When I argue that the debate over gay marriage is a political question, what I mean to say is that our arguments about marriage need to be centered on how we think we ought to live, and how we ought to use our public resources to promote those ways of life (to any liberal reading this: I understand that you think that the genius of the modern liberal state is precisely that it keeps those kinds of questions outside of public debate. You're wrong about that. To explain why is going to take another, much different, post.) I can point to at least four different arguments about gay marriage that seem persuasive, or at least, reasonable, to me. Two would argue for gay marriage, two would argue against. Two I would classify as progressive, two as conservative.
[Note that for the purposes of the following I am going to ignore the question of the morality of homosexuality. This is for a number of reasons, the simplest being that I don't think that homosexual behavior as such is immoral.]
The conservative argument for gay marriage derives from the claim that marriage creates a different kind of relationship with another human being: a deeper, more difficult but in the end more rewarding relationship. To quote the priest who counseled my wife and me before we got married, "it is an adventure in becoming an adult." This way of thinking about oneself and other people runs counter to much of the information we receive from modern consumer society, which focuses on personal and immediate gratifications. If a life as a married person is in fact this sort of long-running moral education, then surely we would want to expand it to a many people in our society as possible. I am all for having more adults and fewer 45-year-old children running things. The argument gets even stronger if the couple in question has children, since the current literature seems to support, pretty clearly, the idea that stable, two parent households are better for children than single parent families.
The progressive political argument for gay marriage, which I also briefly mentioned in an earlier post, is that it would substantially change the way in which gay people were understood within the wider culture. By allowing gay men and women to participate in this most conventional of institutions, modern society would essentially be saying that gay behavior is no big deal, that our gay neighbors and friends and family members are the same as the rest of us. They may act in morally reprehensible ways, but these would be the same kinds of sins the rest of us commit, like cheating on your taxes or bullying underlings at work or beating your kid. This attitude has already begun to move through much of modern society, but the act of legalizing same-sex marriage could help speed it up. And if that happened, maybe in turn we would have fewer confused teenagers hanging themselves in bedroom closets or jumping off of bridges.
The conservative case against gay marriage would go back to the idea of what words mean, and how they mean anything at all. From this perspective, the word "marriage" has a meaning precisely because it labels a human relationship that differs from being friends, or lovers, or life partners. It may involve one or even in some cases all of these other elements, but it cannot be equated to them. If it could, we wouldn't need the idea of marriage in the first place. Like redefining God or justice or democracy, expanding the concept of marriage might like a good idea at first, because it is more inclusive. But as with these other terms, if you expand the word so that it includes everything, in the end it means nothing. And this could happen, arguably, with the idea of marriage. We could make it so inclusive that within several generations no one would bother with it.
The progressive argument against gay marriage is probably better made by people like Michael Bronski or Michael Warner, but my take on it is that by using gay marriage as a method of bringing gay people into the mainstream of American society, the whole gay rights movement is essentially ceding a great deal of political territory that it may eventually regret having given up. Was a time, folks, when the fight for gay rights was linked to much bigger, even revolutionary goals, like: fundamentally changing how western society thought about not just sexuality but desire, human relationships, our position within a market economy, etc. The reason that someone like Harvey Milk was not in favor of gay marriage is that he wanted to build an alternative to that monogamous, state-sponsored ideal of love. Now, I've already gone on record here as saying that I think that for many people, including myself, the marriage model is a worthy ideal. That's not the same as saying that it needs to be the ideal for everyone. This universalistic, cookie-cutter approach to human politics, in which we all pretend that underneath, we're all the same, and everyone really wants the same things: love and peace and food and shelter. I'll go on record as saying I pretty much hate that conception of the human condition. There are a lot of people, both gay and straight, who are quite a bit different from me, thank God. A gay relationship is fundamentally different from a straight one. Not better or worse, just different. I don't know that we need to force all the various configurations of love into one model. And sure, you can say, yes, but all gay people are asking for is the right to get married. No one is saying that they have to. But once marriage is part of the gay community it will almost certainly become the norm, and the expected outcome of any serious romantic relationship, as has happened with the straight community.
We are all God's children. We are all blessed in his sight, and equally loved. The diversity of human personalities is what makes us so fascinating: it is proof of the divine spark that we carry within us. A variety of different human institutions celebrating that diversity is what we truly need, not some phony-baloney attempt at conjuring up a kind of bland, uninteresting sameness that could never be achieved in any case.
All right. That's it. I'm done with this subject for a good long while.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Politics and marriage (second part)
My first post on this subject was not meant to argue (all appearances, I now realize, to the contrary) that marriages with children are morally superior to marriages without children. It's just that Gallagher's position was attractive to me insofar as it reminded the potential groom or bride that "it's not all about you." And I think that to the extent that we can keep that sentiment alive in a consumer society constantly focused on arguing otherwise, it would be just dandy. But kids are actually not the central issue. Whether a marriage produces children or not, there is something morally valuable and noble (sorry to get all 19th-century on your postmodern ass*) about choosing to make a life-long commitment, to forgo certain guaranteed but momentary pleasures and joys on behalf of a deeper, more profound understanding of, and attachment to, another person. This is the sort of relationship that I saw my maternal grandfather and grandmother live through to the end of their lives. It is an inspiring life choice. There is no reason that I can plausibly entertain as to why this kind of relationship need be restricted to a heterosexual couple.
Only, this is not the sort of argument that gets made in the debate right now. Or if it is, I don't hear it. I also don't hear much about how allowing gay couples to marry might make for a better society: not just for gays, but for straights, since it might promote a more humane and inclusive attitude among the population as a whole, as regards sexuality (I think that this is actually an important element in the push for gay marriage. It's just not an idea that gets much play.) The central argument is one about individual rights, and I think that to the extent that one is committed to this argument, one must accept, unproblematically, a more general understanding of the individual enshrined in classic liberalism: an individual, that is to say, with no strong moral obligations to the wider world of which he or she is a part.
So who cares what you think, Trithemius? We live under the rule of law, here. The United States has a constitution. The government has to act according to the rules laid down in that document. And as you noted yourself in the first post, the constitutional argument seems pretty strong.
But I respond: it seems convincing only on the surface, only taken on its own claims. The problem comes with the idea of marriage, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social institution like marriage properly is. My change of heart on this matter came when listening to my then-neighbor discuss the Massachusetts decision right after it came down. He was quite happy about it: it meant his sister would get to marry her long-time partner. Since I could see see where the guy was coming from on that score, and was pretty confused about this issue in any case, I didn't want to argue with him. I limited myself to asking his opinion as a lawyer, what he thought of the decision as law. He answered that the only reason one could give to opposing gay marriage was the unthinking, unexamined assumption that most of had about marriage being a partnership between a man and a woman. Which is entirely true. Had you asked almost any American 20 years ago to define marriage, I suspect that person would have included within the definition the fact that marriage joined together a man and woman. This is still the position put forth by some conservatives: marriage is by definition heterosexual. It seems like a pretty weak argument.
It's not. To say that we have assumed up to now that marriage means, "the legal union of a man and a woman," is simply to say that we treat the word marriage like any other word. All words mean something, and all meanings are derived in part from difference: from what they exclude as much as what they include. To allow gay people to marry would mean fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage, and our understanding of what it is supposed to do. It's not like changing the meaning of the word orange, so that it means the color of a lime. As an institution, the concept of marriage carries social implications. If it didn't nobody would bother arguing about it in the first place. And here is where I think that the analogy with marriage and other institutions starts to fall down. The reason that forbidding blonde people to drive sounds ridiculous is that the color of one's hair has nothing to do with the definition of legal driver. And I would say the same thing about banning inter-racial marriages. It was problematic from the get-go because the race of the couple was never a fundamental element to the definition of marriage. Some southern racists obviously thought that an inter-racial marriage was immoral, but that's the point: they thought it was an immoral marriage. Whereas for most of the country's history a same-sex union was not considered an improper marriage: it wasn't considered a marriage at all. It was something else.
All of which is to say: the question of changing our understanding of marriage is a political question. It is something that should be decided by legislatures, or by referenda, not by judges in courts.
*Or not, actually.
Only, this is not the sort of argument that gets made in the debate right now. Or if it is, I don't hear it. I also don't hear much about how allowing gay couples to marry might make for a better society: not just for gays, but for straights, since it might promote a more humane and inclusive attitude among the population as a whole, as regards sexuality (I think that this is actually an important element in the push for gay marriage. It's just not an idea that gets much play.) The central argument is one about individual rights, and I think that to the extent that one is committed to this argument, one must accept, unproblematically, a more general understanding of the individual enshrined in classic liberalism: an individual, that is to say, with no strong moral obligations to the wider world of which he or she is a part.
So who cares what you think, Trithemius? We live under the rule of law, here. The United States has a constitution. The government has to act according to the rules laid down in that document. And as you noted yourself in the first post, the constitutional argument seems pretty strong.
But I respond: it seems convincing only on the surface, only taken on its own claims. The problem comes with the idea of marriage, and with a fundamental misunderstanding of what a social institution like marriage properly is. My change of heart on this matter came when listening to my then-neighbor discuss the Massachusetts decision right after it came down. He was quite happy about it: it meant his sister would get to marry her long-time partner. Since I could see see where the guy was coming from on that score, and was pretty confused about this issue in any case, I didn't want to argue with him. I limited myself to asking his opinion as a lawyer, what he thought of the decision as law. He answered that the only reason one could give to opposing gay marriage was the unthinking, unexamined assumption that most of had about marriage being a partnership between a man and a woman. Which is entirely true. Had you asked almost any American 20 years ago to define marriage, I suspect that person would have included within the definition the fact that marriage joined together a man and woman. This is still the position put forth by some conservatives: marriage is by definition heterosexual. It seems like a pretty weak argument.
It's not. To say that we have assumed up to now that marriage means, "the legal union of a man and a woman," is simply to say that we treat the word marriage like any other word. All words mean something, and all meanings are derived in part from difference: from what they exclude as much as what they include. To allow gay people to marry would mean fundamentally changing the meaning of marriage, and our understanding of what it is supposed to do. It's not like changing the meaning of the word orange, so that it means the color of a lime. As an institution, the concept of marriage carries social implications. If it didn't nobody would bother arguing about it in the first place. And here is where I think that the analogy with marriage and other institutions starts to fall down. The reason that forbidding blonde people to drive sounds ridiculous is that the color of one's hair has nothing to do with the definition of legal driver. And I would say the same thing about banning inter-racial marriages. It was problematic from the get-go because the race of the couple was never a fundamental element to the definition of marriage. Some southern racists obviously thought that an inter-racial marriage was immoral, but that's the point: they thought it was an immoral marriage. Whereas for most of the country's history a same-sex union was not considered an improper marriage: it wasn't considered a marriage at all. It was something else.
All of which is to say: the question of changing our understanding of marriage is a political question. It is something that should be decided by legislatures, or by referenda, not by judges in courts.
*Or not, actually.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Politics and marriage (first part)
In the early years of this century, my wife, my oldest daughter and I lived in a tony neighborhood in Center City Philadelphia near a little city park called Fitler Square. It was not very diverse economically. Almost all of the people who lived in the area were "upper middle-class" (or as we used to say back in my hometown of Taber, Alberta, "wealthy"). Even those who weren't, like my wife and I (MD and future PhD respectively), were probable future members of the club. But it was diverse in other ways--ways that might seem pretty predictable if you know much about educated, well-to-do East Coast Americans in the 21st century. Almost every day my wife would take one-year-old, Zoe, to Fitler, or the small playground about two blocks to the west, right next to the Schuylkill. Her best friends were Margaret, a little girl from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, whose parents were living in Philadelphia for year while the father was on sabbatical; a little girl from Japan whose name I have forgotten, if I ever knew it; and Spencer, who had two dads. I didn't really know much about any of the parents because it was generally Jane and not me who took Zoe to the park, but from what I could tell from her conversations with them they all seemed like normal, more or less well-adjusted folk. One day, when my Dad was visiting from Canada, I mentioned something about Spencer, and he said that he didn't think that gay parents were the best thing for a child (Dad is pretty conservative). At the time, Jane was working as a child psychiatrist in a clinic in West Philly, and also doing some work in a juvenile offenders "home" (ie., prison) near the art museum. Many of her patients, unsurprisingly, came from broken households: parents who were drug addicts, and/or drunks, and/or prostitutes, and/or criminals. One five year-old had been stabbed by his Mom a week after she was released from prison; another was dealing with a father who was undergoing a sex-change. At the age of 14, she had already been raped once. I compared their lot to that of Spencer's, a young man being raised by two sane adults who loved him and had enough money to make sure, at least, that he would have some stability at home, and likely a decent education. I told my Dad that I didn't really think the sexuality of one's parents was the decisive element in the upbringing of a child in the modern world.
All of this is in the way of a bit of throat-clearing for what I am about to say about the current debate over gay marriage. In fact, I have no strong feelings about gay marriage one way or another. On the one hand, I don't think that giving gay couples the legal status of marriage will destroy the institution, or even really change the way we think about it. Modern society has already radically redefined what marriage means, and it is in fact this redefinition that has allowed the debate over gay marriage to surface in the first place. But on the other hand, the inability of gay men and women to legally wed one another also doesn't strike me as a human tragedy of the first order. I think that we ought to change our laws so that gay couples have the same sorts of rights as straight married ones, in terms of hospital visitations, the ability to receive health benefits, and so forth. But that could obviously be done without having them be formally be considered "married."
What does bother me is the way that the debate has been framed, especially in terms of legal rights, which moves it out of the legislative realm and into the judicial one. I don't think that gay people have a legal right to marry one another. It's not in the constitution, nor is it an element in any of the other notable documents about human rights that have become part of our political tradition in the past 200 years: the Rights of Man doesn't mention it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't mention it. I think that there is a good reason why this is the case.
The argument for gay marriage, as I understand it, runs as follows. Although there is no specific clause declaring that marriage should be allowed to all members of a society regardless of sexual orientation, there is very definitely language that forbids the state from treating citizens in an unequal manner, unless such behavior can be justified as preventing some larger ill. We wouldn't be able to pass a law forbidding people with blonde hair to drive cars on the highway, but we can pass laws forbidding people under a certain age to drive cars. The reason for the latter law is that having children drive cars would be dangerous for everyone on the road, children included. You can't really make that argument for blonde people, as a group. So, in order to ban gay men and women from participating in the same social institution that straight people get to participate in, you would have to show that gay marriage harms other people, or harms society as a whole. But most studies don't seem to support this: there is no convincing empirical evidence that gay people are worse parents than straight people; rather the opposite, as I understand the studies (which is, admittedly, not too much). If there is no good reason for restrictions, then the government is constitutionally obliged to allow gay men and women to get married to same-sex partners.
This argument for striking down laws forbidding same-sex marriage seems pretty clear. On its own terms it is also pretty convincing, at least to me. I should add, since I have read a number of recent blog positions by moderate conservatives recounting their personal narratives, and their movement from opposition to support of gay marriage, that when I first heard about the idea of gay marriage, about fifteen years ago, I thought it was a good idea. It would bring gay people into the mainstream of American society, and maybe serve as a counterweight to some of the self-destructive, sexually promiscuous behavior that I saw in the male gay community at the time. I couldn't see much of a down-side. I knew that most people in my parents' generation wouldn't go for it, but chalked that up to their simple discomfort about homosexuality in general. And I remember being distinctly surprised, and disappointed, when I learned that the late left-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. I admired Senator Wellstone and thought that here he was simply giving in to bigotry, against his better instincts.
My opinion started to change a little when I read a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about seven or eight years ago, concerning an important change in the New York Times' "Society" section. The Times was starting to publish announcements of gay partners' domestic partnerships on its wedding page. Rather than taking the predictable tack of celebrating the advance of liberal open-mindedness over the dark bonds of tradition, the writer instead, more interestingly, pegged the change to a wider social evolution in how Americans now understood marriage. At one time, and certainly among members of the East Coast elite class, marriage was seen as something other than union of two souls in love with one another. It was a family affair: it knit together social networks and businesses, and therefore was not simply the decision of the two married people themselves. Because other people would be affected by this decision, they naturally felt that they had a say in who their children married. But this understanding of marriage has largely disappeared, at least among this class. Increasingly, marriage came to be seen as a decision mainly concerning the bride and groom: it was a celebration of the couple themselves, of their love for one another, of their life-long partnership. (I can't remember if the writer mentioned it or not, but the invention of the pill clearly has something to do with this change.) In this context, the question of whether the partners in question were of the same or different sexes shrank into irrelevance. What was important was that they loved one another.
This is where I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Not about gay partnerships (on or off the Times' society page) but the way that, this narrative suggested, we were starting to think about these sorts of social institutions. I'm not going to argue that we need to bring back the idea of a dowry or anything, but I happen not to be a big fan of what I think of as the modern liberal celebration of the unchained individual, freed from any obligation to other people, accountable only to herself for her actions. I think that we actually do owe something to the social world of which we are a part, in large degree because we wouldn't be who we are without that world. And then there was just the nasty suspicion that my generation was doing with marriage what it did with everything it touched: that is, using it to celebrate our own, wonderful selves. So much more wonderful, of course, than anything that had ever come before in the history of humankind. The changing attitudes toward marriage, in other words, seemed to me to have a lot more to do with egoism than a humane desire for inclusion.
This unease was furthered a few months later when I heard an argument by Maggie Gallagher on the radio. Whatever else you may make of Gallagher, and especially her dubious journalistic ethics, the argument she made about marriage appealed to me, precisely because it attacked this self-centered attitude head-on. What our generation (that is, mine and Gallagher's) had forgotten was that marriage is not and ought not to be primarily about the bride and groom. Nor is it, as the New Yorker piece might suggest, about the parents of the bride and groom. Marriage is primarily about the children which it produces. Marriage is meant to provide a stable home environment and a dependable source of food and shelter for children, particularly by forcing men to stay with their families. If it weren't for children, Gallagher's argument suggests, we wouldn't need marriage at all. Not for straight people or for gay people.
All of this is in the way of a bit of throat-clearing for what I am about to say about the current debate over gay marriage. In fact, I have no strong feelings about gay marriage one way or another. On the one hand, I don't think that giving gay couples the legal status of marriage will destroy the institution, or even really change the way we think about it. Modern society has already radically redefined what marriage means, and it is in fact this redefinition that has allowed the debate over gay marriage to surface in the first place. But on the other hand, the inability of gay men and women to legally wed one another also doesn't strike me as a human tragedy of the first order. I think that we ought to change our laws so that gay couples have the same sorts of rights as straight married ones, in terms of hospital visitations, the ability to receive health benefits, and so forth. But that could obviously be done without having them be formally be considered "married."
What does bother me is the way that the debate has been framed, especially in terms of legal rights, which moves it out of the legislative realm and into the judicial one. I don't think that gay people have a legal right to marry one another. It's not in the constitution, nor is it an element in any of the other notable documents about human rights that have become part of our political tradition in the past 200 years: the Rights of Man doesn't mention it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights doesn't mention it. I think that there is a good reason why this is the case.
The argument for gay marriage, as I understand it, runs as follows. Although there is no specific clause declaring that marriage should be allowed to all members of a society regardless of sexual orientation, there is very definitely language that forbids the state from treating citizens in an unequal manner, unless such behavior can be justified as preventing some larger ill. We wouldn't be able to pass a law forbidding people with blonde hair to drive cars on the highway, but we can pass laws forbidding people under a certain age to drive cars. The reason for the latter law is that having children drive cars would be dangerous for everyone on the road, children included. You can't really make that argument for blonde people, as a group. So, in order to ban gay men and women from participating in the same social institution that straight people get to participate in, you would have to show that gay marriage harms other people, or harms society as a whole. But most studies don't seem to support this: there is no convincing empirical evidence that gay people are worse parents than straight people; rather the opposite, as I understand the studies (which is, admittedly, not too much). If there is no good reason for restrictions, then the government is constitutionally obliged to allow gay men and women to get married to same-sex partners.
This argument for striking down laws forbidding same-sex marriage seems pretty clear. On its own terms it is also pretty convincing, at least to me. I should add, since I have read a number of recent blog positions by moderate conservatives recounting their personal narratives, and their movement from opposition to support of gay marriage, that when I first heard about the idea of gay marriage, about fifteen years ago, I thought it was a good idea. It would bring gay people into the mainstream of American society, and maybe serve as a counterweight to some of the self-destructive, sexually promiscuous behavior that I saw in the male gay community at the time. I couldn't see much of a down-side. I knew that most people in my parents' generation wouldn't go for it, but chalked that up to their simple discomfort about homosexuality in general. And I remember being distinctly surprised, and disappointed, when I learned that the late left-wing Democratic senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, had voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. I admired Senator Wellstone and thought that here he was simply giving in to bigotry, against his better instincts.
My opinion started to change a little when I read a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about seven or eight years ago, concerning an important change in the New York Times' "Society" section. The Times was starting to publish announcements of gay partners' domestic partnerships on its wedding page. Rather than taking the predictable tack of celebrating the advance of liberal open-mindedness over the dark bonds of tradition, the writer instead, more interestingly, pegged the change to a wider social evolution in how Americans now understood marriage. At one time, and certainly among members of the East Coast elite class, marriage was seen as something other than union of two souls in love with one another. It was a family affair: it knit together social networks and businesses, and therefore was not simply the decision of the two married people themselves. Because other people would be affected by this decision, they naturally felt that they had a say in who their children married. But this understanding of marriage has largely disappeared, at least among this class. Increasingly, marriage came to be seen as a decision mainly concerning the bride and groom: it was a celebration of the couple themselves, of their love for one another, of their life-long partnership. (I can't remember if the writer mentioned it or not, but the invention of the pill clearly has something to do with this change.) In this context, the question of whether the partners in question were of the same or different sexes shrank into irrelevance. What was important was that they loved one another.
This is where I started to feel a little uncomfortable. Not about gay partnerships (on or off the Times' society page) but the way that, this narrative suggested, we were starting to think about these sorts of social institutions. I'm not going to argue that we need to bring back the idea of a dowry or anything, but I happen not to be a big fan of what I think of as the modern liberal celebration of the unchained individual, freed from any obligation to other people, accountable only to herself for her actions. I think that we actually do owe something to the social world of which we are a part, in large degree because we wouldn't be who we are without that world. And then there was just the nasty suspicion that my generation was doing with marriage what it did with everything it touched: that is, using it to celebrate our own, wonderful selves. So much more wonderful, of course, than anything that had ever come before in the history of humankind. The changing attitudes toward marriage, in other words, seemed to me to have a lot more to do with egoism than a humane desire for inclusion.
This unease was furthered a few months later when I heard an argument by Maggie Gallagher on the radio. Whatever else you may make of Gallagher, and especially her dubious journalistic ethics, the argument she made about marriage appealed to me, precisely because it attacked this self-centered attitude head-on. What our generation (that is, mine and Gallagher's) had forgotten was that marriage is not and ought not to be primarily about the bride and groom. Nor is it, as the New Yorker piece might suggest, about the parents of the bride and groom. Marriage is primarily about the children which it produces. Marriage is meant to provide a stable home environment and a dependable source of food and shelter for children, particularly by forcing men to stay with their families. If it weren't for children, Gallagher's argument suggests, we wouldn't need marriage at all. Not for straight people or for gay people.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Tony Judt
The British-born, American historian of French culture, Tony Judt, died over the weekend. Right now, Judt is perhaps most famous for a series of essays he has written over the past year or so detailing his struggles with Lou Gehrig's disease. They are unflinching in their honesty about the condition. As difficult as they are to read, I can only imagine how hard they most have been to write. Just prior to this, Judt had attained some level of controversy over his articles on Israel and the Middle East. A former Zionist, he came to a strongly critical position of the Israeli state late in his life. This contributed to a cancellation of a scheduled 2006 speech at the Polish Embassy in New York, prompted by pressure from the Anti-Defamation League.
But in fact Judt's speciality was intellectual history, and this is how I first became aware of him, especially around the publication of Past Imperfect, which indicted a number of Marxist and Left-wing intellectuals in post-War France, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, for their moral obtuseness. At the time, I was falling out of love a bit with Western left-wing thinking myself, so I rather enjoyed Judt's elegant polemics. Now I think that it could also be seen as a bit of piling on: hitting the Left when it was in disarray and demoralized following the collapse of Soviet Communism and the seeming triumphant rise of free-market capitalism as solution to the human condition. But Judt was, to his credit, never a neo-liberal. As far as I can tell he remained a social democrat throughout his life, and his political positions were always a bit unpredictable, which is about as safe a guarantee of an original and honest mind as I can imagine. To get some idea of what we have lost, read this, one of the last essays he wrote for NYRB.
But in fact Judt's speciality was intellectual history, and this is how I first became aware of him, especially around the publication of Past Imperfect, which indicted a number of Marxist and Left-wing intellectuals in post-War France, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, for their moral obtuseness. At the time, I was falling out of love a bit with Western left-wing thinking myself, so I rather enjoyed Judt's elegant polemics. Now I think that it could also be seen as a bit of piling on: hitting the Left when it was in disarray and demoralized following the collapse of Soviet Communism and the seeming triumphant rise of free-market capitalism as solution to the human condition. But Judt was, to his credit, never a neo-liberal. As far as I can tell he remained a social democrat throughout his life, and his political positions were always a bit unpredictable, which is about as safe a guarantee of an original and honest mind as I can imagine. To get some idea of what we have lost, read this, one of the last essays he wrote for NYRB.
Friday, August 6, 2010
Americans will destroy beer if we let them
I'm been meaning to write this post for some time now. About a year and half, to be more precise, dating from the moment when I first tried Sam Adams Imperial Stout. I note for the record that I am a big fan of Samuel Adams and of Jim Koch. Sam Adams Boston Lager was the beer that got me interested in drinking outside the pilsner style that had dominated North American brewing for so long, and I still think that it's a solid beer: a good example of how you can move from niche market to mass market and not totally lose your soul. Also, I think that Koch has done more than any other single person to bring interesting beer back to the American public. I don't remember ever really disliking a Samuel Adams beer with the possible exception of that cherry-flavored crap that they called a lambic, and which they now, Thank God, seem to have discontinued. So I was excited to see that they had produced these "speciality" beers, what they called the Brewmasters Collection. If their regular beers are that good, my thinking went, their speciality beers will be even better.
Well, no. The Imperial Stout, first of all, did not taste like a stout. It tasted like a watery, slightly beery flavored molasses. So bad that for perhaps the first time in my life I was tempted to toss out beer that I had paid good money for into the garbage (I didn't. I used it in recipes instead, where the food could help mask the taste). The last time I remembered hating a beer this bad was when I was at a tasting sponsored by Tulsa's resident beer expert, Elliot Nelson (owner/operator of the always-reliable McNellie's pub in the downtown portion of our city), and we were given a sample of what Nelson called "extreme beer:" which are not really defined by anything other than the desire to push the envelope. Extreme hoppy taste, or extremely high alcohol content, or extremely strange flavors (often, in the last case, inspired by beers of past ages). And then I remembered that Nelson had mentioned Koch being somewhat impressed by the whole idea of extreme beer.
So, who to blame for what I think is this extremely bad idea? Well, maybe Koch himself, who may have coined the phrase. But I think the better candidate might be one Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Brewery in Delaware and the subject of this 2008 New Yorker profile by Burkhard Bilger. Calagione seems to have been a slightly fucked-up scion of American wealth (he got kicked out of his East Coast prep school for shenanigans)--a Holden Caulfield type, a bit of a lost soul, until he discovered his true calling in his twenties: which was to screw up American craft brewing by making really, really hoppy beers. As soon as I started to read about Calagione I recalled Dogfish from my days in Philly. It was one of those beers that I wanted to enjoy but just couldn't. Everything about it was funky and cool, right down to its name and its labels. The only problem was I didn't like the actual taste of the beer. Bilger's story is mostly hagiographic, but for me, the key quote is a negative one from Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery (which makes some good beers):
"When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’"
It's important that beer, like any other sort of food, taste interesting. But actually, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that it taste good. Extreme beer seems to be the product of two different forces. The first is the inherent American tendency to think that bigger is better. The same attitude that gave us the Lincoln Navigator and Golden Corral has produced beer with an alcohol content upwards of 20 percent. The second is the need of the modern beer aficianado to prove cultural capital through drinking beer with "complex" or "interesting" tastes (or sometimes, "notes," as though we were describing wine.) When I was at the beer festival in Montreal earlier this summer, there were a lot of beers that were aiming for this palate: most notably, Dieu de Ciel, whose Péché Mortel has achieved international recognition. But for my money Unibroue--as much as it has turned into a corporation--still has the best of the Quebec brews. Unibroue generally follows older styles, particularly from Belgium and France, and doesn't try to get too fancy.
Innovation is not bad per se (nor, for that matter, is excess), but there's problem, I think, when we start to value these things for their own sake, rather than establishing some other, competing standard for quality. Surrender that more rigorous standard, you end up with some asshole in Scotland making beer that's 55 per cent alcohol, stuck inside a Dead Squirrel. (Why not just drink some whisky? I guarantee it will taste better than that shit.)
We can't let this happen to beer. As Belgian monks have always known, beer is too important.
Well, no. The Imperial Stout, first of all, did not taste like a stout. It tasted like a watery, slightly beery flavored molasses. So bad that for perhaps the first time in my life I was tempted to toss out beer that I had paid good money for into the garbage (I didn't. I used it in recipes instead, where the food could help mask the taste). The last time I remembered hating a beer this bad was when I was at a tasting sponsored by Tulsa's resident beer expert, Elliot Nelson (owner/operator of the always-reliable McNellie's pub in the downtown portion of our city), and we were given a sample of what Nelson called "extreme beer:" which are not really defined by anything other than the desire to push the envelope. Extreme hoppy taste, or extremely high alcohol content, or extremely strange flavors (often, in the last case, inspired by beers of past ages). And then I remembered that Nelson had mentioned Koch being somewhat impressed by the whole idea of extreme beer.
So, who to blame for what I think is this extremely bad idea? Well, maybe Koch himself, who may have coined the phrase. But I think the better candidate might be one Sam Calagione, owner of Dogfish Brewery in Delaware and the subject of this 2008 New Yorker profile by Burkhard Bilger. Calagione seems to have been a slightly fucked-up scion of American wealth (he got kicked out of his East Coast prep school for shenanigans)--a Holden Caulfield type, a bit of a lost soul, until he discovered his true calling in his twenties: which was to screw up American craft brewing by making really, really hoppy beers. As soon as I started to read about Calagione I recalled Dogfish from my days in Philly. It was one of those beers that I wanted to enjoy but just couldn't. Everything about it was funky and cool, right down to its name and its labels. The only problem was I didn't like the actual taste of the beer. Bilger's story is mostly hagiographic, but for me, the key quote is a negative one from Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery (which makes some good beers):
"When a brewer says, ‘This has more hops in it than anything you’ve had in your life—are you man enough to drink it?,’ it’s sort of like a chef saying, ‘This stew has more salt in it than anything you’ve ever had—are you man enough to eat it?’"
It's important that beer, like any other sort of food, taste interesting. But actually, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is that it taste good. Extreme beer seems to be the product of two different forces. The first is the inherent American tendency to think that bigger is better. The same attitude that gave us the Lincoln Navigator and Golden Corral has produced beer with an alcohol content upwards of 20 percent. The second is the need of the modern beer aficianado to prove cultural capital through drinking beer with "complex" or "interesting" tastes (or sometimes, "notes," as though we were describing wine.) When I was at the beer festival in Montreal earlier this summer, there were a lot of beers that were aiming for this palate: most notably, Dieu de Ciel, whose Péché Mortel has achieved international recognition. But for my money Unibroue--as much as it has turned into a corporation--still has the best of the Quebec brews. Unibroue generally follows older styles, particularly from Belgium and France, and doesn't try to get too fancy.
Innovation is not bad per se (nor, for that matter, is excess), but there's problem, I think, when we start to value these things for their own sake, rather than establishing some other, competing standard for quality. Surrender that more rigorous standard, you end up with some asshole in Scotland making beer that's 55 per cent alcohol, stuck inside a Dead Squirrel. (Why not just drink some whisky? I guarantee it will taste better than that shit.)
We can't let this happen to beer. As Belgian monks have always known, beer is too important.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
The uses of bad literature
The idea for this post came when I was reading a Salon column several months ago (which I no longer find unfortunately, and therefore cannot link to) about what books not to bring to the beach with you this summer. It was titled "Worst Books Ever," or something like that, and it naturally got me to thinking about books that I've really, really hated. Which naturally got me to thinking about Olivier Pauvert's Noir. Now, it may be the case that I have hated a book more that Noir, but if so, that happened some time in my distant past, perhaps during my undergraduate years, and I must have blocked the moment from my memory. I hated Noir so much that about half of the way through I seriously considered just throwing it away, which is something I almost never do with a novel, both because I am almost pathologically addicted to plot, of almost any sort, and because I'm such a lazy bastard that when I put a sufficient amount of energy into a book (like, say, reading past the first page) I don't want to think that its all been wasted by not finishing it off. So I kept reading to the end, which fulfilled by expectations by being both as repulsive and banal as I thought it would be.
What makes Noir so bad? Not its prose style: since I read it in translation it wouldn't be fair for me to comment on that aspect of the book. It may be that Pauvert is a master of modern French, though I can't believe anyone this stupid could write lyrically in any language. Not its predictable politics either: progressive denunciations of corporate capitalism and racism are of course nothing new, but that particular sin certainly is not Pauvert's alone. Many other, and better, writers share it, but make up for the failing by being more subtle in their understanding of the human condition, or of interpersonal relationships, or of the nature between reality and artifice. The problem is not even in the overwrought depictions of violence that are a near constant element of the narrative. To be sure, the treatment of violence is something to make most readers queasy, because you get the same sense with Pauvert as you do in a movie like Natural Born Killers: that these depictions are consciously undertaken with an eye toward critique, but unconsciously the artist (Pauvert in one case, Stone in the other) is actually getting off on them, or at least pandering to them.
No, in the end what moves Noir past mediocre or even bad literature into truly terrible literature is the moral incoherence at the center of it. On the one hand, Pauvert clearly wants to be the next Michel Houellebecq, an enfant terrible of letters who shocks the elders but entrances the younger generation with his stylish cynicism. Only he doesn't have Houellebecq's balls, so his targets are all what one would expect of a well-read but not particularly imaginative teenager. Screeds against God, claims about the meaningless of the universe: these are not going to épater anyone at this point. If you want the cultural cachet that comes with transgression, then do something that is actually going to piss people off, like Houellebecq does: make fun of post-60 political pretensions, say something nasty about women, or non-Christian religions, or people of a darker hue. Pauvert can't make himself actually move beyond what would constitute the established boundaries of any conceivable audience for a book like this, so his "scandalous" pronouncements end up as reaffirmations of convention: he's a bourgeoisie in Nietzschean clothing, who wants to combine a 60s flower-child ethos with a nihilistic metaphysics and can't quite figure out (or maybe, can't admit) that the one position makes the other non-sensical. If nothing means anything, then the real hero of Pauvert's tale isn't the poor schlep we've been following through 200-odd pages. It's the amoral capitalist we meet at the end, the guy who's been pulling the strings all along, the one who can look on with equanimity as his wife and children are slaughtered. He's the real ubermensch, the one who's seen through the veil of human weakness (aka morality) that the rest of us use in order to avoid facing up to human existence with genuine courage.
So that's all I'm going to say about Noir (for now). The other part of this post deals with the book I was reading when I read the original essay: Porius, by the modernist Welsh poet and novelist John Cowper Powys. The first thing you should know about Porius, if you're thinking about reading it, is that it is 750 pages long. The second thing you should know is that it is filled with sentences like this: "Even without this new light the upward-spurting flame from the fire tended by the Derwydd would have been in itself sufficient illumination to reveal the pitiful contortion, like that of a child about to cry, that convulsed Llew's face; and her blow was followed by an immediate revulsion of pity, and snatching at his hand, the girl moved straight towards the dirty blanket leanding him gently with her and not forgetting, as her eyes encountered Brochvael's before the curtain closed behind them, to touch her breast with a significant smile, as if to remind her friend of the presence in that warm place of his rag-sheathed dagger." (Just curious. At what point in reading that did you start to wonder about what you were going to make for dinner tonight?)
According to the introduction to the story, Powys considered Porius--essentially a retelling of the Arthurian legend with the historical novel genre--as his magnum opus. He worked on it for over fifteen years. This explains, it does not excuse, his inability to edit either the story or his prose. The American publisher he sent it to, Simon and Shuster, mailed it back with the comment, " over-written and undicepherable," which is not an unfair description of a great deal of the book. At the beginning of the story is a Tolstoyan list of characters, in unpronounceable Welsh rather than unpronounceable Russian. Many of them--Medrawd, Gwennydd, Myrddin Wyllt--are Powys' Welsh versions of more common English names--Mordred, Guiniverre, Merlin respectively--a fact I didn't cotton onto until I was about two-thirds of the way through. Also, it was so complicated moving back and forth from the text to the initial cast of characters that I eventually just gave up. He creates a whole new word, cavorseniargize. Despite the fact that it plays a fairly important role in conveying the personality of the main character, after finishing the book I am still at a loss as to describe what the word means, or even how it might sound if spoken.
Nor are these complications the only major problem with the book. Perhaps more damaging, in the end, is Powys' anachronistic depiction of his main characters. They are not, despite the setting and plot, Romanized Britons of fifth century AD. Rather, they are twentieth-century English bohemians: intensely concerned with their personal feelings and subjective reactions to events. They are people of the text, not of an oral culture which surely would have been the actual historical context of the people who inhabited Wales in the year 499.
And yet, having said all of this, if someone were to ask me if I would recommend this book, and if that person were someone I respected, I would almost certainly say yes, for a least two reasons. First, because of the way that Powys both understands and is able to communicate a relationship between human experience and the world that it seems to me we have lost, and that is essential to regain if we are to avoid eventually destroying ourselves or our descendants. In reviews he is often compared to Garcia Marquez and the magical realists, but these comparisons seem to me to fundamentally miss the point. In Powys' history, nothing happens that, strictly speaking, could not be accepted by any modern materialist: even when characters see instances of supposed magic, it is generally conceded that there is at least the possibility they are only being fooled by their minds, or the angle of the sun on a rock. The closest I can get to labeling Powys' universe is to call it one of realistic mysticism. He does not so much accept miracles and spirits as to see through the veil of ordinary reality into something deeper, more beautiful, more wild. His "super-naturalism" is exactly that: part of the natural world but at the same time superseding it. Beyond it, more of it. His trees, his rivers, his animals, his humans: they are themselves and more than themselves. They are at one and the same time both the copies of the Idea, and the Idea itself.
The other valuable aspect of the book is Powys' critique of Christianity. Speaking as a Christian believer, it is a relief to find someone who can actually articulate an intelligent challenge to the faith, in distinction to metaphysical midgets like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. To be sure, the author loads the dice: all his Christian characters are dogmatic bullies or neurotic gits. But that's fair enough, in a way: Chesterton loads the dice too. While the main characters' briefs again Christianity are historically unconvincing, as philosophical arguments they at least make a sympathetic and persuasive case against the Christian worldview, on the only intelligent grounds, which are not epistemological but moral.
And then, finally, I came to be more sympathetic even to Powys' crazy prose style. At least, I managed to produce a hypothesis that did not simply chalk things up to incompetence. What Powys might have been trying to do, I think, is to craft a prose that paralleled the oral poetry of the original oral sources, with their overloaded physical descriptions and characterizations. It didn't work in the end because oral narrative does not really translate that well into textual narrative. What works in the one medium does not work in the other. But perhaps Powys might be given credit for an heroic, and necessarily doomed, attempt.
I once heard that Louis L'Amour had claimed never to have read a bad book, which I thought was about as dumb a thing as I would expect Louis L'Amour to say. But maybe a case can be be made that there are no worthless books. Some, like Noir, they can help illuminate just why a set of ideas (in Pauvert's case, certain fascistic tendencies on the modern left) are incoherent. Others, like Porius, have a great deal of value despite some very obvious faults, and in the end may have more of an impact upon those who read than much more skillful tales.
What makes Noir so bad? Not its prose style: since I read it in translation it wouldn't be fair for me to comment on that aspect of the book. It may be that Pauvert is a master of modern French, though I can't believe anyone this stupid could write lyrically in any language. Not its predictable politics either: progressive denunciations of corporate capitalism and racism are of course nothing new, but that particular sin certainly is not Pauvert's alone. Many other, and better, writers share it, but make up for the failing by being more subtle in their understanding of the human condition, or of interpersonal relationships, or of the nature between reality and artifice. The problem is not even in the overwrought depictions of violence that are a near constant element of the narrative. To be sure, the treatment of violence is something to make most readers queasy, because you get the same sense with Pauvert as you do in a movie like Natural Born Killers: that these depictions are consciously undertaken with an eye toward critique, but unconsciously the artist (Pauvert in one case, Stone in the other) is actually getting off on them, or at least pandering to them.
No, in the end what moves Noir past mediocre or even bad literature into truly terrible literature is the moral incoherence at the center of it. On the one hand, Pauvert clearly wants to be the next Michel Houellebecq, an enfant terrible of letters who shocks the elders but entrances the younger generation with his stylish cynicism. Only he doesn't have Houellebecq's balls, so his targets are all what one would expect of a well-read but not particularly imaginative teenager. Screeds against God, claims about the meaningless of the universe: these are not going to épater anyone at this point. If you want the cultural cachet that comes with transgression, then do something that is actually going to piss people off, like Houellebecq does: make fun of post-60 political pretensions, say something nasty about women, or non-Christian religions, or people of a darker hue. Pauvert can't make himself actually move beyond what would constitute the established boundaries of any conceivable audience for a book like this, so his "scandalous" pronouncements end up as reaffirmations of convention: he's a bourgeoisie in Nietzschean clothing, who wants to combine a 60s flower-child ethos with a nihilistic metaphysics and can't quite figure out (or maybe, can't admit) that the one position makes the other non-sensical. If nothing means anything, then the real hero of Pauvert's tale isn't the poor schlep we've been following through 200-odd pages. It's the amoral capitalist we meet at the end, the guy who's been pulling the strings all along, the one who can look on with equanimity as his wife and children are slaughtered. He's the real ubermensch, the one who's seen through the veil of human weakness (aka morality) that the rest of us use in order to avoid facing up to human existence with genuine courage.
So that's all I'm going to say about Noir (for now). The other part of this post deals with the book I was reading when I read the original essay: Porius, by the modernist Welsh poet and novelist John Cowper Powys. The first thing you should know about Porius, if you're thinking about reading it, is that it is 750 pages long. The second thing you should know is that it is filled with sentences like this: "Even without this new light the upward-spurting flame from the fire tended by the Derwydd would have been in itself sufficient illumination to reveal the pitiful contortion, like that of a child about to cry, that convulsed Llew's face; and her blow was followed by an immediate revulsion of pity, and snatching at his hand, the girl moved straight towards the dirty blanket leanding him gently with her and not forgetting, as her eyes encountered Brochvael's before the curtain closed behind them, to touch her breast with a significant smile, as if to remind her friend of the presence in that warm place of his rag-sheathed dagger." (Just curious. At what point in reading that did you start to wonder about what you were going to make for dinner tonight?)
According to the introduction to the story, Powys considered Porius--essentially a retelling of the Arthurian legend with the historical novel genre--as his magnum opus. He worked on it for over fifteen years. This explains, it does not excuse, his inability to edit either the story or his prose. The American publisher he sent it to, Simon and Shuster, mailed it back with the comment, " over-written and undicepherable," which is not an unfair description of a great deal of the book. At the beginning of the story is a Tolstoyan list of characters, in unpronounceable Welsh rather than unpronounceable Russian. Many of them--Medrawd, Gwennydd, Myrddin Wyllt--are Powys' Welsh versions of more common English names--Mordred, Guiniverre, Merlin respectively--a fact I didn't cotton onto until I was about two-thirds of the way through. Also, it was so complicated moving back and forth from the text to the initial cast of characters that I eventually just gave up. He creates a whole new word, cavorseniargize. Despite the fact that it plays a fairly important role in conveying the personality of the main character, after finishing the book I am still at a loss as to describe what the word means, or even how it might sound if spoken.
Nor are these complications the only major problem with the book. Perhaps more damaging, in the end, is Powys' anachronistic depiction of his main characters. They are not, despite the setting and plot, Romanized Britons of fifth century AD. Rather, they are twentieth-century English bohemians: intensely concerned with their personal feelings and subjective reactions to events. They are people of the text, not of an oral culture which surely would have been the actual historical context of the people who inhabited Wales in the year 499.
And yet, having said all of this, if someone were to ask me if I would recommend this book, and if that person were someone I respected, I would almost certainly say yes, for a least two reasons. First, because of the way that Powys both understands and is able to communicate a relationship between human experience and the world that it seems to me we have lost, and that is essential to regain if we are to avoid eventually destroying ourselves or our descendants. In reviews he is often compared to Garcia Marquez and the magical realists, but these comparisons seem to me to fundamentally miss the point. In Powys' history, nothing happens that, strictly speaking, could not be accepted by any modern materialist: even when characters see instances of supposed magic, it is generally conceded that there is at least the possibility they are only being fooled by their minds, or the angle of the sun on a rock. The closest I can get to labeling Powys' universe is to call it one of realistic mysticism. He does not so much accept miracles and spirits as to see through the veil of ordinary reality into something deeper, more beautiful, more wild. His "super-naturalism" is exactly that: part of the natural world but at the same time superseding it. Beyond it, more of it. His trees, his rivers, his animals, his humans: they are themselves and more than themselves. They are at one and the same time both the copies of the Idea, and the Idea itself.
The other valuable aspect of the book is Powys' critique of Christianity. Speaking as a Christian believer, it is a relief to find someone who can actually articulate an intelligent challenge to the faith, in distinction to metaphysical midgets like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. To be sure, the author loads the dice: all his Christian characters are dogmatic bullies or neurotic gits. But that's fair enough, in a way: Chesterton loads the dice too. While the main characters' briefs again Christianity are historically unconvincing, as philosophical arguments they at least make a sympathetic and persuasive case against the Christian worldview, on the only intelligent grounds, which are not epistemological but moral.
And then, finally, I came to be more sympathetic even to Powys' crazy prose style. At least, I managed to produce a hypothesis that did not simply chalk things up to incompetence. What Powys might have been trying to do, I think, is to craft a prose that paralleled the oral poetry of the original oral sources, with their overloaded physical descriptions and characterizations. It didn't work in the end because oral narrative does not really translate that well into textual narrative. What works in the one medium does not work in the other. But perhaps Powys might be given credit for an heroic, and necessarily doomed, attempt.
I once heard that Louis L'Amour had claimed never to have read a bad book, which I thought was about as dumb a thing as I would expect Louis L'Amour to say. But maybe a case can be be made that there are no worthless books. Some, like Noir, they can help illuminate just why a set of ideas (in Pauvert's case, certain fascistic tendencies on the modern left) are incoherent. Others, like Porius, have a great deal of value despite some very obvious faults, and in the end may have more of an impact upon those who read than much more skillful tales.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
The Internet doesn't make you stupid: but celebrity just might
Last week, the New York Times published a op-ed contribution by Steven Pinker, dismissing the possibility that the Internet is making us dumber by the day. I have to say, that when I first heard about the idea myself I was pretty dubious. The title of Nicholas Carr's essay for The Atlantic, "Is Google Making us Stupid?" was a turn-off. Like Pinker, this way of framing the matter reminded me of many earlier panics over new media forms, including but not limited to the penny press, comic books, rock and roll, Hollywood movies, and television.
But Carr's more recent effort in Wired magazine struck me as making at least a plausible argument (maybe it's just a case of getting a better headline writer). It's seems reasonable to assume that media have some sort of impact on how we think. It may not be universally bad, or good (nor does Carr argue otherwise, at least in the new article). Still, it seems worth a look into the matter, at least.
For Pinker it's all bunkum. The idea that we might be seeing negative effects on intelligence due to modern media use is belied, he thinks, by the success of modern science. Also, other intellectual activities, like philosophy, cultural criticism, and history, are "flourishing." As to the notion that media change the way our brains work: "cognitive neuroscientists" simply "roll their eyes at such talk," since it overestimates the effect that experience can have on the functioning of our brains.
Some problems with Pinker's argument here: first, it's always a mistake to use widespread social trends--like scientific work, or crime statistics, or IQ scores, or divorce rates, or measures of political cynicism--as convincing proof of anything, pro or con. So many different factors could be at play, and it's not always clear (as in the case of IQ tests) that you are necessarily measuring what you think you are measuring. Moreover, claims such as "scientific progress is dizzying," or "philosophical work is flourishing" are so subjective that they are impossible to support in any rigorous manner. As a working social scientist, I would certainly take issue with the idea that current work in my own field or in related fields like sociology or political science is particularly impressive. Much of it is focused on answering very narrow questions, based on theories developed some time ago. It is rare any more to find a thinker of the stature of Weber or Durkheim, or even Goffman or Geertz. Indeed, the state of the field seems to fit very well with Kuhn's description of "normal science." It makes for a lot of publications, but not necessarily great scientific insights.
Even more infuriating is the fact that Pinker, a tenured professor of psychology, feels no need to cite any actual empirical work to support his argument, beyond the vague gesture towards the opinions of certain unnamed cognitive neuroscientists (in marked contrast, I would note, to Carr). At best this is sloppy, but coming from a man who uses science, and the scientific method, as rhetorical tools with which to dismiss other, competing claims to truth, the better description, I think, would be hypocrisy.
But Carr's more recent effort in Wired magazine struck me as making at least a plausible argument (maybe it's just a case of getting a better headline writer). It's seems reasonable to assume that media have some sort of impact on how we think. It may not be universally bad, or good (nor does Carr argue otherwise, at least in the new article). Still, it seems worth a look into the matter, at least.
For Pinker it's all bunkum. The idea that we might be seeing negative effects on intelligence due to modern media use is belied, he thinks, by the success of modern science. Also, other intellectual activities, like philosophy, cultural criticism, and history, are "flourishing." As to the notion that media change the way our brains work: "cognitive neuroscientists" simply "roll their eyes at such talk," since it overestimates the effect that experience can have on the functioning of our brains.
Some problems with Pinker's argument here: first, it's always a mistake to use widespread social trends--like scientific work, or crime statistics, or IQ scores, or divorce rates, or measures of political cynicism--as convincing proof of anything, pro or con. So many different factors could be at play, and it's not always clear (as in the case of IQ tests) that you are necessarily measuring what you think you are measuring. Moreover, claims such as "scientific progress is dizzying," or "philosophical work is flourishing" are so subjective that they are impossible to support in any rigorous manner. As a working social scientist, I would certainly take issue with the idea that current work in my own field or in related fields like sociology or political science is particularly impressive. Much of it is focused on answering very narrow questions, based on theories developed some time ago. It is rare any more to find a thinker of the stature of Weber or Durkheim, or even Goffman or Geertz. Indeed, the state of the field seems to fit very well with Kuhn's description of "normal science." It makes for a lot of publications, but not necessarily great scientific insights.
Even more infuriating is the fact that Pinker, a tenured professor of psychology, feels no need to cite any actual empirical work to support his argument, beyond the vague gesture towards the opinions of certain unnamed cognitive neuroscientists (in marked contrast, I would note, to Carr). At best this is sloppy, but coming from a man who uses science, and the scientific method, as rhetorical tools with which to dismiss other, competing claims to truth, the better description, I think, would be hypocrisy.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Attention all journalists. Stop with the name-dropping
This recent article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, about a new food movement in France that wants to liven up that country's cuisine, reminded me of one of the more annoying tics of modern journalism. If the technique has a name I am not aware of it, but the best way to describe, it is as "description-through-allusion."
It happens a lot in reviews, particularly of work by newer artists or ones that could be expected to be unfamiliar to readers, in which case the writer will describe the music or plot or style with reference to some older, better-known artist (though not too well-known, for reasons that we'll get to in a second). So, some clever Midwestern wordsmith with a penchant for good hooks becomes "the Elvis Costello of Ames, Iowa," or a young postmodern male novelist is described as "Borges-meets-David Byrne," or "the love child of Italo Calvino and the Rolling Stones." In Gopnik's case, he's decided to characterize every Frenchwoman he meets in the story by reference to some French actress of the past. One reminds him of Brigitte Fossey, another of Bardot, yet another of a "young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani." Also, one of the cooks is compared to Danton, and then a whole host of them to various figures in the French New Wave. By the end you get the idea even Gopnik thinks it's a little silly, and is doing a bit of a self-parody.
It's easy to see why journalists do this. It's a reliable method for describing things or people without having to sit down and really think about what this person looks like, or what this song is trying to do. Also, its a quick and dirty way of establishing a certain level of sophistication: which is why the figures need to be known well enough to get the point across but not so well known that just anyone could have thought up the comparison. But it's still lazy, and no, Gopnik doesn't get any points for realizing that he's doing it. That's another really annoying aspect to modern journalism: trying to foreclose criticism by letting the reader know that you know what's going on, and then presenting this as some kind of postmodern self-irony. Don't tell me that you know it's wrong while you're busy doing it: just don't do it.
It happens a lot in reviews, particularly of work by newer artists or ones that could be expected to be unfamiliar to readers, in which case the writer will describe the music or plot or style with reference to some older, better-known artist (though not too well-known, for reasons that we'll get to in a second). So, some clever Midwestern wordsmith with a penchant for good hooks becomes "the Elvis Costello of Ames, Iowa," or a young postmodern male novelist is described as "Borges-meets-David Byrne," or "the love child of Italo Calvino and the Rolling Stones." In Gopnik's case, he's decided to characterize every Frenchwoman he meets in the story by reference to some French actress of the past. One reminds him of Brigitte Fossey, another of Bardot, yet another of a "young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani." Also, one of the cooks is compared to Danton, and then a whole host of them to various figures in the French New Wave. By the end you get the idea even Gopnik thinks it's a little silly, and is doing a bit of a self-parody.
It's easy to see why journalists do this. It's a reliable method for describing things or people without having to sit down and really think about what this person looks like, or what this song is trying to do. Also, its a quick and dirty way of establishing a certain level of sophistication: which is why the figures need to be known well enough to get the point across but not so well known that just anyone could have thought up the comparison. But it's still lazy, and no, Gopnik doesn't get any points for realizing that he's doing it. That's another really annoying aspect to modern journalism: trying to foreclose criticism by letting the reader know that you know what's going on, and then presenting this as some kind of postmodern self-irony. Don't tell me that you know it's wrong while you're busy doing it: just don't do it.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
When bigotry is, and when it isn't
Several weeks ago the State of Arizona passed a law aimed at illegal immigration, which has so excited the sensibilities of educated America (NB: not just liberal America) that it has provoked calls for boycotts of the state, and I think maybe even the baseball team. We're all properly outraged by those rednecks living down there in Phoenix and Tucson. They didn't celebrate MLK's birthday either, you know.
Okay, so the people of Arizona are bigots (not all of them, prolly. Just the middle-aged white Republicans.) Where it gets weird is when we pass over the ocean a few days later, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain gets caught, on what he thought was a dead mic, calling a middle-aged women from the Northern English town of Rochdale a bigot. This "gaffe," as the newspapers are now calling it, is so serious that Labour's support has cratered in the days since it was aired. "How dare you diss Mrs. Duffy? That's my aunt," reads a headline in the London Times.
Now, it was true that Gillian Duffy didn't actually tell Gordon Brown that he should make all immigrants carry their papers on them at all times, and allow police to stop anyone who they thought was in the country illegally. What she asked him, essentially, was why he wasn't doing those things. But Gillian Duffy is not a bigot. Or at least, it's wrong to accuse her of being a bigot. So why is that?
I offer three possible explanations:
1. Brown's comments fit the classic Kinsley-esque definition of a gaffe, which is when a politician accidently tells the truth. In this case, the truth would be that Duffy is a bigot, only you're not supposed to say so, and especially not during an election.
2. Arizona voters are bigots, and Duffy is not, because white Southern Americans are probably all racists, if you scratch them hard enough, whereas white northern English working class people are all salt-of-the-earth miners and miners' wives who spend their spare time singing "The Red Flag" in their rocking chairs, waiting for the tea to boil, knitting scarves for the strikers.
3. Gillian Duffy is not a bigot because she is a person. She clearly has done some good in the world. She is worried, understandably, about where the money is going to come from to pay for her living expenses now that her husband has died and she is on a pension. She's worried about crime, because she is old and feels threatened. She is worried about education for younger people and the world that her grandchildren will inherit. Whatever her views on immigration, she is more than that. The Arizona voters, on the other hand, are simply the Arizona voters. A big, amorphous bloc of people with no personality or face, with the exception of the noxious Republican governor who signed the bill into law. They can safely be demonized because we don't actually have to answer to any particular person for doing so.
I like all of my explanations but I like the last one the best because it gets to the problem that critics of racism and bigotry have when they talk about racism and bigotry. Very few racists--at least, very few of the ones that I know, and I know quite a few--wear sheriffs' hats and walk around spitting tobacca' juice and swinging baseball bats and hitting colored people over the head just for their daily exercise. They are often otherwise decent people who are afraid, or who are busy and therefore don't care to think too hard about issues like immigration policy, and so some kinds of ready-made, handy explanations appeal to them. So they create stereotypes about who the problematic people are, and what needs to be done about them.
But they're not the only ones who dream up stereotypes, I don't think.
Okay, so the people of Arizona are bigots (not all of them, prolly. Just the middle-aged white Republicans.) Where it gets weird is when we pass over the ocean a few days later, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain gets caught, on what he thought was a dead mic, calling a middle-aged women from the Northern English town of Rochdale a bigot. This "gaffe," as the newspapers are now calling it, is so serious that Labour's support has cratered in the days since it was aired. "How dare you diss Mrs. Duffy? That's my aunt," reads a headline in the London Times.
Now, it was true that Gillian Duffy didn't actually tell Gordon Brown that he should make all immigrants carry their papers on them at all times, and allow police to stop anyone who they thought was in the country illegally. What she asked him, essentially, was why he wasn't doing those things. But Gillian Duffy is not a bigot. Or at least, it's wrong to accuse her of being a bigot. So why is that?
I offer three possible explanations:
1. Brown's comments fit the classic Kinsley-esque definition of a gaffe, which is when a politician accidently tells the truth. In this case, the truth would be that Duffy is a bigot, only you're not supposed to say so, and especially not during an election.
2. Arizona voters are bigots, and Duffy is not, because white Southern Americans are probably all racists, if you scratch them hard enough, whereas white northern English working class people are all salt-of-the-earth miners and miners' wives who spend their spare time singing "The Red Flag" in their rocking chairs, waiting for the tea to boil, knitting scarves for the strikers.
3. Gillian Duffy is not a bigot because she is a person. She clearly has done some good in the world. She is worried, understandably, about where the money is going to come from to pay for her living expenses now that her husband has died and she is on a pension. She's worried about crime, because she is old and feels threatened. She is worried about education for younger people and the world that her grandchildren will inherit. Whatever her views on immigration, she is more than that. The Arizona voters, on the other hand, are simply the Arizona voters. A big, amorphous bloc of people with no personality or face, with the exception of the noxious Republican governor who signed the bill into law. They can safely be demonized because we don't actually have to answer to any particular person for doing so.
I like all of my explanations but I like the last one the best because it gets to the problem that critics of racism and bigotry have when they talk about racism and bigotry. Very few racists--at least, very few of the ones that I know, and I know quite a few--wear sheriffs' hats and walk around spitting tobacca' juice and swinging baseball bats and hitting colored people over the head just for their daily exercise. They are often otherwise decent people who are afraid, or who are busy and therefore don't care to think too hard about issues like immigration policy, and so some kinds of ready-made, handy explanations appeal to them. So they create stereotypes about who the problematic people are, and what needs to be done about them.
But they're not the only ones who dream up stereotypes, I don't think.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
The continued relevance of physical space in the postmodern global village
'Round about now, my sister is driving along the coast of Oregon or maybe Northern California with her new boyfriend, which is not what she is supposed to be doing. What she is supposed to be doing is recuperating from having just run the London Marathon. You already know why she's not in London. One of the many disruptions of the big ash cloud of 2010.
(As a side note: Sort of strange how the world media covered the event. At first it was all, "huh, this is kind of weird." Then increasingly it became, "MONEY IS BEING LOST HERE. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!" And then, "Fucking pussies who won't go up in the fucking air with their fucking big jets. Fucking losers.")
Long time ago, Marshall McLuhan observed that the world was becoming a "Global Village." As is the case with pretty much everything that McLuhan ever wrote, the idea is both useful and also capable of leading us completely astray. To be sure, the modern media have allowed us to connect more easily with people living vast distances from us, and this has caused profound changes in how we interact with both those distant others and the not-so-distant others who share our physical space. It has changed how we think of ourselves, how we construct our social identities. And it has allowed for the near-instant transmission of some kinds of information, a feature of modern life that in turn has been essential to the rise of global markets.
But we can, and we do, take it too far. What media can't do is that they cannot transfer the large packets of information that we call human bodies. And since it is these packets that, in the end, most concern us--although we sometimes manage to forget, or ignore that--the effect of all these transmissions of electronic bytes is not exactly what we imagine it to be. Other things that cannot be sent over fiber optic cables--steaks, tulips, onions, magazines, automobiles, t-shirts, sneakers, living room sofas, video cameras, iphones. The modern world has actually not made distance disappear, or even made it irrelevant. It's just made our experience of it different. It's always good to have these sort of disruptive environmental events take place at unpredictable times to help us see that the new world we've been so busy building for the past 50 years has actually not managed to overcome certain fundamental realities of human existence. You can buy your plane ticket and reserve your hotel room and surf to find the best place to eat in Porto but if the pilots strike, or an earthquake tears up the runway, you're not going anywhere, buddy.
The continued relevance of space--and of embodied experiences--is why most people, if they have the choice, still opt to live in places like Manhattan and Paris and Prague instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Estevan, Saskatchewan. Those latter spots are wired: you could order up some genuine Chicago-style deep dish and get it delivered to your door in a day or two if you really wanted. But somehow it just wouldn't be the same.
Modern media discourse ignores this obvious point because it needs to sell us on the bogus notion that the networked world is making the world "flatter," making every place the same, thus making opportunities increasingly equal for all. The battle against the takeover of our lives by people in places far away from us requires that we periodically remind ourselves of what a crock of shit this has always been, and remains.
(As a side note: Sort of strange how the world media covered the event. At first it was all, "huh, this is kind of weird." Then increasingly it became, "MONEY IS BEING LOST HERE. SOMEONE DO SOMETHING!" And then, "Fucking pussies who won't go up in the fucking air with their fucking big jets. Fucking losers.")
Long time ago, Marshall McLuhan observed that the world was becoming a "Global Village." As is the case with pretty much everything that McLuhan ever wrote, the idea is both useful and also capable of leading us completely astray. To be sure, the modern media have allowed us to connect more easily with people living vast distances from us, and this has caused profound changes in how we interact with both those distant others and the not-so-distant others who share our physical space. It has changed how we think of ourselves, how we construct our social identities. And it has allowed for the near-instant transmission of some kinds of information, a feature of modern life that in turn has been essential to the rise of global markets.
But we can, and we do, take it too far. What media can't do is that they cannot transfer the large packets of information that we call human bodies. And since it is these packets that, in the end, most concern us--although we sometimes manage to forget, or ignore that--the effect of all these transmissions of electronic bytes is not exactly what we imagine it to be. Other things that cannot be sent over fiber optic cables--steaks, tulips, onions, magazines, automobiles, t-shirts, sneakers, living room sofas, video cameras, iphones. The modern world has actually not made distance disappear, or even made it irrelevant. It's just made our experience of it different. It's always good to have these sort of disruptive environmental events take place at unpredictable times to help us see that the new world we've been so busy building for the past 50 years has actually not managed to overcome certain fundamental realities of human existence. You can buy your plane ticket and reserve your hotel room and surf to find the best place to eat in Porto but if the pilots strike, or an earthquake tears up the runway, you're not going anywhere, buddy.
The continued relevance of space--and of embodied experiences--is why most people, if they have the choice, still opt to live in places like Manhattan and Paris and Prague instead of Tulsa, Oklahoma, or Estevan, Saskatchewan. Those latter spots are wired: you could order up some genuine Chicago-style deep dish and get it delivered to your door in a day or two if you really wanted. But somehow it just wouldn't be the same.
Modern media discourse ignores this obvious point because it needs to sell us on the bogus notion that the networked world is making the world "flatter," making every place the same, thus making opportunities increasingly equal for all. The battle against the takeover of our lives by people in places far away from us requires that we periodically remind ourselves of what a crock of shit this has always been, and remains.
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