Author: Ophelia Benson

Ah. That’s reassuring. Perhaps I’m not so confused after all, since Norm makes a similar point. Not an identical point, because he doesn’t focus on the Toynbee column, he merely mentions it; but a similar one. The basic disagreement with what she said and with what Harry said at his place I take to be the same.

Harry endorses a piece by Polly Toynbee in which she belittles the importance of the fox hunting issue relative to the ‘things that really matter’, like social injustice. In response to which I offer the following.

(1) One should care about the suffering of other sentient beings. Indifference to the suffering of others is part of the definition of cruelty.

(2) Putting the interests of human beings above those of other species is all right as a general principle, but it doesn’t by itself settle all particular cases where these interests compete. Otherwise you would have to allow that someone who mildly enjoyed beating an animal to death with a club every morning should be allowed to do so. But one shouldn’t allow that, and in fact as a community we don’t.

Exactly. What I said. Cases where these interests compete. It’s no good just saying liberals shouldn’t stop people doing what they like, because people like doing all sorts of horrible things. And if it were any good saying that, then you would have to allow that someone who mildly enjoyed beating an animal to death with a club every morning should be allowed to do so. Yes, factory farming and battery farming are horrible too, but since I’m a vegetarian (okay apart from a little fish now and then) I’m not being hypocritical in being against fox hunting as well. But I’m even more against saying vaguely that people should be allowed to do what they like.

First off, a personal message: stop reading now Fryslan, you’re not going to like this.

I realise that there is nothing people like more than a game (except maybe chocolate); so here’s the first in a new regular spot on the B&W blog (I hate that word).

Guess that Blog

All you’ve got to do to win – and the person who gets the most right at the end of the series will win a copy of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense – is to guess, on the basis of the (imaginary) subject titles below, which blog I’m talking about. Answers on a postcard; or using the comments facility below.

Here we go:

1. Republicans are fascists.

2. Bush stole the election in Florida (yes, I’m still going on about this).

3. Bush kills cats.

4. Professor Smith takes up new position at Not As Good As Mine University.

5. Bush eats babies.

6. Republicans stole election in Delaware (surely, they must have done).

7. People who disagree with me are wrong, have never achieved anything in
their
lives, and have no qualifications (Part 1).

8. Republicans are aliens from Mars.

9. I’m great.

10. Professor Jones – who admires my work – takes up new position at Really Quite Good University.

11. Bush bribed nun to forge election results.

12. Bush sighted wearing suspicious black shirt (shock).

13. People who disagree with me are wrong, have never achieved anything in
their lives, have no qualifications, and they’re hopeless in bed (Part 2).

14. Bush eats babies whilst they’re still alive.

15. I’m really great.

I’m confused – I must be, because I really don’t understand this at all. I usually like Polly Toynbee (not that I read everything she writes), but this seems to me to be a very odd thing to say:

The countrysiders in the Lords will oppose the hunting bill again, but others will oppose it for good liberal reasons – proving the need for a second chamber. Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like. There needs to be an overwhelming case for the serious harm done: hunting just doesn’t meet that criteria (killing a few foxes is not more cruel than battery farming).

Wait – what? ‘Liberals should always be wary of banning people from doing as they like.’ But isn’t that awfully sweeping? ‘Doing as they like’? Doesn’t that cover an awful lot of ground? Underpaying and mistreating employees, abusing children, driving dangerously, vandalising parks or libraries, threatening or stalking people? And all sorts of things. People get banned from doing as they like all the time. Obviously. What does she mean ‘overwhelming case’, what does she mean ‘serious harm’? Overwhelming according to whom, serious by whose measure? My point isn’t about fox hunting, it’s about the generalization itself. I don’t think there should be some presumption that people should be allowed to ‘do as they like’ – it depends very much on what it is they like. Ah well – I must be confused.

I was thinking earlier this morning in an idle moment – well not altogether idle, because I was looking out the window, because it was one of those staggeringly beautiful autumnal mornings when it has partly cleared up after rain and clouds and the air is bright and clear and hard like diamonds or ginger ale or I don’t know what, and the sun is at just the right angle so that it makes the windows on the boats in the marina wink and twinkle which they certainly don’t do most of the time, and the light and shadows on the water and the peninsula look much more light and shadow-like than usual – one of those mornings. I was thinking, while staring at all this, about the difference – the subjective difference, the cognitive difference, the difference in our heads – between people one knows in real life and people one knows via the written word. That thought led to the related and equally familiar thought about books and their authors and how we think about them. To what extent we have ideas of their ‘personalities’, and how accurate or inaccurate such ideas may be. How some writers have (seem to have, via their writing) more ‘personality’ than others, and how that does not necessarily correlate with the quality of the books. A writer can have bags of personality and write crap books, or have none at all and write dazzlers. And what do we mean by personality, and how does it differ from character, and does the same apply. Can a writer have no discernable character and write brilliant books? Offhand I would say no – I don’t think so. The brilliance, the brilliant-book-writing, is the character, or part of it. But it’s not the personality, so much. Why? I don’t know why. Because personality is more adventitious, and so more beside the point? More just one of those things, like curly hair or buck teeth? Whereas character is more basic, and more important. But I can’t swear that’s not just a mere matter of labeling, rather than a genuine distinction.

Emerson and Carlyle met briefly when they were comparatively young, and had an immediate rapport. They sustained this friendship for years via letters; then Emerson made another trip over, and they found they didn’t like each other at all. Emerson found Carlyle a savage misanthropic terror; Carlyle found Emerson full of moonshine and endlessly talking (one knows the type).

I wouldn’t much want to meet either of them, myself. There are some writers I would want to meet; others I would want to observe but not meet; others I wouldn’t want to meet or observe. But what’s odd about it is that the groups don’t correlate with either favourites or hierarchies. It’s not that I want to meet all the best (in my opinion) writers, or all the ones I like the best. No. There’s something interesting about that fact…but I’m not sure what.

Shakespeare, Keats, Chekhov. Them I would like to meet. Emily Bronte, Byron, Montaigne – them I would like to watch, but not meet. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, George Eliot, Austen – I don’t even want to observe, let alone meet. And yet Austen is possibly my very favourite novelist and the one I think is the best. And Wordsworth is one of my favourite poets – but I would go out of my way not to meet him. Hazlitt, now – yes, I would want to meet Hazlitt. I would be frightened, but I would want to. Thoreau. I would like to meet Thoreau. Emerson said walking with him was like walking with a tree. He sounds like exactly my kind of person. I’m a tree myself. Two trees taking a walk; it sounds very agreeable, in a chilly sort of way.

On a lighter note. (Lighter than what? What could be lighter than Andrew Ross? Okay not lighter then, just different.) I have a staggering piece of news for everyone. Are you sitting down? Because this is a real shocker, and so new and fresh and unfamiliar – you just can’t think how new. Ready? Okay here it is.

Americans don’t get irony.

You didn’t know that, did you. You’ve never ever heard that before, have you. That’s not a stupid boring worn-out stale dull flat endlessly-recycled tedious cliché, is it! No indeed. No, you only hear that some three times in every BBC arts programme, that’s all.

I do beg your pardon. How unbecoming. And unironic. But there it is, you see – I don’t get irony. Never have. It’s a closed book to me. Comes of being born in New York, you see, that well-known haven of flat-footed wide-eyed literalness and naiveté.

No it’s just that I heard that particular gem of folk wisdom three times in one day last week. It’s just that it’s gotten so I can hear it coming, and prepare to roll my eyes. The minute one of the boffins on ‘Front Row’ or ‘Saturday Review’ comments on a certain sentimentality or fatuity in a new American movie, I know the next sentence is going to be the one about how Americans don’t do irony. Followed by a Tweedle-dum-Tweedledee-esque group hug. ‘Aren’t we cool, aren’t we great, aren’t we swell, we get irony and those poor pathetic dweebs across the pond don’t, not one of them, they’re all Biblical literalists and every other kind of literalists to boot.’

Gross exaggeration, I know. Well that’s what I do instead of irony, you see – hyperbole. I always do that. (And, I have to admit, a lifelong habit of doing that has revealed to me that some Americans do indeed not get irony, in the sense that I have had people of that nationality owlishly correct or question obvious hyperbole. ‘Was he really ten feet tall?’ Uh – no.) But if other people are allowed to do irony, then I’m allowed to do hyperbole. There’s a law on the books about it. I’d show you but I’m too busy.

One of the funny (possibly even ironic) things about the three in one day is that one of them was so very old. Two were from ‘Saturday Review’ but the other was from an ancient Morse I happened to watch on tv – one from 1991. Some guy tells Morse he’s going back to Princeton and it will be so nice and restful because Americans don’t do irony. Oh really! Princeton’s an irony-free zone, is it! Well I grew up there, and that’s news to me. In fact it’s bollocks.

To be fair, one of the two mentions on ‘Saturday Review’ was saying the same thing. Good old Tom Sutcliffe pointed out that it’s not that there’s no irony in the US, it’s just that it’s not evenly distributed. It may be a bit scarce in Nebraska, he said mildly, but there’s a lot of it on the coasts. Well exactly.

I’ve been slightly touchy about this for years – decades in fact. Ever since reading a long windy pompous self-congratulatory novel by John Fowles, Daniel Martin, which went on and on and on about how Americansdon’tdoirony. Even the clever ones, even the clever and funny ones, even the very clever and funny ones – even they don’t do irony. Whereas, apparently, all Ukanians, however dim and unfunny, do irony like polecats. I hadn’t a clue what he meant by it, which I thought might possibly indicate that it was true and that I too did not do irony. That it was like those notes that only dogs can hear, or sonic thingies that only dolphins can detect – that I simply couldn’t even recognize it, let alone appreciate it or smile at it or deploy it myself.

Well. That was a long time ago, and I’ve long since realized that Fowles was talking self-flattering crap. (And after that review of his diaries in the LRB the other month, I have serious doubts about his talent in the irony department, frankly.) Yes, granted, of course, a lot of our movies are full of sentimental bilge, but I’m such an ironist that I don’t go see them, so they don’t implicate the whole population, now do they. And granted our presidential campaigns are full of even more sentimental and utterly irrelevant bilge (Vote for me, I have a dog!), but – um – well never mind what. But we can too so do irony. We just don’t always happen to feel like it.

Just a bit more. Because I promised, and because there are more that are too good not to share.

…it is perhaps worth drawing an analogy between the demarcation lines in science and the borders between hierarchical taste cultures – high, middlebrow, and popular – that cultural critics and other experts involved in the business of culture have long had the vocational function of supervising. In both cases, we find the same need for experts to police the borders with their criteria of inclusion and exclusion…[F]alsifiability is often put forward as a criterion for evaluating scientific authenticity…But such a yardstick is no more objectively adequate and no less mythical a criterion than appeals to, say, aesthetic complexity have been in the history of cultural criticism. Falsifiability is a self-referential concept in science, inasmuch as it appeals to those normative codes of science that favor objective authentification of evidence by a supposedly dispassionate observer.

Isn’t that lovely? There’s so much in it. It’s like a big ol’ treasure chest. That ‘it is perhaps worth drawing’ – more of that caginess our sharp-eyed readers have noticed. Sure, ‘perhaps’ – that’s safe to say. Then again perhaps not. And ‘worth’? Well, that depends what you mean by ‘worth’. If you mean in the sense of ‘worth because likely to produce interesting, true, useful lines of thought,’ then no. If you just mean ‘more fun than having your teeth cleaned,’ possibly. Okay and then ‘demarcation lines’. Right. That’s what science is all right, it’s kind of like a football field. And then borders. He has a bit of an obsession with borders, Ross does. He seems to think that every distinction and every value judgement (except the ones he makes) equates to establishing and patrolling borders in a peculiarly compulsive, anal, property-hugging, pedantic way. And then ‘supervising’ to underline the point. Right – people who pay attention to culture (slightly more perspicuous attention than Ross pays, one hopes) spend all their time supervising borders; that’s what ‘culture’ is all about. And then, skipping lightly over several more lovely items (experts, police the borders, criteria, inclusion and exclusion) we come to that loopy phrase about falsifiability. Put forward? Scientific authenticity? Oh never mind. And then all the rest of it, all that bilge about normative codes and ‘a self-referential concept’ and ‘objective’ and ‘authentification’ (he seems to have science confused with stamp-collecting) and ‘supposedly’. I’m exhausted now.

But just a little more, because there is one very sly item.

A more exhaustive treatment would take account of the local, qualifying differences between the realm of cultural taste and that of science –

Oh it would! It would notice those differences would it? Well that is a relief!

– science, but it would run up, finally, against the stand-off between the empiricist’s claim that non-context-dependent beliefs exist and that they can be true, and the culturalist’s claim that beliefs are only socially accepted as true.

There, that’s the one. That’s what Susan Haack calls the ‘passes for’ fallacy. That’s that rhetorical trick where epistemic relativists substitute the word ‘beliefs’ for words like ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ and hope we won’t notice. And he follows that up with our last sentence for today.

Ultimately, the power of science rests upon making and maintaining that distinction, and we ought to recognize that science’s anxiety about authenticating its belief in truths is, in the truly Foucauldian sense, a question of power.

There you have it – the making of a celebrity cultural critic.