Bianca Steele

Faludi’s Backlash contra Carol Gilligan and Difference Feminism

In the comments section of Crooked Timber, in which I mentioned Susan Faludi’s Backlash (first published in 1991), Corey Robin (whose book I really liked) accuses me of talking about a book I’ve only skimmed.  That isn’t true, but I’m not going to argue with him on his blog about the way he teaches the book (though I think it might be useful to raise the question why a partisan contribution to a political debate that’s still going on should be treated as canonical history).

So I borrowed the book from the library for the third time and sat down with it.  Why?  Do I feel guilty for opining on a book I haven’t formed a proper opinion on yet?  No.  Am I going to finish it this time?  Probably not.  But I’m still too annoyed to put it down.  On the one hand, there’s no way in heaven or hell I’m going to be able to read this book without whining in writing about how annoying it is.  On the other hand, if it’s so easy to criticize that I have to ask myself why in the world it was published, why would I want to bother reading it at all?  But having a blog means that whining in my private notes can be transformed into something that seems almost but not quite like useful activity.  Even if nobody actually reads it.

So: one thing, at least, even if the rest of it stays in my scratch files:

(Okay, I feel bad now, because I saw that today is Susan Faludi’s birthday.  Happy Birthday!  But I’m supposed to write a thousand words and then sit on them for twenty-four hours?)

In the couple of hours I spent with the book yesterday, I was intrigued by Faludi’s treatment of Carol Gilligan and her book In a Different Voice [1].  There’s more about this discussion a little farther down, but I wanted to note a paragraph from a review of Backlash, by Jean Bethke Elshtain, in the conservative Catholic magazine, First Things:

“When I was an undergraduate in the 1960s out in the Western provinces (Colorado, it was), my instructors (Democrats to a man, no women in what was called the History and Government Department at Colorado State University in those benighted times) not only encouraged me to make the most of myself, they taught me that conspiracy theory was the hobgoblin of little minds, like those of the local John Birchers. We studied one of their texts in a Government course, unpacking the way the author crossed every t and dotted every i with his overriding paranoid theory, if it may be called that, that the Communists and their dupes ran everything, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He had lots of facts too. It all made sense—if you shared the initial paranoid starting point. We mocked this stuff and marveled that anyone could believe it. The Birchers were pretty much defeated by this sort of humorous dismissal, as was a local group that launched a campaign against the Beatles as the instruments of Satan.”

In most of the public libraries where I’ve lived since I graduated from college, Elshtain’s books have been shelved under “feminism.”  She is a person whom Backlash does not mention.

The third section of Backlash lists a string of anti-feminist figures of the 1980s, ending with right-wing feminist Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Faludi calls her a “neofeminist”), Second Wave feminist pioneer Betty Friedan, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.  What are Friedan and Gilligan doing there?  Friedan wasn’t willing to give up the idea of traditional femininity that some of her younger colleagues in the movement wanted to reject.  Faludi accuses her of being unaware that her rhetoric is borrowed from the right; and of thinking, or at least writing, in such a muddled way that it’s impossible to tell what she really believes. 

As for Gilligan, on close inspection, the chapter is actually in praise of her.  Faludi begins the discussion by attacking difference feminism, after correctly noting that it was the preferred stance of feminist academics and theorists throughout the 1980s.  She goes on, also largely correctly, to introduce Gilligan as a participant in that same school.  She incorrectly claims that those who championed “difference” tended not to care about equality.  Then she moves on to the media discussion of Gilligan’s work.  At this point, the argument shifts to an attack on the media for taking Gilligan up as an example of their preferred narrative.  For several pages, Faludi discusses Carol Gilligan’s own statements, in which she attempted to show that the broad narrative painted by the media wasn’t an accurate representation of  her work, and a critique by another scholar, pointing out flaws in Gilligan’s research.  (This section could serve as a good illustration of some of the flaws introduced by Faludi’s writing style, which uses the journalistic, faux-objective, non-voice “voice,” in which the point of view and even apparent argument meanders from here to there and back again, following the train of thought of each major source, in turn.)  She concludes that Gilligan’s work is very important, and largely correct, but doesn’t actually make the claims most people (misled by the media) believe it does, and (as shown by Zella Luria’s scholarly critique) properly understood, only makes very modest claims in the first place.

So this chapter, like the rest of the book, is an attack on the mass media for promoting anti-feminism.  It’s not an attack on Carol Gilligan or her work.  It is an attack, also, on difference feminism.  But Gilligan, the only scholar Faludi actually discusses [2], is not (as Faludi argues) a difference feminist[3], and so her work is not part of difference feminism, and so she’s fine.  She’s a victim of the media[4].  It remains unclear why Gilligan was included in the list of horribles at all.  Why not describe a more typical member of the difference-feminist crowd?  Perhaps it’s only because Faludi wanted to write a book about the state of media coverage of feminism in the late 1980s, and Carol Gilligan had gotten a lot of press.

Is it also an attack on difference feminism?  It’s hard to say.  By the end of the chapter (save for a cryptic reference to the feminist scholarly journal, Signs), the reader has forgotten that “feminist scholarship conferences [were] awash in papers on women’s special virtues [emphasis added].”  We’re back to an attack on the media, and the media’s putative invention of an anti-feminist narrative, and an unnuanced defense of “feminism” with no apparent effort to investigate what people mean by the word.  In 1991, to be sure, it could seem unclear whether difference feminism would be a flash in the pan, or whether it would endure.  I’ve never been an enormous fan of it myself.  But it seems unseemly to attack it in the same breath as Hayes Tim and Beverly LaHaye[5].  (Here, as in other places in the book, I imagine I hear Camille Paglia off in the wings, waiting for her cue.)

Moreover, there’s that huge nugget of cultural criticism clogging up the lion’s share of the book.  A commenter at CT pointed out, helpfully, that criticizing popular culture is not, by any means, the only thing Faludi does in Backlash.  But actually doing the math shows that the popular culture section makes up a whopping one-third of a nearly 500-page book.  It comes as the second section of the book, and the first substantial section, following the kind of historical survey that you might find in an academic book, and that many readers will presumably skip.  And much of it consists of the kind of movie and television criticism that is very, very closely affiliated with difference-feminist ideas.  In other words, a difference feminist would agree with what Faludi says in this section.  A difference feminist, talking to another feminist and finding that she disagrees with Faludi’s criticism of the shows she discusses, would point to theories and writings from difference feminism in support of her own views.

I’m not saying that Faludi is arguing in bad faith in either one of those sections.  Here, she appears to be in agreement with what, say, a Second Wave feminist might say: both that difference feminism is wrong and actually anti-feminist, and that those movie and television critiques are actually correct.  Feminism in the 1980s and 1990s was fraught and tangled.  But, also, this puts Faludi in much the same position as Friedan.  Whom she attacked as on a par with Allan Bloom, George Gilder, and Phyllis Schlafly.  Why were these writers included in this book in this way?  And now the reader is back at the beginning again.

 

[1] I look forward to returning this to the library, so my four year old will stop trying to convince me that it’s a book about animals.  Because people don’t have different voices.

[2] She mentions three other books, including Suzanne Gordon’s Prisoners of Men’s Dreams, in introducing the topic, by way of demonstrating that bookstores and publishers were marketing a “difference” narrative.

[3] For what it’s worth, Google Search completion begs to differ.

[4] Says Faludi, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.

[5] Who appear in the index under the name Tim Lataye.

O Brave New World

Four times a year, Phi Beta Kappa puts out a newsletter, the Key Reporter, with capsule book reviews, an essay or two, maybe the text of a speech at a PBK event.  For the past few years, the Key Reporter has been getting smaller, as the cost of postage rises, presumably, and it's now only printed and mailed two times a year, with all the issues available in PDF format online.

As of this issue, though, the Key Reporter consists of a pamplet, about 5"x8".  Instead of articles, it prints blurbs promoting the articles, and those square barcodes so you can read the whole thing on your device.

Talk Radio Deplores the Need of People in Basements to Comment on the News

WGBH’s Boston Public Radio (a new program that’s been on the air for a few months, with a rotating cast of announcer/hosts, replacing Emily Rooney’s and Callie Crossley’s shows) did a segment yesterday on how horrible Internet commenters are, and it’s pretty interesting.  Two points, though:

First: This is a call-in show.  That isn’t a dig: I have a running argument with my husband over whether a call-in show that’s on NPR, like On Point (which is on WGBH’s rival station, WBUR), and like most of the daytime newsmagazine programs, is somehow on a higher moral plain plane than something like Rush Limbaugh.  He says it’s not.  I disagree, but he does have a point.

Second: Unless I heard this wrong, the hosts were suggesting that Yelp should get rid of user comments.  Isn’t that just what Yelp is?  Is there anything to it except user comments?

But please don’t take this as a negative attack.

Thomas Friedman thinks corporations are people.

In today’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed calls for real collaboration in Washington, like there is in Silicon Valley.  He quotes “an expert on networks who has been involved in several successful startups,” who notes the need for “collaboration both within and between firms,” where “’collaboration’ is defined as something you do with another colleague or company.”  Then Friedman goes on to contrast this with Washington, where it’s known that “collaboration” means always and only working with the enemy.  Silicon Valley gets things done, and Washington (especially nowadays) doesn’t.  So Friedman calls for Washington types to learn from Silicon Valley . . .

. . . but he doesn’t mention people collaborating anywhere in the essay.  Instead he talks about corporations collaborating with one another.  It seems that the idea of individuals, employees, being important, is something he actually can’t begin to imagine.  The people he mentions are: a corporate vice president, the founder of an energy company, a co-founder of LinkedIn, and the current CEO of the same company.  CEO’s and heads of marketing, in the world of the New York Times Business Section (written largely for people who aren’t themselves in business, but want to feel culturally au courant about the economy, as well as the theatre), are the only individuals who matter.

I could go all critical-theoretical, and claim that Friedman is telling us a little bit about The Truth about how the economy works, who is really important in Society right now, and so on and so forth.  But why would you want me to?  Does Thomas Friedman know anything about this world that he hasn’t read in the New York Times, himself?  Why should you, or I, believe that what he says has a basis in anything except his own head?

Finally, two paragraphs before the end of his essay, he mentions developers, the people who do the collaborating.  He refers to a corporation’s “developer community,” people who aren’t formally affiliated with the corporation, and who (if they get paid at all) aren’t paid by the corporation.  They use the software developed inside the corporation—by employee developers—who do, Virginia, exist—in order to produce consumer tools, or the kinds of tools they themselves would like to use, and they’re motivated by enthusiasm for the platform software, and by the wish to create something cool.  But this is not the only model for a company.  It isn’t even the concept Friedman started out with, about five paragraphs back.  Again, I could ask what Friedman may be trying to tell us, by saying this thing that I think is wrong (or, he could argue, that I didn’t already know, that had never occurred to me before).  But why?  What is it that’s supposed to have earned a reader’s trust?

The fact that he doesn’t seem to know this, that it isn’t at all obvious that he knows anything at all about the subject he’s writing on, beyond what a handful of sources, cabdrivers, and people at cocktail parties have mumbled in his presence, has already put me off.  Just in this same paragraph, he seems not even to know that “the developer community” and “headhunters” are different groups of people.  I suppose that a New York Times op-ed writer may be assumed to know the difference.  But the fact remains he wrote a confusing paragraph that doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between them.  No composition teacher would permit this degree of confusion.  Again, why is he supposed to have earned the readers’ trust?

I can only suppose that he really does think corporations are people, and that he understood the quote at the beginning of his essay in precisely that sense.

Another Scandal: Excessively Nice Critics (UPDATED)

I learned a lot about writing about other people’s books from Daniel Mendelsohn, especially his early essays in the New York Review of Books.  Here, in a blog at the New Yorker, he takes on the recent “niceness” scandal in literary reviewing.  Mendelsohn provides a useful overview and gives all the relevant links, but he also kind of glibly runs through a series of views that he obviously doesn’t have sympathy with.

Mendelsohn asks what is the function of criticism.  Again, he doesn’t really engage sympathetically with the other, mostly younger critics he whose views he discusses, and with which he disagrees.  One doesn’t have to think of critics as “harmful parasites” (an idea he attributes to his colleague Richard Brody, at the New Yorker) to recognize that their writing has a secondary function, while the works they discuss have the primary one.  Sure, you could come up with a theory whereby critics play the leading role, with artists existing only to give critics something to do, but you would be pretty silly to do it.  I suppose you could think of critics as engaged in exactly the same practice as, say, novelists (composers and choreographers seem to me a harder sell), only doing it in a different way.  But where do you stop?  Are science fiction writers engaging in science?  Is Ben Mezrich (author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires) engaging in applied mathematics research, casino security, and business administration?  Why not say readers are engaging in the same pursuit as novelists and literary critics, every time they read a novel?   (That’s a nicely Talmudic idea, in fact: reading as prayer as work.) There’s a point, it seems to me, when you have to stop doing one thing and start doing the other one, when you have to realize that there’s a limitation that applies to one pursuit that doesn’t apply to the other.  If criticism is the same as art, then a critical essay can do everything a novel does.

Dale Peck is the poster child for the harsh review; Dave Eggers—as much as his wife, Vendela Vida, and their colleague at the aptly named The Believer magazine, Heidi Julavits—is the poster child for “niceness.”  (Mendelsohn describes the Eggers who said he’d never write a bad review as “youthful,” which is true, but misleading, as Eggers was at the time the most important publisher and editor in circles that decidedly were not important only to the young.)  Dale Peck rose to broad notoriety when he published a review of Rick Moody’s memoir/essay, The Black Veil, which he began with the indelible words, “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.”  In my opinion, however over the top he was, Peck is more right about Moody than Eggers has ever been right about anything.  The Black Veil, which I read largely on the strength of Peck’s own review, was engaging and fascinating—but like so much of what Moody writes, reading it was (as Gloria Steinem said of seeing Marilyn Monroe on the big screen) like being suffocated with a Baked Alaska.

Dale Peck swore off writing negative reviews after the controversy following his piece.  I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Peck’s collection, aptly titled Hatchet Jobs, when it first appeared (Mendelsohn links to it in the post linked above, though it’s paywalled), but I honestly don’t remember it.  I liked the old Dale Peck.  I like—though I often don’t agree with—Edmond Caldwell’s Contra James Wood blog.  I almost never agree with anything printed by a Dave Eggers publication, and almost never enjoy reading them.  That’s not an argument that Peck’s and Caldwell’s styles guarantee good criticism, but it is an argument to rethink any previous automatic agreement with what Eggers says.

Laura Miller, at Salon (linked by Mendelsohn), puts forward some more practical arguments.  Her editors, she says, have statistical proof that nobody wants to read anything that isn’t entirely positive.  But that’s not a moral argument of the kind Dave Eggers made.  It’s not an argument that should apply to someone discussing a novel on BoingBoing, and it’s not an argument that should apply to the amateur blogger discussing fiction for his own amusement, with no intention of becoming a professional literary critic someday.  It's not an argument that should apply to the dedicated literary blogs like The Millions.  It’s not an argument that people should be, as Jacob Silverman put it in the post Miller’s discussing, “nice.”  Then Miller herself says something that sounds not very nice at all: "for God’s sake, take it to the classroom, workshop or specialty publication.”  This is the kind of thing I wish Mendelsohn would have engaged with.

UPDATE: Fixed the spelling of Julavits's name; and here's another link.

Scandals

If you follow these kinds of things, you know that there have been a number of plagiarism scandals in journalism recently, particularly in the zone where journalism intersects with book publishing, punditry, and celebrity.  The most notorious of these might be the case of Jonah Lehrer, who was discovered to have been reusing passages from his books in writing for magazine publishers that he represented as new, and to have also both fabricated quotations and used someone else’s work without acknowledgement (ironically, he had just written a book arguing that there is little difference between creativity and borrowing from others).  The most recent of these have involved Fareed Zakaria, a foreign policy analyst and journalist who’s made a bigger name for himself discussing the issues surrounding the War on Terror, and Niall Ferguson, a British and now American historian who to a non-academic’s eyes seems to have moved very quickly from writing a popular book on history to pronouncing on US domestic policies (weighing in heavily on the side of the GOP).

Not surprisingly, the scandals have raised the question of “the blogosphere” or “the Internet” as the putative cause of everything that’s wrong with our public culture.  Henry Farrell, at Crooked Timber, instead questions the culture of paid speeches, but his links focus more conventionally on the state of journalism and its infiltration from below by amateurs without academic or journalistic credentials, and without editors keeping them in line.  (This is going to be much longer than I thought it would be when I started it, and I may have to cut it short to keep it from expanding so broadly that I’ll never be able to finish it.)

Even from the outside, it looks like this has been building for a long time.  It had been building even before Jonah Lehrer was forced to resign from the New Yorker and had his book pulled from the stores by his publisher.  There seems to be an increasing intolerance of what many people realize is, in most cases, considered unacceptable—but which, in some cases, the people in charge seem often to ignore.  Arguments like “this is how it’s always done” aren’t persuading, and the issue doesn't seem to be fading.  Instead, each successive case is worse than the one before, and more and more pressure is being brought to bear, earlier and earlier.

Dan Drezner points out that the dynamic is different from what it might otherwise be because there’s a reliance on bloggers like Evgeny Morozov (whom he mentions) and Ed Champion (whom he doesn’t).  Many (including Drezner, in a passage he quotes by another writer) have pointed out that some of the pressure is coming from reporters who are lower on the food chain, doing what reporters do and holding powerful people to account for what they say, but at the same time (in part because the lowest tier of reporters are often associated with online entities these days) there’s an appearance that the only ones complaining are the ones whose career—probably self-proclaimed and unremunerated—exists only in the digisphere.  Morozov and Champion are guys who fit into the online culture, and who do a lot of good work.  It’s true that they are, at times, very aggressive by academic or ordinary journalistic standards.  At the same time, though, their failure to meet those standards isn’t entirely obvious.  My sense as regards Champion’s Reluctant Habits blog, which I’ve read more than I’ve read Morozov, is that he’s perfectly able to do serious criticism and interviews without taking a bite out of someone.  When he goes on the attack, he seems to give as good as he gets, and he looks like he’s trying (in the same way as Morozov) to uphold certain standards that others aren’t in a position to defend so assiduously.  The guys at the top of the food chain are frequently just as aggressive as they are.  As Drezner points out, the whole “I blame the Internet” meme is practically mooted solely by Ferguson’s treatment of Paul Krugman—who as a New York Times columnist, Princeton University professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize is not exactly a liberal blogger ranting about the news in his pajamas, as Niall Ferguson knows perfectly well—yet even if criticism from the blogosphere is of lesser value, somehow, than criticism from anywhere else, it’s hard to see why aggressiveness ought to be the criterion by which they’re condemned.

Anyway, the cases of Zakaria and Ferguson seem very different.  Zakaria, it seems, although he earned a Ph.D., went straight into journalism and used his expertise to inform his work in producing reporting for the general public.  He never produced an academic book.  All his work with editors and readers came while he was working as a magazine writer.  Ferguson, on the other hand, worked for decades as a professor in academia, and developed habits and expertise related to academia, very specifically.  It was only afterward that he began writing books for a popular audience and working with non-academic editors and with general-interest magazines.  Even if the kinds of differences each ran up against, between how academic and journalistic research and writing regards the use and acknowledgement of sources, were the same, it would be surprising if the ways they each encountered those differences—and the errors they made as a result—were identical in each case.

Zakaria has always written on the same kind of thing, for the most part.  That’s not true of Ferguson.  Zakaria had a very specific take on current events (specifically, US relations with the Islamic world), which was clearly disputed by many educated people, but which was equally clearly informed by Zakaria’s knowledge of the scholarly literature.  Ferguson, on the other hand, has moved back and forth between a narrowly academic subject matter (the history of economics and banking, particularly with reference to the outbreak of war in 1914) and more popular works on everything that might be said about the twentieth century as a whole and what led up to it.  The War of the World, his book on World War II (which I haven’t finished, and which I only found out just now, from Wikipedia, was also a BBC television production) seems to be cut from two different kinds of cloth.  There are the sections that draw very broad conclusions about the world in general, and the course of history, and there are the in-depth accounts of very specific aspects of the war.  To me, the latter are more interesting, but as far as I know books like this one aren’t peer-reviewed, and as a student of history, I wouldn’t take them as gospel.  I would expect to find that the jury is still out on any issue raised by those sections that are even the slightest bit controversial.  I feel less comfortable (though this might be a very personal feeling) assuming what Ferguson says is a reliable statement of any kind of academic consensus than I do with Zakaria.

In comments at Crooked Timber, Ferguson was compared to Christopher Hitchens, which I think is rather telling.  It seems to me that Hitchens can’t really exist in a world in which Ferguson can write an article like the one in Newsweek (which, if you haven’t been following the story, and didn’t look it up already, seems indisputably to cross well over the line that divides “contentious description of disputed fact” from “blatant misrepresentation for which no excuse is given beyond the right of a partisan to break the rules of grammar in order to make the worse argument appear to be the better one”).  Hitchens’ aggressiveness is linked to his not being an academic.  It also depends on his assurance that people like Ferguson will tell the truth in an objective, academic and nonpartisan way, that he will not shade the truth to fit some agenda or other.  Hitchens did not do what Wikipedia would term “original research” (at least in the pieces I read by him, most of which I enjoyed and learned from); he analyzed and reported on what other people (researchers and critics) wrote, drawing on his general knowledge of the world and the places those other people occupied within it.  He doesn’t seem ever to have tried to do both.  He doesn’t seem to have believed both were possible.

Also: I don’t know if Drezner has gotten the target audience of Esquire quite right.  The 1%?  Really?

Why I’m glad I don’t subscribe to HBO (UPDATED)

Because I’d be tempted to watch the new Aaron Sorkin series, The Newsroom.  I kind of liked The West Wing, though towards the end I was watching in the hope they’d bring Mary-Louise Parker’s character back, and Josh post-Leo’s chastising/anointing of him as a successor was becoming slightly annoying.  I even enjoyed Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though Emily Nussbaum has it about right when she calls that show “horrible and fascinating.”  And I enjoyed The Social Network, regardless of its mistakes.

But, on the other hand, the preview-reviews of Newsroom seem to be converging on the show as middlebrow and excessively self-important, and these adjectives seem all too likely to be accurate.  Are we really being treated to a rewriting of Broadcast News in which the Albert Brooks character—the real journalist—has disappeared, and we’re actually supposed to take William Hurt’s airhead of a pretty-boy anchorman seriously as a commentator on politics and world events?  I’m pretty sure that’s not how the flashforward at the end of that movie has things turning out.  On the other hand, I was talking with a friend about the movie, which I’d seen shortly after I’d graduated from college (in 1987).  When I asked him why he thought Holly Hunter’s character (Jane Craig, the newsroom producer) cried for no apparent reason, at several times throughout the show, he didn’t hesitate.  It was because she was on the wrong track and deep down she knew it.

I didn’t look up Sorkin’s Wikipedia page until after I’d finished my post on The Social Network.  That was when I found out that the people whom Eisenberg’s dialogue in that movie most reminded me of had not only gone to the same high school Sorkin did (Scarsdale), just a couple of years after he graduated, but like him, had participated in the school’s drama program.  So, for me, that dialogue didn’t register as “Asperger’s” or “computer geek” but—especially in the character’s willingness to say those things straight to a woman’s face—the kind of suedo-intellectual, pseudo-Sartrean self-described “brutal honesty” not uncommon among undergraduates of all varieties.

One of those people was the man who told me he had Jane Craig down cold.  I never actually, as it turned out, spent much time around entertainment-industry people (which might explain his uniqueness), but of all the people I’ve ever known with some pretention to know a little bit about film, theater, or television (which he’d studied in university), he had absolutely the worst taste.  Middlebrow?  That’s probably a good word for it.  He gushed over the moral sophistication of Enemy Mine.  He gushed, similarly, over The Company of Wolves.  His hero was Stephen Spielberg, who made money because he made movies people like.  I don’t know how much more middlebrow you can get than that.  Like Sorkin, apparently (see the piece by David Haglund in Slate), he thought of himself as high-minded without being high-brow—unless you can be highbrow and at the same time mouth the moral pieties that will make the majority feel good about themselves.

Anyway, now everything Sorkin touches will remind me of him, and that’s not what anyone wants.

Writing in the Atlantic, on the other hand, Alyssa Rosenberg seems to complain that Sorkin is not middlebrow enough.  (Nussbaum makes a similar complaint.)  She goes beyond my friend’s worship of the market with its razzle-dazzle valuelessness to a kind of deep populism that redefines “what will make money” as “what is really good.”  Sorkin makes fun of cable news, with its partisan polarization, but according to Rosenberg this is what most people like, and they have good reasons to do so.  Sorkin, therefore, is explicitly making fun of his own audience, insulting them to their faces.  I tend to think Rosenberg is tying herself up in knots to make her argument here, because Sorkin most likely not only isn’t making fun of the vision of the world she alludes to, but in fact has probably never actually heard of it.  If she’s right, however, then maybe Sorkin isn’t so middlebrow after all—or maybe Rosenberg has touched on the possibility of a kind of art that eludes all our categorizations so far.

In her review, Nussbaum complains, in part, that the female characters, and their interactions with the men, are stereotyped and vaguely offensive.  She has a point; the same thing over and over again would quickly become tiresome.  If the stories are good, though, it sometimes is actually possible to ignore what gender the characters are, and how they treat their significant others in the mandatory romantic subplots needed to make sure the show has enough “adult” content, and pay attention to something different for a change.

UPDATE:  HBO has decided to do an end-run around my cancellation of their service by making the first episode of the series available online for free.  Oh, well.  Anyway, this article by NPR blogger Linda Holmes is also very good (she says the first episode is easily the best of the four that have been distributed to critics).  So, shall I download the episode to my iPod Classic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret Philosophy of the Postmodern Novelist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clive Crook: Blogs are destroying the credibility of academic economics

It’s difficult to want to write a blog post about somebody who’s just called bloggers the root of all evil -- particularly when he’s also just accused bloggers of politicizing issues that previously had been seen entirely objectively. It’s difficult to write without either condemning yourself or proving him or her right by getting all angry and polarizing.

Before piling on the blogosphere, Clive Crook, here, attacks academic economists who write for a popular audience. He suggests that when they write for an audience “not of their peers” (their real peers are their fellow Ph.D.’s who have access to JSTOR and huge libraries, presumably), their writing is no longer informed by the theoretical knowledge they possess as economists. Instead, he charges, they are using their economics knowledge -- and more importantly their prestige -- to promote one political party over the other: what they are telling their readers is different from what professional economists would accept as true. What they are really doing, he implies, is providing political partisans with “the economics they want”: an “economics” that is useful for achieving political results, not an economics that accurately describes the world in which they live (and, as a consequence, is useful for achieving results in that world).

I don’t know what could make Crook want to say a thing like this. But he goes on to blame the web for at least “aggravating” the problem. The blogosphere, he writes, “[c]elebrate[s] exasperation and incivility as marks of intellectual authenticity” -- as if such attitudes were not prevalent everywhere.

Hiring editors and fact checkers is probably not an option except for those employed by mainstream media outlets like The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. What should bloggers do then? Write only what could be awarded an “A” in an econ class at any major university anywhere in the US? Write only what’s been given the imprimatur of one of the designated “political economics writers” from their selected party (e.g., Krugman for liberals, Barro for Republicans)? Or just go away?

Henry Farrell, as usual, has a useful response here.

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.

TNR on the Demise of Movement Conservatism

This article by Sam Tanenhaus on why “movement” conservatism is moribund is a must-read. Or it would be if the online formatting of TNR’s print articles weren’t so horrible (good luck trying to find out the name of a book under review when the review is behind the pay firewall). I believe Tanenhaus is saying something more interesting than that this brand of conservatism doesn’t even follow Edmund Burke. Damon Linker assures me that he is. But I can’t say for myself because I got tired of clicking randomly on each of the eight web pages into which the article is split up to see whether I lighted on anything that seemed interesting.

Brooks says: Baseball is a covenant

In today’s column, David Brooks makes the following important points:

1. The moral worth of the medical profession is the meaning and purpose it provides for the lives of doctors and nurses.

2. The purpose of a liberal-arts education is to give students nice-sounding abilities like the ability to think for themselves, to instill individualism -- which Brooks bashed just last Tuesday as the cause of all our ills.

3. Whenever you feel like criticizing an institution, instead, remember: to fulfill your obligations, you should put into it more than you get out.

With Republicans like this, how could the Democrats ever lose an election again?

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.)

Are Online Commenters Nastier Than Letter-Writers?

Yvonne Abraham is one of the Boston Globe’s regular columnists. Today she is writing about the commenters on the Globe’s website -- the people who write responses to articles in the daily paper, in its online version. There are some very nasty things that have been posted about innocent people who found themselves the subjects of amusing or heart-rending human-interest stories.

It is difficult to imagine that anybody would say those things in any other forum. There is something about not being able to see the people you are talking about, specific to the Internet, that brings out some people’s hidden desire to be aggressive. To go to the effort of writing a letter to the editor, you have to care quite a lot about the subject -- or else have fewer inhibitions against saying whatever’s on your mind than most people have. To go to the effort of writing a comment on an article that‘s online, you don’t have to make that much effort. To be sure, newspapers have always received their share of crazy letters, and reporters themselves receive lots of nutty mail. But the newspaper always acted as an intermediary, and absorbed the attacks before the people they wrote about ever heard about them. Only the reporters knew. Now, with the Internet, the audience is immensely larger, and there is no editor -- not in the physical infrastructure that stores and relays the messages, and (too often) not in the minds of those who write in.