Month: November 2004

Now (she said, throat-clearingly), that comment of Amartya Sen’s is relevant (in my mind at least) to the discussion in Politics and Morality, below. Mark Bauerlein emailed me in a cordial way to point out that there was a survey reported in the Chronicle some months ago which asked professors in all fields about their political allegiance. “Those who considered themselves Left or Center Left outnumbered those Right or Center Right by almost 3 to 1.” So, as I said in an update to that post, that at least partly answers my question about Business schools and the like, and it’s interesting in itself.

But even with that question partly answered, the more I think about this whole subject – ‘whole’ in the sense of in its wider aspects, as opposed to the relatively narrow one of party politics – the more complicated, fuzzy, and difficult to pin down it seems. And the similarity to Sen’s point has to do with the question of categories, and how we define people, how they define themselves – how we define ourselves and each other, in short. ‘There is, as a result, a widespread inclination to understand people mainly through their religious beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them.’ You could substitute ‘political beliefs’ there for the purpose of this discussion, and the effect would be the same. In other words, it seems to me that knowing that someone identifies herself as Left or Right or Center Left or Right, doesn’t necessarily tell you very much about her. It might, but it easily might not. And it also might not tell you what you think it does. Your idea of Left or Right might not be hers. But I think Sen’s point is the really interesting one – that those one or two words miss much that is important about most people – miss it or confuse it or both.

You could argue, and I think I’m going to, that one of the most interesting things about people is what trumps what. Does political angle trump artistic tastes, or the other way around? Are your commitments more moral than they are political, or vice versa, or do you have a hard time telling the two apart? And then, within those categories, what do you put where? That’s another interesting item. Consider religion, and secularism. Are those political categories? Intellectual? Moral? All those? Something else? And how are they weighted?

And then, how do we know? How do we know which issues are political and which are not? The media, I suppose, is one answer. The newspaper and tv and radio tell us. If they say religion or ‘family values’ or gay marriage or abortion or creationism are now political issues, then we generally accept it – no doubt because newspapers and tv and radio make such statements true in the very act of making them. Speech acts. Once the hegemonic discoursers throw a subject out into the political boxing ring, then that subject becomes something that political operators have to take into account. (So the media ‘create reality’ as the saying now goes.) But that’s part of the problem, in a way, or at least a source of some of the confusion. (What confusion? Well, mine, for a start.) It’s not really self-evident that, say, ‘family values’ are political at all. In fact one might think they are by definition not political. (That’s part of the problem with the way political campaigns, especially in the US [where political campaigns last four years, which means they never stop], talk about the candidates’ personal lives and characters more than they talk about exactly what the candidates are going to do if elected – it turns everything into a ‘political’ subject, including things that might be vastly more usefully and interestingly discussed under a different rubric.)

Maybe this is just a very long-winded way of saying I’m bored by politics. Which I am. Well, considering the way it’s carried on here, via a mix of cartoonish irrelevancy and shameless bribery re-labeled ‘campaign contributions’, and then considering what we end up with as a result, can you blame me?

Amartya Sen makes an excellent point, one I’ve seen him make often before (but it needs to be made over and over again, because it goes against a very strong stream of current opinion and it doesn’t make much headway), in this article in the New York Review of Books.

The richness and variety of early intellectual relations between China and India have long been obscured. This neglect is now reinforced by the contemporary tendency to classify the world’s population into distinct “civilizations” defined largely by religion (for example Samuel Huntington’s partitioning of the world into such categories as “Western civilization,” “Islamic civilization,” and “Hindu civilization”). There is, as a result, a widespread inclination to understand people mainly through their religious beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them. The limitations of this perspective have already done significant harm to our understanding of other aspects of the global history of ideas. Many are now predisposed to see the history of Muslims as quintessentially Islamic history, ignoring the flowering of science, mathematics, and literature that was made possible by Muslim intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. One result of such a narrow emphasis on religion is that a disaffected Arab activist today is encouraged to take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the diversity and richness of Arab history. In India too, there are frequent attempts to portray the broad civilization of India as “Hindu civilization”—to use the phrase favored both by theorists like Samuel Huntington and by Hindu political activists.

Exactly. I think I’ve made a similar point here quite a few times – but again (and considerably less surprisingly, what with my not being a Nobel economist and not writing in the NYRB and all) it doesn’t do any good so I just go on making it. This radical simplification has a lot of disastrous consequences, some of which are very noticeable indeed in what one might call contemporary hegemonic discourse. I wouldn’t call it that, but one might. One of the most noticeable is the intense reluctance on the part of a lot of leftists to criticise Islam, for fear that that will be taken as criticising Muslims which will be taken as criticising brown or Third World people – with the immensely dreary and discouraging result that leftist, feminist, gay, secular, atheist, dissident people from e.g. Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and the like are ignored or even rebuked by people who ought to be their allies. Another is probably the (mostly unexamined, unaware, taken for granted) idea that religion is and should be and must be immune from criticism in a way that other systems of ideas are not. The over-developed sensitivity and caution and tact about saying any religion and especially Islam might have some truly bad ideas right at its core.

Where did this contemporary tendency that Sen mentions come from, anyway? Is it just a short-cut? Just journalistic laziness? Is it just that it’s faster to say ‘Muslim countries’ than it is to say ‘countries with large or majority Muslim populations’? Or is it more to do with underlying ideas about identity politics? Or is it both? Or both plus more? I don’t know, but I wish everyone would point it out and disagree with it every time it appears until it stops appearing.

Oh, what fun. We have an unfavourable review of the dictionary at Amazon – a very unfavourable review. Really doesn’t like it at all, this reader doesn’t. Thinks it’s bad and awful. Well what’s so fun about that! you ask. Well if you look at the review you’ll see. Or don’t bother, I’ll just quote heavily, because I don’t suppose Amazon reviews are exactly copyrighted, are they, and anyway the reviewer is semi-anonymous.

Another trite and innocently framed attack on those intellectuals who are trying to decenter the–and here is a phrase they make fun of–dominant hegemonic discourse, that is so corrosive and debiliating to our civilization. The authors of this book hark back to a mythical Baconian age of deductive logic. They insist on the heroic processes of logic and reason. All of this other stuff is just poo poo, lets make fun of it because we know that a.)not only can we make money off it–logically and reasonably in a consumerist world that they admire–but, b.) we can at the same time admonish complex and careful thinking–that either they are jealous of the individuals who were able to construct such complex arguments, or they actually don’t really understand them–to the realm of the ridiculous and unreasonable, the illogical. Its a powerful little book, that is far more subversive then it pretends to be, by making ‘cute’ ‘funny’ attacks on the ideas they oppose in favor of a western hegemonic ideology.

There, I quoted so heavily that that’s the whole thing. So you see why it’s fun.

Those (read: brave, heroic, embattled, misunderstood, etc) intellectuals who are trying to decenter the dominant hegemonic discourse, that is so corrosive and debilitating to our civilization. Oh them. Now, I would say, if asked, that I spend a fair amount of time here trying to do something – not decenter, particularly, but something – to the, let’s call it, dominant rhetoric of politics and various media. Call it hegemonic discourse if you insist. I would also say, even if not asked, that I do a better job of it than people who talk or write the way Ryan (the reviewer) do. In other words, I would claim that I am at least as interested in pointing out the hidden agendas, deceptions, mistranslations, euphemisms, evasions, manipulations and the like of public rhetoric as the hegemonic-discourse-decenterers are. So the implication (and it is an implication – quite manipulative and rhetorical in fact) that the dictionary attacks decenterers because they try to decenter hegemonic discourse, is nonsense. On the contrary – it’s because they do such a damn bad job of it.

Then the bit about harking back to a mythical Baconian age – where does he get that, one wonders. And the insistence on the heroic processes of logic and reason – again: really? Where? In other words, more rhetoric. The time-honoured tactic: when at a loss for an argument, just make stuff up. And then the flattery about ‘complex and careful thinking’ and ‘such complex arguments’ – familiar stuff, for instance from the old ‘difficulty’ defense that always crops up in discussions of Bad Writing. This stuff isn’t a lot of jargony polysyllabic neologistic babble disguising an empty box, no, it’s complex careful thinking and complex arguments. Yup uh huh.

And as for more subversive than it pretends to be – I beg your pardon?!? We make no pretense whatever not to be subversive! Subversion is exactly what we have in mind. Tsk. I guess we should have had ‘A Subversive Project’ for our subtitle. You have to spell things out for some people.

Okay, that was just my little fun, but there’s a slightly serious point too. That review is quite symptomatic – as I’m sure all of you who are familiar with this kind of thing will recognize instantly. It’s pure boilerplate, pure formula, and utterly empty. And that’s why things like the FD are necessary at the moment. Until would-be intellectuals get back in the habit of actually saying something instead of just stringing vacuous cliches together, well, the rest of us will just have to keep mocking.

This New York Times article by Ron Suskind about Bush’s ‘faith-based’ certainty got a lot of attention and comment, I gather, but I was away from my desk at the time – away from my desk, from radio and newspapers, from telephones and people, tables and chairs, bread and butter – no, I exaggerate. I was still in civilization. But I was mostly too busy running around and looking at things to pay attention to things like the New York Times magazine or comments on same, so I missed the reaction. But it is a very interesting article. I would like to think it’s a little exaggerated, a little animus-driven – but I’m not sure I can manage it. It’s all much too plausible.

There are a lot of points worth commenting on, but I’ll just mention a couple for now.

Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush’s substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. ”He’s plenty smart enough to do the job,” Levin said. ”It’s his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me.”

That’s not the first time I’ve heard those two observations made together. It’s not that Bush is not smart, goes the line, it’s that he’s not curious. But I think that’s an almost meaningless thing to say in this context. It’s like saying it’s not that Bush flies, it’s just that he moves through the air by flapping his wings. It’s not that Bush eats, it’s that he puts food in his mouth and chews it and swallows it. Look – if Bush is in that job and thinks he doesn’t need to be ‘curious’ about complex issues – then that’s not smart. To put it mildly. That’s all there is to it. It just is not smart to think that ignorance is okay for someone who chose to go for the job of being the most powerful single human on the planet. That observation is essentially the point of the whole article – that Bush doesn’t give a shit what the facts are or what the evidence is, because he has ‘faith’ in a supernatural being instead. He apparently shocks and scares a lot of people with the extent to which he simply does not care if the facts indicate he’s doing the wrong thing. He has instinct, he has intuition, he has faith, he prays, so who cares about facts. So – he’s not plenty smart enough to do the job, is he. Surely not. Surely that’s a pretty good description of someone who is in no sense smart enough to do the job. (Which of course is unfortunate, since he’s doing it.)

And then there’s the famous bit about ‘reality-based’ people and then the other kind.

I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Well…who knows, maybe there’s no need to take that too seriously. Maybe the aide was just yanking Suskind’s chain, or flattering himself, or both those plus having a laugh. But then again…

And of course again it’s so stupid. If he does mean it, it’s so stupid. What can he think he means, ‘we create our own reality’? Of course they create some reality, that’s obvious enough. They change the tax code, they invade Iraq, they appoint Supreme Court justices and other judges. They make things happen. But since when does that equate to creating ‘reality’? Hey, guess what, aide, reality’s a big thing, there’s a lot of it out there, and a fair bit of it is actually created by people other than you and your team. However powerful you all are, and you are plenty powerful, nobody denies it, you aren’t in a position to create reality full stop. You are of course in a position to influence the way other people create some more pieces of reality – which is one big reason it would be advisable for you to do it with plenty of respect for things like facts and evidence and careful thought, as opposed to stupid shortcuts like prayer and ‘faith’ and ‘instinct’ and brainless certainty. Shortcuts to nowhere, those are – if not worse. As a Bush fan hinted to Suskind:

A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: ”I’m happy he’s certain of victory and that he’s ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he’s planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What’s that line? — the devil’s in the details. If you don’t go after that devil, he’ll come after you.”

Yeah, and the rest of us, too.

Lotta proofreading done today. So I’ll give myself a little dessert, and link to a few miscellaneous items I’ve been meaning to link to for a week or so.

There is Julian in the Guardian on ‘dating’ for instance. It’s funny, I’m an American, but I’ve always hated that word. It just sounds like such a silly, stilted, unreal, arbitrary activity – ‘dating’.

Although I find US-bashing a tiresome game, I do object to one lamentable feature of the American way of life that has insidiously infected our indigenous culture: dating. When I grew up, no one talked about dating, let alone did it. You “went out” with someone or, if you wanted to be cool, were “seeing” someone. But it is not the word I object to. It’s the ethos.

Yeah. I object to the word too though. I think the word is probably part of the ethos. It seems to turn interactions between potential lovers into something bizarre, formalized, unlike more ordinary (or as one might say, ‘quotidian’) interactions between friends, colleagues, acquaintances, people on the bus and in the shops.

Then there are a few more of Julian’s columns – one on the use of making mistakes and one on the difference between Aristotle and self-help. And one on speech as act and the implications of speech-acts for freedom of speech. It’s relevant to what we’ve been discussing lately about Theo van Gogh and Rohan Jayasekera.

And speaking of that discussion, there is a post about Jayasekera and his article at Index on Censorship (not to mention his position at same) on Harry’s Place by Juan Golblado, a reader of ours who commented on the subject here too. There is a lot worth reading at Harry’s Place right now. Well there always is – and especially at the moment I want to point to a number of particular items. Maybe I will just mention one or two. There’s a brief but sharp comment on Livingstone and Qaradawi. There’s an amusing dissent from Johann Hari’s defense of Chavs. There’s a post by Harry on Jayasekera’s reply to his critics. And there’s a post on a book I read and recommended here a year or so ago, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

Hmm. That’s only some of the things I wanted to link to. Well – more later. There are still about forty pages left…

It was a worm, that’s what. A damn worm. That’s why B&W has been a little quiet for the past few days, and why I wrote a despairing valedictory N&C on Saturday which I later replaced with an incomprehensible one – it’s because I spent three days wrestling with the worm Orobouros. Only I didn’t know that was what I was wrestling with. But my invaluable colleague was able to figure it out and find out how to fix it, so now B&W will be normally noisy again. After today. I have a lot of proofreading to do today (but I may make noise anyway by way of recreation), and then after that – well I have a lot of other work, to be sure, but I’ll make noise anyway, because I always do.