the selection of the initiates—by age in the tribal situation, by mammogram or palpation here.  Then come the requisite ordeals—scarification or circumcision within traditional cultures, surgery and chemotherapy for the cancer patient.  Finally, the initiate emerges into a new and higher status—an adult and a warrior—or in the case of breast cancer, a ‘survivor.’

I wish there were more quotes in this section of the book.  Ehrenreich refers to things she’s heard from, for example, oncology nurses, or seen posted on the walls of radiology departments, but the only people she identifies by name (though with no other personal information) are the women who post on Internet bulletin boards.

In the second half of chapter one, Ehrenreich surveys research supporting the claim that a positive attitude increases cancer patients’ chance of survival.  This section is much too brief.  Only four studies, by three different researchers, are included, plus a handful of studies that discuss the relationship between cancer and the immune system, rather than to psychology.  It might actually have been better to treat each of these studies even more quickly, so that more information and more context could have been added to the discussion.  For example, she quotes a researcher contending that there are “endemic problems” with the research supporting this theory, but what this means is far from clear.  Many readers will have no idea how to interpret that, and would be better served by an explanation of why these kinds of scientific questions are so difficult to examine conclusively.

She might be too interested in the subject (which was that of her Ph.D. dissertation).  Some readers might read this section and discover how fascinating, complex, and still uncertain science really is.  Some readers will find the point opaque.  I do find it fascinating to think about the fact that macrophages and cancer cells, alone of all the types of cells in the human body, are “free agents” rather than subordinating themselves devotedly to the well-being of the whole organism—but the image is so vivid that it distracts from the argument that the science is decidedly against the idea of a mental or emotional component to cancer recovery.

How do you feel about the word inspired?

My freshman year in college, my roommate and I both were prospective English majors and writers/journalists.  She had a lot more experience than me, however: more preparation for college-level study of literature, and a better idea about how to write.  One day she came back to the room and announced that, after having struggled to find a topic for an essay, she was inspired.  Sounded reasonable to me.  But, some time later, I tried the same thing on a guy who lived in the same dorm as us, down the hall.  It was the first snowfall of the year, my first snowfall in New York, and I had gone for a walk down Broadway to get a sandwich at Mama Joy’s, and was when I came back, I told him, “inspired.”  His reaction was scorn.  “Inspired?  What does that mean?”  I was tongue-tied; I didn’t know what inspired really meant, or why it was a good thing with reference to essay-writing.  Since then, I’ve been leery of the word.

John Holbo over at Crooked Timber isn’t afraid of it, though, apparently.  And he’s a philosophy professor, so he should know.  He’s also got a good post about why the conservative arguments against health care reform are silly.

I'm Okay, You're Dumb (The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein)

My local public library has purchased a copy of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.  I may be the first person in eleven months to have turned pages past the midpoint of the book, but they do have it on the shelf.  I picked it up several months ago, opened it randomly, and said, “this doesn’t make sense,” so I put it back.  Then I saw it again at Border’s, and this time I noticed that there was a chapter titled “The Betrayal of the Mentors” that appeared to talk about what has gone on in academic humanities departments over the last thirty or forty years.  I didn’t agree with it on a first glance, but on a second glance it seemed thoughtful and thought-provoking.  On a third and fourth glance I’m puzzled and, strangely, almost, insulted.

I figured the book would discuss why, in spite of increasing access to higher education, young people evidently score less well than their seniors on social scientists’ measures of knowledge and skill.  Since Bauerlein is an educator who has written as a conservative activist, he would presumably focus on what liberal college professors believe and on what education schools advise regarding lower-level schools (both topics conservatives consider important).  Instead, we find a complaint to the effect that reading, of the kind Bauerlein teaches and was himself taught, and the kind of reading all educated people (according to Bauerlein) have practiced for centuries, is dying out.

That is the argument of the first two chapters, especially:  The Internet has been around for between ten and twenty years, depending on how you count.  Therefore, American kids now finishing high school and beginning college have grown up with the Internet and we can expect them to display whatever advantages Internet is actually able to confer.  The Internet contains lots of information about topics of civic and academic interest, so kids who have grown up with it ought to know a lot.  They don’t, though.  The reason for this is that they don’t read; reading provides all kinds of benefits that help kids do better in school, and readers acquire all kinds of information as they engross themselves in books and reflect on what they say.  Kids don’t really acquire information in school, so it’s natural that their leisure-time activities are what determines how well they do on standardized tests and in college.  Bauerlein pulls the elements of this argument from a smorgasbord of sociological studies.

He appears to take the incredible yet still increasing popularity of the Internet as obviously the reason for the decline he feels exists.  The book is addressed both towards people who are interested in the rise of this new technology and also towards people who are interested in culture and reading.

As Bauerlein reads the studies, working with computers appears to improve a kind of putative intelligence which is actually bad. (He does not describe what it is, or at least not in any detail, but presumably he knows it when he sees it.)  Thus, the book will make those who work with computers consider whether they have been missing anything.  And, correspondingly, it will make those who are interested in culture and reading, and who suspect that those who work with computers are missing something, more sure that they are right.

I don’t personally find this argument convincing, but Bauerlein covers the bases very neatly.  The data for the arguments are not Bauerlein’s, so if they are questionable, he is not responsible.  And he emphasizes frequently that lots of people appear to be highly intelligent yet are (in his opinion) unable to read.  Those who disagree with him and cannot make sense of his argument may conclude they fall into this category.

Which raises the question who he thinks his audience is.  Because he has lost the people for whom critical thinking involves evaluation of evidence, as well as felicity in word choice.  He has lost the people who are turned off immediately by statements like the one I peeved about last week.  He has lost the people whose response, when faced with huge metaphysical arguments like the ones that English professors today are so fond of, on one of which I presume Bauerlein implicitly bases this book, is WTF?  And I’m not sure whom that leaves, other than college professors, the more credulous sort of journalist, and maybe the clergy.  Yet his book is published by a nonacademic press. 

To a large extent, he is criticizing educators like himself, yet his book is addressed to a general readership.  I get the sense he is trying to rally nonacademics to join in his critique of a subgroup among his fellow academics, something that conservative college professors have been doing for two decades, at least.  Because the book reads, essentially, like an (ever so mildly worded) jeremiad.  Yet it seems ungracious to harangue his lessers for not correcting his own colleagues and even himself.  Why would he do that?

Perhaps to make readers feel guilty or indignant enough that they would urge their legislators and other elected officials to support the educational policies Bauerlein promotes (vaguely described as these are).

Perhaps to intrigue future teenagers who feel they are smarter and more moral than their peers, who after reading this book may feel inspired to major in English and put into practice the high-flown sentiments they’ve learned from reading it.

Perhaps to console middle-aged and retired autodidacts and former English majors, who know they know how to read and are frustrated by the fact that they can’t express their own opinions without being challenged.  Perhaps to give them talking points for responding to such (explicit or implicit) challenges. 

Perhaps to encourage what general readers may actually remain (and have time for books like his) to discuss the ideas it contains with their friends and colleagues after work or during their lunch hours.

Of course, it’s more than probable that Bauerlein had no such rhetorical intention.  Perhaps he is simply articulating the beliefs of those he considers the entire educated class.  In fact, I have little real doubt that he sees himself as doing something quite different from what I describe above.

As a conservative and an English professor, naturally, I think, he writes a kind of book that is really rather traditional.  He assumes no subject matter expertise and, indeed, prefers no such expertise.  Though he seems to have no problem turning reading itself into an expert skill.  He assumes a unitary culture and even proceeds as if one existed.  Though, at the same time, he is continually discovering individuals and groups that don’t properly belong to it.  Though he dehumanizes those he disagrees with by referring to them as a faceless horde with an ugly name like “technophiles” or “technovangelists”: almost a metaphysical cause in itself—like Tony Kushner’s imagination of what an angel is—here, though, a fallen, Satanic angel.  It’s the continual casting out of the other that really grates, but maybe I ought to ignore that.  After all, none of us are without sin.

He is writing for a general audience: not political, not professional or technical.  He is writing an old-fashioned kind of book, the kind of book that can be read by all educated men and women.  His book is not at all of a type that can be read and be of use only to wonks, to bureaucrats and technocrats and low-level government clerks.  His book is, precisely, a book that informs educated men and women of what’s going on behind the scenes in the social and governmental institutions that determine what their lives will be like (on those infrequent occasions when they interact with such institutions).  His readers do not themselves work within those institutions, and they don’t have any influence on the controlling beliefs within those institutions either (except the small incremental influence any one of us has, and uses when we talk among ourselves or raise concerns with authority figures).  His readers are educated and at least vaguely conservative and much like himself.

This interpretation, however, while generous to Mark Bauerlein, leaves this particular reader out in the cold.