Bianca Steele

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.

Bill Ayers on Fresh Air

Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber discusses Bill Ayers' interview on "Fresh Air" last week:

His attitude toward the activities of the Weather Underground still seems somewhat cavalier. For example, he says that they planted bombs only to go off when there was a very small chance that anyone would be around, and gave plenty of warning, and that they withdrew from bombing when they suspected the the bomb that killed Diana Oughton had been made to take lives, not just to destroy property (maybe I’m not quoting him exactly, I haven’t gone back to listen; it seems obvious that it was made to take lives). They were young, I suppose, but it seems both naive and arrogant to suppose that once you start making bombs none among your number will seek to take life; and reckless to suppose that just because you give plenty of warning no-one will be killed. If you place a high value on not killing innocents, you do not set bombs anywhere; if you just place a pretty high value on not killing innocents you remain physically present until the bomb detonates.

In the comments:

First, general agreement that Terry Gross is a pretty darn good interviewer.  (If you enjoy listening to "Fresh Air," consider sending money to your local NPR station or to WHYY in Philadelphia, where her show is produced.) James Fallows at the Atlantic says so too.

Second, a debate about the Weathermen by people who were actually around at the time.  This discussion, via a general debate on the permissibility of violence in achieving political ends, has not quite entirely somehow degenerated into accusations that "Zionists and neoconservatives" are not loyal to the government of the US, but I'd love to hear first-person accounts from people who were actually there.