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 Posted Saturday, May 3 |
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| Argufying ... check back tomorrow Last night I promised to talk about this important topic today. But I got distracted, and now I'm a bit tired. And I just got invited to play bridge with a colleague. Damned if I'm going to miss that. And they'll be a sorry threesome without me. I'm off. |
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| Posted Saturday, May 3 |
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| Plan Your Own Philosophy Matthew Yglesias wins hands-down the 'leave this site immediately if you do not understand and agree to these terms and conditions' prize of the week for his wilfuly esoteric Jaegwon Kim blogging. I think perhaps he should consider, as an opportunity, the fact that surely www.superveniencepundit.com is still available as a domain name. (Have I verified that? Of course not. Are you insane? My time, although not valuable, is not worthless.) Here's his slogan: "If it's something that there can't be a change in without there being a change in something else, we report it first!" I can see that on T-shirts, coffee mugs and thong underwear in no time. Maybe he could find other people to help and it would be like the Commandpost. It could have a sort of spunky and irreverant, sly spirit. Like if Sassy (back when it was keeping it real, or was at least weakly supervenient on it) interviewed Donald Davidson. In other Yglesias news, I find interesting his Korsgaard/Parfit comparison/contrast. I have, frankly, always found Korsgaard an implausible scold. There is a fine Donald Barthelme short story entitled "In the Tolstoy Museum" - my copy isn't to hand, damn - whose fictional architectural subject is described as 'an inverted ziggurat designed to seem as if it was about to collapse on you, out of sheer moral authority.' Or words to that effect. Korsgaard's Kantianism has always struck me just that way. My response has always been to stand well back. If it falls, I at least will be in the clear. [UPDATE: I have atoned for my intemperate, inaccurate characterization of professor Korsgaard.] Derek Parfit, by contrast, I have long and greatly admired. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: he's got that less-threatening Peter O'Toole thing going like nobody's business.) Ango-American philosophy has the occasional big book in it. Reasons and Persons is one of them. Thing about these books is: you never read them unless you take a seminar on them. This is a tremendous determinant of academic loyalty and allegiance and culture and succession-lines, by the by. But that isn't my point today. My point today is that I once picked up Reasons and Persons, for no pressing seminary purpose, and read the whole thing. All 500 pages, or whatever. Which is why it is so amusing to me that Matthew finds Korsgaard and Parfit similar - which, now that I think about it, I can sort of see. Here's the thing about Reasons and Persons, the thing I love about it. It's a 784 step deductive argument (I don't have it handy, so I can't give you the exact figure. But this is the right order of magnitude.) More specifically, it isn't but ought to be a 'plan your own philosophy' book, on the model of these 'plan your own adventure' books of youth. 'If you would like to subscribe to a a desire-fulfullment theory of personal well-being, TURN TO PAGE 497.' You do so and find a series of reflections terminating: YOU ARE REFUTED.Go back to the beginning.' And it's totally true. There ought to be illustrations. A ten-year old boy with freckles, wearing Wrangler jeans, wandering into dark caves, accompanying the text. Or - actually -something a bit more Alice in Wonderland would be more the thing. In para-Parfitian news: David Brin's fine new novel Kiln People is really a confirmation of Parfit's theory of personal identity. Meets Raymond Chandler. Or at least an exciting thought experiment in favor of such a meeting. |
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| Posted Saturday, May 3 |
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| The Mollusk While I'm on the subject of great music: if you haven't downloaded and watched the greatest music video ever, run, do not walk along the beach to the nearest crustacean. (I've had it on my links page for a while, but who reads that? And the link was broken anyway. Sorry set-up all round.) Sorta fits in with my sea-life theme generally. Fish three days a week. Squid. Was kelp elsehwere? Flaming marshmallow balrogs (same link as the kelp). Grunion. I've blogged it all in my time, like some sort of Old Man of the Blogosargassosea. UPDATE: for reasons that really escape me, every time I put in the right URL for the link to the video, GoLive makes it become wrong. It's right for a second. Then I go away. Then I come back. And it's changed. Something about the en-yah 250 bit of the address that turns into multiple % signs. Creepy. To see the video, go to this google page and click on the top link. Search me. |
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| Posted Saturday, May 3 |
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| Blogging Listening to Thumb of The Maid; track 2 "Hey Twelve" This is a 1998 CD, eponymously entitled Thumb of the Maid (that's the second time I've used 'eponymously' in a fortnight; I'm angling for a google hit.) Track 2 is "Hey Twelve", which I take to be a nudge nudge, wink wink at Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen". Which makes it sound paed0filik (I'm misspelling to avoid google hits, not to be cyber) but appears quite innocent, as age 12 can be. And googling about has just taught me what the band name and album name is probably a nudge, wink towards (whatever it means). It's depressing. This great album is no longer even for sale on Amazon. (Go here, click the Buy from Amazon button and see for youself.) You don't exist if you aren't for sale on Amazon, surely. But this guy clearly is in the know. Get it if you can. It's a folk punk pop thing. Like Neil Young gets run through some sort of Squeeze, with - I dunno - Trip Shakespeare turning the crank. But someone else looking over their shoulder, making sure that it doesn't get all, you know, wimpy. And guitar. Did I mention: these guys play guitar? And sweet harmony. They got it. That members-of-the-same-family sound good together thing goin' in. Oh, and I see you can buy it here. (Thanks for nuthin, Jeff Bezos.) They've got some new albums, too. One is compared to the Soft Boy's fantastic Underwater Moonlight. Best. Album. Of. 1981. (Must have been.) The other has some web-listenable MP3's which I am, this very second, listening to. I like this. And this. And this. Gotta get the Moore Brother's new albums. Yep. The little band bio you find on some of these links is priceless. We played as several Bar-B-Q's in Oakland. Stuff like that. Funny. Thing is. I was at one of those Bar-B-Q's. A house party in Berkeley. The Moore brothers - friends of a friend - took out their instruments; no amps no mics nuthin'. Strummin n' singin'. I was, as St.Thomas once remarked, as straw in the Presence. |
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| Posted Saturday, May 3 |
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| Pablumblogging So you make a little innocent fun of Canada. And the next thing you know - funny yahoo hits: people really do want to know where the inventor of pablum was from. |
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| Posted Friday, May 2 |
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| A Day Late, a Dwarf Short; and Our Text For Tomorrow Spent the day on ... non-blog stuff. My paper on Stanley Fish is coming along nicely. When I tired of that I tried to enjoy this video game I bought to comfort me in absence of wife and child. It's called "Heroes IV: of Might and Magic". After about five hours of play, I am prepared to submit it would have been more aptly subtitled. "a day late, a dwarf short". It's one of those dwarf-herding games - maybe you know the type? You have your hero and your castle and your army, which very soon consists of a strikingly multiethnic grab-bag motley crew of fantasy figures - elves and ogres and wizards and sprites and wolves and elementals and unicorns and necromancers and what-not. And, well, it seems like it should be a strategy game. But really it feels more like doing a puzzle; or stamp collecting. Shuffling stuff around, losing track of stuff, looking for stuff. Mostly when things go wrong it's because it was too boring to worry that the vampires and leprechauns would choose that moment to wander away from their pot of gems and attack my half-forgotten contingent of orcs, halflings, medusas, a thief (a cook, a wife, his lover.) By the time you are winning, and you've got maybe three castles full of troops and there aren't many enemies left, and you are just sort of aimlessly wandering, looking for the stupid key to open the stupid gate that must be around here somewhere - well, it gets to be a lot like cleaning out your odds-n-ends drawer. Will I ever use that barbarian again? Is that my behemoth? Hey, it's my old druid that I forgot about! Where did I put those pixies? I paid good money for these harpy breeding grounds, and now I never use them (sigh) There's something rather like the guilty over-consumer lifestyle about it all. The expensive juicer you don't use. The pasta maker gathering dust. The Italian coffee grinder. The order-aligned earth elemental summoner. And potions? Man can you not keep track of all your potions. As your forces multiply, and the need for them dwindles, and you are just impatiently hitting return, return, return to get on with it - well, why didn't I just quit? I dunno. The refusal to quit something that was supposed to be fun but really isn't. You get sort of psychically wound around a particular set of repetitive procedures; low-grade Asperger's syndrome sets in, or something. I'll bet the Germans have a word for it. I know for damn sure what I'll dream about tonight. (I can see 'em already on the backs of my eyelids: centaurs throwing spears at halflings, over and over and over.) Maybe I'll play it again tomorrow, just to be sure that it isn't fun. Here is our text for tomorrow, children. The topic will be: metaphysics and argufment. No, that's not a typo. This passage from a William Empson essay - really, just a short bit of journalism for the Listener, back in 1963 - entitled "Argufying in Poetry", will help open the doors of your mind in this regard. I must have had strong feelings about this topic for a considerable time, without recognising them. As a writer of verse myself, I grew up in the height of the vogue for the seventeenth-century poet Donne, and considered that I was imitating him more directly than the others were. We all said we admired him because he was so metaphysical, but I can see now that I really liked him because he argued, whereas the others felt that this side of him needed handling tactfully, because it did not fit the Symbolist theory. 'Argufying' is perhaps a tiresomely playful word, but it makes my thesis more moderate; I do not deny that thoroughly conscientious use of logic could become a distraction from poetry. Argufying is the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our way; I do not mean nagging by it, but just a not specially dignified sort of arguing. Well, we'll take it up there tomorrow. I want to explain how the sorts of writers I have been critiquing - the Fishes, Zizeks, Harphams, et. al. - are all argufiers. The poetry connection, which Empson is sort of sidling up to indirectly, is important, too. And I will tell you what his thesis is. Empson is really great. |
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| Posted Thursday, May 1 |
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| Cleaning Up After Last Night Get up. Read the morning blogosphere. See what sprouted in the night. (That's the thing about living on the other side of the world from 90% of bloggers I read. Blog entries are like mushrooms. They weren't there when you went to bed. They're there when you get up.) This guy is an idiot. He needs to calm down. And - oh, I'm reading my own post. Sigh. Does happen, doesn't it? You barrel into darkness, thinking, 'man, I hope that light at the end of the tunnel isn't my train of thought, because then what am I riding?' It's like when Yosemite Sam is chasing Bugs on one of those see-saw pump two-man railcar things (those would actually be very fun to ride; do they still exist?) And into the tunnel he goes; and then he comes back out going twice as fast, with the train on his heels, Bugs wearing a conductor's hat and blowing the whistle; Sam pumps like mad, hat hopping up and down. But he can't get off the tracks. Comedy. Where did I go wrong, with my metaphysically pathetic schtick? Brutally, the problem is that I write like I think I know that 99% of English professors are stupid frauds. Which is a thoughtless, ignorant thing to say, not to mention wrathful (see previous post). Well, OK, it should be clear to the sympathetic reader that I wasn't saying that. But why be sympathetic when I'm not inviting it. I wasn't clear about the scope of my claims. And when one of your main theses is that the other guys aren't clear, it behooves one to be clear. If you read my post, there's this sort of baffling (baffled is more the word) mix of targets: literary studies, English, the MLA, American studies, cultural studies. Am I targetting all, some, a sub-set of some? Tendencies exhibited by the lot? Do I think everyone is out to get me? This sort of panicky pointing of the gun every which way will not do. Innocent people are going to get hurt. Really, when I critique the likes of Harpham and Zizek and Fish, as I have in recent days, what follows is exactly and only that what they have done wrong is wrong. Assuming I am right. Why the temptation to overstate my complaints, then? Well, these problems I diagnose are symptoms. But: to say that the badness of Zizek tells you something about the way in which the discipline of literary studies/English/American studies/cultural studies has lost its bearings is not to say that every English department is populated exclusively by Zizekoids (as if the body snatchers landed in the night, and now the faculty lounge throbs with pods.) Not everyone is a 'theorist', after all. That's the simplest way to put it. Most English/literary/cultural studies/American-studies-types (I'm getting tired of typing all this; I'll just start saying 'English' for short, even though it's not right) are pottering in their corner of some field; they have their little journals, which I don't read - Scranletting Ticklepenny Quarterly, or whatever - so I certainly have no business bad-mouthing the quality in public. (Denouncing publications you've never heard the names of, let alone read, is a foolish passtime.) So take Critical Inquiry, which I do make a point of reading cover to cover every issue. (Must stoke the flames of the garrulousness of my wrath. I don't run on coal, you know.) Critical Inquiry is perhaps - arguably - the flagship journal if you are an English/literary academic-type. It's tops anyway. It presumes to command the heights and survey all the little fields in which the little people, the academic peasants (or migrant field workers, which is more the way the economy works today) labor and toil. Here's the thing. Critical Inquiry is just plain bad. It doesn't publish thoughtful, interesting, rigorous stuff. And often it publishes stuff that is just staggeringly bad. On this target I will steady my aim - will stop waving my gun in everyone's face. This journal consistently publishes third or fourth or ninth rate stuff. Occasionally, you see a passable essay - usually by Stanley Cavell or Bernard Williams, i.e. someone moonlighting from a philosophy department - that somehow slips by the editors. This journal has no business being the heart and soul of any discipline. If the view from the top looks bad - and that's on a good day - then things are bad. You are the sick man of the university. This unhealthy state - I'm now inching back out on my limb, saw in hand - is widely felt in the discipline. Sure, there are still all these humble scholar-ants - likable, intelligent, honest folk, toiling away for less salary than they deserve. But the ants are not happy ants. It feels as though the whole discipline is terribly hollowed out at the core. The wind has been knocked out, or at least been taken out of the sails. The hobby horse isn't fun to ride anymore. Many officers in the cavalry arriving at the same thought at the same time: do I look just a little ridiculous on this thing. It isn't just the funding cuts, though those don't help. It's the suspicion that, somewhere along the line - when did it happen? - one incurred the obscure obligation to ape the mannerisms of foolish people. It's like everyone got up one morning in the court of the Sun King and not only put on their ridiculous court costumes but thought - each one privately to him or herself - these wigs are not just itchy; they make my face look fat. This is the main reason why it is so unjust of me to imply - as I did last night: sorry, sorry - that somehow everyone in English departments is like the folks who make me mad. I don't think that's it at all. Most people in English departments are smart. Which means they could say why this Zizek stuff is just silly. Yet, somehow, they are stuck with the likes of Zizek. They are stuck with Critical Inquiry being a top journal. It's just bizarre, frankly. If everyone took off the wigs at once it would be OK. But, the thing is, for a few seconds there you are going to look worse. Hair pins, sweaty trickles around the edges of the powder. Wig head. So who is going to be first? Of course it all goes back to 'theory', which is a funny thing - the ofless of its relationships: not theory of anything, which is a bad sign. And it has to do with the fact that the high-water mark of theory was probably hit way back in 1985. The waters have receded. But still no one knows what to make of the new configuration of driftwood to be found on the disciplinary or post-disciplinary beach. There is a felt need to be theoretically significant - which hardly goes deeper than a fashion sense - but a faithlessness in theory. Where does that leave you? With a grasp on one's subject-matter no more secure than a drunk's palsied grip, as he decided whether or not to reach for the bottle the morning after going on a real bender. Well, now I've gone way over the top. Maybe I'll clean up again later. |
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| Posted Thursday, May 1 |
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| Which Type of Garrulousness Are You? §97 from Nietzsche's The Gay Science: There is a garrulousness of wrath - frequently encountered in Luther as well as Schopenhauer. A garrulousness due to a superabundant supply of conceptual formulations, as in Kant. A garrulousness due to the delight in ever new twists of the same thing: to be found in Montaigne, A garrulousness due to the delight in good words and language forms: not at all rare in Goethe's prose. A garrulousness due to an inner pleasure in noise and confused empotion: for example, in Carlyle. Blogging is just cyber-garrulity, 'natch. What's your psychic/affective impetus? Me, I estimate I'm 35% wrath, 20% superabundant conceptual formulations, 35% delight in twists on the same thing, and 10% pleasure in noise and confused emotions. How's 'bout you? How 'bout your favorite blogs? Lileks: 15% wrath; 60% delight in twists on same thing; 15% delight in good words; 10% pleasure in noise and confused emotion. The Volokhs: 80% superabundant conceptual formulations (legal stuff); 10% delight in twists on same thing; 10% delight in good words and language forms (different side of the legal stuff.) LGF: going on 100% wrath. Used to be worth reading when it was only about 80% wrath. Haven't been by in weeks. Instapundit? He isn't really garrulous. Isn't that interesting? He's a model hostess of a salon, really. He's a facilitator - a central plumbing system for regulating the release of everyone else's hydrodynamically forceful verbiage. |
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| Posted Wednesday, April 30 |
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| Metaphysically Pathetic One of the great frustrations of my academic life (maybe it's one of the malicious pleasures; depends how you assess my character) is the fact that I really would like to be a Lionel Trilling-type cultural/literary critic, with a penchant for occasional philosophical indulgences. The Liberal Imagination and Sincerity and Authenticity are pitched just about how and where I like things to be: this proportional mix of philosophy and politics and literature and culture; this magnification setting on the speculative microscope or macroscope, whichever. This quality of prose: one level of scholarly remove up and away from readable journalism. Essays about topics about - oh, so big. But there really isn't any such thing in philosophy departments as a Lionel Trilling-type thinker. That's neither an area of speciality nor competence. It's not a natural niche. Of course, there wasn't any such thing in English departments back before Lionel Trilling showed up and made there be such a thing. (And they didn't like Jews either.) So I really have no grounds for complaint. It's not like my life is hard or anything. But let me complete my thought. And there really isn't such a thing as a Lionel Trilling-type in English departments these days either. American studies and cultural studies seem to be generally in a bad way. Which is odd. Because there's only about 30,000 people getting Ph.D.'s in one or the other, or teaching one or the other. (Or maybe that explains it. Cultural/literary critics are prophets of a sort, and no society could endure having 30,000 actual prophets unleashed upon it. So 99% have to be frauds, and say absolutely nothing, just for safety's sake.) It's rare to find an academic writer on the sorts of topics that interested Trilling who does not appear to have his or her intellectual shoelaces tied together, with a double-knot, at the start of the race. I'm serious. It's rare to find an article in a top flight literature or culture studies journal that is not dead in the water at the bottom of paragraph one. This is really a striking circumstance. It isn't healthy by any means. I know, I know, it's a common complaint. The MLA is Pandaemonium. Well, so it would appear to be. The fact that people keep writing funny NY Times articles about it every year does not make it not funny, the things people say and do. Let me be a bit more specific. One of the things that I really like about Trilling - whom I have been rereading; can you tell? - is that he is not unhealthily scholarly. What do I mean? I quote Nietzsche, from the Gay Science: Almost always the books of scholars are somehow oppressive, oppressed; the "specialist" emerges somewhere - his zeal, his seriousness, his fury, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunched back; every specialist has his hunched back. Every scholarly book also mirrors a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked. Of course, Nietzsche promptly executes an about face, praising the scholar's honesty, his seriousness, his devotion and dedication, which reflects so well on his character, in contrast to the butterfly flightiness of the dilettante or journalist. Which is all right and proper. The thing about Trilling is that he manages to avoid the hunched back (maybe it's a good thing that there no such thing as a Trilling niche; maybe that would be killing the beast with the sort of kindness it precisely cannot tolerate.) But Trilling takes philosophy, in particular, seriously. This is terribly important. There's a lot of Hegel in Trilling, which may come as a surprise to some. Trilling's such an American thinker, so approachable and almost journalistic - things one does not automatically associate with Hegelianism. Of course, Hegel being Hegel, it can't be swallowed whole. (As a wise man once said: never eat anything bigger than your head.) But when he bites off suitably sized bits of Hegel, Trilling makes sure to do so intelligibly, substantively. The bit you are hearing about is explained. It is brought up because it is interesting and appropriate and genuinely bears on whatever is being discussed. There is no attempt to draw down curtains of confusion for confusion's sake. It's never just a flashy glass-bead game, even if - being cultural criticism - it is, in a sense, a glass-bead game. (Nothing wrong with a well-played glass-bead game.) Let me be more specific still. Trilling is never metaphysically pathetic. A quote from Arthur Lovejoy's still very enjoyable Great Chain of Being: This influential cause in the determination of philosophical fashions and speculative tendencies has been so little considered that I find no recognized name for it, and have been compelled to invent one which is not, perhaps, wholly self-explanatory. 'Metaphysical pathos' is exemplified in any description of the nature of things, any characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like the words of a poem, awaken through their associations, and through a sort of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feeling on the part of the philosopher or his readers. For many people - for most of the laity, I suspect - the reading of a philosophical book is usually nothing but a form of aesthetic experience. For Trilling, reading a philosophy book was not just a form of aesthetic experience, though it was that. But the ranks of the laity these days include most of the profession, I should think - at least in literary studies and cultural studies. The reason why so many academic articles in American studies or cultural studies - or, indeed, literary studies - are face down by the end of paragraph one is not that they are choosing to write about Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather than something more stolidly canonical. The reason they are facedown is that, before going toe-to-toe with Buffy, they feel the need to well and truly flunk basic metaphysics and epistemology, and perhaps a few other electives, by mangling it all in the most Lovejoyously pathetic manner conceivable. Which brings me to my exhibit for the day. This passage from an essay in praise of Slavoj Zizek, by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, from the most recent issue of Critical Inquiry. Harpham sets up a contrast case: The standard format of argumentation is so deeply ingrained in academic culture that it generally goes unremarked. An argument begins with a hypothesis, a testable characterization of the data in a limited field. It proceeds by such means as adducing evidence, drawing inferences, proposing counterarguments, probing provisional conclusions in a spirit of skeptical inquiry, and eliminating contradictions, all of which lead towards a conclusion, a summative statement whose various elements have passed through the fires of rigorous and disinterested testing. This process functions as the form of fairness, an agreement to display the means by which a conclusion is achieved in order to prevent themere reiteration of prejudice or the interference of desire. While this process cannot, of course, altogether eliminate flaws of observation, description, or reasoning, it does at least invite the scholarly conversation to continue because conclusions arrived at in this way can either be challenged on the grounds of procedural flaws or can serve as the starting point for further investigation. Zizek, we are told, shatters the mold. But the mold has been shattered for years, if ever there was a mold. I can't remember the last time I saw an academic article in, say, Critical Inquiry which remotely conformed to this model. This model is alien to the discipline of literary critical inquiry, as it is currently academically practiced. But I digress. Zizek is described thusly: So unsettled is Zizek's work in this regard that the very idea of a discipline - an orderly inquiry producing falsifiable results in a limited field - is placed under considerable pressure. It is diffcult to know exactly what he is, what field he occupies, because he is so heavily invested in a number of discourses, all of which seem to be immediately available to him. His work in film studies alone would qualify him as a leading film scholar and theorist. His references to popular culture evidence a prolonged and ecstatic immersion. And yet he is capable of an exceptionally astringent and sustained metaphysical rigor; by comparison with Zizek in full Hegelian gust, Richard Rorty, Robert Nozick, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Stanley Cavell, BernardWilliams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Thomas Nagel seem to be pop psychologists disseminating edifying ideas in the Great Books tradition. I'll stop there. Can a more metaphysically pathetic attitude be conceived? Exceptionaly astringent and sustained, eh? Is Maimonides more astringent than A. J. Ayer, or is it the other way around? Is philosophy turning into wine-tasting or isn't it? 'This impertinent yet strangely floral passage from Hume is infinitely more valid than this leggy yet bashful passage from Kant. Agreed?' You cannot conduct the life of the mind this way. It isn't meaningful. And this grab-bag of serious thinkers: pop psychologists? How can Thomas Nagel or Robert Nozick even seem like pop psychologists? Even if you thought they were bad - how could they seem bad in that way? This is really staggeringly unperceptive. In general, there seems to be a serious and unbridged fiction-reality gap in Harpham's whole treatment of Zizek. It's like someone asked: who do you think is the greatest boxer of all time, and someone says Ali, and someone else says Tyson before he went nuts; and Harpham chimes in The Incredible Hulk. And you want to say: yes, in a sense that's right. The Hulk could beat up Tyson. But in another, more accurate sense, the Hulk isn't real. And the Zizek who can think rings around the likes of Rorty, et. al. is similarly unreal qua philosopher. This is a thing that must be kept in mind as one reads his works. He has a fictional persona - a role he plays, for aesthetic and entertainment purposes only - in which he is a philosopher. No actual thoughts were disturbed in the writings of his books, however much their astringent gusto may bellow to the contrary. |
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| Posted Tuesday, April 29 |
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| Why Is there No Fish? I honestly don't know whether anyone cares, but - if so - I'm taking my (anti-Stanley) Fish ventings of recent days and trying to turn them into an honest-to-gosh academic paper. The thing was: he irritates me so much that I think I was becoming intemperate and, as a result, not as on-target as is really necessary. If and when I finish the draft, I'll post it. (Cheers, Cosma. I'll get back to you.) |
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| Posted Tuesday, April 29 |
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| Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful II Further thoughts re: this morning's post. The USA is a celebrity, no question. So, naturally, everyone tends to wish it ill. But some celebrities are loved and some are regarded as jerks of one variety or another. Why are Americans so universally regarded as 'arrogant'? And why have we come to seem more so in the wake of 9/11? America is arrogant because it thinks it can run the whole world - be the world's policeman. So we are thought to be thinking that we can do, or get away with, more than we really can. But post 9/11 all the evidence so far is running smack in the other direction. We have succeeded at what we tried - Afghanistan and Iraq: two up, two down. No failures yet. If anything was a sign of arrogance, it was the hubristic absence of anti-aircraft guns from the top of the twin towers. The thought that you could have such tall, badly-guarded buildings when it is perfectly well known there are so many pissed-off people about. But no one called us arrogant on 9/12, of all days. That only started about two weeks later, if I recall. Call this the 3.5 wars Pentagon doctrine of arrogance. It is arrogant to stand up in the middle of the ring and roar: I can fight any 3.5 men in this room! Roooar! But, on the other hand, if the Pentagon has got contingency plans for fighting 3.5 wars at once (this is the figure, as I recall: I could be wrong); if it's been budgeted for, then it would be irrational not to think you could do it. And imprudent not to announce that capacity if you had it. Surely it cannot be a rational, prudential duty to be arrogant. Therefore, this can't be arrogance. I think the psychic source of the arrogance change has more to do with American pride. Americans are proud to be Americans. They take pride in American history and achievements. Now why should this be a bad thing? I honestly don't think it is. But - if you live in a country that has a standard of living this high, opportunities this thick on the ground - there is something a little bit arrogant about being proud, as opposed to humbly grateful, that one has won the genetic-geographic sweepstakes that made it all possible. (America is the geopolitical equivalent of Tom Hanks in this regard. It's just plain weird how well everything is going.) This is significant because, as noted by many travel writers and other observant folks, 9 out of 10 non-US citizens who denounce the US as the Great Satan, have a green card application pending. (I just made that figure up off the top of my head, in case you are gullible and believe everything you read on the internet.) It annoys the world that (living) Americans act like they deserve the good things they've got. And, to be honest, the world is right. We are like those annoying Hollywood actors who act like having cheekbones half an inch above your ears - cheekbones you could open letters with - is some sort of moral achievement; something you should compliment the possessor for having the good sense to possess. (Think about the way Americans are personally proud of our country's noble achievements but not personally ashamed of, say, Andrew Jackson's treatment of native Americans; not to mention the flagrantly illegal mining of Nicaraguan harbors. If you add all the moral credits of your country's history to your personal account, and don't subtract the debits, you will come off a pretty great guy or gal.) And we do have an annoying habit, I suppose, of too easily supposing that our good luck in this department will of course promiscuously spill over into every other conceivable department; like Sean Penn supposing that he can solve the Middle East problem. He thought he could do it why? Because he played Spicolli (sp?), was briefly married to Madonna, and was (to be honest) quite good in ... what was that dePalma movie in which he played Alan Derschowitz (sp?) (No, not that other movie, with Jeremy Irons, in which someone - who was it? - actually played Alan Dershowitz.) Why do we - the US - think we can do it, i.e. even make a noticable dent in the Middle East problem? But - world, please understand - it's not like we feel it's our Manifest Destiny, little dudes! From the inside it looks and feels so different from the way the world evidently feels it must feel. It's like anti-Manifest Destiny. It's the least frickin' manifest destiny ever. Two years ago, if I'd leaned over and said, 'honey, I've a feeling we'll be invading Meso-pot-amia soon' - well, she wouldn't have divorced me. (I'm a lucky, lucky man to have her.) The world feels so brow-beaten by the unstoppable juggernaut that is America. And America is thinking (like that Talking Heads song): How did I get here? What am I doing in the middle of Mesopotamia. I have no business here. |
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| Posted Tuesday, April 29 |
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| Don't Hate Me Because I'm Beautiful So I have a colleague - nice guy, good friend - who has been violently anti-war. He's very much a 'cosmopolitanism = good; nationalism = bad' and 'George Bush = cowboy = very bad' kind of guy. He's much of the 'Americans need to figure out (be taught by Europeans) why the world hates them' school of thought. (He isn't a US citizen himself but he went to school in the states and taught there for years.) Anyway, this being the general tenor of many of our discussions, a few months ago I had occasion to posit the theory that America is hated because the world is sick of seeing the same team win again, and again, and again. It's natural to root for the underdog, to snipe at the overdog, and generally suffer from constant, low-grade infection of ressentiment in the face of others' ascendancy. I didn't posit this as a magic bullet, one-size fits all explanation. I just think it's a real dynamic, of uncertain but non-trivial force. A lot, a lot of the world goes around all day thinking it wouldn't be half bad if the US got taken down a peg or two. No reason really; just an automatic response to Uncle Sam's big, beaming, ascendant mug. The only way we can overcome this aspect of the world's hostility is to get taken down a peg or two, which is presumably treatment we will not volunteer for. My friend was gravely insulted, or else derived entertainment value from convincingly pretending to be. He took this to be some sort of 'non-American's (or whatever) are non-rational' position. Foreigners have savage minds, actuated by simple, emotional rather than intellectual impulses. Americans are adults. Non-Americans are children. But I hadn't meant it that way at all. I figured I was just being a good Nietzschean. (My friend likes Nietzsche, so I thought I was just talking the talk.) Why do people, when watching a game between two teams to which they have no prior loyalties, tend to root for the one favored to lose? Why do people take malicious pleasure in the public humiliations and downfalls of politicians and celebrities and so forth who have (in at least some cases) never done them any wrong or harm? It's human nature. It just happens that America is the celebrity of the world. Why is the world so determined to expose American criminality, greed and mendacity? Why are paparazzi so eager to get a shot of Gwyneth Paltrow's bare butt looking flabby and insufficiently toned? Why should these be such obsessional objects? Not because Paltrow has such a flabby butt ... And just yesterday Matthew Yglesias made much the same point, at somewhat less blathersome length, admittedly. What do you think? Is it gravely insulting to insinuate that there are Nietzschean explanations for anti-Americanism? It would be stupidly over-simple and reductionistic to say this is the whole story, but is it intolerably insulting to say it is part of the story? I suppose it is insulting, in a way, because intellectual anti-Americanism is, in self-conceptiion, very much a rigorously critical, disciplined, unmasking operation that would not want to feel itself psychically equivalent, in any way, shape or form, to tabloid celebrity show-all or tell-all junk food journalism. But surely if it is OK to call George Bush a crazy cowboy, because you think there's a kernel of truth in that, it ought to be possible to say: Noam Chomsky is addicted to collecting pictures of celebrities (one in particular) looking their very worst. |
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| Posted Monday, April 28 |
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| Been Tryin' to Get Some Writing Done I mean, of the non-blog variety. I'll just pass along a couple a' links if you really don't have anything else to do. Via Junius, this horror story. Via Colby Cosh, this link to on-line writings by the ever irascible, oft-acute, occasionally too aggressive for his own good Australian philosopher David Stove. Via Three-Toed Sloth ... this is damn funny. That's it. Now go amuse yourselves. |
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| Posted Sunday, April 27 |
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| Canada! There's More There There Colby Cosh reports the semi-final results of Edmonton's late attempt to come up with an Economic Development slogan. How about: "$200,000 poorer; none the wiser. The worst is probably over. We're Edmonton!" This reminds me of a thing Belle and I came across back in - oh, must have been 1997 or so. A giant, multi-page insert advert in the Sunday NY Times travel section (so someone else must remember it). It was from the Canada Tourist Wossname and bore the title: "The World Needs More Canada!" Such sentiment from any number of other countries might be threatening. But due to the fact that, at present rates of consumption, the world's known stocks of Canada will not be exhausted for an infinite number of years - well, who thought that was a good slogan? (I'll bet a multipage advert in the NY Times costs more than $200,000. And you have to pay in American dollars.) Hell, there are places in Canada where Canada just bubbles right out of the ground. (And the amount of Canada under Canada. Enormous. Off-shore drilling? No need, sir!) "More Canada per square inch than anywhere else on earth! We're Canada!" Maybe the idea was that visiting tourists would pitch in to help cart it off. "Canada! You know what it is! Do you know what it's for?" "101 Uses For Canada at Home And At The Office!" Actually, the title wasn't even the best part. The advert detailed some main attractions. Example: Canada was home to the inventor of ... pablum; and the inventor of the paint-roller. And, having now verified these claims via google, I see the page just linked also claims for Canada the honor of having housed the inventor of the green plastic garbage bag and the 'antigravity suit' (way back in 1940). No doubt very useful for getting away from all that Canada from time to time. There was another bit about (I'm paraphrasing from memory, obviously): 'So exciting, you won't be able to get those pictures and home videos back from the neighbors!" Now there's a scenario to make even the guy from One Hour Photo sit up and say: 'these people are weird.' ("Honey, let's watch the footage of our neighbors at the pablum factory again. And if they ring the doorbell again, don't answer it.") How 'bout if Edmonton just put signs up at the city limits - "Edmonton: If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now." (C'mon, where's my $200,000?) I think a deeper problem here is the assumption - exactly when did this seep into our ad-soaked cultural consciousness? - that everything can have a slogan. Our logos is: a logo. It's (yes, yes, I'm not the first to notice) like a postmodern update of the Medieval doctrine of the 'Book of the World'. Everything in creation, from the smallest piece of belly button lint up to the most majestic king, is a sign, an advertisement for the next world. Now we think it is possible that everything is, or can be, an effective advertisement for itself. What about philosophy. Can it have a slogan? "Philosophy: We're People Helping People Refute People" "Philosophy: Come For the Answers, Stay For the Questions" "Philosophy: Give a Man an Idea, He'll Be Confused For a Day; Teach Him to Think, He'll Be Confused For a Lifetime!" "Philosophy: Because You Know You're Probably Wrong" Which do you like best? |
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