Changing hearts and minds

I went to a presentation the other evening at Columbia University by a colleague of mine. The subject was the "anti-utilitarian movement" in France, which is probably a French intellectual movement that no one has heard of, maybe not even most French. As Wikipedia tells us, "Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that states that the best action is the one that maximizes utility," with "utility" usually defined in terms of the well-being of sentient entities. I suppose that Jeremy Bentham, founder of utilitarianism, meant here the well-being of humans. So, who on earth would be against (i.e., "anti") utilitarianism?

From what I gleaned from the presentation the objection comes from the crass correlation between the provision of welfare by the state as a way of minimizing social tensions. One should not take from this that the anti-utilitarians are conservative. No, the AUs are utopians, although some scholars, e.g., David Graeber, associates them with the Left. At least, this is what I get from his piece "Give It Away." "Giving" should be a gift, something freely disposed of, without any anticipation of a reward or even thanks. Even the provision of welfare anticipates a reward: the poor won't riot! From what I have read the AU movement derives its ideas from Marcel Mauss, who wrote a book called The Gift (available here in English). Mauss was Emile Durkheim's nephew and heir of his sociological theories, and The Gift "is the foundation for social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange." Mauss, besides being something of a socialist, was a scholar of so-called primitive societies that did not participate in the kinds of modern economic exchanges with which we expect a return for our money. We give a dollar; we expect something in return. Proceeding from Mauss, the AUs (again as I understand them) hold that we also owe something that might be called "social debt."

At the same time as I heard this talk I happened to be reading a novel by the Swedish writer Jonas Karlsson called The Invoice. It seems that "a big international agreement" has been signed by "politicians and leaders from different areas of society," in which it was agreed to tax people on the basis of their levels of happiness. After the taxes were collected, there would be a redistribution to those with negative scores, who would receive compensation for their unhappy lives. It was reckoned by the powers that be that the "happiest" would be people with high incomes, those who had been born with silver spoons in their mouths or otherwise had won life's lottery.

The first-person narrator of the novel, a very average man of 39 -- he works part time in a video store and has no girlfriend -- receives an invoice in the mail for 5,700,000 kroner. (That's U.S. $740,000.) He thinks this is a mistake: he has no money, no savings even, and has lived the most ordinary of lives. He doesn't even consider himself a happy person, but in the course of the novel you come to see that he is happy, that he enjoys simple pleasures (mint chocolate and raspberry ice cream, listening to the rain beat against the windows), in contrast to all the stressed-out folks who can't bear to get out of beds in the morning. Very funny, very touching. It's not surprising that a socialist state like Sweden would come up with something like this.

Don't I look like I care, esp. if you are an animal?

But wait. Why should money be redistributed to people who are unhappy because they have jobs they don't like or are stuck with partners they have come to loathe? Taxing the wealthy (are we presuming they are happy?) to ameliorate inequalities is one thing, but a tax on happiness? The principle, which is not really worked out in the novel, is that society gives us a certain amount of "wealth." (Elizabeth Warren would say that "you didn't built it.") In socialist Sweden that wealth would include all the goodies of the modern welfare state. Having enjoyed those one's entire life, the presumption is that one should be happy and that one should cough up when someone else is unhappy. Well, as I said, the principle is not well worked out. Nevertheless, I am aware that international busybodies are afoot with ideas to institute "international taxes" that would then contribute to the busybodies' desire to fix the world.

The AUs, although people of the Left, are not yet there. As I mentioned, I find them utopian. Their aim, like that of most utopians, is to change people's "thinking." Thus, when we give it would be because we wish to do so, not for crassly utilitarian motives or in anticipation of gratitude. Shades of Kant here.

We are all smiles now

When did I first notice that everyone was smiling, indeed laughing? It must have been when I returned from Japan, circa 1980. The TV commercial that most impressed me in this respect was for a soda -- Coke or Sprite. It showed a party of happy young people, on a beach perhaps. All were happy, all were smiling. I also noticed at that time that people were more gentle, especially with their kids. You noticed it on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I had come to live (and still reside).

I could not fail to notice a great change in the moral atmosphere of the U.S. Had I not been absent from the U.S. for several years at the end of the 1970s, this change might not have been so apparent to me. One seemingly small thing caught my attention immediately on my return. It was the kinder, gentler mood of child-raising that I observed. Parents, I noticed, constantly talked to their kids, even with babes in strollers. They had conversations with three- and four-year-olds, as if they were adults. They held hands with their children way beyond what one would have seen in the 1950s: fathers with girls on the verge of puberty, mothers with their growing sons. Little League teams were made up of girls and boys. Parents immediately demanded to know what their kids wanted on entering a store. Yes, a gentler, kinder world, one contrasting to the era in which my generation had been raised, when we had been required to eat all the vegetables on our plate at dinner and when our parents took the side of teachers, not of children.

It turns out that this small difference was really not so small at all, and it was a sign of the different priorities of my cohort going forward. Gentleness, kindness, after all, are virtues that are easy to practice when you never doubt that you will always have a roof over your head and enough to eat. And it is only one generation in American history that has been so fortunate in this respect. It was our values, those of the authentic “Sixties” generation — of tolerance and gentleness, of feeling good about ourselves — that now began to dominate American life.

It is perhaps not surprising that young people in TV commercials in 1980 looked so happy. The commercials, after all, were produced by my cohort, the people who were now doing well. We had entered "the institutions" by the early 1970s: the universities, the media, the professions. By 1980, however, the U.S. was entering an age of economic instability that still affects most Americans. Remember the oil crisis of 1973? The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, the U.S. had allowed itself to become dependent on oil imports.

The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” as it says in Rilke's poem. Indeed.

Instead, we continue to smile.

Picture credit: Coca Cola Journey

Supplanting Authority: the Enlightenment

Encyclopedias have been around for a long time. One of the earliest in the West was Pliny's Natural History. Pliny is a source of information, for instance, on Roman technology, engineering, gold mining in Spain, and so on. Although a personal creation, it represented a a compilation, as Pliny wrote, of 2,000 "facts" that he had gleaned from over 2,000 works by 200 writers. Other civilizations also produced encyclopedias, but, before printing, the collected knowledge of humanity was accessible only to the learned.

The early modern period produced a modification of the genre. Encyclopedias would henceforth provide the general public with the fruits of knowledge. Knowledge was to be accessible. Accessibility was enhanced with alphabetical entries and diagrams. The most famous project of this genre was that of Diderot and D'Alembert, Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, published during the years 1751 and 1772. It had a very grand purpose: to accumulate all the knowledge of the world. Clearly, many collaborators and contributors would be required for such a project, even more than Pliny had accessed for his Natural History.

Previously, knowledge had been institutionalized. The Church and the Crown were major institutions, and also the curators of what was known. One could say the same about craft guilds, which guarded their industrial secrets. The Encyclopédie showed how to make cloth, to dye, to brew, to produce horseshoes, and so on, processes that in the past had been closely held by practitioners in order to curtail competition. There was an aura surrounding such authority, as there was no appeal beyond them. The story of Galileo's troubles with the Inquisition are an instance of the pitfalls of seeking to offer an alternate version of institutionalized wisdom. So, along with the praiseworthy goal of enlightening the public, the authority of such traditional authorities would be undermined by demystifying knowledge, by making it accessible in readable form.  The idea was that individuals, instead of accepting the truth of a single authority, could read an article in the Encyclopédie, on which a number of learned scholars had contributed, and decide for themselves what constituted truth.

The perils of institutionalized knowledge

Until a few days ago, I had never thought much about the way that a collaborative work functioned to overcome or transform existing forms of authority. I attended a talk at Columbia University concerning the first alphabetically organized encyclopedia of Jewish law, the the Pahad Yitzhak, by the Italian rabbi and physician Isaac Lampronti (1679–1756).

I asked myself, however, whether a work that is produced by a gaggle of collaborators or contributors is any more "truthful" than the authority of a single instance. Today, for instance, 97 percent of scientists are said to agree that humans are responsible for global warming. But, back in Galileo's day, 97 percent of scientists thought that Galileo was incorrect about heliocentrism. Thus, a consensus is just as prone to errors and, indeed, biases, as is a religious or other traditional authority. Indeed, "experts" are not always reliable.

Picture credit: Slate

Present Laughter

The title of this post concerns, first of all, the Noel Coward play I saw last evening at the Saint James Theater in Manhattan. Kevin Kline was brilliant. I didn't realize that I wasn't the only person who loves him. The theater was packed. I wish I had enough money to go every night for the rest of the run and sit in the front row. The play was a piece of puff, but there was so much to see that I could not take it all in.

Afterward I went out with my new pals Rena and Andie. While I wasn't paying attention, I saw that the theater district has come to life in recent years: tons of restaurants and hotels. We ended up at a Brazilian place on 46th Street. A glass of white wine and calamari took off the edge after concentration on the theater piece. Rena, whose late husband was in real estate, said that "retail is dead." Malls will soon be rebuilt as office spaces and apartment complexes. All over the Upper West Side, it is true, the stores are closing. Storefronts stand empty, with FOR RENT signs in the windows.

I thought of this situation this morning as I was walking near where the old Coliseum Book Store used to be, just south of Columbus Circle. Checking the internet, I discovered that it closed in 2006, over a decade ago already. A way of life -- bookstores -- was on its way out. Who would have imagined that when I arrived in New York in 1980?

Can one use the term "present laughter" to refer to the ridiculous op-ed in the New York Times by Ulrich Baer, professor in NYU's German department? (The link here is to Jonathan Chait's response in New York magazine to such “illiberal” attacks on free speech. The piece includes a link to the NYT op-ed.)

On the one hand, it is amusing to consider what most readers of the New York Times might have made of the postmodernist jargon of the op-ed. It was as convoluted as the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the French “literary theorist” who is Baer's authority on the issue of free speech. Baer identifies himself as “a college professor and university administrator with over two decades of direct experience of campus politics.” Clearly, he has spent too much time around twenty-year-olds. On the other hand, his defense of recent university protests against conservative speakers disguises the fact that students today are simply acting out the cynical ideals of Baer's academic cohort.

Most of the liberal free speech advocates, such as Chait, are tearing out their hair now, asserting that it is important to listen to all views, even “hateful” ones, “bigoted” ones, and so on. But why would anyone want to listen to hateful or bigoted views? I don’t want to. I don’t listen to the views of Holocaust deniers, for instance.

But are the views of Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, and Condoleezza Rice (another uninvited speaker) “hateful”? Or are they simply offensive to a portion of the population that has its own fixed views?

Besides illustrating what happens to an intelligent person when he spends too much time with young people, Ulrich Baer is exhibit no. 1 of why academics should stick with their area of expertise. (He writes books with titles like Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma.) If someone thinks that I am wading outside of mine, let me remind you that I have actually done work in this area and edited a book on the subject.

Photo credit: Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

Back-up Parents

"The Other Side" by Toby Morris

By the title of this post I don't mean "back-up parents" in the sense of, say, you are a child and your parents are drug users or other low lives and you have no models or no refuge when things go bad. In such cases, you may be fortunate to have some adult folks in your environment that serve as substitutes for parents. Indeed, for some of us, teachers once fulfilled that function, or at least they did back in the old, old days of the so-called terrible 1950s.

I come to the term "back-up parents" by my observations of parents in my milieu, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of these are Sixties veterans, like myself, and others are younger, but we came of age at a good time, in the sense, that we transitioned from youth to adulthood with a good education, good jobs, and, for many of us now, great retirement plans. If the economy sucks for many Americans, not for us. To be fair, we often worked very hard.

The kids in this milieu, however, are of a different substance. Even if they went to privileged schools, they, like all other American kids, have experienced a certain dumbing down. Thus, their parents have done everything in their power to make sure that their own kids make the same transition to adulthood. When I have conversations with these parents -- usually the mothers in the locker room at the health club -- I learn that their children are now on the verge of adulthood and are contemplating careers. They have studied anthropology or women's studies or art history in college. They may have enjoyed a "gap year," during which they lived in Kenya and worked in "urban planning." Now it is time to make a career choice going forward, and it is generally of a feel-good sort, say, working for a non-profit. Whatever the merit of these jobs, they will not be exceedingly high paying, especially since the jobs -- with their outward show of trendiness -- are highly coveted. Lots of young, bright people with B.A.s in art history, for instance, gravitate to the glamour of museum jobs or art galleries. The salaries there, however, are not high paying. In other words, these children will probably not make as much in their own lifetimes as their parents or grandparents did.

That's where I come to the term back-up parents. The parents are there to back up their children financially as they enter adult life, for instance, to pay off their college loans or to lay down the money for their kids' first apartment. We are clearly entering a world of class distinctions, which have arisen since the Sixties generations assumed the reins of powers over the institutions of the U.S.

In contrast to such privileged kids, an ordinary American graduating from college with a degree in physical therapy -- a real profession, by the way -- will be paying $600 a month for the rest of her life (like my own physical therapist) and unable to buy her own personal computer (ditto). Her own parents are among those Americans who keep a roof over their head and expect their kids to work and do likewise.

The cartoon selection above is from the artist Toby Morris, who manages to put in a few pictures what I have less elegantly put into words.

Virginia Woolf channeling Jane Austen

Recently an essay by me appeared in The Yale Review on the career of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, in particular Warner's lesser status in comparison with her almost exact contemporary, Virginia Woolf. At the conclusion of my essay, I contrasted their differing treatments, in their own essays, of Jane Austen. It seemed to me that in writing of Austen's greatness, Woolf was speaking of herself. For instance, of Austen's unfinished early novel, The Watsons, Woolf writes (in Common Reader I): "Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature."

Virginia was a scribbler from an early age, and her "juvenilia" have been published, as have her girlhood diaries and letters. One can't help thinking that she was concerned from early on with creating a literary legacy and of situating herself in the "canon" of English literature. Note the opening of her essay on the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, which appeared in 1932 in Common Reader II:

"When we think how many millions of words have been written and printed in England in the past three hundred years, and how the vast majority have died out without leaving any trace, it is tempting to wonder what quality the words of Donne possess that we should still hear them distinctly today."

The only thing holding her back, if you believe what you read in A Room of One's Own, was a lack of a university education. Anyone who has read her essays, however, can see that Virginia Woolf was quite learned, if not in an academic sense. Indeed, she enjoyed the best kind of education for a writer: she grew up in a literary household, had access to her father's library, and read all the time.

To return to Woolf's channeling of Jane Austen. In a scholarly study of Austen, I came across the following excerpt from a letter Jane wrote to James Stanier Clarke, who had written to her suggesting a clergyman for the hero of her next novel. Austen declined, saying that she knew nothing about the subjects of men's conversations, for instance, science and philosophy. And here is the pay quote (with my emphasis):

"A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress."

Do I make my case? Did Woolf go on to spin this into A Room of One's Own?

Image source: Playbuzz

U.S. Communism in the 1950s

I am going out on a limb here, and I have certainly not seen it formulated as such, but being "American" in the 1950s stood in opposition to being "Communist." Indeed, in the milieu in which I grew up, one spoke of “communist Russia or “communist China,” both pronounced as if those were the official names. The threat of communism to the American way of life, to the self-understanding of people like my parents, should not be underestimated, not so much the native, homegrown variety as represented by the American labor movement, but the socialist product already well entrenched in Europe. After all, wasn't Britain, a nation with which the U.S. had been allied in World War II, which had so recently celebrated the coronation of young Elizabeth, in the process of establishing socialism? Something of this got through to me in connection with reports of labor strikes among English unionists, which led my father to explain to me the difference between the American and the English laboring classes: if an American union worker saw you driving a Cadillac, he worked to earn enough to buy one for himself; the English worker, on the other hand, sought to deprive you of yours. That was communism in a nutshell, and even I, an eight-year-old, got the point. Cold War threats, especially after the unleashing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, strengthened our sense of this lurking evil.

At the same time, my father's relatively benign attitude toward the American labor union movement indicates that most Americans did not believe that a violent revolution of the communist variety was likely to take place in the U.S. The concern was for national security, and by 1950 there was plenty of evidence that Party members and fellow-travelers had indeed sought to undermine the security of the U.S.

Thus, it was with some interest that I came across an article yesterday by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., entitled "The Life of the Party," which appeared in The Saturday Review in July of 1949. It is a very clear-sighted analysis of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA) at that moment, when the extent of Soviet penetration and manipulation was becoming clear, but it also ends with a conclusion remarkably similar to that of my father. In Schlesinger's own words: can anyone seriously believe, he wrote in 1949, that the CPUSA is "absurd enough to contemplate a violent revolution in the U.S.?"

At the same time, Schlesinger also has this to say: namely, that the communist movement in the U.S. was, at the time of his writing, "an organized party of 70,000 members, extending its influence by means of an underground apparatus and through the collaboration of fellow-travelers; controlling a political party, several trade unions and a great many front organizations, and exerting a lingering power in cultural circles."

This was in July 1949, six months before senior government officials met in secret to discuss the "Rosenberg case," which would eventually lead to the trial and conviction of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 and their execution in 1953.

Schlesinger's article begins by noting the strangeness of a communist movement in the U.S., a country that had enjoyed the longest period of liberal government in history. In his view, however, America had its "quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual, and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society." And even though, as Schlesinger writes, it was hard work to be a communist, party discipline was an attraction for such people. After all, each member acted "as if he embodied the impersonal force of history."

In the eyes of the Soviet masters, however, the American Communist Party was "one of the expendable parties. The Comintern has never exerted itself to give the CPUSA aid or to spare it embarrassment. No one in the CPUSA even knows in advance of impending change in party line." Schlesinger gives credit, however, to the domestic product, which he claims was responsible for "grass-root initiatives" that engaged in "courageous activity against local injustice and exploitation." I assume he is talking about the civil rights movement, which, like all such initiatives, the CPUSA infiltrated and sought to control.

So it was that in sleepy Louisville, where I grew up in the 1950s, the antagonisms of the Cold War came to our very back yard, and, for most of us, solidified the connection between communism and desegregation. It was 1954, when a white couple bought a house in a working-class white neighborhood in Louisville and then promptly turned around and sold it to a black couple. In short order, the house was bombed. No one was injured in the bombing, but, clearly, the new inhabitants were not welcome in the otherwise all-white neighborhood. The white purchasers of the house were arrested on charges of advocating sedition, and at the ensuing trial their membership in the Communist Party played a major role. Indeed, it was alleged that the white couple was behind the bombing, stirring up racial animosity for the purpose of advancing social revolution.

As in the celebrated case of Alger Hiss, the wife went to her grave in 2006 denying her CP membership. This refusal to admit being communist has always surprised me: it seemed to be a case of denying who you were. As Schlesinger notes concerning the refusal of Hollywood Leftists to own up to their political beliefs before a Congressional committee, imagine the indignation that would have followed if the Congressmen had been asking witnesses if they were members of the Klan.

Rosa Parks, 1955, with M.L. King, Jr.

I think Schlesinger was wrong, however, to give credit to what he considers "courageous activity against local injustice and exploitation." As Schlesinger himself points out, it was the method of the CPUSA to attach itself to "mass organizations -- that is, groups of liberals organized for some benevolent purpose" that were "designed for control by an alert minority," which they sought to do by the civil rights movement.

After all, by 1954 influential sectors of American society were already in favor of dismantling the barriers to full participation of black citizens. For instance, on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman abolished racial discrimination in the United States Armed Forces, which eventually led to the end of segregation in the services. It would have been a struggle for American blacks, for instance, Rosa Parks, to fight against discrimination, but it would have been their struggle. Instead, civil rights became a "liberal" white cause that the communists turned into a violent confrontation.

I am also of the opinion that the market, i.e., capitalism, was already breaking down the barriers. In 1947, for instance, the Brooklyn Dodgers ended a sixty-year ban on black baseball players. The management didn't integrate the team primarily for the cause of "social justice": there were good business reasons for opening the game to more talent. An example from my own experience indicates how things were changing. By 1954 I was already traveling on my own by Greyhound Bus to visit my grandmother in central Ohio. These solo trips, which indicate the relative safety of those days for a child, were broken by several rest stops, including one in the large city of Cincinnati, where I moved among the offerings of colored jello and "fruit cocktail" in the bus station cafeteria. There were plenty of black passengers on these trips, mostly black women, among whom I circulated freely at the lunch counters and in the restrooms of the bus station. This intermingling was not something I had experienced in Louisville, but I like to think that living in Louisville had made me worldly enough to accept it as normal. It was these bus trips that first impressed on me the separate existence of blacks and whites in America, and of the different kind of segregation from that which excluded my own family from the Louisville Country Club.

The aggressive participation of whites, especially of the Leftist variety, has not resulted in a color-blind society. The "courageous activity" of Leftists, even today, has always had the aim of destroying liberal democracy. The result: more divisiveness than ever before. Instead of dignified personalities like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., we have contentious blowhards like Al Sharpton. The Soviet Union is no more, but there remains the dissatisfied "quota" of whom Schlesinger wrote, and their legacy lives on. Is it any wonder that the first black president has been unable to heal the division?

Picture credit: Lib Com