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.

Framingham Reads The Killer Angels and Three Cups of Tea

The Killer Angels, the subject of my last post but one (with a few others begun in the interim but this not done) and the main subject of this one, was my town’s “One Book” selection for 2011.  Three Cups of Tea, which I’m going to mention briefly, has been in the news lately because it turns out not to be true—how much is false is, as yet, unknown, though it seems pretty certain that on top of the book’s being false there are a few financial improprieties involving the charity the book’s author, Greg Mortenson, founded and described (and promoted) in his memoir.  Aaron Bady has useful roundups here and here.

(Side point: Is there a comma missing in this title?  In other words, did I mean to say “This post is about the program, ‘Framingham Reads The Killer Angels,’ and also about Three Cups of Tea”—which is true?  It is true, but as it happens Three Cups of Tea was the Framingham Reads selection a few years back.  Children’s versions and even picture books broadened the scope of the “One Book” project to the high schools and elementary schools, and there were cross-cultural programs, as well.  Improving understanding of other cultures can’t hurt, so I hope the book is not inaccurate in that regard, too.  For example, the title of the book, Mortenson says in interviews, comes from an Afghan custom of making a stranger almost a part of the family, though he has to drink three cups of tea with them, and the process takes time.  Something to think about.)

More on The Killer Angels: Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, in an otherwise unexplained post titled “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” linked a little while ago to a scene from Gettysburg, the not very well reviewed movie that was based on The Killer Angels.  The scene is of the point at which Chamberlain (played Jeff Bridges) tells his officers, “Fix bayonets.”  He has been ordered to hold the left flank, maintaining the Union Army’s position on the series of hills called Cemetery Ridge, and not under any circumstances to withdraw.  Now his men are entirely out of ammunition, and the enemy is still coming.  If they fix bayonets and charge downhill, they may at least prevent the enemy from circling around behind the Union line.

The film shows Chamberlain surrounded by his staff as they react to the command.  They all are stunned by what seems a foolhardy charge, nearly unprotected, into certain death.  Chamberlain himself appears to be perfectly aware of the unusual nature of his own order.  His mood, as much as his decision, seems to illustrate something dangerous in his character.  In the book, however, it is different.

In the novel, Chamberlain is described as making the obvious choice.  His options are limited.  His men are out of ammunition, and his requests for more bullets haven’t been answered.  If he retreats—as he has been ordered not to do, under any circumstances—shifting to the right, towards the rest of the Union line, the enemy will not only take the hill, but will sweep behind the Union line and attack them from behind.  If he stands pat, he and his men will likely be slaughtered.

His only option is to tell the men to fix bayonets.  They will be armed only with those, against an infantry armed with guns (and possibly also a cavalry armed with swords), but this would be their situation in any event.  What he does that is unusual is order them to take the offensive (unplanned by his own superiors), and charge down the hill.  He tells them to sweep to the right, pushing the enemy across the front of the remaining Union guns.  He has heard of the maneuver in his training to be an officer but has never seen it done.  His troops end up sweeping well across the front of the line, taking large numbers prisoners.  They may well have startled the enemy as much as they did their own side. 

It’s only after the battle is over that Chamberlain realizes that what he did was unusual.  He knew the battle could not be won unless he ordered his men to charge downhill, so he ordered his men to charge downhill.  Most experienced officers, though, as he discovers, would probably not have done the same.  His reason for acting as he did, in giving such a risky order, is not so much that he was a college professor as that he was inexperienced.  He probably acted more as a young man would, just out of officer training school, than as a professor of military science (which wasn’t his field in the first place).  Of course, in most wars, twenty-somethings have not been given command of so many men as Chamberlain was given.  He happened to combine the confidence of an experienced professional with the inadequate, untried school-learning of a recently graduated student.  That doesn’t have much to do with his being a professor—it wasn’t Chamberlain’s thinking like a professor that led him to take such a foolhardy action—so much as with his being an older, respected professional man whose high position in society was seen as transferring easily to another sphere.  As it happens, that worked out well at Gettysburg, but it might have been otherwise.

And Shaara illustrates well that, though social hierarchies operated slightly differently in the South than they do in the North, every social interaction that happens in the Army is necessarily hierarchical.  The visible double-takes the characters allow themselves in the film version of Gettysburg are unthinkable in the world of Shaara’s novel.  Nearly everything in the novel is described from the point of view of a high-ranking officer: in most cases, the highest-ranking officer possible, given the situation as prescribed by the plot.  There are few exceptions.  The book starts off in the point of view of a sometime-Shakespearean actor turned Rebel spy who is well aware of the fact that the real Army is more than a little suspicious of him.  The second section begins with the point of view of John Buford, a cavalry officer who has never really reacclimated to life in the East, and who stakes out a Union position in Gettysburg, not entirely trusting that additional troops will arrive in time for his efforts to do any good, and—again—well aware that he will get little credit from history or from Washington.  After that, however, the novel shifts to the regular Army officers who have taken over the battlefield.  The only conflict we see between officers in which the commander is not always the one in the right is that between Longstreet and Lee, the former arguing that they are sure to lose the battle if they engage again the following day.

The scene from the movie is damning for Chamberlain’s case.  At this point, in Chamberlain’s chapters of the book, the reader seems to be humming under his breath, “Another victory like that and we are done for.”  In Longstreet’s chapters, however, what we hear is most likely worse: “We were hip deep in the Big Muddy, the big fool said to move on.”

Gettysburg and the Modern Military (The Killer Angels and Game Theory)

In The Killer Angels, a novel about the battle of Gettysburg, General James Longstreet—generally, the hero of the book—is enormously struck by the changes in military tactics that he is in the middle of.  Longstreet is, himself, a protagonist of these changes.  He has seen, in the battles of the Indian Wars in the North American West, that traditional methods of combat are bound to result in unnecessary deaths, and ultimately in the loss of the war.  A single artillery gun in a good location, or even a single rifle wielded from behind a tree, will simply massacre any army that tries to capture it.  Longstreet’s solution is to emphasize defense, and to deemphasize honor.  He prefers to abandon a hard-won battleground rather than defend it at the expense of a more likely victory elsewhere; to withdraw in the face of greater force rather than attack simply in order to be first to strike; to cut off the enemy’s supply lines rather than confront them face to face in battle.  And he prefers to find a defensible location and dig in rather than lead a glorious charge.

Robert E. Lee, who happens to be Longstreet’s commanding officer, is a soldier of the old-fashioned school.  It may well be that Lee is losing the war because the needs of the age are for mechanism, not for honor, but Lee will not change.  Shaara presents his determination as a kind of virtue, in line with the (now usually poorly thought of) view that the South deserved to win the Civil War in some kind of “higher” or actually moral sense, regardless of the immorality of slave-ownership and racism.  And Longstreet does come to doubt himself.  He is fighting the war because he is a soldier and his commanders have ordered him to do so, not because he believes in the cause, and he recognizes the advantage of having the kind of cause he lacks.  Regardless, the predictions and views which Shaara presents as Longstreet’s are more correct than those he presents as Lee’s.  And even so, Shaara describes the old-fashioned kind of battle as more “human,” in some way, than an artillery charge, or even a careful trench-based defense.

It isn’t surprising to see a Rebel cavalry charge complete with Rebel yell (the “inhuman screaming of the onrushing dead”) depicted as glorious, if also primitive, even as those troops ride straight into the face of modern artillery and hidden riflemen.  What is more surprising is to see the advance of a mile-long line of infantry described as beautiful and as noble.  The sight of thousands of men in brightly-colored uniforms marching slowly forward under constant artillery fire must surely be impressive in some way, even sublime, but it is hardly one of the greatest expressions of the human spirit.  Yet Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Yankee college professor turned officer, with little combat experience, immediately thinks in just those terms.  Chamberlain has been learning to see battle as his fellow soldiers do, to see it in its gritty details as it really is, and what this classicist and professor of theology discovers about the dying art of Napoleonic battle array is that it was a triumph of human will.  The horror of so many men bound to die does not appear to enter his mind.  By contrast, Chamberlain’s reaction on experiencing his first artillery barrage from behind his own line is to dive to the ground, stunned, and fall into unconsciousness (having failed to give his troops any orders).  The repeated violent shaking of the earth under the impact of machinery is, for him, is what registers as true horror. 

Does Shaara—in this book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975—intend to make a comment about modern military practice?  What, exactly, does he have in mind when he mentions the modern, mechanized military?  I’ve been reading about game theory and wonder if it might provide some hints.

On page 64 of Luce and Raiffa, Games and Decisions, a military strategist named Haywood is quoted on the “American” decision theory for battle.  It is striking.  He says that the US military commander bases his strategy not on the intentions of the enemy, but on the capabilities of the enemy.  This is a little chilling.  It calls, logically, for building up capacity even in the face of the fact that the enemy has no plan to attack, on every possible battleground even when the enemy cannot possibly attack on all of them at once.  This kind of talk rightly gave Cold War hawkish thinking a bad name, and tarred much of the field of game theory along with it.  (The result, in part, was an emphasis by doves on the limitations imposed on game theory’s having restricted itself to the narrowest range of human motivations, those associated with the purest self-interest.  An example is research, publicized by Douglas Hofstadter and others, on the absurdities that result whenever a game-theoretical example is brought down to earth and put into effect.)

Less dramatically, however, it also calls for a rather mechanistic view of the army itself (both ours and that of the enemy), as questions of intention are set aside.  All that matters is a tallying up of the numbers of weapons of various sorts, of their capacities (probably expressed in numerical terms), of their geographic placement, and of the numbers of soldiers deployed to make use of them.  Old-fashioned strategical thinking—trying to get into the mind of the commanders on the other side—goes by the board.

Thus, all opportunities for finesse have dissipated.  The military strategist is no longer a strategist in the old sense; he no longer needs the skills of a chess master.  Instead of pitting himself against an enemy who is human and his equal, he submits troop numbers to a computer.  A concern about the potential replacement of human decision-makers by computers would explain Longstreet’s regret more plausibly than would a simple distaste for prudence and defensive strategy.  It doesn’t make the idea that the South was some kind of glorious lost cause any more persuasive.  It does, however, turn Longstreet into a character with whom late twentieth-century audiences may be more likely to sympathize.

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.

Brief Links About Literature

Who would have thought that if you want to do journalism, there’s a book to tell you how to do it . . . unless the kind of journalism you want to do is reporting on the arts.  (Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes)

This seems absurd to me. If a theater catches fire in the middle of a performance and kills everybody inside, there is no shortage of guidance on how to write the news brief covering the fire for the next day’s paper; how to write the extended story about the investigation a few days later; how to write an obituary about an individual victim on deadline, and how to write on the victims collectively for a Sunday-magazine thumbsucker a few months later; how to write a formal editorial condemning the lax building codes that helped accelerate the fire, and how to write the emotional column or op-ed piece demanding more out of our neglectful civic leaders; how to use public records and the Freedom of Information Act to background the parties responsible; how not to libel any of those people; how to decide where to place the story; how to photograph the story and how best to visualize data related to it; how to blog, video, podcast, tweet, Facebook, and SEO the bejesus out of the story; and, after all that’s done, how to have a tedious discussion about the ethics of handling every last one of those things. But nothing on how to write a review that might have persuaded people to do something better with their time that fateful evening.

This sounds so familiar.  Don’t we have a word for it by now?  (Jonathan Raban, LRB)

Red Tory is like a 300-page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelves are stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modern psychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson (in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the key to the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds. We have sunk, Parson Blond says, into a condition of ‘rootless cultural relativism’, godless and cynical, in which there is ‘a pervading lack of daily joy’. He blames the Bloomsbury Group, especially Lytton Strachey; the disillusioned war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I watched on the internet) and the pernicious laissez-faire doctrines of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is said to examine “the riddle of atavism”: the racist fear of biologically inferior human specimens living among us.  But, arguably, it’s actually about cocaine addiction, as this suggests (h/t Andrew Sullivan).  If so, the argument that late Victorian horror fiction like Jekyll/Hyde, Dracula, The Time Machine, and Dorian Gray expressed society’s ingrown and irrational racism falls apart.  Could this fiction instead be expressing an entirely rational wish to suppress drug abuse and fight addiction?  And, then, why did the scientifically minded (such as Galton and Lombroso) believe the issue was race?

Meritocrats Vs. Rockefeller Republicans

I don’t know as much about Robert McNamara as I should.  I do know he was the Lyndon Johnson adviser who was responsible for the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam.  His recent death brings David Brooks and Gail Collins, on their New York Times blog, “The Conversation,” to discuss a question the caption writer words as, “Has our ruling class gotten better or worse over the ages?”

Brooks starts off.  He compares the bureaucratic elite of the 1950s to the elite of the 1960s (McNamara’s time), and presents McNamara’s failings as of a piece with what he as a conservative considers the decline of America generally over those two decades.  He presents a narrative in which the “wise men” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were great men, innovators, responsible for creating the institutions that made the America of the second half of the twentieth century what it was.  The corresponding “best and brightest” of the succeeding decade, however, were entirely different.  In their hands, everything fell apart.

In case you were wondering why, Brooks offers up a handful of possibilities: the kind of education they were given, their belief that they were in possession of scientific knowledge that could tell them exactly how to govern, their belief in their own competence, and their belief that they could improve conditions for other people at home and around the world.  Basically, they were Democrats.  The men of the 1950s, on the other hand, were wealthy industrialists (and the sons of industrialists), plutocrats with Wall Street values who believed their wealth and opportunities gave them the responsibility and the competence to participate in government.  In other words, Republicans (though probably Rockefeller Republicans, as they’d later be called, not necessarily conservatives).

Undeniably, something happened sometime between 1958 and 1974.  The difference between the bureaucrats of the immediate post-war period and those of the Vietnam era makes a nice example.  But the question remains what the causes of the difference really were.

With the data Brooks relays to us, it seems that the only way of explaining the change is by the subsequent generation’s being inexplicably dumber than its predecessor had been (not its parents: the only subsequent political Harrimans that Wikipedia lists exist in science fiction).  Or we might invent some theory of inevitable decline—where the men of the 1950s were indeed better than those of any other period in recent memory, but where the law of reversion to the mean shows that all good things must come to an end, and that they correspondingly did.  What seems certain is that, for Brooks, many other possibilities, though imaginable, are not likely.  The men of the 1950s did not leave weak or fragile institutions to their successors.  The men of the 1950s did not leave nearly insuperable problems, of their own creation, to those of the 1960s.  The men of the 1960s did not do the best they could under bad circumstances, and certainly did not lay the groundwork for improvement in the next two or three decades.  (Any of these possibilities would cast in doubt Brooks’ assertion that the 1960s were a sad falling off from a high place.)  No: what you see is what you get.

What you see is what you get.  Americans were generally happy in the 1950s, and the presidents of the 1950s were Republicans.  Americans were increasingly unhappy in the 1960s, and the presidents of that decade were Democrats.  In the 1950s there wasn’t yet much in the way of the social sciences, and bureaucrats could be only generally educated yet govern with little outside criticism.  In the 1960s many people felt a lot more was known, and at the same time problems were being identified with increasing frequency.  Conservatives like David Brooks are asking you to do the math.  He thinks you’ll be forced to draw the right conclusion.

Ressentiment and Self-Love

From Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals:

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says No to what is “outside,” what is “different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed. The inversion of the value-positing eye -- this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself -- is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all -- its action is fundamentally reaction.

The woman who taught me Nietzsche pointed out that -- according to this description -- the practitioner of ressentiment, par excellence, is the scholar or the writer: Nietzsche was describing himself and knew it full well. Of course, there remains much that could be criticized in this passage. It offers a sample of Nietzsche’s fastening upon contemporary biological science for metaphors, which he not uncharacteristically misuses by attaching to them a moral sense; the availability of external stimuli is a requirement for every conscious living thing, yet Nietzsche stigmatizes all such living things, astonishingly, as actually less than human.

However, obviously, the real importance of the passage is that it is here that Nietzsche begins to define what he means by his key term “ressentiment” (literally, “re-feeling,” or the feeling of the same emotion a second time, a kind of acid reflux of the mind). For Nietzsche, the moral corruption inherent in Western civilization, which he took for granted, stemmed from religion itself. Here lies the scandal of Nietzsche -- and nobody denies that it is a scandal.

Have you ever been hugged by a registrar?

Asks beloved BU history prof and author Howard Zinn:

Writing a play is more fun than writing a history book. And when somebody decides to produce it, it's wonderful. You are taken out of the cold world of the academy and you're in a world of movies and plays where you are hugged by everybody - the director, the cast, they all hug you. Have you ever been hugged by a registrar?

Zinn's twenty-odd year-old play, Daughter of Venus, is being produced by Suffolk University and BU's Boston Playwright's Theatre.

Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets Among His Friends

For anyone who is interested:

There is a one-per-week discussion of Shakespeare’s sonnets at the Google Group “Forest of Arden.” They are currently doing number sixteen.

It seems they got the idea from the Usenet group “humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare”, where these discussions used to take place. “Forest of Arden” was founded by the combined disaffected forces of hlas and the Shakespeare Fellowship, who wanted a moderated forum where they could discuss “alternate Shakespeare authorship” without being, as they felt, harassed by people who care about the historical truth.

Revolutionary Road - III

In today’s New York Times Judith Warner has a column taking off from some thoughts about Revolutionary Road, and by coincidence she discusses some of the same points I’ve been thinking about.

In my earlier post, I guessed that the only reason anyone would want to watch the film version of Yates’s novel was “voyeurism”: a desire to observe the suffering of others with whom one has no personal or emotional connection, and to take pleasure in such observation.  Warner comes up with another possible reason: we might want to view the novel (or the film) through the lenses of the social sciences.  To an anthropologist or a sociologist, Revolutionary Road has something to say about the values and the social practices of a specific time in history.  To a psychologist, Revolutionary Road exemplifies how -- in certain situations -- people generally think; in particular, it illustrates a kind of pathology that occurs under adverse conditions typical of the Eastern suburbs of the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.  And to a historian (my own preferred lens most of the time, if I had to pick from among this one group), it is, simply, evidence: one source among others, though an important source.

Of course there is an important distinction, a moral one, between the scientific worldview and that of the voyeur.  It has to do with their motives.  The scientist wants to learn about the world, both to increase humanity’s intellectual understanding and in order to make the world a better place: he has a place in society and a defined role.

The artist also studies people and writes about them: in this he is much like the scientist.  And like the scientist, he as a defined role in society.  However, the artist can’t claim to be benefiting the world in anything like the way the scientist does.  Social science is the objective observation of other people, supporting the generation and elimination of theories about how people generally think or behave.  The social scientist cannot have an emotional involvement with the people whom he studies (or his observations would fail to be objective), and the social scientist most definitely cannot be studying himself.  When we enjoy art, however, we do get emotionally involved.  And when we enjoy art most deeply, what we are “studying” is in a very real sense actually ourselves.

The late philosopher Richard Rorty, in his excellent book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, suggested dividing novels into two categories: those that provide readers pleasure of an aesthetic sort, and those that make readers aware of injustices in their own society.  Drawing on the writings of the best novelists, critics, and philosophers of art, Rorty concluded that a novel can belong to one of those categories, or it can belong to the other category, but it never can belong to both.

Now, Warner suggests that the novel Revolutionary Road has value for us readers because it is the second kind of book.  She may be right.  However, the best critics and novelists in recent decades have praised it for the opposite reason: they say not only that Yates’s novel belongs in the first category, but that the book is especially notable because of the level of aesthetic craftsmanship its author displays by his having written it.  I think it is probable that they are right.  I think, if we cannot see why they have the opinions that they do, we are most likely missing some piece of information that they were using in order to come to the conclusions that they did.

But that’s the novel and I was discussing the film.  There’s no doubt that the film promised us by the trailer (which again is all I have seen of it) looks very pretty.  But that’s not all there is to a film.  Certainly, most people, including me, do not go to the movies just to admire the cinematography -- any more than we go to the movies as anthropologists, considering Hollywood and its fans as providing us with case studies.  We want a story and we want a kind of emotional involvement.

But we don’t want that kind of involvement.  At least I don’t.

This world in which we live in

Ted Nelson wrote:

In this crazy, mixed-up world in which we live in,
Paul McCartney is forgiven.

Where does the feast of seven fishes come from

Mark Liberman questions the phrase “feast of seven fishes.”

I was tempted to comment, “It’s called the feast of seven fishes because it’s traditional to serve a dinner with seven courses, all of them fish.” But I resisted.

In comments, Chris asks whether it would it be excessively pedantic to note that only one of the seven is actually a fish.

No, not at all.

Was Nazi Science Not Really Science?

One of the worst things you can say to someone in a university is that their work or their ideas are the same as something promoted in Nazi Germany. (Unlike the Internet, in academia there is nothing like Godwin's Law. Such accusations are perfectly well within bounds.) The idea that what the Nazis called "science" was altogether unlike what we know to be science is, thus, important to maintain. Recently, in the London Telegraph, historian Richard Evans argues that this is not the case. In fact, he says, when he looked into the most heinous, disreputable experiments German scientists carried out in the National Socialist era, he found that they were astonishingly "similar in form, if not content, . . . to the research of today."

He did find some differences. This is not surprising. However, it does not necessarily reflect moral differences between Germany's culture and society under Nazism and the rest of the world. Many of the institutions we take for granted simply did not exist until after the Second World War. Evans appears to focus on peer review as the reliable sign of decent research. He correctly notes that one characteristic of Nazi medicine was to try to improve the average level of healthiness in society -- not only by studying very healthy people in order to discover the factors that contribute to their good health -- but also by trying to eliminate the people on the low end of the healthiness scale. What is truly revolting about, for example, Mengele's experiments, however, was their inattention to any kind of ethics around the study of human subjects -- the protocols surrounding which were instituted after the war, in large part as a direct result of those abuses.

It is also not surprising that in most respects German science at the time should have greatly resembled science in other Western nations. Germany was in a sense actually the hub of scientific research at the time. Many discoveries were made in other countries, but they were often developed to their full extent only in Germany. It is important to remember to what extent Western-style science has always been an international activity.

There is a great desire to divide science into "good" science that evil people like Nazis somehow could not even have contemplated, and "bad" science that can be recognized at first glance. A look at the historical sources, unfortunately, shows unequivocally that such a division is impossible.

East Wind Rain

Recent research seems to vindicate US leaders against the charge they knew about the Pearl Harbor attack before it happened. The accusation seems to have been made by people who knew (or who claimed they knew, after the fact) that Japanese messages, signaling the attack was imminent, had been successfully and completely decoded by the US military, and that the decoded messages had been tramsmitted to Washington.

From what's reported, it does seem that the code was successfully broken and the system for decoding individual messages worked just fine. There are two ways a claim that a secret message is hidden in a text might be false. There might be no real evidence that a message is present. The distribution of colors in a pattern is unlikely to conceal a message if they are distributed evenly. Or, there might be no way to prove a meaningful interpretation of the text or whatever is the true one. "No cats are grue" can mean anything.

One somewhat well-known example is the engraving at Shakespeare's burial site. Some people believe it contains a hidden message to the effect that Shakespeare's real identity was someone else, for example, Shakespeare's contemporary and fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe. However, the argument that it does rests on the assumption that certain words in the inscription can be interpreted in certain ways, hundreds of years after they were composed, with absolute and conclusive certainty. A decent argument against that idea was put forward by William and Elizebeth Friedman in their book The Shakespeare Ciphers Examined. The Friedmans, incidentally, were involved in the effort to decipher those same Japanese codes. (And be warned: Their discussion, while well-argued and probably enlightening for a general audience unfamiliar with the subject matter, doesn't make use of the latest research.)

Then again, there is the possibilty that a real message is insignificant. It sounds like this is what happened with the Pearl Harbor message: the message was deciphered successfully, and interpreted successfully, but it was considered meaningless, and therefore the message was more or less thrown away.