CLANG CLANG CLANG WENT THE TROLLEY

When I was a boy, the Reader's Digest was a very popular little magazine -- little in the sense that it was small enough to fit in a drug store rack, unlike such full-size magazines as Life, Collier's, and Look.  Reader's Digest had a regular bottom-of-the page feature called "The Most Unforgettable Person I Have Ever Met."  My nominee [never submitted for publication] was Benjamin Muckenhoupt, a Harvard classmate who was an albino piccolo playing mathematician.  One of Bennie's more endearing quirks was a passion for trolley cars.  Bennie swore that in the old days you could go all the way from Boston to New York on trolley cars for one fare plus transfers.  [Bennie was notoriously cheap].  He once went out on a date with a young lady from North Attleboro, arranged by another classmate, Bob Funk, who came from Speaker of the House Joe Martin's home town.  Bennie took her on an extended trolley ride, and was very distressed when she wanted to dismount to get a Coke at a point where he would have been unable to secure transfers to get back on.

My latest blog post seems to have brought a number of trolley enthusiasts into the conversation.   Pastrypride [those Internet handles again!] breaks a lance for trolley car examples, and JW offers a link to his/her discussion of my post on another blog.  At the risk of trying the patience of the rest of the blogosphere, I shall try in this post to respond, expanding my remarks and perhaps making clearer the reasons for my scepticism about trolley car arguments.  None of this, it goes without saying, is in any way intended to cast aspersions on actual trolley cars, either those that run on tracks or the Boston variety always referred to as "trackless trolleys."  [They get power from overhead power lines to which they are attached by flexible arms that are always coming loose and flailing about, forcing the conductor to stop the trolley, get out, and swing the arm back and forth until it attaches itself again on the power line.]

The heart of pastrypride's objection to my comments is this sentence:  "Harris's mistake wasn't to try to use such thought experiments, it was to misuse them."  In the previous paragraph, he/she offers, as an example of the proper use of such hypothetical arguments, asking with regard to George Zimmerman's murder of Travon Martin what the reaction would have been had Zimmerman been Black and Martin White.  The correct answer, though pastrypride does not think it is necessary to spell it out, is of course that Zimmerman would have been apprehended, indicted, and convicted of murder almost before the newspapers could carry the story, and pastrypride is quite correct that that fact tells us something important about America. 

So just what is my objection to trolley car arguments?  Let me try again.  Most philosophical arguments in the general field of Moral Philosophy [which I use to include Political Philosophy as well] make appeal at many points to what is often referred to as our "moral intuitions."  Now, the word intuition is, in some branches of philosophy, such as Kantian epistemology, a term of art with a precise denotation and connotation, but that is almost never the way in which it is being used here.  "Appealing to our moral intuitions" means, rather loosely, checking with our sense of a complex situation, asking ourselves what we think about it, sometimes asking how people like us think about it -- or even, though moral philosophers virtually never offer any evidence for the claim, asking how all decent normal people would think about the situation if they were confronted with it.  In less exalted venues than philosophy journals, this is referred to as taking a gut check.

How I respond to a situation, what seems obvious and incontrovertible to me about its moral significance, is deeply shaped, if not determined, by my personal history, by my culture and class position, by my knowledge of history and economics and sociology, and also by the broader ideological context of my life, of which I may be utterly incapable of articulating.  Let me give a personal example, as is so often my wont. 

Shortly before I joined the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts in 1992, a Los Angeles taxi cab driver, Rodney King, was brutally and wantonly beaten by a group of LAPD officers, a beating that was caught on tape.   The acquittal four of the officers videotaped beating King triggered riots reminiscent of those following the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.  The reaction of my new colleagues in Afro-Am to the Rodney King affair was markedly different from that of most White commentators, on the left as well as on the right.  The White commentators viewed the incident as an aberration, whether excusable [those on the right] or to be condemned as arising out of widespread racism still present in American society.  But my colleagues saw it, to use the familiar phrase, as same ole same ole.  They saw it as simply the most recent of a string of abuses, oppressions, enslavements, beatings, and lynchings going back more than four hundred years.  Their moral intuitions about the event were utterly different from those of the majority of Americans  -- not their moral judgments, but their moral intuitions.    

The trouble with trolley car hypotheticals is that they are deracinated -- they are rootless.  They are not situated in the actual social, political, historical, and ideological context of the lives of those who are being asked to "consult your moral intuitions."  Consequently, replies to trolley car hypotheticals are virtually valueless.  In the real world, when subordinates bring to a President a decision about, let us say, a bombing raid or a drone strike, the subordinates scrub the briefing papers clean of all manner of facts -- about probable civilian casualties, about the uncertainty of the intelligence, etc. -- that they know might implicate the President in the responsibility if something goes wrong -- and any person who occupies the position of President knows this, or ought to know it, or has contrived to forget it.  Ever since Watergate, this has been referred to as preserving the President's "plausibly deniability."  If our "moral intuitions" about the President's decision are not grounded in an awareness of that simple fact, along with countless others, then our moral intuitions are no better as a guide to our judgment than my moral intuitions were about the Rodney King case before I learned some of the things my colleagues had known all their lives.

It would be tedious to spell out in detail example after example of appeals to moral intuitions and the contexts in which they are embedded.  By the way, this problem is not peculiar to trolley cars.  John Rawls' elegant account of what he calls "reflective equilibrium" suffers from the same problem.  It is no more reliable than what the ancients called consensus gentium.

Well, enough from me about trolley cars.

EXCAVATING THE DUMPSTER

My Marx course is concluded, the papers are read, the grades are submitted, preparations for my Paris trip are complete, I have even had my car Jiffy Lubed.  What to do?  I decided to explore a desktop folder I had not visited for ages.  In it, I found some WORD files I created in conjunction with the 1997-1998 version of the year-long double seminar that we in the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at UMass required every first year doctoral student to take.  I had exercised my slender authority as Graduate Program Director to add to the list of fifty assigned texts Henry Louis Gates' first, and best, book, The Signifying Monkey, which was the revised version of his doctoral dissertation at Yale.  All seven of us teaching in the doctoral program attended all of the two and a half hour twice weekly sessions of the seminar [it was pretty intense.]  We shared the job of leading the discussions.  Since I had lobbied for the inclusion of the Gates, it was my job to handle that class.  [Fifty classes, fifty books, fifty papers.  We were serious!]

To prepare the students for the book, I wrote a a few lines by way of introduction -- some 3700 words in all.  My memo to the graduate students has not seen the light of day in seventeen years, but I think it is worth reproducing here.  So settle down.

May 11, 1998

 

From:               Bob Wolff

To:                   Members of the Major Works Seminar

Subject:           The Signifying Monkey

 

 In order to make sense of this book, you must begin to think and talk ironically.  You must be alert to ways in which an author communicates meaning by form as well as by content, and ‑ especially important ‑ I want you to examine the way in which Gates mobilizes and uses his very great anger in the service of his critique.  What follows is, needless to say, my interpretation of Gates.  As will immediately be clear to you, my interpretation is, as they say in the lit crit game, a strong reading of the text, and open to serious questioning.  I might say that I wrote to Gates, complimenting him on the book and telling him that it was the angriest book I had ever read.  I received an equivocal reply [which, given my reading, is what one would expect!]  Make of all this what you will.  I very much hope each of you will try your own independent reading of this complex text.

 

Gates has at least three large aims in his book, aside from the obvious goals of informing the reader and presenting interpretations of three major Afro‑American novels.  These are, in order of accessibility or ease of appropriation:  First, to demonstrate that certain West African religious and cultural traditions contain a theory of literary criticism that has deeply affected Afro‑American literature and can, when applied to that literature, illuminate it significantly;  Second, to demonstrate that the tradition of Afro‑American literature will sustain a literary critical analysis as rigorous, as sophisticated, and as theoret­ically complex as that which has come to be standard in the interpretation of the dominant canon of Western literature, thereby rebutting the claim that that literature has no tradition, or is secondary in importance and literary quality, or can achieve importance only insofar as it imitates and inserts itself into the dominant canon;  and Finally, to carry out a corrus­cating, hilarious send‑up of literary criticism, especially of the Yale variety, by showing, in a mocking fashion, that a monkey [a Black man] sitting on a log can Signify [do literary criti­cal interpretation] as well as Hartman, or Miller, or Derrida, or Bloom, or de Man.  It is this last aim that has the most complex ironic structure.  Gates is simultaneously outdoing his mentors from Yale, thereby showing that he deserves to be one of them, and making fun of them and of their exalted notions of a literary canon.  If a signifying monkey [Gates himself ‑ the title is transparently a mocking and angry self‑reference] can extract from African folk tales, for God's sake, a literary theory as sophisticated as that elaborated by the giants of literary criticism out of their struggles with classical literature, Romantic poetry, and the like, then the pretensions of this crew are thoroughly punctured.  I do not see how we can avoid the conclusion that Gates felt like a signifying monkey at Yale, a brilliant black man on display ‑ "Look at that!  The monkey can imitate Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller perfect­ly!  It is almost as though he actually understands what he is talking about!"

 

Let us begin with the notion of a canon, for it underlies everything in this segment of the course.  The term "canon" is from the Greek, meaning "rule," and in many of its modern usages, it continues to carry that sense.  [In music, a canon is a contrapuntal composition composed according to a certain rule, etc.]  In the extremely important debates that took place at various times up through the Renaissance over the authenticity of certain books of the Old and New Testaments, the word came to be used for the list of books that the Roman Catholic Church considered genuine.  Since the genuine books of the Bible are considered by Christians to be the Revealed Word of God, it is obviously of transcendent importance to determine just exactly which books belong in that canon.

 

There are several crucial points to be noted here.  First, there is an absolute, un­bridgeable chasm dividing those books that do, and those that do not, belong in the canon.  Those that do are inspired by God, and are the vehicle of His revelation to man.  Those that do not are merely interesting books, perhaps strikingly written or filled with wisdom and piety, but not revealed by God.  Second, a book that belongs to the canon belongs to it forever.  Future scholarship or archeological discoveries may add a text to the canon, but books in the canon do not, as it were, become superseded.  If future scholarship should reveal that a supposedly canonical book is apocryphal, then that shows that it never should have been in the canon in the first place.  Finally, because of the transcendent status of the canonical books, a deep bifurcation takes place in the quantity and character of attention paid to books in or not in the canon.  Those in the canon are read and reread endlessly, virtually memorized [see the famous Bible passage scene in The Adventures of Tom Saw­yer], commented on, analyzed, dissected;  those not in the canon, although virtually indis­tinguishable from those in the canon to the untutored eye, are ignored, taken account of only by specialists, allowed to languish and even to go out of print.

 

In the Renaissance, a major effort was made to recover what was thought of as the lost glory of the classical age of Greece and Rome.  The same techniques of textual criticism and interpretation that had been developed in the Church as a means to establish­ing the canon of authentically revealed books of the Bible were now brought to bear on manuscripts supposedly containing versions of secular texts from classical times. Because of the universal belief that the culture of classical times was vastly superior to that of the intervening centuries, something akin to the religious significance of the canon was at­tributed to the authentic works of the classical period.  Thus was created the conception of the literary canon, over which so much ink is now being spilled.

 

[Note, by the way, that we have here one more example of a religious conception being secularized, but carrying with it a great deal of the associated passion and significance that makes sense only in the original religious version.  Other examples are the seculariza­tion of the Protestant doctrine of predestination, as analyzed most famously by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and the secularization by Marx of the eschatology of Christianity, in the form of a theory of stages of historical development, and Hegel's transmutation of the Christian notion of transcendently defined stages of spiritual development ‑ Eden, the Fall, The Law, The Incarnation, The Last Trump ‑ into the notion of stages of aesthetic development ‑ Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc]

 

If we think for a bit about the modern notion of a literary canon, we can see how much it draws from the original religious notion of the canon of authentically revealed texts.  In English literature, for example, the canon of great works starts, let us say, with Beowulf, continues on through Chaucer, Gawain and the Green Knight, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets, and so on and on.  Anyone who has had a good undergraduate education in English Literature will be intimately familiar with the canon.

 

In literature especially, a distinction far sharper than can ever be justified is made between the works that are, and the works that are not, in the canon.  Those in the canon are taught over and over [see any college catalogue or Readings in English Literature].  Those not in the canon are dealt with distinctly as sub‑literature, interesting only to special­ists.  The justification put forward, when one is demanded [and it is a large part of the canonical character of the canon that under normal circumstances it is not justified], is that the works in the canon are great works of literature, immortal works of literature, part of the enduring heritage of western civilization, whereas those works not in the canon are merely, at best, good books.  Since those not initiated into the sacred mysteries have a bit of trouble telling which is which, these claims must be supported by extremely aggressive assertions of expertise, refined taste, and authority.

 

[A brief story.  During 1961‑63, I taught at the University of Chicago, in the sophomore Social Sciences course.  On the same hall as my office were the people teaching the Fresh­man Humanities course.  In one of their exams, they reproduced a poem, and asked the students to state, first, whether it was a nonsense rhyme or a real poem, and secondly to explain why.  The poem began, "Margaret, are you grieving/Over golden groves unleaving?"  I unerringly identified it as a nonsense rhyme.  It is, of course, a famous poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins!]

 

Now, enter a group of African‑American authors and scholars, challenging the literary canon on the grounds that it slights the literary productions of African‑Americans, provoking a violent reaction from the literary establishment [please note that this political use of the term "establishment" is itself a secularization of an originally religious conception.  The term derives from the institution, as in England, of an established church ‑ that is to say, a church that, by law, is the official, sanctioned and sanctioning, religious body of the state and society.  Orthodox Judaism in Israel, Islam in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and elsewhere, the Anglican Church in England, the Roman Catholic Church in Italy, etc., are established churches.  To characterize a network of upper income families with close educa­tional, economic, and political ties as an "establishment," to describe a group of literary critics and scholars as "the establishment," is to make the claim that they operate as though they had been authorized by law as the official religion of the society.  This use of the term obviously involves both an extended analogy and a metaphorical transmutation, and you ought never to use it without having both of those facts self‑consciously in mind.]  The defenders of the established canon [you see how these two terms fit together to convey a quasi‑religious meaning] reject the claims of the  African‑Americans with all the horror, anger, and self‑righteousness that churchmen rejected the claims of those whom they judged to be heretics.  What is at stake is not at all a difference in literary tastes.  Rather, what is at stake is nothing less than the proper identification of the word of God ‑ or at least so it would appear, judging from the intensity of feeling aroused by the sugges­tion that Richard Wright take his rightful place next to F. Scott FitzGerald. 

 

Needless to say, jobs, perquisites, editorships, endowed chairs, and other material good things are also at stake.  But I think it would be a serious mistake to think that the fuss is over nothing more than those material rewards.  After all, it didn't actually threaten Lionel Trilling's eminence at Columbia to propose the inclusion of Native Son in the curriculum. I think one can only explain the ferocity of the debates by appeal to the quasi‑religious notion of a received canon, faithfulness to which defines our nature and worth.

 

The religious analogy helps us as well to predict, and to understand, the inevitable splinterings and internecine fights that characterize the dispute over the canon.  As with the history of Christianity, we find those holding the centers of wealth and power trying to fight off popular heresies, we find a splintering of sub‑heresies, we find an on‑going struggle between those of "Catholic" incli­nation who lean heavily on tradition and collective establishment of dogma, and those who celebrate in "Protestant" fashion individual literary judgment and taste.

 

In addition, of course, in the African‑American challenge to the canon, we find the very important second challenge mounted by African‑American women authors against the African‑American male "establishment."  That is precisely the special focus of Hurston’s novel, as we saw earlier.

 

Let me now turn to a topic that plays a major role in Gates' book, and in the literary debates about the existence and nature of an African‑American literary tradition.  I am referring to what is rather pretentiously called "intertextuality," or, more simply, the practice among writers of referring to, commenting on, and making revi­sions in the dominant images and literary figures, or tropes, of their predecessors.

 

Once again, we have here the secularization of an originally religious practice of textual cross‑reference.  [Let me strongly recommend to you the great work, Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach, particularly the first several chapters, on this subject.]  As some of you surely know, but others of you may not know, the Bible is filled with texts that anticipate later texts, fulfill earlier texts, and endlessly comment upon one another.  Let me give you a handful of examples to show you what I mean.  Here are five passages chosen from the Gospels, with the Old Testament texts of which they are fulfillments, or on which they are commentaries:

 

1.         Matthew, 27:46 [i.e., The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Chapter 27, verse 46]

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

 

Psalms, 22:1:

 

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

 

2.         Matthew, 27:48

 

"And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink."

 

Psalms, 69:21

 

"They gave me also gall for my meat;  and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink."

 

3.         Mark, 14:62

 "And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven."

 

Daniel, 7:13‑14

 

"I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven..."

 

4.         Mark, 15:24

 

"And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments, casting lots upon them, what every man should take."

 

Psalms, 22:18

 

"They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture."

 

5.         John, 12:8

 

"For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always."

 

Deuteronomy, 15:11

 

"For the poor shall never cease out of the land:  therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to the poor, and to thy needy, in thy land."

 

The last of these examples of echoes and fulfillments also, of course, illustrates the process of revision ‑ compare the conclusion Moses draws, in Deuteronomy, from the fact that the poor shall never cease out of the land, with the conclusion Jesus draws from the fact that the poor always we have with us!  The most famous revisionary statement in the Bible occurs in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthews, 5:17‑18.  Jesus says, "Think not that I come to destroy the law, or the prophets:  I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.  (18)  For verily, I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled."  What sounds like a denial of revision is in fact the most profound revision.

 

Now, authors are constantly commenting on, alluding to, reviving, and revising their predecessors.  Texts refer not only to the world, but to other texts [hence, "intertextuality"], as in the examples above from the Bible.  What is more, a common claim made by modern literary critics [such as Gates' teacher, Harold Bloom, at Yale] is that subsequent authors write against their predecessors, in the sense of taking up dominant images or literary maneuvers ["tropes"] that their predecessors have used to make an extremely strong statement of some esthetic sort, and then twisting or revising those images or maneuvers, in effect taking the words out of their forebears’ mouths.  This is represented frequently by the critics as a kind of killing of the father, a supplanting by the new generation of the old one.  [You begin to see the significance of the image in Their Eyes conjured by the line, "Mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf," which substitutes a collective voice for the competitive, exclusionary voice of the revisionary male author.]

 

One brief example, to show you what I am talking about. Michael Awkward, a young African‑American literary critic at Michigan, has written a book on women African‑American novelists called Inspiriting Influences.  He begins by stating that he is going to explore a process of linguistic revision that he calls "denigration."  "Denigration" means "blackening," of course, and it is standardly used in English with the sense of defaming someone or casting aspersions on someone's good name.  Awkward deliberately takes the term over and reverses the signifi­cation of it.  By using the term over and over, he forces the reader repeatedly to confront the entrenched negative connotations of "black" and "blackness," connotations, of course, that he claims are attached to everything connected with the history, literature, and lives of Black people.

 

One more general observation, before turning to Gates' book itself.  In recent times, especially in French and American academic literary critical circles, the curious notion has become current that critics are more important than authors, and theories of literary criti­cism more important than works of literature.  Indeed, the wildly comical notion has even been bruited about, rather humorlessly, that there are no authors, only texts with multiple meanings [take another look at the little tidbit from Derrida with which we began the course.]  Crazy as this view is, we can, I think, understand its attraction.  [The following is my own personal view ‑ it is not supported by any foundation grants, could not get pub­lished in a refereed journal, and will never be the subject of a panel at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association.  The reader is warned.]

The received canon of literary classics in the western tradition is very large, but definitely finite.  Mediocre students of literature find it all they can do simply to read through it and try to understand the theories about it that scholars and critics have put forward.  These good gray souls soldier on, writing forgettable papers about ever more obscure aspects of Daniel Deronda or The Lyrical Ballads.  But the truly brilliant young students of literature [of whom there is always a small but steady supply] soon discover that they have crested the wave ‑ they have read the canon, mastered the going theories, and now are confronted by the ego‑deflating fact that they must sit passively, waiting for au­thors to write more great literature before their finely honed scalpels of interpretation can be wielded. 

 

Bright literary critics are in fundamentally a different position from philosophers in this regard ‑ an inferior position, furthermore.  A philosopher who has mastered the sec­ondary literature on Descartes' Meditations can launch out into an original piece of philo­sophical argument triggered by that text.  She needn't even try to claim that this new argument is an interpretation of the text, any more than a young novelist influenced by James Joyce need represent his novel as an interpretation of Ulysses.  But literary critics don't, qua literary critics, write novels or poems.  What to do?  The answer almost leaps off the page:  Deny that there are any authors [that takes care of their primacy];  deny that there is any one correct reading of a text [that opens up the field to endless new readings];  privilege theories of criticism over works of literature [that instates the authors of literary criticism, the critics, as superior to the mere readers of even the most multiform of texts ‑ notice, by the way, that even Derrida, in the very act of denying the existence of authorship, manages nonetheless to sign his own books and collect the royalties].  And wait for the money to roll in.

 

All of this is done in an ever more obscure jargon, a mode of writing that separates the leading literary critics from the ordinary teachers of college literature courses, from the writers of literature, and, of course, from the general public.  The entire operation is pre­cious, exclusive, obscurantist, competitive, and self‑aggrandizing.  Gates's book is an attack on all of this ‑ an attack both from the inside and from the outside.

 

A word about the central notion of Gates' book: "Signifyin(g)".  I don't think I need to belabor the obvious and deliberate ambiguities and multiple meanings of this term, which Gates plays with endlessly.  I leave it to those of you who are enamored of Saussure and such like to expatiate on that.  Nor will I repeat what Gates has to say about the cultur­al practice of signifying in African‑American speech ‑ especially since virtually everything I know about it comes from Gates.  [I call your attention to footnote 12 to Chapter 2, one of the funniest footnotes I have ever read.]  One preliminary admonition:  DON'T BE AFRAID TO LAUGH.  This is, in its arcane way, a very funny book.  A large part of its point is its humor.  If you plow through it with a straight face, you will miss the point.  Remember, start thinking ironically.  Everything Gates says is meant to be taken seriously and also to be taken as a wild joke.

 

Generally speaking, I cannot do better than to advise you to read Gates carefully, now that I have said a few things by way of background.  One final point worth thinking about.  Gates makes it clear that the tradition of literary criticism he is explicating is an oral, not a written, tradition.  In the first place, it comes out of the oral religious and literary traditions of the Yoruba.  In the second place, it manifests itself in what he calls "speakerly texts."  And finally, the activity of signifyin(g), unlike the activity of literary satire, say, is an essentially spoken, rather than written, activity.  Playing the dozens in print is even worse than playing chess by mail.  It would take forever for two authors to exchange in print a series of ever more exaggerated and imaginative insults.  The force and fun of it lie very much in its spontaneity, immediacy, and in the voice in which it is done.  [Compare, by the way, insult comedians like Don Rickles.]  Now, the Western literary tradition is originally an oral tradition as well.  The Iliad and Odyssey are oral epics.  The Gospels were transmit­ted orally for at least a century before being written down.  And Plato's Dialogues are obviously a form of stylized verbal duel transmuted into a written text.

 O.K.  Now read the book.

 

SOMETHING HARD

I am going to try something hard, and I may just crash and burn, in which case, simply avert your eyes and move on.  Here is the background.  I posted a remark triggered by Michael Eric Dyson's attack on Cornel West, and Chris responded with a link to a different dispute between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky [embarrassed disclosure:  I did not actually know who Sam Harris is until I read the exchange and then looked him up on Wikipedia.]  I read the entire exchange, which Harris posted on his blog.  It seems to have taken place over four days in late April [irrelevant aside:  how on earth does Noam find the time for all of this?  He is even older than I am.]

As it happens, I read the exchange right after lunch.  Now, pretty much every day I have the same lunch:  no-fat cottage cheese, no-fat yoghurt, some sugar, and a lot of seedless grapes on top.  I eat it sitting on my bed watching Television.  Today, I caught a few minutes of the latest remake of King Kong, which I have seen several times before.  This is the one in which Adrian Brody is miscast as the hero and Naomi Watts plays the Fay Wray part -- Jack Black, as usual, is great.  I tuned in as Kong is trying to figure out what he has taken prisoner and Watts is dancing and doing her vaudeville turns in an effort to distract him.

With this as background, perhaps you will understand why I felt so strongly, as I read through the extended Harris/Chomsky exchange, that it really just wasn't fair to put little Sam Harris, hopping and skipping and singing as fast as he could, up against this enormous overpowering Great Ape, Noam Chomsky.  It was like a boxing match between a Flyweight and a Heavyweight.  Noam is so much smarter than Harris, and knows so much more, and is so much more relentless.

Chomsky makes reference to President Clinton's decision to blow up one of the only pharmaceutical factories in Sudan, thereby leaving that poor country with no way to replenish desperately needed medicines.  Harris [you need to read the exchange to get the full story] is trying to defend the view that America, despite all the harm it causes in the world, has good intentions and its actions therefore ought not to be equated with those undertaken by al Qaeda.  He coughs up a hypothetical about al Qaeda good-heartedly blowing up a pharmaceutical factory in the American heartland because it mistakenly thinks that drugs are being produced at the site which threaten to cause uncounted deaths and injuries in American children.  He is trying to separate out analytically consequences from intentions, in order to make a point in what I think he imagines is moral theory.  Chomsky is having none of it, and brushes the hypothetical aside, pointing out that Clinton had every reason to know that the factory he ordered destroyed was indeed making pharmaceuticals and not munitions.  Harris is clearly frustrated by Chomsky's apparent inability to understand this standard move in modern philosophical discussions -- i.e., the use of hypotheticals constructed to make a point about morality.

OK, got that?  What I want to talk about is not Sam Harris or Noam Chomsky or Bill Clinton or al Qaeda or the Sudan, but this technique of argument in contemporary analytic philosophy.  Some of you may be familiar with a relatively recent example of this technique, the trolley car hypothetical in all its variants, about which so many words have been written.  The idea is [I am not kidding] that a trolley car is out of control, bearing down on some people trapped in a car [or whatever], and you are standing on an overpass watching this horrified.  The only way you can stop the slaughter is to push a fat man, conveniently positions, off the overpass so that he will hit the tracks and derail the trolley.  You are not permitted by the terms of the hypothetical to question the factual premises of the hypothetical, which are constructed so that there is no other way to save many lives save by sacrificing one innocent life [the fat man.]  You, we are asked to assume, are thin and your body would not suffice to stop the trolley.  You get the idea.

There are many things you can say about this example, and almost  all of them have been said by one or another eager participant in the debate.  To my way of thinking, the only really interesting thing to observe is that there are actually otherwise apparently intelligent and accomplished university professors who think that this is an appropriate way to talk about Ethics.  Sam Harris is clearly one of them.  In my view, this is utter nonsense -- not this or that or the other particular take on one or another hypothetical example, but the notion that anything of the slightest value can be arrived at in this manner of reasoning.

I am quite convinced that these sorts of thought experiments are nonsense, but it is not so easy to say why  That is why I warned that I might crash and burn.  Let me have a go at it, nonetheless.  

In formal logic, we routinely abstract from the content or matter of an argument in order to reveal its form, about which it is quite often possible to say something extremely interesting.  That is the idea behind the syllogism [If All A are B, and all B are C, then All A are C, regardless of what A, B, and C are, and also regardless of whether in fact all A are actually B, etc.]  Philosophers, entranced for two and a half millennia by the power of such arguments, are forever seeking to import that technique into ethical theory or metaphysics or political philosophy.  I engaged in a bit of it myself in In Defense of Anarchism.  But the process of abstraction on which the process of formal argument depends presupposes that we can precisely and accurately distinguish the several elements of a real world action in such a fashion as will permit us to detach them from one another in constructing hypotheticals.  It also assumes that we can use terms like "intention" as though they were the names of simple identifiable particulars that can be safely abstracted from the complex context in which they are normally embedded.  Harris and Marvin Kalb and all those philosophers talking about trolley cars suppose that we can identify, let us say, President Clinton's intentions in abstraction from the knowledge and circumstances in which they occur, so that we can judge the intentions independently of the actual consequences or the knowledge that actors should have had, or -- and this is quite important -- independently of the institutional, historical, and bureaucratic context of the actions.  And that, I suggest, is wrong.

Whenever one of those factors is cited by someone objecting to the hypothetic example, the person posing the example will wave a hand and say "I will assume that consideration is not operative here."  Let me now say something peculiar, but really quite important.  The dismissal of the objection with a wave of the hand is too easy.  Not wrong, exactly, but too easy.  The right to set aside that consideration has not been earned, by hard study, by experience, by history, or by personal sacrifice.  Philosophy done that way requires no heavy lifting, so to speak.  You can be as ignorant as a new born babe and yet, with a fertile imagination, you think to brush aside the hard-won wisdom of those who have actually been trolley car conductors or military field commanders or operating room nurses or heavy equipment operators by abstracting from it.

Now, to be sure, if all the A's really are B's, and all the B's really are C's, then all the A's really are C's, regardless of the life experiences of those who have dealt with A's, B's, and C's for decades.  But in the real world, there are always hidden filiations, caveats, connections, and exceptions that experience and knowledge [and sometimes the bearing of responsibility] teach us.  And too often, philosophers ignore those and are taken in by the false simplicity and specificity of actually quite complex matters.

So when Sam Harris conjured up that example of the al Qaeda well-intentioned bombing of an American pharmaceutical factory, I cringed.  "Oh Lord," I thought, "it is trolley cars all over again."  And when Noam brushed the example aside, I thought he was right to do so, even though Harris thought he had scored an unacknowledged debater's point.

Well, time to prepare dinner.

AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?

I recently came across a very long, very personal, and rather mean-spirited attack on Cornel West by Michael Eric Dyson, in the New Republic.  Then Jerry Fresia, a frequent and valued commenter on this blog, wrote an e-mail to me in which he referred to the attack and linked to a defense of West by Henry A. Giroux.  The controversy started me brooding about the fratricidal character of so much of the debate in the public domain about large issues of public policy.  I do not consider myself a public intellectual -- I never write for journals of opinion, I am almost never asked to speak at public gatherings, I do not show up to mass demonstrations -- but I have a deep lifelong concern with economic, military, educational and other questions, and some of my writings have played a small part in public debates of the past.  As I was driving about here in Chapel Hill running morning errands, I wondered whether there wasn't a better way for all of us -- the famous, like Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, and the much less well-known, like myself -- to think about ourselves and the really rather small number of our colleagues on the left.

Since I spent my entire working life teaching at one university or another, my thoughts naturally turned to how things are on an academic campus.  At any university with which I am familiar, there have always been some members of the faculty whose voices are heard whenever a dispute arises, who speak up at faculty meetings, organize teach-ins, join student sit-ins, and stand out on the campus as forceful defenders of principled positions.  There are others, less prominent, who support those with the big voices, vote with them when all-faculty meetings are called on pressing controversies, and in general serve as troops in the struggles, without achieving anything like prominence on the campus.  And there are still others whose work is informed by the same deeply held moral or political concerns, but who quietly go about their teaching and other duties while they write scholarly books and articles.

Similar distinctions are observed among the various intellectuals on the left [and, I might add, on the right, but I do not care about them, save as problems to be dealt with somehow.]   Suppose we were to stop competing for the spotlight [as Dyson pretty clearly is with West] and instead thought of ourselves as a virtual University of the Left, content to let each of us fight for what we believe in the way that each of us finds most comfortable.  As I have so often observed, if we are to have any chance of changing the world [as opposed merely to bearing witness to its faults], we are going to need many millions of us, not simply that orthodox fragment of the Saving Remnant with whom we have no disagreements whatsoever.  If the truth be told, all the people in the entire United States who would feel comfortable with the label "Marxist" probably would not fill  Fenway Park, let along Yankee Stadium.

Any viable movement for radical change will of course need Cornel West, but it will need Michael Eric Dyson as well.  Indeed, though I am sure it will cause heartburn in some of my readers for me to say it, any movement with a chance of succeeding will even need Paul Krugman.   At this point, we are not the tip of a spear.  We are not even the tip of an iceberg.  So if Dyson wants to mock West for having some ego as well as some skin in the game, let us just avert our eyes and keep going.  The way things look now, both of them will be long in the tooth before real change comes to America.

BUSH LEAGUE

I have been mesmerized by Jeb Bush's floundering efforts to hit the softball that Megyn Kelly lobbed at him on Fox News several days ago.  "Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion of Iraq?" or words to that effect.  The correct answer, the obvious answer, the answer that any halfway competent advisor would have fed him in their very first strategy meeting, is "No, and neither would my brother.  But all of us had false information that compelled us to act."  Jeb's inability to come up with this answer forces us to wonder whether he is another Phil Gramm, Rick Perry, or Fred Thompson -- someone whom the wise insiders all knowingly tip as the one to beat, the real deal, the heavyweight, until he actually steps into the spotlights and reveals that he is another empty suit.

I will freely confess that I have worried about a Jeb Bush candidacy.  With the House seemingly firmly in the hands of far right crazies and the Senate a serious reach for the Democrats in 2016, we desperately need a President, even a faux Republican like Clinton, who will stand against some of the worst things the Republicans wish to inflict on us.  I have long thought that Jeb Bush was the one Republican who could defeat Clinton.  Now, I am beginning to wonder.

CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL

All right, snark if you will.  I found today's NY TIMES crossword puzzle very tricky.

THE IDEOLOGY OF SPACE CONSCIOUSNESS CONCLUSION

The colonial expansion that eventuated in the establishment of the United States has its own particular version of the ideology of space, captured perfectly in the opening pages of one of the most successful college American History textbooks of the twentieth century, The American Pageant, by Thomas A. Bailey.  Bailey, by the way, at one point served as the President of the leading professional organization in the field, the Organization of American Historians.  He introduced generations of readers to the colonization of the North American continent with these words:

"The American republic, which is still relatively young, was from the outset singularly favored.  It started from scratch on a vast and virgin continent, which was so sparsely peopled by Indians that they could be eliminated or pushed aside.  Such a magnificent opportunity for a great democratic experiment may never come again."

The American continent was, to be sure, "virgin," in the eyes of English colonists, because not a single square foot of it had attached to it a claim of property that an English court was bound to observe.  The claims of the local inhabitants to hunting grounds, grazing lands, territorial boundaries or sacred burial sites were null and void, so far as an English magistrate was concerned.  Indeed, in many cases they were not even recognized as claims at all.  Deeply embedded in the American consciousness is the belief that, as Americans, they have an unassailable right to everything between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  It is striking to contrast this with the claims advanced by the Germans or the Russians or the French to borderlands, claims that inevitably run up against counter-claims from other nations that must at least be attended to and rebutted.

I encountered a fascinating variant of the American myth of the virgin continent several years ago when Susie and I made a brief three-day visit to Israel.  We hired a guide, an officer in the Army Reserve, who drove us here and there to see the sights.  At one point he paused and waved his hand toward a large valley, which, I suspected, had for many years prior to the establishment of Israel been populated by Palestinians.  "There was nothing here until we came," he said, clearly meaning all of Israel and the Occupied Territories, not simply that valley.  It was at  roughly that moment that I began to regret our decision to detour to Israel on our way to Paris.

I have spoken of the ideological conception of space that underlies International Capitalism, Traditional Patriotism, Imperialism, and Colonialism, but what of Revolutionary Socialism?  As we should expect if we have been paying close attention to Marx, the ideology of socialism is an evolution beyond that if capitalism, not a throwback to earlier ideological orientations.  Like Capitalism, Revolutionary Socialism is unambivalently international in orientation.  [Hence the unofficial anthem of the movement, The Internationale.]  It organizes the world not spatially but along class lines, treating national borders as obstacles to be overcome.  If there is a space that carries any ideological freight in the imagination of a revolutionary socialist, it is not a region but a demarcation: the barricade, which is to say, the line, wherever it is, that divides the working class from the ruling class.   When the First World War broke out, socialists around the world [including my  own grandfather] confidently expected French and German working men to refuse to fight their comrades facing them in the trenches.  The utter frustration of that hope crushed a dream that had been several generations in the making.

With the orientation toward space of Revolutionary Socialism we may contrast that of Utopian Socialism, or more generally of Utopianism.  Utopia is a word coined by Sir Thomas More and used as the title of a book.  The word means "nowhere" [see Samuel Butler's Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited], but it also is a pun on a very similar Greek word meaning "a nice place."  Marx had great disdain for the critics of nineteenth century capitalism whom he dubbed Utopian Socialists because their speculative descriptions of ideal societies were, he thought, not grounded in any sort of analysis of the reality of capitalism as they experienced it.

An interesting modern version of this rootless speculative political philosophy is A Theory of Justice, by John  Rawls, whose "veil of ignorance" is conceived as an objective, neutral standpoint free of parti pris.  In fact, of course, the book turns out on examination to be an ideological rationalization of late twentieth century welfare state capitalism.

And with that, I conclude my effort to suggest how we might do for the consciousness of space what Mannheim does so brilliantly for the consciousness of time.  These are no more than preliminary notes, but I hope you found something of interest in them.