Bianca Steele

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.”

Don't Troll the Customer Service Rep!

In response to the story about Sen. Schumer’s apparently calling a flight attendant a “bitch,” Amanda Marcotte has some interesting thoughts (here) about how middle-class people treat service personnel.  This reminded me of the recent Crooked Timber post about trolls (here—it’s also worth following the link), because I think there is a kind of snide, impersonal style of interaction that people sometimes are tempted to adopt in public, and trollishness has more than a little in common with that.

I suspect this habit is a temptation to which academics, and also pedants in general (no shortage of those on the Internet!), occasionally succumb, when they are talking to a customer service person who seems less knowledgeable than maybe ought to be the case.  I have in mind primarily situations where you have asked someone for information, especially technical information, and you think you know more about the subject matter than they do.

It is not your job to take the service person to school over the issue you’re discussing with him or her.

What good could possibly result from doing so?

In the very best case, you might just possibly open up a dialogue between the service person and the more knowledgeable people in his or her organization.  The service person might become better educated, and the organization might become aware of the need for better training.  But this is very unlikely.

If you make the service person feel bad about not knowing enough, he or she may blame the knowledgeable people they interact with, for not teaching them enough, or for teaching them misleading things.  He or she may blame the people they work with for being, as you demonstrated to them, wrong.  He or she may totally misunderstand, and make up a narrative around the incomprehensible things you said to them, as best they can manage to interpret it.  (They may blame you for being a jerk, but only if they are so confident in themselves that it never occurs to them that they could be in the wrong, and it never occurs to them that their information was lacking, in any way, in the first place.)

Canine Linguistics

At Language Log, commenter “anon” (who I'd guess is British) says:

Many years ago, some Army combat engineers tried to teach dogs to sniff out explosives. They taught the dogs to bark once for a land mine, twice for an unexploded bomb, and so forth. Unfortunately, when the dogs encountered explosives for which they had not been taught barking and growling patterns, the dogs ignored the explosives, and some of the dogs and their trainers were blown to bits.

The engineers concluded that the dogs' ability to detect explosives depended on the words for explosives in the dogs' language.

This is called the Sapper-Woof hypothesis.

(Explanation: here or here).

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.

Peeving The Dumbest Generation

I’ve been reading Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation, a screed against kids today and the culture that formed them, the scapegoat being the Internet.  I’m planning a longer post on the book, and I don’t intend to make style a main object of criticism.  But I wanted to get this off my chest: I just came across the following sentences, on page 107:

“Because that glorious creation of youth intelligence hasn’t materialized.  The Web expands nonstop, absorbing everything it can, and more knowledge and beauty settle there by the hour.  But no such enhancement has touched its most creative and frequent users, the digital natives [i.e., youth who’ve grown up with the Internet].  There is no reciprocal effect.  Digital enthusiasts witness faithfully the miraculous evolution of the digital sphere, but they also assume a parallel ascent by its consumers, an assumption with no evidence behind it.” 

This isn’t even a mixed metaphor, because there is no metaphor here.  There’s just words.  All the words apply to “[t]he Web.”  The Web expands, the Web absorbs things, and it’s possible for good things to settle on the Web.  (We don’t have to suppose the subject should be replaced.  We can just redefine the predicates to make them fit.)  Like God according to some medieval philosophies, the Web can have any and all attributes applied to it.  But the Web isn’t really any more like God (or a god, or a divine-like kind of something or other) than anything else is.  When people write in the style Bauerlein has chosen, it’s just that words can be used any way that seems convenient.  Again, this isn’t zany creativity, which would imply there are limits being pushed up against—rather, everything just kind of seeps around everywhere.

Miscellaneous Friday

Angels and Mullets

How can anybody resist the word mullet?  I wouldn’t say mullet is one of my favorite words, in the sense meant in this thread on Language Log.  I don’t think saying “mullet” is a pleasure in itself, or hearing “mullet.”  It’s the idea that I think is fascinating, with all the cloud of connotations and historical references and visualized images that follow in its trail.  I first saw a mullet, I think (at least as a distinct look, up close), in 1984, as a freshman in college, on an engineering student from one of the more distant villages of Queens County, and first heard the word about fifteen years later.  In between, I’d seen lots and lots of them.  I really didn’t know there was such a word.  By way of pointing to Christopher Orr’s review of Angels and Demons as a film about a haircut:

Robert Langdon, has returned, but without the mullet, which in the interim evidently detached itself from his scalp, crawled off to some dark corner, and grew up to be Danny McBride.

Orr says the film has been “lightly reworked.”

The Producers is being produced in Berlin.

Despite coverage of the show in local newspapers, not all Berliners have been clued in to its comic nature, Bech said. City police have received a number of complaints about posters for the production, which “provoked associations with the Nazis” despite the fact that swastikas have been replaced with images of pretzels in order to conform to German law. (Swastikas can be used onstage as part of an “artistic statement,” Bech said, but not as part of the show’s promotional materials.) 

Here's the poster, complete with pretzels.

Every so often, Michael Bérubé

. . . finds himself witnessing . . .

. . . or sometimes actually taking part in, exchanges that go like this:

First Person: Hey, what do you think of this proposal?

Second Person: Excuse me, but I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Beg pardon?

Second Person: I wasn’t consulted about this.

First Person: Um . . . but that’s why I’m asking what you think.  I’m consulting you.  This is the consultation right now.

Second Person: I can’t believe you went ahead and did this without asking for anybody’s input.  I really think we need to talk.

First Person: ??

And no, I am never the Second Person.  When people ask me what I think about X, I simply say “kewl” or “meh” or “ZOMG” or “do not want” or some other Internets locution. 

Are Humans Creative?

In yesterday’s Boston Globe, language columnist Jan Freeman raises a question that’s of interest to all bloggers: can we have too many peeves? and can community peeving increase each person’s count of annoyances even an order of magnitude higher than it would have been normally?

She starts with the great problem of the word “create.”  Many of us, I suppose, have never heard anyone complain that the word “create” has a modern implication that is foreign to our traditional way of thinking.  I think I first ran into this purported “issue” when reading The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom, or maybe in George Steiner.  At the time, most likely, I assumed the idea—that only since the modern era have artists been considered “creative” in a sense previously reserved to God’s creation of the universe in the Biblical book of Genesis—was a commonplace.  I can easily imagine Percy Bysshe Shelley, perhaps, arrogating the word “creative” to himself and his fellow poets.  Yet that is only speculation, especially if, as Freeman says, there’s no basis in historical fact for thinking that “creative” in this sense is a modern invention.

In Bloom’s case, it is easy for me to dismiss what he says in retrospect.  In the fifteen or twenty years since I read his book, I’ve learned a little about how political disputes can contaminate otherwise scholarly thought, and these days I wouldn’t believe anything Allan Bloom says about anything unless I could find corroboration, properly documented and argued.  The case of George Steiner is more difficult given his liberal politics, but the personality he conveys in his books (and the fact that he says much Bloom would also agree with), makes it increasingly less so.  Yet, if there isn’t a real issue there, why would Daniel Boorstin have begun his popular book The Creators, about the literary canon, with a survey of metaphysics or creation myths in various world civilizations?  Though, on the other hand, the absence of a real issue might be exactly what makes that book a little unconvincing.

Is there really anybody who believes it’s immoral or impious for individuals to “create”?  A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times Book Review ran a review of a book by the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus that inspired me to coin the new logical fallacy, “dixit ergo creavit”: he said it, therefore he created it.  Neuhaus, in essence, blames philosopher of postmodern pragmatism Richard Rorty for certain ills of the modern world.  His evidence: Rorty’s vivid description of the effects of those ills.  That is unfair, surely.  Describing problems does not make them any worse or bring them more concrete being than they had before.  In fact, Neuhaus himself would have been unable to attack those putative developments without Rorty’s description.

Anyway, I considered whether “creavit” or “invenit” (discovered) was the better word.  “Discovered” certainly describes better what I think Rorty, a scholar, not a belle-lettriste, was trying to do in his book.  But the fallacy is not only the unsurprising fact that the first person who says a thing may not have been the first person to think it.  Without the idea that Rorty had introduced something new into the world, Neuhaus’s accusation doesn’t have a lot of force.  Evidently he felt Rorty had created the turn of thought he wrote about: taught his students to believe this, whether or not that was an actual fact.  Evidently he felt human beings would be better off if nobody at all had even suggested its possibility.

Frames Versus the Invisible Hand

Via Will Wilkinson, Matt Yglesias says of financial firm CEOs: “surely we could agree that the executives at these institutions are primarily bad people.”  He goes on to elaborate, explaining that they are “greedy.”  This isn’t his main point, and he goes on to invoke Adam Smith and to “recognize that none of us are without sin,” but he says it more than once, and I think Wilkinson is right to point out that it’s not consistent with what Yglesias has represented his argument to be.

Yglesias’ post invokes a frame that it’s unusual to see in sophisticated economic reasoning: every problem can be blamed on a particular person, who both benefited directly from the problem in the most natural way, and committed a particular sin that necessarily would have caused that particular problem.  In this case, as the frame, and as Yglesias, would have it, the problem was not only caused by financial firms, but by the individual executives of these firms.  And it’s not just that their actions caused the problem because they made some mistake, because they were lazy, because they were incompetent, because they were out to get somebody else and lost track of what they were really supposed to be doing—they caused financial problems for other people because they were out to benefit themselves financially.  And it’s not just that their desire to get big bonuses or to drive up the price of their employers’ stock—or even their self-identification with the firm and its products, so that the firm’s gains felt like their own—led them to act in acquisitive ways, it’s that they were acting to benefit themselves instead of with the public good in mind.

There really is no other way to explain the stupidity of this kind of argument (at least I can’t think of one), than to see it as basically automatic, nearly unconscious.  It’s something you expect to hear from a guy who’s just finished yelling, “You kids get off my lawn!”

And what it misses is something important.  If we really think Adam Smith was right, it is important to have people around who will act with self-interest (their own and others’) in mind.  If we want to live in a modern society with complex institutions, it is important to have people around who are aware of the impact their actions have on the well-being of others without imagining that impact is direct.  And if we want to get anything done at all, it is also important to have people around who do not become paralyzed with fear every time it occurs to them that “none of us are without sin.”

Frames in the Business Section

A couple of posts ago, I commented slightly negatively on George Lakoff’s frame theory, but I actually think it is very valuable, so here is an example of how one might make use of the theory.

In today’s New York Times business section, Robert J. Shiller has a column addressing the idea that the experts could have or should have known the current crisis could or would happen.  Shiller’s column illustrates a particular set of frames that are sometimes found in business writing.

In 1989, Shiller heard an expert (Lawrence Summers) muse on his speculations that although nobody thinks it could occur, “a severe contraction, even a depression, could indeed come again.”  This is the people think a certain huge problem can never occur again, but in fact there is no reason to think the world has changed frame.  The state of affairs it describes may well be true, for any given situation, at any given time—but often it sounds alarmist, and one is tempted to think it has some of the attributes of a stopped clock.

The fictional scenario began with “lawyers and dentists explain[ing] to one another that investing without margin was a mistake.”  This is the problems are caused by certain kinds of licensed professionals who think they know something about a different field but really are ignorant frame.

The fictional crisis was then triggered when “a major Wall Street firm was forced to merge with another after a poorly supervised trader lost $500 million by failing to properly hedge a complex position.”  This is the problems are caused by subordinates’ failures to follow instructions frame.  There was no real problem, either with the regulations governing Wall Street firms, nor with the way executives were running the company, but only because a small number of employees were insufficiently disciplined.

All of these frames have one thing in common.  They all exonerate the people on top before the fact.  They all find problems only at the very bottom of the hierarchy.  They might permit a problem to be found just one level up from the very bottom—in the supervision or hiring of the lowest rank—but never explicitly put the blame on first-line managers.

None of the frames states ideas that are 100% inaccurate.  Sometimes people don’t follow the instructions given them by their managers.  Sometimes dentists and medical doctors misunderstand the ideas they hear coming out of other disciplines.  However, these frames do make it nearly impossible for any systemic issues to be identified publicly, not only by anyone who feels constrained to stay within the lines they indicate, but also by anyone who is dependent on information provided by those who feel so constrained.  Merely reversing the frame doesn’t work either, in part because the only information that can be provided is what fits into the frame.  It is not an unfair criticism of the New York Times to say that it reuses a limited set of frames over and over again, and that these frames very often indicate a neoliberal point of view.

Don't Think of an Elephant: Progressives and Foreign Policy

George Lakoff’s book Don’t Think of an Elephant has been on my radar since it was published in 2004, and I’d of course heard of Lakoff’s seminal theoretical work, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, but until recently I hadn’t read anything of his.  I had heard interviews with Lakoff on NPR and he sounded like someone I didn’t agree with.  The review in the Atlantic that appeared just after the election didn’t make the book sound especially appealing either.  It was reviewed with Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas, which I ended up tackling first, and which I ended up liking quite a bit.  Possibly the media overexposure itself left a bad taste behind, because I’ve just begun Don’t Think of an Elephant and I’m finding it entirely worthwhile: I don’t agree with everything Lakoff says, but his analysis is compelling, and the results of that analysis are persuasive.

 

Last night, however, I ran across a statement I disagreed with to the point of being unable to find anything of value in it.  Most of the first part of Lakoff’s book (I’ll be referring only to Don’t Think of an Elephant in the rest of this blog post) consists of pieces that appeared on the web site AlterNet in 2003 and 2004.  The second chapter, dated October 13, 2003, is about the 2003 recall of California’s Governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to take his place.  In the course of explaining why the “poor communicator” frame fails to explain those events, first because other, more important things were taking place that the frame elides, and second because Democrats generally are poor communicators when it comes to the greater majority of voters, Lakoff introduces his “family” metaphor for politics.  As I think is well-known, Lakoff says the way we think of politics reflects the way we think families ought to be run: when conservatives think of families, they think of a “strict father” model, while liberals use what Lakoff calls a “nurturant parent” model.

 

Lakoff goes on to enumerate the implications each model has for thinking about various topics in current affairs.  Here is what he says about foreign affairs as seen from the viewpoint of the strict father model: “In foreign affairs the government should maintain its sovereignty and impose its moral authority everywhere it can, while seeking its self-interest (the self-interest of corporations and military strength).”  Here is what he says about foreign affairs as seen from the viewpoint of the nurturant parent model: “In foreign policy the role of the nation should be to promote cooperation and extend these values to the world.”

 

If Lakoff is typical, no wonder Barack Obama’s support among progressives is so tenuous.

 

It explains why the left’s objection to the war was that it was “fought under false pretences”: a slogan you hear much more than that the war was “fought for nonexistent WMD,” yet which is consistently explained as meaning simply the latter.  This would seem to assume that people who supported the war did so because they believed it was a just war, just the way the Bosnia war was just: fought for humanitarian ends, in order to effect a discrete moral purpose.  It might also begin to explain why Democratic insiders who at first had been hawkish on Iraq switched sides exactly when they did: at a time when, to the average person reading the news, nothing obvious had changed.

 

This is essentially a neoconservative argument.  Obviously Lakoff is not a neoconservative.  If I did not know he considered himself to be a progressive, I might conclude that he is a neoliberal.  The argument is strange to hear in a book about how progressives think differently from conservatives, in a talk about how Democrats don’t know how to communicate with the electorate and need to become less like stereotypical liberals.

 

There is more to politics than the family.  There is more to politics than personal morality.  War is not justified by our desire to do good.  Lakoff makes me realize why I am a liberal who sees good things in progressivism, and not a progressive full stop.

The Definition of "Neoliberalism"

At Blographia Literaria, Andrew Seal is discussing Walter Benn Michaels’ essay “The Neoliberal Imagination,” which appeared in n+1, and he says:

Michaels accuses liberals of stooping to a politics of respect or recognition where we should be practicing a politics of redistribution. "[T]he politics of the neoliberal imagination involve respecting the poor, not getting rid of poverty—eliminating inequality without redistributing wealth." Liberals, he argues, like to treat classism as homologous to racism or sexism—as being primarily about the destructive force of prejudice, rather than the destructive force of not having enough money to pay for basic needs. "So, just as being opposed to racism is by no means to be opposed to racial difference… to be opposed to classism is by no means to oppose class difference."

But to my ear, “neoliberal” is not interchangeable with “liberal.” “Neoliberal,” as originally used in the US in the 1990s, refers to the second generation of people who were previously liberals but were moving in the direction of conservatism. The first generation said they were “liberals who had been mugged by reality,” whatever that means, and called themselves “neoconservatives.” The next clump were politicians like Joseph Lieberman, people who wanted to consider themselves liberals, still didn’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, etc., but who read Sullivan’s The New Republic and increasingly saw merit in conservative arguments.  These Democrats, the DLC and so on, are the ones who were in power since the early 1990s, so I think I'm using the word in pretty much the same sense Michaels is, at least in this Bookforum essay.

“Neoliberal” is a word I didn’t hear much for a while, until around the time the n+1 guys came around. I assumed they had heard it from their professors at Harvard. No idea what those guys thought it meant.

I later learned that “neoliberal” was used in Europe to refer to what’s called a “classical liberal”: someone who believes in the free market, disestablishment of religion, in other words, someone who a European reactionary would call a liberal. My understanding is that the Liberal Party in England is “liberal” in this sense. In the United States, it describes Jonah Goldberg: conservatism without the bigots.

But, as I said, I have no idea what those krazy n+1 kids mean by it.

How out of touch are conservative pundits?

Here is a quote from ex-Bush speechwriter and GOP strategist David Frum (as told to Barron YoungSmith of The New Republic). He’s talking about Sarah Palin:

Here's a candidate who embodies and epitomizes not just conservative values but a conservative style. At the same time, she's a person who inspires very little confidence in her ability to run a modern government. Which of these things is more important to you?

Frum voted for the McCain/Palin ticket, and said he thought there was nothing to choose between Palin and Obama when it came to fitness for high office.  He's the most well known of those Republicans who criticized the Palin VP pick very harshly (as did his wife, Danielle Crittenden, at the Huffington Post), and he writes genial posts on occasion about the English and American novel, but he is the farthest thing from "nonpartisan" that can be imagined.

He and others are trying to find a new direction for “conservatism,” by which they mean the Republican party. To begin to see why they are unlikely to succeed, and why David Frum is not a good ally for those who might consider themselves to be “cultural conservatives” without strong ties to either party, try to answer the following questions:

1. What are “conservative values”?
        a) Values typically possessed by the mass of people who accept things as they are
        b) Opposition to values typically possessed by those who can’t rightly be considered part of
“the mass of people who accept things as they are”
        c) Values that derive from conservative institutions, such as Christianity, the writings that constitute “Western Civilization,” and the medical professions
        d) Values that my parents, grandparents, and teachers shared

2. What best characterizes a “conservative style”?
        a) “Of the people,” practical-minded, taking cues from the past
        b) Proudly defiant and defiantly anti-intellectual
        c) Calm, staid and dignified
        d) Reminds me of the most respected members of the community in which I spent the most time as a child

3. What would “inspire confidence in [a person’s] ability to run a modern government” or other large organization?
        a) Has worked in large organizations, had management positions within them, got things done effectively and reasonably efficiently, left behind a good reputation among other people in those organizations
        b) Knows everything without having to ask or to look it up, and doesn’t take no for an answer or let anyone push him/her around
        c) Good manners, conservative moral values, requires hard work from themselves and others, makes the bottom line a priority
        d) Reminds me of the people my teachers and past employers had labeled as having “leadership qualities”

4. Which set of answers would be given by
        a) Ramesh Ponnuru?
        b) Ross Douthat?
        c) Andrew Sullivan?
        d) David Frum?
        e) Leon Wieseltier?
        f) Jim Manzi?

5. Who can the GOP most easily do without?

6. Who is most likely to stick with the GOP no matter what?

7. Why do conservatives feel that “values” and “style” are appropriate criteria for choosing a president?

8. Who or what is responsible for the fact that global warming and obesity are considered partisan issues?
        a) Human nature
        b) Capitalism
        c) Secular humanism
        d) “Arrogant libruls always telling people what to do”
        e) National Review and rightwing talk radio

9. Who or what is responsible for the fact that “modern art” was long considered a partisan issue?

10. What is the difference -- if any -- between a policy argument and a strategy argument?

Also see this analysis from a civic republican point of view by Jim Sleeper at openDemocracy.

Stanley Fish on Interdisciplinary Rivalries

When I was working on a master’s thesis in history about twelve years ago, the subject of my research was best known to literary historians, and I read a large number of recent critical articles. Trying to understand their point of view, I began to read about the literary theory of the time, including a handful of the earliest essay collections published by Stanley Fish.

Some of these essays were on topics I knew something about from my undergraduate courses in computer science and philosophy. Almost invariably, as I recall, they struck me, at the time, as interesting attempts to explore the implications of research in some area or other relating to linguistics, logic, or philosophy. Also almost invariably, they struck me as falling short, almost literally -- before the end of the essay had been reached, some mistake had been made, some misapprehension followed up on when it ought to have been corrected. Over and over again, they failed to grasp the point, failed as Mark Liberman puts it to “understand [the writer‘s] work in the context of her native interpretive community.” It seemed to me that Fish failed to understand the activity that had given rise to the discourse he was, at that moment, trying to learn about, and as a result failed to understand what the words actually meant.  (I realize this sounds arrogant; what credentials do I have to criticize a figure like Stanley Fish?)

Nonetheless, I found the essays interesting for four reasons:

First, in spite of the mistakes I thought I perceived, enough of the ideas themselves showed through his own words that a beginner could learn a lot from them. I think this is because Fish depicted his own struggles with the material in his writing. By following his attempts to understand, I could also understand in part. By noticing his thought processes, I could discover where I agreed or disagreed with them. But once past the beginning stage, this source of interest dissipates somewhat.

Second, Fish seemed to think the way I think. He refused to go forward until he understood the argument being made. He did not accept theoretical statements merely as dogma. He did not seem to accept assumptions that were not obvious.

Third, the form of the essays, always incomplete and often fulfilled in some sense by later writings on somewhat different topics, seemed to confront the incompleteness of our understanding. I was reminded of Nietzsche’s aphorisms, or of Shaw’s contention that each play he wrote should address a problem left unsolved by the previous one.  I guessed the "falling short" was intentional.

Fourth, Fish seemed to be learning as he went along. It seemed that by following the essays in sequence one might confront each successive conceptual difficulty in turn, and that by the end of the process, Fish and we might have approached more nearly to the achievement of a fully worked out science.

However, on the basis of these four reasons, I might reasonably have expected Fish to continue on in the same way as he’d begun, and he did not in fact continue to write explorations of philosophy and theory that pushed his and his readers’ understandings forward. His most recent books, to the contrary, have sharply criticized his own discipline for attempting to do just the kind of thing he himself did in those early collections.

If he is right, his arguments have profound implications going even beyond the possibility of interdisciplinary understanding. They raise questions, for example, concerning source analysis in historical research.

But as far as I know, Fish’s ideas are considered eccentric and are not taken seriously by experts in the relevant fields; he never did make himself enough of an expert in those fields to persuade their practitioners to listen to him. At Language Log today, Mark Liberman calls attention to the problem that Fish strongly defends disciplinary integrity at the same time he crosses disciplinary lines in order to issue a wrongheaded critique of, for example, philosopher Ruth Kempson:

[Fish] depicts Kempson as drawing back in horror from the logical implications of her argument . . . But the context of Kempson's 1973 PhD thesis, republished as her 1975 book, was not an argument about whether rational inquiry is possible . . . Rather, it was an argument among linguists and philosophers of language about whether proof theory or model theory is a better way to think about natural language semantics.

…

The one positive conclusion from Fish's work that I believe I've grasped, so far, is the crucial role of what he calls "interpretive communities" in providing enough of a shared context — even if ephemeral and unfounded — for some minimal communication to take place. So it's ironic that he so completely fails to understand Kempson's work in the context of her native interpretive community.

Fish had little reason to care about the argument between the proponents of proof theory and the proponents of model theory. Additionally, there is really no way he could have learned enough about philosophy of language to understand the problem as a philosopher would have; this would, most likely, have required more time and resources than were available to him.  But he was capable of grasping the arguments for and against theoretical positions similar to those of Kempson, weighing those arguments in relation to one another, and articulating an argument of his own about their relative strengths. I'd guess this is what he did.

I believe the irony Liberman points out can be resolved fairly simply. I assume Fish believes the following: that disciplines have the right to define what their practitioners ought to do -- including when their practitioners talk about other disciplines -- but do not have the right to prevent other disciplines from talking about them. If so, the irony disappears. In favor of this interpretation is the fact that Fish is very clear about there being no “higher court” to which practitioners from rival disciplines might appeal.

Trust But Confirm

Jan Freeman, in her language column in today’s Boston Globe, shares a complaint she’s been sent from readers: people asking us to “confirm” or to “verify” information when what they really mean is, “give me the information yourself.” Freeman’s answer: (nicely) get over it.

Of course if we just got over it, Freeman and other language writers wouldn’t have much to say. And it’s fun to bring up peeves. When I read the first paragraph of her column to my husband, he brought up his own -- that when you’re on a plane and about to land, the pilot says you are making your “initial descent.” Why an “initial” descent? Does the pilot envision that you’ll some of the time have to climb again and then start over?

How embarrassing.

Looks like when I bought into the implication that the name of David Frum’s promised “NewMajority.com” referred to the majority of the electorate that wanted Obama to be President -- and thus that Frum was embracing bipartisanship -- I was duped.

Either that, or, for him, “There is a new Republican majority” means merely “I wish there were a Republican majority.” (Oops, I linguified. How embarrassing, again.)