Author: Ophelia Benson

In the very first Note and Comment of this year I linked to a heart-warming little story (the link is now dead, unfortunately) in the New York Observer about those wonderful hip folks at the Modern Language Association, which featured the profound, almost Gnostic aphorism, ‘Theorists are the snappiest dressers.’ What is it about lit crits these days, people often, often wonder; why are they so full of themselves, so grandiose, so deluded about their omniscience? It couldn’t be mere physics envy could it? Surely they’re too wised up and knowing to fall into that old trap!

Leonard Cassuto takes a look at the issue in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. He had to talk to scientists about a very technical subject recently, and was surprised at how friendly, helpful and non-condescending they were. It is not like that among the humanists, he says mournfully, and includes himself in the indictment. He attributes much of the difference to the peer-review system.

Physicists told me that peer review in the sciences has an ethical code built into it. There can be personality conflicts, of course, but the scientists share the belief that the peer-review system can deliver trustworthy assessments of their work. That enables them to relax and treat each other with respect.

It is different in the humanities because of the subjectivity of the work. The ‘softer’ fields, Cassuto says, are conspicuous for their social hierarchies, their status anxiety, their celebrity culture, and their jargon and turf-protecting.

Attempts to popularize have often been met with the special hostility that attends defense of hierarchy — consider the philosopher Judith Butler’s assertion on the op-ed page of The New York Times that her ideas were so complex they couldn’t be expressed in a way that regular people might understand.

Rebecca Goldstein includes an amusing riff on this subject in her 1983 novel The Mind-Body Problem:

Observers of the academic scene may be aware that there are distinct personality types associated with distinct disciplines. The types can be ordered along the line of a single parameter: the degree of concern demonstrated over the presentation of self, or “outward focus.”…At the low end, with outward focus asymptotically approaching zero, we find the pure mathematicians, closely followed by the theoretical physicists…At the other end, with the degree of outward focus asymptotically approaching infinity, we find sociologists and professors of literature…The degree of outward focus is in inverse proportion to the degree of certainty attainable within the given methodology. The greater the certainty of one’s results, the less the concern with others’ opinion of oneself.

So there you are. Literary theorists are the snappiest dressers.

There was a tiny local skirmish in the ongoing battle between scientists and their various critics, teasers and self-appointed scourges a few days ago at the Los Angeles Book Festival, which was shown on the defiantly uncommercial tv channel Cspan. The critic was one Jeffrey Schwartz, who made a bizarrely impassioned, over-emphatic near-oration on the perils of ‘scientism,’ the putative belief of scientists that only what can be measured is real and that science claims it knows everything worth knowing. Schwartz spoke fervently about the importance of inner experience (do a lot of people dispute that nowadays? Isn’t behaviorism kind of, like, over?) and claimed that it too should be treated as science, that there were ways (not specified) of making it measurable and reproducible, and that it’s very very important. (Odd – he’s against scientism and yet wants science to encompass inner experience and inner experience to be made measurable and reproducible – isn’t that kind of ‘scientistic’ itself?)

The other panelists were David Baltimore, John Maddox, Timothy Ferris, and Brenda Maddox, and they all disagreed with Schwartz, though Ferris also thanked him for making the discussion more interesting than it would otherwise have been. Ferris also advised Schwartz not to try to get published in Nature, to which Schwartz replied, laughing a good deal, that he had tried, several times, and been rejected. John Maddox was the editor of Nature for many years, and he did indeed seem particularly unimpressed by Schwartz’ comments. He wondered how one would go about making inner experience measurable and reproducible, and he pointed out that there are many things science doesn’t know yet, such as how life began and how the mind works. Timothy Ferris talked about seeing a panel of scientists line up to ask hostile, probing questions of researchers and remarked that one would wait a long time before seeing that happen at a panel of theologians. In short it wasn’t much of a victory for the anti-science team.

I generally do my best to ignore political commentary and rhetoric, especially of the right wing variety, because all it does is annoy, not to say infuriate. But once in awhile I bump into some by accident, and it’s invariably even worse than I had imagined. A few evenings ago for instance I tripped over some absurd person on tv (and not even on Murdoch’s Fox channel, but on Gates’ msnbc) ranting about those liberal elitists who dare to disagree with President Bush. That’s the definition of elitism? Disagreeing with Bush? Because…what? Bush was born in a mud hut? Bush is the twelfth child of Mississippi sharecroppers who got where he is today by sheer force of brains and talent? Bush wouldn’t know an elite if it sat down next to him and thanked him for eliminating the estate tax? Is that how that is?

And then last night I heard Geoff Nunberg on Fresh Air discussing a piece by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal that was even more ridiculous, not to say downright sinister in places. All about the ‘stunning’ patriotism of good old ‘bigger and realer’ America.

American journalists still fear that, being called biased in favor of America. So do intellectuals, academics, local clever people who talk loudly in restaurants, and leftist mandarins of Washington, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities. For all cities have them. But there was always another America, and boy has it endured…They came from a bigger America and a realer one–a healthy and vibrant place full of religious feeling and cultural energy and Bible study and garage bands and sports-love and mom-love and sophistication and normality.

It gets even worse, with a lot of drivel about the pope, but I’ll spare you. I’ll spare you so that I can give myself plenty of room to look at Noonan’s sly, nasty, and frankly sick-making rhetoric. Note that intellectuals and clever people are from a smaller and less real America than the one those other, Good people inhabit. Note that cities are bad places. And note (if you can without turning pale and having to rush for a basin) the cheerleading for religious feeling and ‘Bible study’ and…sports-love? and…mom-love? mom-love?? Philip Wylie where are you when we need you. Chatting with Norman Bates, probably. And then of course the clincher. Normality. Ah yes. Normality. Because of course all those other, bad, wicked, urban, eddicated people with their mandarin leftism and their fear of patriotism, they are not normal. They are weird. Odd. Strange. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, abnormal and perverted and sick.

And there is, again, the question of why it is intellectuals who are mandarins, whereas overpaid CEOs who pocket huge bonuses while cutting the pay of their workers are the salt of the earth. There is the even more pressing question, do Republicans never talk loudly in restaurants? I’m not absolutely sure that conforms to my experience of the world. There is the slightly Talibanish air of the desired bigger America – religious feeling and Bible study? One wouldn’t have been enough?

But most of all there is the horrible blinkered narrowness of it, the suffocating parochial smallness, and the disgusting message to the readers: stay as sweet as you are, be little, don’t try to be more, don’t leave, don’t learn, don’t become curious, don’t expand, don’t aspire. Just stay right there in your healthy, vibrant, religious world and never change, or else you will become abnormal and unhealthy. This is particularly repellent coming from someone who herself writes for the Wall Street Journal and other big city publications. She seems to be having an interesting and (sort of) intellectual life, so why all this sneering, why the attempt to discourage other people from broadening their horizons beyond dear mom and the garage? If Peggy Noonan, former White House speechwriter and now columnist for the WSJ, is not a mandarin, who is? Intellectuals and academics? Please.

I wonder how long this is going to go on before all those bigger realer Murkans start to see through it. Start to wonder why it’s intellectuals who are the elitists and mandarins, while rich people are the salt of the earth. Why buying and selling elections and allowing lobbyists and corporate lawyers to write legislation is perfectly fine but disagreeing with George W. Bush about anything is corrupt mandarin city behavior. But then I would wonder, wouldn’t I, because I’m just a sick abnormal citified mandarin myself. Where’s my Bible…

A different, and very minor point that Nunberg made in his commentary is that Noonan uses a rhetorical device in this piece that is more popular with rightists than with leftists. It is that string of ‘ands’ (and Bible study and garage bands and). It’s called polysyndeton. This interests me because it’s a device I use a lot myself, as a friend and editor of mine likes to point out. It could even be said, he hints, that I overuse it. I am now more convinced than I was. I looked it up in a literary dictionary, which said that Hemingway ‘was particularly addicted to this device’ and that ‘in the more extreme instances of his pseudo-biblical style (ouch!) it becomes the equivalent of a verbal tic’. Oh dear.