Category: Philosophy

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Book Recommendation

This week at Left Bank Books, as December begins and Christmas is upon us, a number of books—Staff Picks (all of us have them, please check out the list)—are being offered at discount for on-line purchase.  For Wednesday, the 5th, my particular pick is…

China Miéville’s novel Embassytown is, to my mind, one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade.  Not necessarily the best novel published as science fiction, but one of the best examples of what science fiction at novel length can do.

Maybe that’s a fine distinction, possibly one without a difference, but what I want to talk about now is what I mean by “science fiction” in this context and recommend a first-rate experience.

It’s an ongoing debate, and Miéville himself has weighed in on it, namely the definition of science fiction, principally in relation to fantasy.  What it comes down to for me is a question of philosophical utility.  Does the text at hand offer an examination of the “real world” consequences of a philosophical question given the constraints of a universe we recognize as that which is accessible by science?

A bit long-winded, maybe, but insofar as any fictive enterprise can be shown to deal with the consequences of questions, the defining terms in this instance—or at least the limiting terms—are “philosophical”, “real world”, and “science.”

Let me deal with this quickly, since I’ve dealt with it at length elsewhere.  By science I do not mean the rigorous application of what we know of science—if that were to be the determinant, 99% of SF would not qualify, and of that which did, a goodly portion would be enjoyable for a relatively small, self-selected audience.  What I mean by this is more on the order of an æsthetic stance vis a vis the narrative, mainly that the background setting and the foreground action conform to the forms we readily identify as “scientifically defined.”  The universe as understood by scientific enquiry.

Basically, a vision of a “real world” that we can recognize and agree fits with what we can understand as how the universe operates.

This automatically throws out most fantasy conceits.  (If you take the trouble to redefine your elves and fairies as parallel human species ala evolutionary branching or as aliens, you have retasked your imagery to perform a science fictional exploration.)

Which leaves what I consider the most interesting and salient of components, namely the philosophical aspect.

Science fiction is self-consciously philosophical, insofar as it is deeply, principally concerned with questions of how to live in a changed universe.  Not just technologically, but ethically and morally.

Which brings me to the Miéville and my rather bold claim that it is one of the best science fiction novels of the last decade.

The conceit dealt with here is the question of language and its relation both to biology and to a universe that evolves, changes, and is largely unexplored.  Miéville gives an alien race whose language is hardwired into their biology.  They do not “learn” it, they are born with it and simply mature into its proper use.

And they cannot, therefore, lie.

Enter humans.

The humans, as is our wont, work to learn to communicate with these aliens—the novel is set primarily on the alien homeworld, where humans have a single, rather naked and fragile colony/embassy— and when they succeed, they nearly destroy these aliens, who in response to the threat very nearly destroy the colony.

Throughout, there is discussion and examination of language, its uses, and how it relates to both the universe at large and the inner landscape of individuals.  The examination, which in many ways is an abstrusely philosophical one, is absolutely central to the action of the novel.

And this is what good science fiction does!

I won’t here go into further detail.  To do so risks spoilers and if you’re in least interested, you will not thank me.  (I will say that Miéville has produced one of my favorite lines in all science fiction.  No, I won’t tell you that, either.  I want you to have the fist-pump experience I did when I read it.)

I must also add that while in some ways what I have described might easily be seen as a dry, plodding work, the exact opposite is true.  Miéville is a gifted stylist and his prose rush along, carrying the reader through an adventure.

So for Christmas, for yourself, for a treat, go on-line at Left Bank Books and buy a copy.  Read it, give it away as a gift, feed the SF geek in your life, or introduce someone who has stubbornly refused to see the merit in all this “space stuff” to something of undeniable intellectual worth.  Wednesday, December 5th, it’s 20% if bought online.

Do it.  You’ll be glad you did.

Art

Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.  It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.  Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.  If there is one thing we have all learned in the last half century, though, it is that such institutions—and their products—are expensive.

Blame for the death of the Liberal Arts is lain at the feet of conservatives, but here is where I would like to start teasing these definitions apart.  Genuine conservatives, those with whom I grew up and became most familiar, were the champions of the Liberal Arts.  This was before the term “Liberal” became inextricably tangled with the concepts of “permissiveness” and “socialism.”  Because of the constant hammering both liberalism and conservatism have taken in recent years from a class of philistine whose twin deities are money and conformity, we have lost sight of what both of those labels originally meant and, worse yet, the kind of country they informed.

William F. Buckley jr. may have been many things, but poorly-read was never one of them, nor was he an advocate for the kind of close-minded censoriousness that has poisoned the Right today.  Presently, George Will carries the torch of a conservatism fast vanishing in the flood of a reactionary myopia that passes for conservative but is nothing but avaricious opportunism dressed up in an ill-fitting suit of Victorianesque disapproval.

But then Ebert goes on to remark on his comment log and how refreshingly well-read, educated, and enthusiastic his readers seem to be.  The Liberal Arts is not dead or even dying.

But it may no longer have a comfortable place in universities, which charge a small fortune for an education with which the buyer not only wants but needs to cash in.  Degrees in philosophy, except for a rare few, pay poorly in a job market grown increasingly cutthroat by dint of the exclusion of the kind of broad outlook once supplied by a Liberal Arts education.  Why bother with Thomas Paine when he died poor, a loser?  Or Herman Melville, who had to quit writing because it didn’t pay well enough to support him?  One could go down the list.

And yet.

People read.  Widely.  Minds rove over as broad a range of interests as at any time in the past—more, as there is more to learn, to see, to experience.  It would seem the Liberal Arts is far from dying.  It has only moved out on its own.

I’ve encountered students who refuse to read.  They want to know only those things that will garner them good salaries and all that this implies.  Success.  Goodies.  “Why read F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hell, I read Ayn Rand in high school.  That’s my kinda culture. ”

I have no time for them.  Were I a teacher in a college, I’d flunk them and send them from the hall.  They are as clueless and feckless as they think others are who pay attention to the contents of the mind.

Tell me this—once you have the six-figure salary and the 2200 square foot condo and the BMW, what are you going to do with yourself in those moments when you’re the only one to keep you company?  Other than winning a footrace, what have you done?  When you look around for something to Do, how will you recognize what is of value, of worth, of substance?

I know, most people like this could care less.  If they don’t have any culture now, they think, if they think about it at all, that they can always buy some later, when they’re “secure” or ready to retire.

Unfortunately, by then they may only be able to recognize “value” as the price tag on the frame rather than the world that’s on the canvas.

culture

War On Women

My previous post, over-the-top as it was in some ways (yet heartfelt and, I think, not misdirected) spurred a few remarks about the so-called War On Women.  There are people who claim this is a myth, a straw man argument, a distraction, that there is no war on women, only the mouthings of a few extremists with no real authority and, really, nothing has or will change.

I can agree to an extent that maybe War On Women is perhaps an overstatement, because—and it’s a fine distinction—I don’t really believe most of the politicians engaged in it care one way or the other.  It has become a useful polemic for them to stir the ire of their base and garner votes for the things they do care about.  It’s like race-baiting, which I think few of those who indulge it actually believe in but will nevertheless employ the language because they collect a constituency around it.  It’s bait, in other words, to attract a following which they can then use for other things.

In this sense, claiming that it’s a “war” is perhaps inaccurate, an overstatement. It was, perhaps, more a war with women, a loud pyrotechnic show that kept our attention over here when it should have been over there. If true, then the hammering on contraceptive access and abortion and the blocking of various anti-rape and violence-against-women bills really meant something else. Battlefield tactics in a cause of a different nature. One might take some comfort in that.

Except for those who feel themselves being used as human shields and missiles in a cause disingenuous at its core and fraught with unintended consequences.  It would not be the first time in history that the cynical use of a rhetorical position (to defeat an opponent, rally a populace, misdirect attention from other things) took on a life of its own and produced results no one wanted.

I think the Right has seen some of those unintended consequences in the last election.

How hard is this?  Equality means we should not limit people based on their biological characteristics, which include race and gender, as well as physical capacity, health, mobility challenges, and so forth.

As for the rhetoric, I will leave you with this, which cuts to the chase rather better than anything I might say:

culture

A Final Thought (Maybe)

I’m listening to Bartok.  The Miraculous Mandarin, a recording by the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.

Earlier I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR.  A report caught my attention about—you guessed it—why Mitt Romney lost.  Or, more to the point, why he almost won.  It had to do with something I find utterly baffling about the American political consciousness.  I don’t know, maybe it’s true everywhere.

Basically, that during most of the campaign Romney ran on issues and did little to “let people know him personally.”  This, according to the report, was the cause of his low approval numbers.  People didn’t “like” him because he seemed cold and distant.  In August, his campaign turned that around by presenting a more “homey” Mitt, highlighting his “personality” and his “likeableness.”

It worked.  Suddenly people warmed to him, his approval rating rose, and, as we saw, he took 48% of the popular vote, something six months earlier seemed unlikely in the extreme.

Because people liked him.

It reminded me of George W. Bush’s first campaign, when we kept hearing this “he seems like a guy I could sit down and have a beer with.”

As it turned out, that quality did not translate into good policy.  Honestly, there are many people I like but I wouldn’t even let them watch my dog.  Like does not translate to ability.

So my reaction was—is—what the hell?

What this tells me is that a candidate can misrepresent, lie, withhold, distort, tease, and otherwise spew nonsense, but if the voters like him, none of that matters.  (Let me remind you, Romney kept to a very casual relation to the truth in the debates; none of this is arguable, he either didn’t know what he was talking about or flat out lied.)  Furthermore, as I indicated early in the election cycle, he was an advocate for a failed policy.  People have had it demonstrated to them by everything short of utter and total economic collapse that the fiscal and tax policies of the GOP have not worked.

And yet.

People will ignore measures of competence, reasonableness, sound judgment, and policy and vote for someone because they like him?

For the record, I’ve done the reverse myself—voted for someone because I didn’t like his or her opponent.  I get that. (Heck, I did it this time.)  They did or said something that turned me off.  But frankly, how much I liked the candidate for whom I voted played little part in my decision.

This is something that beggars the imagination.  I deal with this in the arts all the time.  Basically, there is the artist…and there is the work.  It is the work that matters.  I don’t care (usually) if the artist is the reincarnation of Simon Legree, if the work he or she produces has merit, that is what counts.  (Yes, there are exceptions, but it takes a great deal to force me to abandon this principle.)  What matters if So-n-So was an alcoholic womanizer who kicked puppies, if the novel he wrote or the music he made moves and inspires us, that is the salient point.

So to—perhaps more so—with politicians.  I want someone who will do the job well, not someone I might be able to “sit down and have a beer with.”

Like that would ever happen anyway.

I didn’t respond to the nonsense about Romney putting his dog in a crate on the roof of his car, because it had nothing to do with his qualifications as a potential president.  We try to ignore the religious leanings of candidates for the same reason.  Personal foible, the vagaries of “character” are slippery, tectonic grounds on which to base such an important decision.  I don’t care how much I might “like” a candidate for the school board, if he or she doesn’t understand basic science or thinks the Earth is the center of the solar system, I will not vote for that person.  Competence trumps personality.

(Besides, how the hell are we supposed to gauge “like” or “dislike” in such a context?  No matter what the image presented may be, none of us know that person, nor will likely ever know them.  “Like” in this case is purely a projection, our own hopes and desires put on someone we may never meet in person.  We aren’t “liking” them so much as liking what we want of ourselves that we imagine reflected in the candidate.)

Back in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, possibly the most intelligent, educated, and competent politician vying for high office, lost to Eisenhower because, as it was spun at the time, he was an intellectual elitist.  I think we were fortunate that Eisenhower possessed a competence of a different sort, but the fact is people did not vote for him because of that competence, but because “We Like Ike!”  Kennedy defeated Nixon because of his “personality.”  (Famously, the debates held showed an interesting divergence—those who listened on radio said Nixon had won, those who watched on television said Kennedy had.  Depending on the medium, “personality” favored the candidate who could appeal best through the insubstantiality of “likeableness.”)  Hubert Humphrey lost to Nixon because he could not translate policy competence into the kind of popular “like” that Bobby Kennedy clearly had.  George McGovern, four years later, never overcame a certain dourness, which is something when you consider that Nixon was possibly the least likeable president since Coolidge.

And on that note, it is only in recent years that people have been acknowledging what competence Nixon did possess, digging its way out from beneath the ignominy of his ultimate paranoid ogre image.

George H.W. Bush was by far the better qualified contender in 1980, but Reagan had “like” all over everyone.  Reagan is still forgiven for the damage he did by virtue of a profound lack of grasp because people think back fondly on him as someone they liked immensely.

This is a lousy way to choose a president.

Competence should have favored John Huntsman in the primaries.

Probably, if competence had triumphed, we’d be looking at a second term for Hilary Clinton today.

But in fairness, just how are we to judge competence when we collectively know so little about what the job entails?  People vote for the candidate they think will be “on their side” and the only way to pick that is to go with gut reactions.  We “like” one or the other.

That could be partly rectified by simply paying more attention.  But that’s the other problem with us, collectively—frankly, my dear, outside whatever issue adrenalizes us at the moment, we don’t give a damn.  And that’s why we keep getting representatives who in the end don’t really represent us.

How do you like that?

Art

My World of Tomorrow

This weekend I’ll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon.  I’ve only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we’d been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years.  Until that year I hadn’t even known such things happened.

Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life’s ambitions.  Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it.  It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future.  The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.

I’ve written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful.  My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present.  I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place.  I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.

And I liked that world!

It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition’s sake.  It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed.  It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.

True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated.  But they were always shown as examples of where not to go.  You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us “Be careful, or it will turn out this way.”  We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as “if this goes on” parables.

You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways.  You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build.  You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.

You could see the future.

And what did that future offer?  By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because.  I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender.  I understood that building is always more important than tearing down.  I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.

Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics.  You can get to them by many paths.  I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.

I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.

So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future.  A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.

There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die.  She’s 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them.  She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.

In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn’t have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.

This is not the world I imagined.  Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education?  How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea?  This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible.  This is evil.  This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.

So I write.  I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue.  It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope.  I can’t help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.

I still have hope.  It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world.  If that’s naïve, well, so be it.  Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.

See you at Archon?

 

culture

Rights

A couple of posts back I made a claim that seems to have upset a few people, namely that Rights (as we generally use the term) are legal constructs, not something inherent in nature, even though we talk about them as if they were.  One criticism, quite correctly, pointed out that one of the bases of the Enlightenment was a recognition that human rights emerged out of a clear understanding of Natural Law, and that civil law was necessarily grounded in that understanding.

True, that is how we formulate it.  And it may well be that there is, somewhere, a fundamental natural basis on which we build our moral and legal houses.  But it is not nature from which it is derived in the sense of the physical universe in which we exist—clearly we order our social systems more often in contravention of nature than in imitation—but Nature in the sense that Spinoza and possibly others like Kant and Hegel understood the term, namely reality as we perceive it in respect to our condition.  This is in some ways an abstruse and complex concept and contrary to popular usage it is not common sensical or self-evidently apparent.

Why do I say that?  Because we are still arguing over what it is we’re trying to describe.

One of the elements of criticism leveled at me was a spirited defense of the manifest truth of such things as the Declaration of Independence.  My own argument was only that, while we seem to have accepted the moral injunctions of the Declaration, we are still trying to put those concepts into practice through law because we can’t agree on a common meaning.  This has been the case since Day One of our Republic.

…all men are created equal…

Great.  Wonderful.  But what does that mean in practice?

It’s one of those phrases that would seem to be so self-evidently true that it requires no further explanation and should automatically be regarded by all as obvious and put into immediate practice.  Never mind the obvious failures to prevent avaricious and corrupt people to flout such a principle, it has been the case that even people of good will and social conscience have simply not agreed on the supposed self-evident meaning of that phrase.

Simply put, which men?  All men?  What about women?  Or, at the time it was written, slaves?  What about people in other countries?  What does this mean in terms of resources?  Equal how?  Does this make it incumbent on us to guarantee equality, even for those who apparently are incapable of the unstated but quite real consequent responsibilities?  Should some be held back in order not to tip the scales of social justice unfairly?  And what about those who simply reject that formulation?

If you think this is an academic issue, remember that in the early Republic, not only were slaves and women held to be inferior to “men” but men of property were implicitly and in practice accorded greater rights than those with nothing—like the vote.  Nor did this begin to change until Jacksonian Democracy start the erosion of social privilege in matters of politics.

Kant, among others, claimed that liberty was based on the free will and its unimpeded exercise and that free will was a product of Reason.  Reason, however, as a necessary aspect of nature, that all humans possessed.  I am not indulging hyperbole when I point out that Reason is a rare commodity, exercised seldom, and usually poorly, and needs nurturing in order to be of benefit to the individual.  Humans possess a cleverness, a proclivity for pattern-seeking and its concomitant capacities for problem-solving at possibly the highest level of any creature on the planet.  But I think it fair to say that this is not what Kant meant by Reason.  He meant the ability to indulge abstraction and thereby project imagination onto a landscape and formulate conceptions not immediate evident.

Sorry, but I do not believe that is a skill people are born with.  It is a potential, a latent capacity which must be seeded, cared for, fed, and grown.  It is not, by definition, “natural” in the way I think many people conceive the term.  It is only natural in that it is something humans as a species have a potential ability to practice, but we do not necessarily grow up with it.  The pattern-seeking which seems to be hardwired into our brains is generally taken as reason, especially when it produces useful results in environmental manipulation and social construction.  But it ultimately lacks the purely abstract aspect that leads to what we can honestly call ratiocination.  It does not lead to philosophy.

And it is out of philosophy that any concept of Rights emerges.

I confess here that this is a rather scary proposition.  Historically, humans base their law on a concept of Higher Order Morality, the assumption that there is an authority above our own which requires certain normative standards.  God, in other words.  A Law Giver.  It is presumed that human law is a reflection of this higher law.  Over time that higher law has morphed into what, during the Enlightenment, became codified as Natural Law.  It is reassuring to believe that we aren’t actually all on our own.

But even Kant, intuitively or otherwise, seems to have sensed that we are, ultimately, on our own.  In his 1784 essay An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? he states in the first paragraph:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.  Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.”

In other words, maturity, as pertains to the ability to reason, is the point at which we stand on our own, without the crutches of dependency on authority-qua-authority.  By definition, this would include assumed Higher Order sources of law.

Given the diverse and ever-conflicting nature of civil discourse and the constant disagreement over what is morally defensible within a liberal framework (and by liberal I do not mean its current defamed definition, but the traditional meaning of Liberty of the individual to act as he or she will free of arbitrary constraint) obviously we have no clear, definitive explication of what that Higher Order Law might be.

We’ve been creating it on our own all along.

Before I am accused of claiming that a concept of individual rights has no basis in moral reasoning, it is equally obvious that it does.  Common human needs and aspirations are clearly universal and the consequences of oppression are equally obvious across all systems.  This much can be seen and understood and that pattern-seeking creature that is the common condition of all humans can here demonstrate a universal sense of good and evil, right and wrong, beneficial and destructive.  We learn, over time, what will or will not secure a beneficial social environment, at least in its basics.

Abstractions can clarify as well as obfuscate this, which too-often is diminished by such terms as common sense or natural law.

What Thomas Jefferson wrote and what the Enlightenment-besotted Founders then tried to put into place is an abstraction intended to guarantee freedom of action by barring arbitrary restrictions.

You will note, please, that in the initial draft of the Constitution, there is no mention of these ideals.  The Articles that form the principle body of our Constitution is a legal framework and no more.  The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, a demand by those opposed to Federalism and fence-sitters without whom ratification would have been impossible.  And even in the Bill of Rights there is no reference to the kind of natural law argument on which many people assume the legitimacy of said system of rights.

Which all begs the question as I originally phrased it—if “natural law” is so obvious and so “right” why has there been any need to continually wrestle with meaning and intent?  Why would there ever have been the need for a Civil War, 13th and 14th Amendments, and for the purposes of my prior essay, a 19th Amendment?

Because it is neither obvious nor is it an inevitable recognition that “all men are created equal.”

In the 1970s, an Equal Rights Amendment struggled for ratification and was defeated by people who, without the need to demonize them, simply disagreed with its stated principles.  Many, while willing to admit the core principle of the amendment as valid, worried over the legal ramifications of its enactment.  Ultimately, two things can be said about its defeat.  One, that we do not all agree on what Equality means or to whom it applies.  And Two, that if you can deny a right through legal mechanisms, obviously you can only grant it through the same mechanisms.

So when I said that, contrary to our cherished prejudices, Rights are legal constructs, this is what I meant.  Each of us, individually, can choose to act according to our own conception of rights and this need not be based on legal constructs, but as a society it is absurd to talk about self-evident rights outside a legal framework.  Rights, on that level, are consequent upon law, and we say what that is.

Which means we should be a bit more alert about them than we usually are.  Rights are gained and lost all the time and often, if they don’t affect us directly, we don’t even notice.  We rely too much on this idea that our rights are based on some vague Higher Order—Natural—Law and therefore are self-evident and, in the phrasing of Jefferson, “unalienable”, but this prized chestnut means little in the face of a determined effort by some to rewrite the codes for the rest of us.

Thank you for your attention.

culture

The Vital Gore Is Gone

Gore Vidal has died.

Anyone with the merest scintilla of cultural or political awareness of the last 50 years should know who he was.  My first memory of him was from the 1968 election when he called William F. Buckley a crypto-nazi and Buckley, losing his cool, threatened to “sock you in your goddam face” on national television.  At the time (I was not yet 14 and only beginning to become aware of politics in any meaningful way), I thought Buckley was the cool one, but in retrospect Vidal never got ruffled, continued speaking clearly, and made his points.

Points which I later found myself in agreement with, by and large.

At other times I’ve found myself frustratingly at odds with Vidal, particularly in some of his reframings of American policies.

But I was right there with him during the Bush years when he told us what Bush-Cheney were doing to the Bill of Rights and what a fix we were all about to be in.

Vidal is one side of the spectrum of political essence that makes up who we are.  If you read Buckley, you must read Vidal for the other side (which most people don’t, on either side: we pick one or the other and stick to it without ever giving the opposing voice a chance, which is why we are in the cultural nightmare in which we are presently trapped), because between the two you can get some sense of the totality.

For my part, I would like to say that Vidal was one of those writers whose ability I admire.  He was a first-class stylist and his historical knowledge was enviable.  When he chose a historical subject—like Lincoln or Aaron Burr or a year, like 1876—he described what happened and what people said if reliable sources were available and added in the connective tissue with a fine eye for detail and sense of place.  His essays, often maddening, never bored, and usually revealed a vein of thought or fact hitherto unremarked that could prove absolutely trenchant.

Many on the Right hated him because he identified, generally quite accurately, the foundation of their politics (money or power, or both) and aimed his barbs at their historical amnesia, cultural ignorance, and always at their political hypocrisy.

Many on the Left were uncomfortable with him because he wouldn’t let them off the hook.  If they pandered, compromised their values, paid lip-service and then voted otherwise, he called them on it.

He once commented that he thought we had lost our chance to “have a civilization” here, that it looked for a time “like we were going to have one” but apparently not.  He said it with a deep sadness and while I took it as hyperbole, I can understand what he meant.  We’ve been arguing in the Forum about who we’re going to be as a nation and while the argument rages on we’re squandering our resources.  We have all the components of a really fine civilization but by and large they don’t seem to matter to most people, so they atrophy from lack of proper attention.

I stress though that a steady diet of Mr. Vidal’s writings, with nothing to balance it, can be as bad as a steady diet of William F. Buckley (or William Safire or George Will).  He represented an important aspect, one side, that must be respected and engaged as an equal part of all the other sides.  (Put Will and Buckley on one end and Chomsky and Vidal on the other and in the mix you find the substance of what it means to be a free people of serious intent.)

He was on Dick Cavett’s old talk show, often, and on one of them they were playing anagrams with names, and Vidal asked Cavett what his should be.  Without missing a beat, Cavett said “You’re the Vital Gore.”  Vidal smiled, apparently pleased.

Some of our essential vitality is gone.

Art

Reflections On the 4th of July: A Personal Statement

I am not given to setting out pronouncements like this very often, but in light of the last several years I thought it might be worthwhile to do so on the occasion of the 236th anniversary of our declared independence.

I don’t think in terms of demonstrating my love of country. My affection for my home is simply a given, a background hum, a constant, foundational reality that is reflexively true. This is the house in which I grew up. I know its walls, its ceiling, its floors, the steps to the attic, the verge, and every shadow that moves with the sun through all the windows. I live here; its existence contours my thinking, is the starting place of my feelings.

The house itself is an old friend, a reliable companion, a welcoming space, both mental and physical, that I can no more dislike or reject than I can stop breathing.

But some of the furniture…that’s different.

 

I am an American.

I don’t have to prove that to anyone. I carry it with me, inside, my cells are suffused with it. I do not have to wear a flag on my lapel, hang one in front of my house, or publicly pledge an oath to it for the convenience of those who question my political sentiments. Anyone who says I should or ought or have to does not understand the nature of what they request or the substance of my refusal to accommodate them. They do not understand that public affirmations like that become a fetish and serve only to divide, to make people pass a test they should—because we are free—never have to take.

I am an American.

I am not afraid of ideas. My country was born out the embrace of ideas, new ideas, ideas that challenged the right of kings to suppress ideas. Ideas are the bricks that built these halls. I claim as my birthright the freedom to think anything, entertain any notion, weigh the value of any concept or proposition, and to take refuge in the knowledge that wisdom comes from learning and the freedom to learn is among the most hallowed and sacred privileges we have inherited as a country. The greatest enemy of our republic is the fear of ideas, of education, and by extension of truth and fact. Those who see no harm in removing books from libraries or diluting fact with wishful thinking and teaching our children to accept things entirely on faith and never question will weaken the foundations, damage the walls, and corrupt every other freedom they themselves boast about and then fail to defend.

I am an American.

I do not need to demonize others to make myself feel safe or superior or even right. I do not need to pretend that I am innately “better” than anyone else to prove my own worth. America was founded on the idea that all of us are equal in potential value. I do not need to oppress, undercut, strike, or otherwise impede others so that I can claim the dubious and ultimately meaningless label of Number One.

I am an American.

Sometimes I wear my sentiment on my sleeve, display my emotions at inappropriate times. I often side with unpopular causes, cheer those who aren’t going to win, get unreasonably angry over unfairness. I believe in justice and I don’t have any trouble with the idea of making an extra effort for people who can’t afford it for themselves. Other times I am stoic, even cynical. I accommodate a world-weariness far beyond the scope of my heritage. I do not believe in providence. Things will not just “work out in the long run” and the bad are not always punished and the good too often are crushed. I know the world doesn’t care and has no interest in level playing fields or evening up odds or anything other than its own ravenous acquisitiveness. It’s an uphill battle against impossible odds, but it’s the only one worth fighting, and I have an unreasonable belief that as an American I have a responsibility to help fight it.

I am an American.

I take a childish pride in many of the attributes and details of my heritage. We build things, we invent things, we have moved mountains, changed the course of rivers, gone to the moon, created great art, changed the face of the earth, broken tyrants on the wheel, and made the world yield. At the same time I am embarrassed at many of the other details of my heritage. We have hurt people unnecessarily, killed and raped, we have damaged forests, poisoned rivers, waged war when there were other avenues. I like the idea that I can work my way out of poverty here, but I hate the idea that we idolize the rich when they put barriers in the path of those like me just because they can. It’s not the money, it’s the work that counts, but sometimes we forget that and those with less must school those with more. That we have done that and can do that is also part of my heritage and I am glad of it.

I am an American.

I am not bound by ritual. Tradition is valuable, history must never be forgotten, but as a starting point not a straitjacket. Those who wish to constrain me according to the incantations, ceremonies, and empty routines of disproven ideologies, debunked beliefs, and discredited authority are not my compatriots, nor do they understand the liberty which comes from an open mind amply armed with knowledge and fueled by a spirit of optimism and a fearless willingness to look into the new and make what is worthy in progress your own.

I am an American.

I do not need others to tell me who I am and how I should be what they think I should be. I elect my representatives. They work for me. They are employees. If I criticize them, I am not criticizing my country. If I call their judgment into question, I am not undermining America. If I am angry with the job they do, I do not hate my country. They should take their definition from me, not the other way around.

I am an American.

If my so-called leaders send soldiers in my name somewhere to do things of which I do not approve and I voice my disapproval, I am not insulting those soldiers or failing to support them. They did not send themselves to those places or tell themselves to do those things. My country has never asked one of its soldiers to kill innocents, torture people, lay waste to civilians, or otherwise perform illegal, unnecessary, or wrong deeds. Politicians do that and they are employees, they are not My Country. Greedy individuals do that, and they are not My Country. No one has the right to call me unpatriotic because I condemn politicians or businessmen for a war they make that I consider wrong, nor that I am not “supporting out troops” because I want them out of that situation and no longer misused by the narrow, blinkered, and all-too-often secret agendas of functionaries, bureaucrats, and bought stooges.

I am an American.

My success is my own, but it is impossible without the work done by my fellow Americans. I acknowledge that we make this country together or not at all and I have no reservations about crediting those whose labor has made my own possible or condemning those who seek to divide us so they can reap the plenty and pretend they made their success all by themselves.

I am an American.

Which means that by inheritance I am nearly everyone on this planet. I am not afraid of Others, or of The Other, and those who would seek to deny political and social rights to people who for whatever reason do not fit a particular box simply because they’re afraid of them do not speak for me. I reject superstition and embrace reason and as a child I learned that this is what should be the hallmark of an American, that while we never discard the lessons of the past nor do we let the fears and ignorance of the past dictate our future.

I am an American.

I accept the rule of law. This is a founding idea and I live accordingly, even if I dislike or disapprove of a given example. If so, then I embrace my right to try to change the law, but I will not break it thoughtlessly just because it inconveniences me or to simply prove my independence. My independence is likewise, like my Americanness, something I carry with me, inside. The forum of ideas is where we debate the virtues and vices of the framework of our society and I take it as given my right to participate. Cooperation is our strength, not blind commitment to standards poorly explained or half understood. Because we make the law, we determine its shape and limits. The more of us who participate, the better, otherwise we surrender majority rule to minority veto, and law becomes the playground of those who learn how to keep the rest of us out.

I am an American.

Such a thing was invented. It came out of change, it encompasses change, it uses change. Change is the only constant and too-tight a grip on that which is no longer meaningful is the beginning of stagnation and the end of that which makes us who we are. Change is annoying, inconvenient, sometimes maddening, but it is the only constant, so I welcome it and understand that the willingness to meet it and work with it defines us as much as our rivers, our mountains, our cities, our art. A fondness for particular times and places and periods is only natural—humans are nostalgic—but to try to freeze us as a people into one shape for all time is the surest way to destroy us.

I am an American.

I do not need others to be less so I can be more. I do not need others to lose so that I can win. I do not need to sabotage the success of others to guarantee my own. I do not have to take anything away from someone else in order to have more for myself.

America is for me—

My partner, my family, my friends, the books I love, the music I hear, the laughter of my neighbors, the grass and flowers of my garden, the conversations I have, the roads I travel, and the freedom I have to recognize and appreciate and enjoy all these things. I will defend it, I will fight anyone who tries to hurt it, but I will do it my own way, out of my own sentiments, for my own reasons. Others may have their reasons and sentiments, and may beat a different drum. That’s fine. That is their way and we may find common cause in some things. This, too, is America.

“All colors and blends of Americans have somewhat the same tendencies. It’s a breed — selected out by accident. And so we’re overbrave and overfearful — we’re kind and cruel as children. We’re overfriendly and at the same time frightened of strangers. We boast and are impressed. We’re oversentimental and realistic. We are mundane and materialistic — and do you know of any other nation that acts for ideals? We eat too much. We have no taste, no sense of proportion. We throw our energy about like waste. In the old lands they say of us that we go from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“There’s the country of America, which you have to defend, but there’s also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it’s an idea. An idea that’s supposed to be contagious.”
Bono

“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
John F. Kennedy

“When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”
Adlai Stevenson

culture

Education

We seem to have lost sight of a simple truth of late.  Not all things we do should or ought to be money-making enterprises.  Yet we should do them anyway, because, to put it simply, without them we lose everything that makes making money worth the bother.

 

A string of university decisions in the last few years—most recently the forced resignation of the president of the University of Virginia and now the announced cutting of the University of Missouri Press— underscore how far we have drifted from this truth.  None of these decisions have been about bad decision-making or scandal or anything that might impair the work of education.  They have all been about bottomlines and making money.

Basically, the president of the University of Virginia, Teresa Sullivan, was fired over a disagreement with the direction of the university with the board of directors, who wish to see more business courses and fewer liberal arts courses.  But we don’t really know because no cause was ever given.  Inadvertently, a billionaire, Peter Kiernan, admitted to orchestrating her firing behind the scenes, but still never fully explained why.  He has since resigned from the board of directors.

The elimination of the UM Press is even less explicable other than as a bottomline measure—yet the university recently received thirty million to expand its sports infrastructure.

Actually, anyone paying attention knows what is going on.  Boards of directors everywhere are trying to turn universities into money machines and anything that doesn’t turn a tidy profit is set to be axed.

If these were businesses like any other, this is perfectly understandable, even laudable if it means saving the business.  But a university is not a business like any other.  We have forgotten that.

You do not have a university press to make money.  You have it to make available the materials for learning.  You do not have a university to make money.  You have it to teach.

And you should not teach the making of money to the exclusion of all else.  Universities should teach in service to truth and knowledge and discovery and the investment of character and soul in people so that they have an idea what to do with money when they make it.  Universities should not have to be held accountable the way a bank or a factory is.  That’s ridiculous.

Some things should exist because they are beautiful, elegant, meaningful, true, inspirational.  If all of that had to rely on the ability to turn a profit, we would have a civilization of fast-food franchises, malls, comic books movies, bad music, and superficial fashion.

Oh, wait.  We do have that civilization.

Teresa Sullivan has been reinstated at the University of Virginia because of an enormous groundswell of student and alumni support.  Someone even suggested that maybe there should be fewer political appointees to university boards.  Hmm.

I have no such hopes for the survival of the UM Press.  It hasn’t been in the black for years.  In my opinion, that shouldn’t matter.  Important books often do not earn a profit, yet they remain important books.  They should exist, as should presses like UM’s, because they contribute an absolutely vital yet unquantifiable essence to our culture.  They should simply Be.

We need to get over this nonsense before we lose too much of ourselves.  We’ve been fed a line that capitalism is the essence of America.  That’s as far from true as can be.  The essence of America are the ideas that formed us.  Ideas that came out of scholarship and philosophy and education.  Ideas that have become an inconvenience to certain people who have found a good way to use our own commitment to free enterprise against us to destroy the very things that make us who we are.

It’s not the money.  It should not be about the money.  It’s about the mind and what’s in it.

 

culture

Preferred Position

I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson.  He’s my kinda scientist and he speaks well.  Please watch the entire video before continuing with my little bit.

Okay, there’s a lot in that with which I agree.  In fact, he gets to my preferred stance on the whole issue, that I would rather not have to deal with the categories and all the rhetorically inevitable garbage that comes with them.  The problem is that most people actually won’t let you do that.

If I am asked honestly about my thoughts on whether or not there is a god, my answer is usually predetermined, not by me but by the person asking the question.  You can pick this up from context, from body language, from tone of voice, from a hundred small cues that accumulate into the preferred position of the asker.  And while there are many permutations, and shades of gray, it usually—not always, but usually—comes down to two formats.

There are those, few though they may be, who are honestly interested in a philosophical discussion.  This is the “how do you see this god question” conversation, which can lead to very interesting and fruitful dialogues and can be immensely enjoyable and even enriching.  These are people who, while they may have a preferred position, aren’t interested in pushing it on anyone, they really want to explore the topic.  One key feature of such people is that they are not threatened by the unorthodox, the heterodox, the outre, the radical.  They want to have a conversation about this admittedly complex topic.

Then there are those who are looking for a reason to pigeonhole and proselytize.  They don’t want to know your ideas, they want to know if you’re With Them or Against Them.

Atheists and Believers fit into this description and I unhesitatingly claim that there is no functional difference between them if this is all they are interested in.  They don’t want a dialogue, they want a chance to tell you how wrong you are, or hold forth on all the idiots who don’t think like them.

I’ll admit right here that I’ve fallen into that paradigm on many an occasion.  There’s no real defense for it, but there are reasons.  I do get tired of certain positions on certain topics and the shortcut to ending the harangue often seems more desirable than any possible benefit that may come out of trying to address the questioner as if he or she belonged to the first group.

Do I believe there is a god?

Depends on what kind of a god you’re asking me to believe in.  But right there you see the potential for a long explanation.  The concept is not reducible to a simple statement of fact, because all gods have been believed in and it is an insult to suggest that such belief automatically meant one set of acolytes was dumber than another.  When belief faded, the god became an artifact of history.  Do I then belief there never was such a god?  Depends on your requirements for a god.

There are many aspects of the proposition with which I can categorically disagree.  But the thing that makes it impossible to dismiss out of hand is Belief.  To me, asking if I believe there is a god has many of the same characteristics of asking if I believe there’s such a thing as an idea.  You can’t see either one, there’s no physical evidence for them other than how they motivate people, it is easy (and done all the time) to say that ideas aren’t real.

It’s in the realm of human action where the problems with both the discussion and the notion of a god pop up, but to my mind that’s a separate issue.  If someone creates a great good—hospitals, art, music, a new way to see—in the name of a god they believe in, it is easy enough to accept that they drew their inspiration from that god and except for some diehard ideologues no one has an issue with the conflation.  No one goes around beating them up for that belief.  If, on the other hand, some one goes around killing, maiming, stirring social ill-will against groups of people because they claim their god wants them to, everyone gets uncomfortable.  The people who may believe in the same god have a problem, atheists use it as an excuse to deny agency, and the zealot feels justified in his or her isolation and martyrdom.  Nothing is solved.  We seem hard put to separate out the issues because inevitably questions are raised as to the nature of belief and the nature of god.

To me, all gods are real and at the same time they are all irrelevant.  They’re real because people believe in them.  They’re irrelevant because I don’t and do not wish to.  And yet the world functions, regardless which position is true.

You want to know where I think god is?  In the dialogue.  Whatever it may be.  God, however you choose to define it, appears in the midst of honest communication.  When someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson talks to us about the stars, the universe, the cosmos, and we listen—there’s god.

When that doesn’t happen, when people don’t communicate—there is no god.

I invite you all to chew on that idea for a while.

Unless you think ideas aren’t real.