Discrimination, or the lack thereof

Is it "discrimination" to find tattoos repellent, especially on young women? At the gym I go to, I encounter female bodies with tattoos spread over the shoulders and back and even down the legs. My reaction: why do you want to disfigure what is otherwise a beautiful body? -- for some of the young women are very attractive. It is not a question I am going to find an answer to. I did a lot of stupid things in my twenties and even thirties. Thank God that tattoos were not "popular." I am sure that some of these young women will wonder one day what possessed them to spend so much money -- the same goes for smoking -- on these unsightly scribbles. After searching the internet for a tattoo image to include in this post, I found many disturbing ones and purposely selected a moderate one.

My initial question, however, comes down to the issue of "discrimination." Discrimination suggests making a judgment -- in my case, finding something repellent. What I am really saying, however, is that tattoos are not simply ugly but also a sign of downward social mobility. I am making a moral judgment -- and it is bad these days to make such judgments. Thus, in a public place like the gym, no one says out loud anything about the ugliness of tattoos. Like a lot of contemporary tendencies, the tattoo regime is ignored. It's as if people don't see it.

This issue of seeing is important. If we did not see, we would not be able to discriminate. Discrimination is regarded as bad, as in sexual or racial discrimination that considers certain humans as less than human. But the women in my gym with tattoos are not less than human; they are fully human. But IMHO they have made bad decisions. And what people don't want to admit publicly today is that some people have made bad decisions. Again, I have made bad decisions in my life, so one must resist thinking that others are "bad" people for doing what I might have done in the same circumstances.

The ability to discriminate, however, is at the core of aesthetic judgments and of judgments of taste, both of which concerned 18th-century philosophers, including Hume and Kant. We make distinctions between the works of Leonardo and Jeff Koons. It strikes me that the contemporary aversion to making judgments has affected our sense of beauty, to the detriment of our public spaces. Something like that must has been at the core of the objections several decades ago to the unsightly (to my eyes) structure of Richard Serra in downtown Manhattan. Most of the time we are forced to turn our eyes away from what we find repellent, to keep our judgments to ourselves, but there comes a time, as with Serra's "work," when something is so repellent that the objections overcome the argument that ugliness is something we must put up with.

Why the Jews didn't resist

The opening pages of a short story by the writer Edgardo Cozarinsky has caused me to think about a question people occasionally ask: Why were the Jews so passive? Why did they not rise up and defend themselves against the Nazis, especially in the camps where they outnumbered their guards? This question overlooks the fact that the majority of Jews in Germany were ordinary people, ordinary Germans.

The story, "Emigré Hotel," opens with the departure of a Greek-registered steamship from Lisbon for New York in October 1940. Among the passengers, feeling "a sense of loss and foreboding," were Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, and Hertha Pauli. Others who had already left from the port of Lisbon were Franz Werfel, Leon Feuchtwanger, Alfred Polgar (according to Wikipedia: "one of the most renowned intellectuals of the Vienna coffeehouses"),  Heinrich and Golo Mann, and Friderike Zweig (first wife of Stefan). On the ship, according to Cozarinksy, they lived in forced seclusion because of their status -- they had "sufficient funds to pay the extravagant price of a berth on this modest vessel" -- and played "the role of the last scions, emissaries, or survivors of European culture."

Instead of asking why the Jews were passive, I wonder why no one has ever asked this question: why did all the prominent people, whose opposition might have been crucial in combating the Nazis, turn tail and run? Why didn't they stay and resist? If they had, the Jews, too, would certainly have joined them. It was the intellectuals and artists and important people who were passive.

Since I wasn't alive in those terrible days and can't say that I would have behaved any better, I probably should not be criticizing those who went into exile. But the absence in Germany of intellectual opposition to the Nazis must have had an effect on the demoralization of the population, Jewish and otherwise.

Picture credit: The Paris Review

Academia's "extinction event"

The event referred to in the title of this post comes form a very long, logorrheic piece in the Chronicle Review of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Because there was no opportunity to post comments on the site, I am going to vent here concerning the pitiful self-laceration of the would-be academic, Andrew Kay by name, a freelance writer living in Madison, Wisconsin, who gained a Ph.D. some years back with a dissertation on 19th-century English poetry.

Kay was one of the losers in the academic job search, and his attendance and report of the annual MLA conference held at the beginning of this year were for "closure," as he puts it. Even after several years, he continues to long for the intellectual community he imagines that academia represents, such a community now being in the throes of extinction because of the decimation of departments of language and literature throughout the American realm. Nowhere in his overly long piece does it seem to occur to him that it was the so-called intellectual community that put itself out of business, beginning with deconstruction and all the other theoretical B.S. that invaded the profession in the 1970s.

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, it was the era of "Criticism,” which consisted of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which meant exposing the hidden or submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that was hidden below the overt surface of a novel or of poetry. Literary scholarship itself went about institutionalizing the rejection of the literary heritage. The deconstructive temper extended right down to the students, even if most of them could not have identified Jacques Derrida. The lesson the kids absorbed from their professors was that the values of the past, whether literary or historical, but especially of America, stank.

Such professors seemed to have forgotten that kids of eighteen and nineteen are idealistic. The humanities can reach them, if you can touch their idealism. But kill that idealism -- which deconstruction did -- and the kids ran away in droves. It didn't take Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, cutting the educational budget in that state to extinguish the humanities. The departments of literature, especially those of foreign languages, were no longer attracting buyers. The best and brightest students simply do not see the relevance of the humanities. Why should they when their professors seem so dismissive of the subjects they teach? Instead of teaching the "great" writers, there has been, among others things, the continuous imposition of an ideological agenda, best encapsulated in the second and third rate female writers that take up so much space in curricula. The current crop of students ventilates their idealism in phony political issues like climate change, a subject on which in academia there is ZERO debate. It is all "97 percent of scientists" all the time.

The academic community, the leading voices of which came of age in the 1970s, now sees a crisis in the humanities and bemoans the shift among students toward disciplines like economics, business, statistics. "Academic extinction" is not the right term for describing what happened. It is more like the sinking of the Titanic, a great pleasure boat that was supposed to offer a never-ending party for the lucky few who had managed to board.

Kay brings on the head of the MLA itself, Anne Ruggles Gere, a professor in the English department at the University of Michigan, who mentions the drop from 1,000 English majors to 200 during the previous eight years. She believes, however, that the profession is on a course correction, in the functioning of the MLA itself. "I think we need to do a lot more educating of faculty, and of English departments, about how to rethink what they’re doing. But I think it’s possible. We’re talking about smart people.” So smart. Why didn't the MLA point out the problem twenty-plus years ago, when it was obvious that literature had become secondary to ideology?

Image credit: Times Higher Education

The Other

Friends reading

In my previous post I discussed a piece by Javier Marías on the subject of friendships, in particular their ending. In the case of the Spanish writer, the end of earlier friendships came when people who were once like-minded went different ways politically. From what he says in the piece all these former friends, like himself, were on the Left side of the political spectrum, and the deviation from this side as they got older ("matured"?) has resulted in "disenchantment, quarrels, betrayal."

Those three nouns sum up the way I felt in two cases where friendships with others have ended, but the occasion was not because of our political differences. As I wrote in the previous post, one of the friends was a conservative, the other liberal. I have parted ways with them because they had truly betrayed me personally, in the process severing any good will I once felt for them. I do not despise them. Henceforth, they do not concern me at all. In contrast, I suspect in the case of Javier Marías that these former friends occupy him too much mentally, that their supposed betrayals rankle.

These thoughts as a preface to the subject of this post, also inspired by another piece by Javier Marías from the same collection. The title of the piece is "For Me Alone to Read." Superficially, it has nothing to do with politics or betrayals. It concerns the sense of being soiled that one has in discovering that someone we dislike expresses enthusiasm for a writer whom we feel is "ours" alone.

I like the way he describes the private possession we experience on reading certain books, as if the author's intention was to address us specifically. Or, me, as JM emphasizes. In an earlier post, I wrote about the effects of childhood reading in providing us with a "map of life," and as JM writes this appropriation of a writer is felt most intensely in youth. It happens that if the particular writer becomes a cult writer, has too many enthusiasts, grows successful beyond the realm in which he was our personal discovery, we may  move on. All very true.

JM's subject, however, is the discovery that people we dislike, persons who "strike us as errant fools" or worse, have a passion for our writer. Mentioning Don Quixote, he writes that it is hard "to see people we consider to be utter idiots suddenly discovering one of our favorite authors and starting to quote from and to comment on him." Although JM retreats to ethical judgments to characterize such usurpers ("someone for whom we have little respect"), the subject is not individuals about whom most of the population is repulsed (say, Hitler or Putin), but about fellow humans. To his credit, JM realizes that he is speaking of subjective feelings rather than objective judgments and that others may think the same about him when he expiates on his own reading enthusiasms, thus taking him down a peg or two.

He does not go into whether our assessments of others, when they are making aesthetic determinations, are valid, i.e., whether the other person is in reality as disagreeable or foolish as he appears to oneself. To do so would force him to recognize a common humanity, to acknowledge that the other has something in common with him.

Common humanity, after all, is the basis, according to Kant, of the universality of judgment. Insofar as we all respond to something outside of ourselves -- art or the behavior of others -- we expect others to feel the same way. When we enthuse to our friends about a book or movie that we love, we expect that they too will love it. We feel discord in ourselves when they have a different opinion, for the universality of judgment means that we believe our judgments to be universally true and valid. When our friends disagree with us about novels or movies, we may let the matter go. But when people who are not our friends, who are in fact people whom we despise, we are disturbed by their concurrence with us.

What I am getting at is that ethical judgments are always aesthetic. This is evident today in politics. Whatever one may think about our current president, there is no way to arrive at an objective assessment of his presidency, as the media (left and right) are biased. People who dislike him, indeed hate him, bring out the language of ethics to attack him, but they are simply responding "aesthetically." He displeases them on a very visceral personal level. If this were not the case, why would thousands turn out to protest him in England, but no one turns out to protest Putin? I experienced this myself many years ago when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to the U.S. and gave a speech at Columbia University. Students gathered on the campus, as if a concert were taking place, and attentively watched the screen on which appeared the former president of Iran. The few protesters were kept outside the campus by police.

What does this have to do with "the Other"? For some reason conservative political figures (and their voters) are the Other. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, identified the Other as one of the conceptual bases of intersubjectivity, of the relations among people. That is taken verbatim from a Wikipedia piece (by the way, it is time to make a donation to the site), which goes on: "The condition and quality of Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self."

"Social identity" is the key term here, a very subjective state of affairs.

Enough for today.

Picture credit: PBS Parents

On the ending of friendships

I am reading a book of articles by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. These are occasional pieces that were penned for a newspaper in Spain, translated now into English as Between Eternities and Other Writings. I have read several of his novels and am very impressed with his craftsmanship, if, at the same time, the stories leave me cold. From the articles, I get the feeling that he is person who doesn't like b.s. and  who sees through political correctness and the various vanities of our age. At the same time, he belongs to the species of European secular liberal who disdains religion and conservatism.

One of the articles, "Old Friends," has given me much to think about. He begins by mentioning how, over time, one loses touch with people with whom one was once evidently close, say, during one's youth. (In a related piece, he writes of "the ghosts" in his 30-year-old address book, for instance, names whose faces he cannot recall or who have since died.) He alludes to the reason for losing touch by mentioning that those earlier friendships were marked by the idealistic and combative stance of university students and that, in time, some of the same idealists now defend attitudes and people that they loathed thirty years earlier. The loss is thus the result of "disenchantment, quarrels, betrayals."

While he insists that he is not against people "changing and adapting and modifying and coming to see things differently," he finds that there are "limits that 'converts' fail to respect, a long path that needs to be traveled." "Sudden transformations are unacceptable," occurring as if by magic or overnight.

Since I came of age in the early 1970s, attending graduate school at the University of Texas with lots of idealistic and combative folks, I have had plenty of experience with people who, in my view, are stuck in the same combative and idealistic frame of mind as they were in the 1970s. They are people who would call me conservative, in fact have accused me of "becoming conservative." I would have to say, however, that my attitudes today are no different from what they were in the 1970s.

It just so happened that in 1975 I went to live in Japan for several years. On my return an enormous shift in cultural and social norms had taken place, and my friends from the pre-1970 days simply went along with this shift, accepting every hair-brained idea that has come down the turnpike, resulting in an ever widening extremity of social and cultural attitudes. Very few people in the early 1970s, for instance, talked about "dead white males." Very few even thought about "transgender rights." Or homosexual marriage. Since the 1970s there has been a continuous pushing back against limits, and anyone who objects is characterized as "bigoted." The idealists of my generation have simply marched in time and in tune, enlarging their identity. Had I not been away from the U.S. for several years, I might have become "progressive" myself. In contrast, my attitudes remain the same as they were back then. I have not "evolved."

Moreover, I don't have a problem maintaining friendships with people with different political views. Some former friends have dropped me, but I continue to like those with whom I am still in contact for personal qualities that have stood the test of time, not because we share the same political views. In fact, of two friends with whom I have broken in recent years -- because of what I consider betrayal on their part -- one is a conservative, the other a liberal. When that break occurs, it happens quickly and is not the result of simmering differences. I don't allow myself to be hurt or disappointed by the betrayal or to linger over it -- or even think badly of the person. Just move on. Remove them from your address book. Because of the peripatetic existence I have lived, I don't have a huge number of friends. Thus, I try to hang on to the few who remain and to cherish them, despite our differences.

Picture credit: New York magazine

Utopians ad infinitum

Argentinian Utopians

Recently seen, a title of a book under review in the New York Times Book Review:

GIVE PEOPLE MONEY: HOW A UNIVERSAL INCOME WOULD END POVERTY, REVOLUTIONIZE WORK, AND REMAKE THE WORLD

The author of this book is Anne Lowrey. Some people never learn from history. Lowrey was born in 1984: that says it all.

Picture credit: Brujula Communications

Michiko Kakutani is Ignorant

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

The New Yorker, The Atlantic, among others, fell all over themselves two years ago to heap praise on the New York Times book reviewer -- they actually referred to her as a "book critic" -- after her 38-year sojourn on the book page of the newspaper. To which I say: why didn't she leave earlier? Like practically every other regular writer for the Times, she was a predictable bore. Really, there should be term limits for these reviewers. Has any reader really profited from a review by Michiko Kakutani? I stopped reading her about twenty-five years ago (along with the Times itself). Well, today more evidence for her mediocrity.

A friend of mine subscribes to the New York Times and regularly gives me a pile of the Sunday book review (also a pathetic publication). So, today I went through the pile and found in the July 15 issue an interview with Kakutani, one of those front-of-the-publication features in which the first thing we learn is what books are currently on the interviewed's nightstand. When asked her opinion on "disappointing, overrated, just not good books," she replied: "I am hoping English department curriculums have changed since I was in college. I couldn't make it through Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Samuel Richardson's Clarissa."

A couple of comments. Kakutani is so out of it that she doesn't know that practically no English department, probably not even at an ivy league institution like Yale, where she went to school (40 years ago), includes either of those novels in its course offerings. Indeed, it is possible to get a graduate degree in English literature today without reading them. But what a breathtaking show of ignorance for a supposed "book critic." To be  critic means to be familiar with the history of literature. And in support of my contention that she is an ignoramus, another summer issue of the book review featured a book of essays by William Giraldi, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring. The reviewer (Nathaniel Rich) speaks of Giraldi as an enthusiast for high standards. He quotes Giraldi responding to Fifty Shades of Gray: "Do I really expect Americans to sit down with Adam Bede or Clarissa after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day? Pardon me, but yes, I do."

Well, put me down as not insisting on such reading for those contending with full-time jobs and domestic life, but for the "book critic" of the New York Times one would expect a bit more. A "book critic" is familiar with the history of literature, knows (as Nathaniel Rich writes) that "for a book to outlast its first breath, it must contend with all that has come before." Kakutani always struck me as being trapped by the time in which she lives.

What really brought home Kakutani's irrelevance is her new book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. The Guardian, not impressed by the book, calls it "an account of the mental malaise that made Trump possible, [in which Kakutani] explains him as a postmodern phenomenon, a product of the deconstructionist assault on absolutes that raged through American universities in the 1980s." Excuse me, Ms. Kakukani, did you not know what was going on back in the universities in those days? Why did not the New York Times "book critic extraordinaire" use her pulpit to excoriate this phenomenon back when it might have counted for something? Like the New York Times, Kakutani is totally irrelevant.

My criticism of her is impartial. I have not published a book that she might have reviewed, though I am happy to add here a few nuggets from published writers (this from Slate) who also agree on her ignorance: The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank."  Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.