Bianca Steele

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.

From The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

This is possibly my favorite passage in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System:

"Now, Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.  This is a valid though, as I've seen this afternoon, by no means exclusive way to attack the problem.  Are you getting my drift, Vigorous?"

"Well, a drift is such a--"

"It occurs to me that I couldn't care less.  A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman.  We each need a full universe.  Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void created by that diminution of the Self.  Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem.  Is my drift getting palpable?  Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous.  There is always more than one solution."

. . .

"Of course one other advantage of my approach to the Yin/Yang problem is that dieting becomes the worst possible thing to do.  I find dieting makes me extremely angry at everything.  Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me."

"Instead of merely appropriating their space."

"You are not un-sharp, are you?  Rather like your father.  Your father whips a mean carrot.  I could, of course, leave selected small corners of the universe unfilled for those who might arouse in me feelings of affection and attachment."

"I'll get back to you, probably, if things begin to crowd."

This is not, of course, a light-hearded view of the universe.  Corporate CEO Norman Bombardini has rethought the idea of universal complements as an idea of aggression: taking a gentle theory and importing an entirely different idea into it, making it something very dark.  He appears not to have considered the possibility of a middle ground between total equivalence and total domination--or, at best, if he did consider such middle ground, it seems he had not been able to discover any appropriate stopping point between these two extremes.  But it is a fascinating personalization of what I personally feel to be a problem in philosophy or in logic.

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.

No Payoff

I think this is a good definition, from John Emerson's Trollblog:

[T]heories take ten years to learn and a lifetime to unlearn, and all they do is make it possible for you to make counterintuitive mistakes instead of traditionalist, common-sensical mistakes. No payoff.

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.

Marjorie Grene (1910-2009), and the Mirror of Nature

The philosopher Marjorie Grene died earlier this month, at age 98.  She may have been best known for her work on Aristotle, but her primary field of interest was in fact the philosophy of biology, challenging Cartesian ideas of consciousness.  Before getting her Ph.D. she studied with Heidegger and Jaspers in Germany.

She was also married to the classicist David Grene until 1961.  David Grene was one of the translators of the often-assigned University of Chicago Greek tragedies series.  As an amusing and interesting side note, Mr. Grene decided, apparently, in the 1940s, to become a gentleman farmer, a pursuit at which Mrs. Grene lasted not quite twenty years.

I’ve never read any of Marjorie Grene’s work, but here is where Richard Rorty cites her in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

Kuhnians should, I conclude, resist the temptation to dish the Whigs by talking of “different worlds.”  By giving up such phrases, they would not be conceding anything to the epistemological tradition.  To say that the study of the history of science, like the study of the rest of history, must be hermeneutical, and to deny (as I, but not Kuhn, would) that there is something extra called “rational reconstruction” which can legitimize current scientific practice, is still not to say that the atoms, wave packages, etc., discovered by the physical scientists are creations of the human spirit.  To buy in on the normal science of one’s day in constructing the largest possible story to tell about the history of the race is not, unless one also buys the various Platonic dogmas mentioned in the previous section, to say that physics is “objective” in some way in which politics or poetry may not be.  For the line between making and finding has nothing to do with the line between incommensurability and commensurability.  Or, to put it another way, the sense in which man is a spiritual and not merely a natural being—the sense to which antireductionists like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Marjorie Grene have devoted attention—is not a sense in which he is a being who makes worlds.  To say, with Sartre, that man makes himself, and that he differs thereby from atoms and inkwells, is quite compatible with repudiating any suggestion that part of his self-creation consists in “constituting” atoms and inkwells.  But the confusions among the romantic notion of man as self-creative, the Kantian notion of man as constituting a phenomenal world, and the Cartesian notion of man as containing a special immaterial ingredient need to be examined in some detail.  This set of confusions is embodied in much discussion concerning the “nature of spirit,” “the irreducibility of the person,” the distinction between action and motion, and the distinction between the Geistes- and the Naturwissenschaften.  Since the last distinction is supposedly coextensive with the distinction between hermeneutical and other methods, it is especially important to take it up in order to clarify the notion of hermeneutics which I am offering.

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.

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.

Ressentiment and Self-Love

From Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals:

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

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

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

Columbia College's Core Curriculum

President Obama, like me, is a graduate of Columbia College, the 350 year old Ivy League undergraduate college in New York City. (When he attended the College, it admitted only men. Columbia was the last school in the Ivy League to go co-ed. It began admitting women to the freshman class only in 1983. However, women were permitted to cross-register for classes if they were enrolled at Barnard, across the street, or at the graduate schools and affiliated schools in the neighborhood such as the Manhattan School of Music and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Barnard and Columbia also shared most non-first year dorms, but as a transfer student, Obama would have had almost no chance of getting into oncampus housing.)

Therefore, he would have been required to enroll in the College’s famed Core Curriculum, established in the wake of World War I in order to provide students with a background in Western values. The Core was one of the College’s best selling points -- for those who were interested in that kind of thing -- for others, especially science students (it was relatively easy to place out of the one-year science requirement, at the time, if you had taken AP courses at your high school, but the Core was absolutely mandatory), it was an unpleasant opportunity to read lots of boring books and write a lot of essays. (Barnard women and engineering school students were permitted to enroll in a limited number of Core courses, though the latter found it extremely difficult to find a slot in their class schedules for a liberal arts elective.)

The Core consists of four courses (at least it did in the mid-eighties when I attended): two year-long courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization, and two half-year courses, Arts Humanities and Music Humanities. The year-long classes were small and taught by professors from various departments. (You can find the current reading lists here.)

However, transfer students (of which Barack Obama was one) were required to take only half of the Core, one each of the full-year and half-year courses. It seems amusing to wonder which half of the Core Obama elected to take. But it doesn’t seem too difficult to guess. Surely he would have enrolled in CC and Music Hum. Those would have been my choices, if I had had to pick at the age of seventeen. I’m glad I didn’t have to. I enjoyed Music Hum a lot, and learned a lot too, but I probably would have picked up most of it over the years even without taking the course. If I hadn’t taken Lit Hum, I would not have the following books on my shelf now: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (pants I break-a your leg), Aristophanes; Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Inferno; Gargantua and Pantagruel -- but, again, I might have found many of the same books, and read them in the same way, after I had graduated. The one core course I would never have taken the equivalent of unless I had been forced to do so was Art Humanities.

My mother had a handful of art books in the house, but I’d never really gotten much out of them. I don’t think I got much out of school art, either, except that I knew who Leonardo da Vinci was (he was a multifaceted genius, unlike us Penn- and Drexel-bound sixth-graders, who couldn’t even do one thing poorly). In Art Hum, I learned that painting, sculpture and architecture were traditions that each successive artist learns to emulate and to excel. I spent time at the Met, in class groups and by myself, taking the crosstown bus through Harlem, in order to write essays about an eighteenth-century oil painting or a Baroque sculpture of Bacchus. I learned that one of my classmates thought it was either interesting or funny to ask -- of each and every painting we looked at as a class -- how much it had cost. I learned words like “painterly” and “atmospheric perspective.” I learned enough to know that Dan Brown is full of it, and so are whatever people persuaded him of the art-historical “facts” he writes about.

There are a couple of arguments people use to defend the liberal arts from the accusation that studying them is useless; one of them is that when you are old or middle-aged, you will be glad that you know about them, and glad you had learned to read them. That argument is usually made about reading, though, not about art. But at age forty-two, I am glad of the ability to spend an hour or two at an art museum and enjoy it.