My Weird Jewish Pangs: A Divulgence

I don't know when it started, but it definitely recurs. Something will trigger it. I'll read something particularly brilliant, and quite often: yep. There it is: a Jewish name attached. I think it all first started for me when I was around 13. My last name? Johnson.

I was one of those introverted, bookish kids. Deep in WASPy Los Angeles suburbia. I don't recall ever knowing a Jewish person; that is, I somehow didn't know what "jewish" meant. I'd heard the word, but it was a cipher. I always had one best friend as a kid, and we spent all our time together. When I was 13, my best friend was a kid that got the best grades in math, and he also broke the school record for the  mile run. I think his background was British, by way of North Carolina. We were both bookish in our own ways. We had other friends, too.

                                                           Woody Allen 

My mom thought we'd like a new movie - new to us, because at the time our little burgh filled with white flighters didn't have its own movie theater - and my mom had to drive my pal and I to an adjacent town to see the second run of a film called Take The Money and Run. I remember we laughed through the whole thing, then stayed and watched it again. As I remember it, we were the only people under 30 in the theater. It felt that way. Back then, if you paid once and you wanted to see the film again, you just remained in your seat and waited for another showing. They didn't chase you out. Anyway, at 13, all I knew was this Woody Allen guy was a genius.

Later, I developed quite a taste for Allen's books and films. As I slowly pieced together for myself ideas of "Jews" - reading the OT on my own, trying to figure out Israel and Palestine, tracing that history, I kept running into writings and ideas that I found endlessly interesting, and almost always some Jew was at the center of it all.

Now: my people are from Norway, Scotland, England, Sweden. But on the West Coast of Unistat, in the last third of the 20th century, in the suburbs of LA, I had no religion. I grew up with no tradition. My mother had been active in the League of Women Voters and was a JFK Democrat. I don't remember my father talking about intellectual ideas at all. He wasn't religious but he was good at sales and had very many friends because he was a master joke-teller and genuinely loved people. He was the life of the party.

How did I become so bookish? Around age 20 or so, I remember I sort of thought I was sort of...jewish. But how incredibly not Jewish I was! My ancestors were not hounded all over he globe and  subject to pogroms.

                                          Franz Kafka, prophet of absurd State power

Well, growing up an introverted asthmatic kid, in suburbia, with long hair and guitar, not Protestant, not wealthy, with an anxious mother who passed that on to me...I escaped into books and other worlds, other ideas. This was a world inordinately influenced by Jews, an influence far above their numbers relative to the larger population.

So: being alienated and persecuted for looking like a dirtbag pothead rock and roller in a small, smoggy white town overwhelmingly clean-cut, Republican and WASPy was one aspect. My bookishness ("Why do you...read books?," I distinctly remember a fellow band-member ask me) was another. The asthma and anxiety was probably another ingredient. Anyway, I most definitely felt (and still to this day feel) as The Other...without any of the Holocaust-y stuff bagged in there.

And by my late teens I had become steeped in Jewish humorists and had become interested in ideas by people like Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Einstein, and later, Chomsky. I had practically memorized Groucho's lines from Duck Soup. 

[It occurs to me my blog entries on "Favored Hungarians" can double as "More Jews That I've Found Fascinating."]

Chaim
I recently became acquainted with a writer friend's friend, a San Francisco writer named Chaim Bertman, roughly my age. He was housesitting for my friend and I went over to check on him and we talked rapid-fire about odd ideas for a solid hour as I stood in the doorway. I asked him if he'd published and he told me of his 10 year old first novel. Later that night I found a library that had it in its catalog so I obtained it a couple days later and read it. He'd previously said he'd like to read my (this) blog. As I read his first chapter, it was so fine, so writerly, that I felt like calling him up to request that he not read my blog. His book - which he seemed quasi-embarrased about, or maybe it was such ancient history to him? - is called The Stand-Up Tragedian and it came out in 2001. If you want to write a novel about not being able to write a novel while having picaresque adventures through Israel, Florence, and all over Unistat, you will have a tough time topping this guy. He writes beautifully. I loved one little moment, when the protagonist (who seemed very like Chaim; it was difficult to not read the book as poetic autobiography) is talking on the phone to his university professor-father, who wants him to finally settle down and "do" something with his life."Eric" dodges the question and tells his father a Hasidic story:

"I asked him if he knew the story of Rabbi Isaac, son of Yekel, in Cracow. I'd found it in an English translation of a book of Hasidic tales. It explained better than I could what had set me into motion - why I wanted to be a writer.

"After many years of poverty, which had never shaken his faith in God, Rabbi Isaac dreamed that someone had bade him look for a treasure in Prague, under the bridge that leads to the King's palace. Rabbi Isaac didn't have a curvy bone in his body: He always told the truth. When he arrived at Prague, Rabbi Isaac ingeniously told a native his dream. 'Treasure, king, bridge, palace,' the man laughed. 'I have dreams too - who doesn't? Me, for instance, I keep having this dream that I find a big treasure under the stove of some poor Jew by the name of Isaac, son of Yekel, in Cracow. But you think I'm going to wear out my shoes, walking to Cracow, where one half of the Jews are named Isaac, and the other Yekel?' And he laughed again. Rabbi Isaac bowed, traveled home, and found his shovel." (p.16)

This tale acts as a fractal for the entire book. His next book will be science fiction, Bertman told me.

                                                             Robert Scheer

Robert Scheer
One of my favorite political writers. My beloved English professor - the best teacher I'd ever had and who was incidentally not a Jew -  told me about Scheer, who I'd never heard of. Scheer had written a book on how dangerous and crazy Reagan and the people he was surrounded with were; Reagan was into his second term and my Professor pointed me toward Scheer's With Enough Shovels. Some Reaganite had told Scheer that nuclear war was winnable, it's not that bad: we can dig holes in the ground and dirt is a wonderful thing. And he was serious.

I followed Scheer closely after that, then realized he had been writing in "my" newspaper, the Los Angeles Times. Later I found out he'd been involved in SDS, had written for Ramparts and maybe even, if memory serves, The Berkeley Barb, all sorts of romantic things.

Anyway, he'd published, in the Times, a very long, three-part piece that ran January 29-31, 1978: "The Jews of Los Angeles." It was filled with history, influential figures, and all sorts of arcane (to me) minutiae about various schisms and causes and immigration routes to LA, and statistics. (You can find it collected in Scheer's Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death.) It clarified some things for me about Jewish identity that I've never ceased to think about since: the idea of Jews as a race (and how this must be preserved, and various other dissenting takes by Jews); the idea that Israel is the most important thing to a Jew: to keep Israel safe and thriving. And third: the culture of improvement of the human race, which was based in a universalist idea. It is this face of Judaism - the universal brother and sisterhood of the human race - that appealed to me greatly. (And, in my current state of ignorance, I trace the historical epicenter over this idea, its coalescence, to Holland and Spinoza, but I will leave that for some future blauge/blah-g/blog.)

Scheer wrote of a retired female Jewish garment worker in LA. She didn't care about the ideas in the synagogue; she'd left oppressive Russia 50 years before. She did miss Yiddish speakers, socialist rousers coming to give furtive talks despite right-wing LA's WASP-rulers and their thriving Red Squads. "She missed the young Jewish girls in leather jackets, organizers in the fledgling garment district, transplants from the East Side of New York, trying to have their fiery idealistic commitment, and sunshine and oranges, too. [...] They passed this secular religion of the Jews - this special moral concern that would not quit - on to their young, who then flooded the ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements."

Now, below is a passage that gave me an envious Jewish pang way back when, when I first read it. Recall that not for one moment was any "idea" ever discussed around my family's dinner table, while my mom and dad were still together, nor even after they split:

(Despite the sunshine and beaches of Santa Monica and the crime rate, rudeness on the buses, etc:) "But their minds were still occupied with social ideas, with what, for generations of Jews, had been the substance of life itself - with issues, with ideas, with what the contemporary Jewish writer Vivian Gornick captures best in her recent book [presumably The Romance of American Communism? published in 1978? - the OG]:

"It was characteristic of that world that during those hours at the kitchen table with my father and his socialist friends I didn't know we were poor. I didn't know that in those places beyond the streets of my neighborhood we were without power, position, material or social existence. I only knew that the tea and black bread were the most delicious food and drink in the world, that political talk filled the room with a terrible excitement and richness of expectation, that here in the kitchen I felt the same electric thrill I felt when Rouben, my Yiddish teacher, pressed my upper arm between two bony fingers, and his eyes shining behind thick glasses, said to me, 'Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.'" (Thinking Tuna Fish, pp.47-48)

                                              Meghan Daum, hilarious shiksa

Meghan Daum
Not long ago I finally got around to reading Daum's 2001 book of essays, My Misspent Youth. I first encountered Daum in the LA Times. I still read her online. She's wickedly funny, often self-deprecating, sometimes bitchy, always very intelligent. I had never given any conscious thought about whether Daum was Jewish or not. I just knew I had a crush on her because she was such a tremendous essayist.

So I'm reading through, admiring each piece, when I get to "American Shiksa" near the end. That tears it: Meghan is not Jewish. She's a WASP from the East-ish part of Unistat, now living on the Left Coast.

And she's got a variation of my Jewish pang.

When adolescence hit her, she skipped becoming a woman and instead became a shiksa:

"I just didn't have much taste for those praying quarterbacks, those hunks in blue satin choir robes, the hulking social drinkers, the swaggering lifeguards and stockbrokers, the good old boys from the verdant athletic fields of my youth. I discovered Jewish men like I discovered books in the library, tucked away in the dark corners of suburbia, reticent and wise and spouting out words I had to look up in the dictionary. Unlike Christian men with their innate sense of entitlement, with their height and freckles and stamp collections and summer Dairy Queen jobs, all those homages to the genetics and accoutrements of Western Civilization, Jewish men were rife with ambiguity, buzzing with edge. Their sports were cognitive, their affection seemingly cerebral. They were so smart that they managed to convince girls like me that they liked me for my brain, that even though I was a shiksa, even though I had been deprived of Hebrew school and intense dinner debates about the Palestinian Question, I was a smart girl."(pp.129-130)

She goes on in hilarious detail. Daum eventually married a Jew. You could see it coming. Oh my gawd Daum is funny. And she's not even Jewish! (Well, maybe she got some of it via osmosis?) Anyway, I ain't the only one, although I myself have never had a Jewish girlfriend...until my wife found her birth parents and it turns out her biological father is Jewish. I'd rather not get into the particulars as to whether that actually "counts," because it's not my point. My point is: I missed out on Vivian Gornick's tea and black bread and ideas being "everything."

                                            Steve Almond. I identified a lot with the 
                                            main character in his short story, "My Life
                                            In Heavy Metal," which, 'nuff said.

Steve Almond
I recently read, with mounting envy, his collection of essays, (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions, from 2007. His obsession with Kurt Vonnegut, his run-in with Fox News after he quit his Adjunct Professor job at Boston University after they invited Condoleeza Rice to talk. An essay on the Boston Red Sox that is probably the finest piece of sports fandom-sickness I've ever read, and I've read a lot. I'm a connoisseur. Almond writes about sex in the most frank and funny manner. Read his books if only for the sex. He's not an erotic writer, although at times he writes about sex in such a starkly truthful and poignant and poetic way, he seems erotic nevertheless. And then, near the end of the book, an essay on his Jewish identity, "Ham For Chanukah":

"It will be difficult to explain why, as full-blooded Jews, the spawn of actual rabbis, we took part in this deeply fucked-up ritual. But I am going to try to explain. Because that is what Jews do: we try to explain." (p.273)

Almond tells why his upbringing near Stanford was so non-religious: his parents were professionals. They were busy. His grandparents had a lot to do with it, too, and Almond is hilarious about it: "My paternal grandfather Gabriel endured a thorough Jewish education, then went off and became a famous political scientist. His basic attitude was that God had done some interesting work early on, but hadn't published much lately."

Well into his adulthood, Almond didn't seem to consciously identify with any of those three aspects of Jewish identity: Race. Israel. Universalism. Gabriel's wife was Jewish but seemed to so desire assimilation in the US that she seemed almost "tacitly anti-semitic," identifying with German culture and becoming involved with the Unitarian Church.

Eventually, as Almond grows and begins thinking for himself about his background, he gravitates to the universalist aspect of identity:

"My appreciation of Judaism has more to do with pride. I viewed my people as pound-for-pound champions of consciousness - Christ, Marx, Freud, Einstein - stars of the longest-running ethnic drama on earth..." (p.285)

Here's a passage that activated my pang big-time. Almond's mother spoke Yiddish, and passed a large Yiddish vocabulary on to Steve. Almond writes:

"I cannot begin to express my adoration for Yiddish, the official language of the shtetl Jews and the most emotionally precise vernacular ever devised. More than any holiday ritual, Yiddish is the legacy my mother passed on to me. I once actually wrote an entire cycle of poems (awful, all of them) devoted to the Yiddish word schmaltz." (p.285)

He writes that his "recovering Catholic" wife wanted to convert to Judaism, which moved him greatly, and they will bring their daughter up in Judaism. "She will know where and who she came from. She will be loved unreasonably. The rest is hers to determine."

Almond impressed the hell out of me a few months back when he dared to publish a critical essay on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert - and their slavish fans, of which I guess I'm one - for congratulating themselves for being so cool and hip and smart, when, Almond thought, Stewart and Colbert were more enabling and giving air time to fascists. I admired the essay even though I thought Almond misunderstood the function of satire and comedy - and Almond does both very very well himself - but he really made me think. (I'm always grateful for this.) When the piece was picked up by Huffington Post, I was embarrassed for the 3000 (it seemed like it) liberals in the comments section who lashed out at this "Steve Almond" for offending their immaculate tastes, making fun of his name, no one evincing the slightest hint they knew who he was, accusing him of being a sour grapester who probably got turned down for a writing gig with Stewart or Colbert. Thereby sorta proving - or at least strongly bolstering - Almond's points.

It's this kinda schtuff that get me all lathered up in admiration. A brilliant Jew taking on another brilliant Jew (and Colbert is a Catholic): all ideas are worth fighting over. Words. Ideas. Creativity. Intelligent Talk. Books. Science. Human Universalism.

Hoo-kay! Now: it's out there. My weirdo Jewish pangs of some sort of envy. But in my heart, I'm sort of Jew myself. Indulge me? Do a mitzvah and grant a goy some delusion?

On Lit Crit

One of my favorite academic literary critics, Stanley Edgar Hyman (who was married to Shirley Jackson, an underrated writer who wrote the famously chilling short story "The Lottery") seemed to have read everything and wrote about his reading in a provoking and engaging way. I love his book The Armed Vision. Hyman quotes an earlier critic/academic, I.A. Richards: "To set up as a critic is to set as a judge of values." (I wrote about Richards long ago HERE.)

I find Richards fascinating for many reasons, one of which was that he was influenced by both Coleridge and the early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Besides Richards's scientific foray into how literature is received by bright college students (as described in Practical Criticism), he thought critical evaluation functioned largely as "social communion." He explicitly saw his work as "phatic," and I tend to wish more critics had these values in mind. (Certainly someone like Dale Peck doesn't see the role of critic like this!)

Hyman seemed to not like teaching all that much, and "Professor X," who wrote In The Basement of the Ivory Tower quotes Hyman: "I've been doing it for years, and before every class, I take a piss, I check my fly, I wish I were dead - and I go into the room and begin."

Jacob Silverman
Two months ago in Slate Silverman made a complaint about too much "niceness" in literary criticism lately, and he thought it had to do with authors using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Yelp, and Tumblr. They create a "fan base," tweet nice things about other authors, every other author is awesome, we're all friends here, authors create an aura of good feelings around themselves, and literary criticism suffers, due to the "mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online." The level of criticism an author receives amounts to a literary culture in which "cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments." Silverman would rather we cultivate an environment where we care less about an author's biography and who follows them, and more on the work itself. When no voices of dissent are heard about a work, it tends to chill a "vibrant, useful literary culture." He quotes Lev Grossman of Time, who admitted he won't review a book he doesn't like. Silverman would like us to act more like adults and not mix criticism for an author's work with criticism of the person who wrote the work. The last paragraph of Silverman's article sums his stance well: we ought to think more and "enthuse less."

Chris Collin
Around a year before Silverman's article, Chris Collin wrote a piece for Wired titled, "Rate This Article: What's Wrong With the Culture of Critique." I found and read this after I read Silverman's argument. Collin objects to online lit-crit's star-rating system, its thumb's up, its plus one, the number for how many times the article had been Tweeted (or re-Tweeted?), the number of "likes," etc. I couldn't agree more: go ahead and give some article four stars out of five, but don't pretend you're adding anything to the conversation. You're certainly not thinking. Well...probably not. Maybe a little, if the piece was good. Voting/giving symbolic feedback seems - to me - more a gesture along the lines of the consumer.

Hey, I dig good feedback and kind vibes - we all do - but in our writings as in life, we want to feel like we've been heard.

Collin quotes one of my favorite culture critics, Erik Davis: "Our culture is afflicted with knowingness. We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that's great on many levels. But we forget the pleasure of not knowing. I'm no Luddite, but we've started replacing actual experience with someone else's already digested knowledge."

(I wrote about "knowingness" not long ago, HERE.)

Collin says that "There's an essential freedom in being alone with one's thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else's. Diminish our aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective."

This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Buckminster Fuller: "Dare to be naive." In a culture of knowingness, where everyone is always online, I can't help but think that our interiorities are suffering. It's getting to the point where the act of not looking to see what everyone else is looking at, what's viral, what's hot, what's cool...and instead just following your own path and evaluating on your own...seems a bona fide radical act. 

Roxane Gay's Answer To Silverman
Not long after Silverman's piece appeared, Roxane Gay parried in Salon. And while I think she played a tad unfair by tsk-tsking Silverman over not actually reading Emma Straub's book - that really wasn't his point - I think her rebuttal quite fine, and I present these three points of view about literary kulch in our online-world as a possible opening to a conversation itself. About the role of criticism.

I thought Gay's best point was the analogy that literary culture is like school, and serious criticism is the classroom; social networks and all the mundane trivia and phatic (How would I.A. Richards see "evaluations" of literature on Twitter?) aspects of five stars and "liking" is the cafeteria. Gay pulled up an apt quote from 1846, by Edgar Allan Poe, on writing too sweetly about someone else's book. There's nothing new under the sun, truly, Ms Gay! She also takes issue with Silverman over too much niceness regarding women, people of color and writers who'd fall under the LGBT rubric: when they are reviewed, often their personal lives are considered fair game. Gay shows that she's able to give a good review to a book while noting some perceived problems with it, and at times she might even know the author personally. She urges that we stop thinking of reviews as "positive" or "negative" as this is the "wrong conversation."

Points all well-taken...until someone's feelings get hurt. Vicious, savage reviews by the aforementioned Dale Peck and his ilk: do these people thrive on shame? Are they thinly-veiled sadists?

And I bet that it's true that males - especially white males - get reviewed more often. But I also bet they are "savaged" more often by critics, too. And sometimes it might seem the reason they're getting savaged is precisely because they're male. I cop to being a lot like Lev Grossman, but my reasons for not writing negative reviews are due to the unpleasant mental states I'm required to be in to write that stuff. It's not worth it to me. NB Roxane Gay seems to evade the question somewhat by saying that everyone who read the book would see its flaws jump out at them, so why bother writing the bad review?(However, if someone wants to pay me to review Dick Cheney's or Paul Wolfowitz's or Rupert Murdoch's memoirs...I'd take that advantage. Some things need to be said, sometimes, no matter how unpleasant.)

Intellectuals and Critics: The Mafia?
Woody Allen once said that intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own. As much as this culture of criticism chugs along, let's not pretend that a large portion of the critical class - the fine writers, the intellectuals, the "chattering classes," congenitally bookish bloggers - let's not pretend that they don't consider evaluations of a rival or a political foe's work as something akin to a blood sport.

I have never published a book to scathing criticism, but can easily imagine what it feels like, especially if one feels they've produced a fine work, filled with long hours of sweat, tears, inspiration, elation, actually getting themselves to believe that they were contributing something of value to society, that they might even inspire a handful of people not blood-related in a very deep way.

The cultivation of a Nietzschean sensibility seems in order, although 'tis probably easier said than done.

Finally, I can't help but think that most of us are taking ourselves and our evaluations far too seriously, and while I surmise that many of us give critics far too much power over our choices, this seems as virtually nothing compared to forming your opinion based on relatively faceless/nameless others' likes and thumb's ups and plus-ones and re-Tweets. Fer crissakes! Let us dare to be naive! I have tried it and found it quite invigorating. Am I preaching to the choir here? I suspect so...

Tomorrow I'll note an example of polarized approaches to the role of critics and criticism by two novelists, and I hope you'll get a nice laff then.

The Cosmic Schmuck Principle and Some of Its Family Resemblances

The Cosmic Schmuck Principle
Robert Anton Wilson minted the term "Cosmic Schmuck" in a similar spirit to Murphy's Law. The Cosmic Schmuck Principle seemed aimed at greater ethical behavior among the educated classes; I see this impetus in RAW as an influence from Ezra Pound and Confucius, and also Alfred Korzybski. Also: RAW wrote a lot about hearing and reading formulations like this while growing up:

An X (person or group) appears to have done something lousy.
Therefore all people who seem like Xes are suspect or bad or dangerous, or might do something lousy.

This formulation leads to incivility, bad ethics, injustices, violence, and even genocide. (Think of Hitler making the above statement, and replace X with Jews.)

Yes, but what is this thing called The Cosmic Schmuck Principle? It has to do with pretending to a level of certainty or knowledge that you are unlikely to have, and so you're acting like a schmuck. Oh, but let's have a concise statement from RAW:

The Cosmic Schmuck Principle holds that if you don't wake up, once a month at least, and realize you have recently been acting like a Cosmic Schmuck again, then you will probably go on acting like a Cosmic Schmuck forever; but if you do, occasionally, recognize your Cosmic Schmuckiness, you might begin to become a little less Schmucky than the general human average at this primitive stage of terrestrial evolution. - p. 21, Natural Law: Or Don't Put A Rubber On Your Willy

HERE is the text of this incredible little anarcho-libertarian pamphlet on epistemology at Scribd.

Another website excerpts more from the page(s) with the quote I used above; I link to it in the interests of context. I don't know who the man is in the photo. It is not RAW.

Nota bene and what I find very lovable in the Cosmic Schmuck Principle is that it's heavily implied that we are all schmucks, to some degree. And RAW would've acknowledged his own schmuckiness at times. This dovetails really well with the ideas about Wrongology from Kathryn Schulz, who I write about near the end of this piece...

One of the main tropes that runs through Wilson's entire oeuvre is the embracing of uncertainty; one reason being that, in his epistemology, given our nervous systems and how we're wired, coupled with what we've found in quantum mechanics, cultural anthropology, genetics, perception psychology and neuroscience, linguistics, and a whole host of other disciplines, we cannot know anything but the most trivial things for certain, and maybe not even these trivial things. And secondly, this is something to be embraced, not because it is inevitable and seems to have been built into the fabric of the weirdness of "reality," but because it enables us to live with a sense of deep wonder, which he once said was "all the religion we need."

It could be that Pyrrho the Skeptic was the first to advocate for something along these lines (after encountering some "naked wise men" in India?); there seems much to dispute here.

Other ideas that seem to bear a family resemblance in the Wittgensteinian sense: fallibalism, aspects of the sociology of knowledge, Eric Hoffer's "True Believer," and many other forms of social epistemology. I want to discuss - and maybe even elucidate - a few others here.

Richard Rorty and "Knowingness"
One of my favorite academic philosophers of the late 20th century (Rorty died in 2007 at the age of 75), Rorty thought the educated classes, especially via too much theory, had fallen into a trap he called "knowingness," which he may have gotten from someone else, possibly the literary critic Harold Bloom? Anyway, when I first read about knowingness in Rorty's sense it knocked me on my ass, and a definition has stuck in my neural circuits:

"Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe."

Think of the 23 year old grad student who thinks he's "seen it all." He hasn't. Not even close. He "knows" too much. A 23 year old grad student has hardly seen anything, but he is under the illusion he's seen it all. He has been trained to think analytically, and possibly over-analyzes everything, so that nothing is wonderful anymore. This seems born of a deep-seated fear, because another part of himself knows he hasn't experienced much of the world yet. Academics up to the age of 80 have been known to have fallen deeply into the slough of knowingness. It's pretentious to us, but for them, they have defended their knowledge in learned paper after learned paper. Who reads these papers? His colleagues and hardly anyone else. He lives in an academic bubble of knowingness, and many of his fellow academics are hyper-theoretizing and caught in the mire of knowingness also. Females are just as liable to this trap, this "state of soul," as men. It seems a lot like the Cosmic Schmuck Principle, but I seriously doubt Rorty ever read Wilson. They ran in different intellectual strata. But I think it would be a safe guess, were someone to have asked Wilson (who also died in 2007) if Cosmic Schmuckiness prevented  a shudder of awe, he'd say yes.

Likewise, I easily imagine Rorty, after reading his books and seeing interviews with him, that he'd embrace the idea of recognizing when you were pretending to know when you really didn't. His theory of truth - which was not a theory - was that truth was something that happened to an idea. And it happened because it was found to be good, pleasurable, helpful. When you're on that track - what helps you get through your days and nights with more humanity - I hazard that you're bending towards less schmuckiness, less knowingness already...

Rorty was often labeled a "neo-pragmatist." I think the Cosmic Schmuck Principle fits into the pragmatist (accused as "anti-philosophy" by some) project snugly.

When I read online about criticism of people between 18-30 who are thought of as "Hipsters," I get a vague whiff that their critics think the Hipsters have too much knowingness, or are Cosmic Schmucks. But because I'm still not sure what truly constitutes Hipster-hood, I will neither defend Hipsters nor join in the scorn. But above all, I don't want to play in the formulation near the top of this article ("An X appears to have done something lousy..."), as it's NEVER fair or just to do so. Moving on...

                        A hedgehog. This one is probably smarter than Thomas Friedman?

Hedgehogs
Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1953 a famous essay on types of intellectuals, "The Hedgehog and The Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History," and he drew upon the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In Daniel Kahneman's recent - astonishingly erudite, endlessly worthsomewhiles - book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he expounds on the Hedgehogs in our midst, the "experts" and (worse, to my eyes) the "pundits."

Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize for Economics (a fascinating story in itself), is the go-to guy for insight into our own biases, and how to stop acting like a sucker or Schmuck...even though it appears we're wired to fall into schmuckiness (not the word Kahneman uses!) by evolution.

"As Nassim Taleb pointed out in The Black Swan, our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past makes it difficult for us to accept the limits of our forecasting ability. Everything makes sense in hindsight, a fact that financial pundits exploit every evening, as they offer convincing accounts of the day's events. And we cannot suppress the powerful intuition that what makes sense in hindsight today was predictable yesterday. The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future." - p.218

Kahneman illustrates the role of chance in 20th century history: in very minute sections of time, the fertilized eggs that went on to become Mao, Hitler and Stalin had around a 50/50 chance of becoming females. And around 47 million people were murdered because of this chance. (My estimates, based on a few moments rustling around in some history books; Kahneman does not come up with a number in the text.)

[I may have taken tremendous liberty with this past example; I may have made something along the lines of an egregious error. If anyone would like to point it out, I would be happy to hear what that error might consist of. In other words: was I being a Cosmic Schmuck there? Or not? Or does my writing this bracketed paragraph somehow exonerate me from any Cosmic Schmuckery I may have been guilty of in the above paragraph? Are we in a Strange Loop right now?]

Daniel Kahneman then discusses Philip Tetlock's 20 year project of doing massive interviews and questionnaires with "experts" - pundits who forecasted about political and economic trends - and how these experts panned out, with hindsight. The results, which should be far better known than they are, show that these pundits performed, as Kahneman writes, "worse than they would have if they had assigned equal probabilities to each of the three potential outcomes." (Tetlock got 80,000 predictions for very many questions that had respondents pick whether they think the status quo would remain, there would be more of something such as political freedom or economic growth, or less of those things. Tetlock's book is Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about this very thing, quite amusingly, in The Black Swan: quite often, instead of asking your stockbroker for tips on how to invest in the market, you can ask a taxi cab driver and you'll end up with the same amount of money. Similarly, Tetlock is quoted: "In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals - distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on - are any better than journalists or attentive readers of The New York Times in 'reading' emergent situations."

Tetlock falls back on Berlin's "Hedgehogs" when talking about "experts" and why we listen to them. Most of the pundits we see are not foxes - who know a lot of things - but "experts" who are loathe to admit when they were wrong, but when forced to admit their wrongness always have many ready-made excuses. They are dazzled by their own brilliance (to my mind the worst of the worst in Unistatian electronic corporate media are Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, not that you'd asked), and they're led astray not by what they believe but how they think. They have a coherent model of the world, and they worship that model. Robert Anton Wilson called this "modeltheism." If you show them they have been wrong in their predictions, they get angry and say they were off by a little bit, or the timing was a tad askew. As Kahneman writes, "They are opinionated and clear, which is exactly what television producers love to see on programs. Two hedgehogs on different sides of an issue, each attacking the idiotic ideas of the adversary, makes for a good show." (p.220)

These Hedgehogs seem like cousins to the Cosmic Schmucks (look at the astounding level of schmuckiness attained by a guy like Rush Limbaugh!), and they seem far too knowing also, eh?

The take-away message? Take the punditocracy with a massive salt-lick, and be a Fox. (Or a non-overweening generalist?)

                                 Kathryn Schulz, who has a lot to say about being wrong

The Pessimistic Meta-Induction From The History Of Science
The wha? Get it straight, kids, from the sexy intellectual Kathryn Schulz. This same article is collected in the recent book This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts To Improve Your Thinking, pp.30-31. Most of the theories of the past have fallen by the wayside, so why do we, as Schulz says, grant ourselves "chronological exceptionalism"? When I ran across this bit in the book, I was reminded of John Horgan's book The End of Science, in which he asks very many of the biggest names in science whether we know about 99% of what there is to know, or maybe it's closer to 1%? Fascinating book, wonderful on the sociology of scientific intellectuals and the hard-to-pin-down field Horgan calls "limitology," and it's quite readable, with an ending that, for me, had a twist and was surprising. (Horgan's attitude toward his own question.)

I liked what blogger Roger E. Breisch had to say about the Pessimistic Meta-Induction From The History Of Science, and other of Schulz's ideas from her own book, Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margins of Error.

In my own reading of classics, I think I've seen variations of all of the above family members in the writings of Montaigne, and earlier, Lucretius. And still earlier, Epicurus. But I refuse to dogmatize about any of this and would rather declare that I think I've detected more than enough Cosmic Schmuckery in my own thinking and utterances lately...


Here's Kathryn Schulz, Wrongologist, talking about many of the ideas above. It's 4 mins and 19 seconds.

Edward O. Wilson and the Humanities

The following is part of a 1965 Unistat Congressional statute, trying to define the Humanities, and served as part of the context within which the NEA and NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) were founded:

The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life.

82 year old Edward O. Wilson has recently released The Social Conquest of Earth, and according to statements Wilson's made in recent articles, it may be his last hardcore, serious sociobiological work. In this latest book, Wilson builds on ideas first articulated deeply in his book Consilience, which sought to ground all human knowledge in the broad discipline of Biology.

The Arts and Biology? Oh hell yea: Wilson has a thick argument for how all the stuff in the above quoted paragraph on the Humanities cannot be known unless we account for the evolution of cognition and the human being's sensory modalities compared to other animals (we are retarded in taste and smell, compared to other animals: what we do well is visual and the auditory), how these cognitive processes are bound in our nervous systems, the heredity that gives rise to our human-ness, and all of the humanities' prehistoric origins.

Having spent a good while perusing Wilson's new book, I'm struck by two things: 1.) He still writes very elegantly for an 82 year old; for a man whose been in the forefront of at least three "revolutionary" movements in Biology, and has articulated very abstruse ideas based in molecular biology and statistical modeling, this man still writes almost poetically at times. And 2.) Wilson, at 82, has ignited yet another scientific firestorm over a basic idea in evolution. This one's such a big deal that at least 137 of his colleagues signed a "we object" statement about Wilson's latest bombshell.

And it's quite the rancorous debate among intellectuals. If you're like me and instead of watching boxing you'd prefer to watch PhDs and public intellectuals and other eminent thinkers whip their symbolic feces at each other, then you really can't top this latest one, with sweet old "EOW" (as I abbrev. him) in the center of it all, getting his colleagues all exercised over...Group Selection. (It's usually not capitalized, but the fulsome vitriol surrounding the idea seemed to warrant caps.)

Aye, EOW says Dawkins's "selfish gene" idea was way overblown. In the more sober works, Dawkins's idea was known as "kin selection." You take care of your own, because their genes/replicators will have a better chance of flourishing in the next generation. Even if you don't have offspring of your own, you aid (in various ways) your nephews, nieces, cousins, siblings. Why? Because they basically carry "your" genes. The further away from your gene pool, the less you find you care about Others. This has given rise to a very "fit" (in a broad sense) gene pool. (Don't laff!) Kinship selection is enough to account for cooperative complex behavior. And, as space/time and light/particle can't be separated, altruism is really the obverse of the coin labeled "selfishness." So say the kin selectionists.

                         Wilson is said to have collected a million different ant species?

I loved reading Dawkins's great book (I consider this The Selfish Gene), because it was so intellectually thrilling. But EOW - perhaps the eminence gris among all evolutionary biologists - now says, basically, kin selection has been given far too much its due.

[Caveat: Although a generalist, I know enough about the politics of Biology to know that, even with my honest attempt to define kinship selection very briefly above, there are probably readers who want to wring my neck for simplifying it too much. Or, I guess, "getting it wrong." In the comments, please!]

Darwin himself - for EOW the greatest thinker ever - thought quite a lot about individual selection and didn't know anything about genes, but seemed to intuit them.

So, we've got individual selection, kin selection (which, from W.D. Hamilton's 1964 paper on, has been the foremost exponent for the "theory of everything" in Biology...until EOW's mathematical colleagues found basic errors in Hamilton's math), and group selection, which, until now, or until EOW achieves his paradigm shift, is a "woo-woo" idea not taken seriously, or if proffered by a Credentialed One, has been attacked as Heresy.

There's a lot to discuss for the generalist, but EOW thinks the time has come to explain the Big Q: how did humans and ants and other social creatures conquer? It's because they are "eusocial." Yes, but how? Well, there must be "trigger" genes that give rise to a species' complex forms of cooperating beyond kin or individual selection.

Harnessing molecular genetics, anthropology, ecology, and cognitive science, EOW says when termites or wasps or humans or (of course!) ants or snapping shrimp or a certain kind of mole rat develop a "defensible nest" they have passed through an evolutionary bottleneck and the genes that encourage cooperation and division of labor - even if individuals are not related! - has made them "realize" that a defensible nest is an advantage that accrues to all...and I'm still trying to understand the argument for group selection, but it's fascinating, even thrilling intellectual thought-stuff!

But what a magnificent intellectual Edward O. Wilson is, has been, and always will be. Even if his Group Selection gets shot down in 30 years, he's certainly caused his most eminent colleagues to think, not to mention your humble yet somehow overweening correspondent.

Listen to EOW on NPR's Talk of the Nation from a few months ago, on this very subject.

Intellectual Reputations: The Long View

I'm going to take as the paradigmatic case ancient Greek philosophers.

Socrates willfully quaffed some hemlock, probably in 399 BCE. He'd gotten busted. The charge: not believing in the gods and corrupting the youth of Athens. You know it's a lousy political climate when those in charge go for this kind of persecution. And so it goes. For the next 100 years philosophy exploded all over Greece, with the founding of many diverse schools, and almost all of them were founded by followers of Socrates, who never wrote a book in his life. (That we know of.)

Who were the most influential figures following in Socrates's wake? The Skeptics, The Cynics (which, every time I read about ancient Greek history, I still think sound like a punk rock band...and there is a very technically adept and thrilling - in my view - heavy metal band right now called Cynic, but I digress...) had as their founder Antisthenes, who was a known associate of Socrates. Antistenes listened to another of Socrates's pupils say there was a realm of Pure Being out there somewhere, and said bullshit: there are only bodies and pain, and that pain is true and good and beautiful, just look at all the great hero stories. (Why did the Pure Being guy seem to "make it big" while Antisthenes is...well, who evuh hoidda the guy, am I right?)

Diogenes of Sinope, AKA Diogenes the Cynic, can be traced to Antisthenes although there is no proof they ever met. Diogenes was said to admire Antisthenes's thought. Diogenes the Cynic said local culture is arbitrary and not special and he declared himself a cosmopolitan. His father had minted coins but Diogenes defaced them, made a virtue of poverty by living in a tub and carried a lantern around during the day, declaring he was searching for just one honest man. What a character! What a classic wise-ass! In his day Diogenes of Sinope was a major player, mocking Alexander and getting away with it (see Colbert, Stephen, White House Press Club Dinner Speech), and making Plato's life miserable by calling him out on his bogus use of Socrates's good name. Picture some guy as a mixture of Abbie Hoffman and Don Rickels, in a ragged not-quite tunic, and you have my interior image of Diogenes. (Of course he's still speaking some language I don't understand at all, but his rhythm is so deadly, his delivery so masterful, I laff at everything.) The way Chomsky has consistently attacked intellectuals in our lifetime? Diogenes was his day's intellectual anti-intellectual. But I get the feeling his tone was more Carlin than Chomsky. O! Diogenes the Cynic! We hardly knew ye. (And the textbooks for Philosophy 101 don't mention him these days, do they?)

Euclides of Megara - not the same "Euclid" who wrote the foundational text on geometry - was a celebrity philosopher and friend/pupil of Socrates too. He founded a school that made a big deal about argumentation and debate, and the Megarians did pioneering work in logic.

                                         Here's a rendering of what Socrates supposedly looked like. Nietzsche said 
                                        in Twilight of the Idols that Socrates was ugly, and questioned if he was even 
                                        Greek at all. Then Nietzsche mentions current 19th c. ideas about ugly people 
                                        as criminal types, which is still a popular notion, though refuted by science.
                                        Did Nietzsche feel threatened by Socrates for some reason? I doubt it.

Some of you may have studied a dialogue called Phaedo. Phaedo was another follower of Socrates, who  founded his own school at Elis, which was hot for awhile but burnt out quickly. The major approaches to knowledge were questioning everything, debate, and a big topic was the value of life itself.

Another one influenced by Socrates was a figure known as Isocrates, whose main game was the development of rhetoric, a man after my own heart.

We're still not to the year 300 BCE yet.

Aristippus was yet another disciple of Socrates, who founded the Cyrenaic school, which carried on in Socrates's tradition of omniquestioning and dialectic. This school culminated with two divergent philosophical stars, Hegesius and Theodorus. Then this school fizzled around 330 BCE. Aristippus was a serene character who thought only our feelings exist for us, and that we were responsible for our own happiness. (Why didn't this catch on in a bigger way and develop down to our time? My answer below.)

Lemme see...who am I missing here? I know there was one more student of Socrates who made a splash, but I just can't re...Oh right: Plato. Plato seemed to notice that Socrates's name was hallowed all over the greater metropolitan Athens area. Plato was not, as an adult, all that taken by his teacher's omniquestioning act; he was a rich kid, much more interested in metaphysics, which were heavily influenced by those extreme weirdos the Pythagoreans. Plato was also interested in aesthetics and politics, which were peripheral concerns among Socrates's students' competing and far more popular schools.

So Plato made Socrates his mouthpiece, even though Socrates was long dead and never really showed much interest in Plato's ideas. A ballsy move, that.

Aristotle studied under Plato, and he took philosophy in yet another direction. You may have heard of this Aristotle guy...He made it to The Show.

Here's the question: Why are Plato and Aristotle the Big Deal these days, and not Aristippus, Diogenes, Phaedo, Euclides, or Theodorus?

The answer - my answer, my educated guess as of the date above - is: the general turns and trends in thought far after these guys were dead have made them immortal thinkers; they had no idea they were going to be a big deal! A lot of it seems like luck to me; they had great ideas, but I don't think the one and only reason they "won out" was because they were "really" the best ideas. There were other fantastic ideas, now long out of favor. These guys - Socrates/Plato/Aristotle - were passionate thinkers, creative, lots of energy, created relatively detailed and coherent systems, and cultivated a large enough network of associates and pupils, but this never guarantees lasting fame. The most we can assume is that, whatever the content, immortal thinkers created a large enough thought-space for subsequent thinkers to play in. Lasting fame seems to me more like a chance operation than what we're led to believe by the textbooks, which tend to enshrine and encourage the idea that, as soon as these guys hit the public stage as Thinkers, a particularly bright star was seen to appear in the East, and a chorus of angels gave the high sign by singing something in four-part harmony, like a Bach fugue. No. Worse: the notion that these guys are big-time because their thought somehow very closely "corresponds" to "the truth"...

(Speaking of J.S. Bach: he had no idea he would be a god to us now. In his day he was thought of as merely the dude who totally shreds on organ. That weird old dude with tons of kids, all hopped up on coffee and smiling, could improvise on the spot a fugue on any given theme: dude's a MANIAC! But Bach had no inkling of what he'd be to us...and he died in 1750 CE. This business of posthumous reputation is a tricky one. We ought to say something similar for the person named William Shakespeare, who died in 1616.)

Back to Socrates/Plato/Aristotle: their reputations waxed and waned and had all kinds of colorful turns before they reached us.

Socrates as an influential figure largely died out around the year 100 CE, probably because he hadn't written anything, but who knows? He's known to us as that iconic figure who appears in Plato's books, first as probably something like how he really was (although Xenophon and Aristophanes should definitely be consulted on this), later as the speaker of Plato's own ideas, which diverged quite a bit from his beloved teacher's.

Plato turned out to be a huge influence on Christianity, Neoplatonism (of course!), gnosticism, the occult, mathematics, and Bertrand Russell's esteemed colleague Alfred North Whitehead said that the history of Western philosophy consisted of "a series of footnotes to Plato."

Aristotle, after minor stardom, got bigger and then, in his old age, scored a chart-topper by being Alexander the Great's tutor. There are stories he was a "millionaire" in his day, but when Alexander died he had to flee for his life in 323 BCE. He had the most interesting road to our day. In his day his ideas - a solution of Platonic idealism dissolved in some materialism - were fairly influential for a couple generations after he died. Then for the next 100 years or so his "school" became more interested in empirical science. Then his school fizzled as Rome became a bigger deal. His own texts were rediscovered around 75-50 BCE and his fame rose again, but the intense ferment of ideas around Greece and Rome (this latter where you went to "make it" as a philosopher, much like rock bands used to go to Hollywood) had his ideas mixed in with Plato's and other's to such an extent that Aristotle (called "Arry" by Ezra Pound) kept moderate fame for the first 600 years of the Common Era, but was thought of as a quasi-Platonic thinker. 

Then, a lull for what is usually known as the Dark Ages in Europe. 

The Muslims recovered Aristotle's texts, transcribed them, and his star shot through the roof. Arry was on top of the world. He was suddenly big in Baghdad. Who could've predicted that? His texts filtered back into medieval Europe, and St. Thomas Aquinas calls him simply "The Philosopher." Arry had a tremendous influence on what we now call Catholicism. That was big-time for Arry's reputation. In the Renaissance, one faction of Humanists idolized him, and used him against a self-described "modern" group of philosophers. 

Aristotle's been the big winner, it seems of all those pupils of Socrates. (Arry was a pupil of a pupil.) But Plato's not far behind. 

I think Aristotle's actual texts have been hugely influential on all our lives, whether we know it or not, a large reason for this being his enormous contribution to logic and especially the Law of the Excluded Middle.

On the other hand and whereas, the diverse interpretations of Plato's texts may have an even bigger influence, because of what I'll call the Legacy Software of his thought. To be absurdly perfunctory about it: the notion that abstract notions, ideas that we can create out of nothing, just imagination, are reified, and have some Real reality somewhere else, but "appear" as a sort of washed-out copy of a copy in our mundane reality. By doing certain things, we get closer to the real Reality. This notion seems hyperseductive to a certain caste of mind. (I see it largely as a mistake in understanding the role of language and metaphor in our nervous systems, but as I say: it's complicated. There are some otherworldy-smart mathematicians who'd dispute me on this, and I'd lose the argument, probably.)

This all seems like a wonderfully perplexing puzzle, which I might try to tease out some other day here, playing the OG role. Suffice: Plato is probably, along with Nietzsche, the greatest writer in Western philosophy, which is ironic because Socrates taught that writing was debased speech and harmed memory and put us further away from getting at the Truth, which was best gotten at by a fierce talking style with others called dialectic. It could be that great writing so dazzles various audiences and readers down the vast channels and throughout history that their ideas will be picked up like shiny objects on a vast beach and used in ways the writer never intended. Or it could be that some aspect of the human nervous system prefers ideas like Plato's metaphysics (in fact, I think as history has marched on we humans have gravitated more and more to a sort of self-medicating psychotropy, whether in thought, or in engagement with others, via technology, or drugs...we want to feel good), and once someone's metaphysics get used by other Leaders and New Schools, under pressure of historical forces and with an insurgent rise in the need to Dream Big...ahhh...but this is blah-blah-blah speculation.

One wonders how large figures like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Frederic Jameson, and Jacques Lacan - who were major philosophical stars on college campuses in Unistat and Europe in the late 1970s through to around 2000 - will loom in history of philosophy textbooks 100 or 200 years from now? 

I have not proven anything about intellectual reputations in philosophy, but I have tried to make some interesting assertions, and let my Dear Reader(s) do with them as they wish.

Updates on a Few Old Posts

Rachel Maddow's Herman Cain Thesis
Regarding Rachel Maddow's framing of Herman Cain's run amongst the Republicans as "performance art," I posted THIS back "then" but soon after, sexual harassment charges and then (what's worse among Republicans, apparently) strong allegations that Cain had an extramarital affair brought him down.

Now, I watch Maddow's show about once every two/three weeks. I like her a lot, but would rather do other things with my time. I wasn't able to find anything about how Maddow responded to Cain's dropping out of the race, or if she changed her thesis in any way. My take on it is that, if it was a big piece of performance art, then Cain wasn't in on it. I'm not sure what it was, but I think the guy was just a colossal d-bag, an evermore typical sociopathic personality who will do literally ANYTHING for money. The Theater of the Absurd which is national Unistatian politics has no end of varieties of this type of stock character strutting upon the stage for awhile, a large enough segment of the populace apparently stoned enough on the dazzling little pills that makes you think that, if it's on the teevee then it's to be taken seriously.

In this case, he appeared to be running for the Republican nomination only to sell more books as a "motivational speaker." (Or, in maybe a first for me, I'm basically with George Will in calling Cain an "entrepreneurial charlatan.") Hey Rachel: there's a section of Huckleberry Finn that concerns a "duke" and a "dauphin." Re-read that.

I didn't see any wit, anything all that creative or "artsy" in his act. What was the imaginative intent if this was indeed an artwork? I think his handlers were as cynical as he was, and plied him with lines from Pokemon and other pop kulch sources. The fact that the Koch Brothers funded this ass should tell us more about them and what they think of us than perhaps we'd wanted to know.

Maddow is very smart, and very smart people sometimes can't fathom someone as hellaciously bad a person as Cain and his motivations. Which were/are - I assert - crass and solely for individual gain, not to make any sort of "point" via performance art. Or perhaps the lovely Ms. Maddow isn't as well-read about the raisons de etre for performance art in the first place? That would be surprising; she seems to be well-read concerning just about everything. But no, Rachel, it wasn't performance art. The guy was just another sociopathic jackass. And because Mencken wasn't being perhaps as hyperbolic as he thought when he wrote that no one every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, we shall see many more variations of this horrid type. Sarah Palin precedes him.

                                                           An artist's rendering of the Duke and the Dauphin, 
                                                           with Huck and Jim looking on


The Pepper Spray Incident at UC Davis
My little blogspew on this was HERE. Around the same time, UC Berkeley students were violently clubbed by campus police, and later the faculty voted No Confidence in the chancellor, Robert Birgenau. The UC Davis chancellor, Linda Katehi, publicly apologized. Both chancellors have been walking on eggshells ever since, but we shall see how long this lasts. It's clear that campus police don't act as free agents; these sorts of egregious actions towards nonviolent protesters were part of official higher-up "policy." I wrote both chancellors, telling them they need to do the right thing and resign, but surprisingly, neither wrote me back.

The enigmatic, eerie and dispersed presence of the hacktivist collective Anonymous came down on the cop who pepper-sprayed the protesters at Davis, a human named John Pike. They published on *the Internet his home address, his email address, his cell phone number, his home phone number, and other personal information. It's since been found that Pike is an ex-Marine and has a problem with homophobia. (*= why do we say "the Internet"? There's only one...or is there?)

In what seems to me as the most troubling aspect post-Pike, I find that his pay as a campus goon...errr...policeman was $110,000 a year. That's twice what a newly minted Humanities professor gets, and three times what a non-tenured adjunct professor gets. See Mark Bousquet's jaw-dropping article.

Finally, a shout-out to the mordant wits who started Ask Lt. John Pike, An Advice Column, for adding some much-needed satire to this story. (My personal fave of the letters is the Q to Pike from a parent about whether to tell their kids about Santa Claus.)

Regarding Your Own "Weaponized" Drone
In what I take was a lame stab at satire, I posted THIS article six days ago. I kept digging on this story and found that, for example, the Europeans think armed police drones for domestic purposes seems, uhhh...questionable. See, for example, HERE. And further, what is one to think about THIS?

"Clinical distress" is hampering a lot of the "pilots" in these high-stakes all-too-real video killing games. In reading this article, get a load of the quotes from Kent McDonald, about how they try to select only guys of "high moral" quality. Is it me, or is that just creepy-sick-o stuff?

By the way, one of the OG's favorite public intellectuals and Third Culturalists, Prof. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford - one of the world's most knowledgeable people about how stress manifests in humans and our primate cousins - has been talking about the video-game killers of other humans on the other side of the world aspect of stress for at least eight years. Note how the military in this article tries to downplay the causes of "clinical distress." Sorry. I know you love your toys that allow you to kill from an absurdly safe vantage point, but this was KNOWN to cause stress in anyone even close to mentally "sound." If you want less health problems in your remote drone-killers, hire the mentally deranged. I'm sure there are plenty of them in the military. It should be easy! But noooo...you want only the good family men. "It does cause them to re-think aspects of their life and it can be bothersome." Sez Lt. Col. Kent McDonald.

Good gawd! You can't make up more clueless, bloodless, and zombified quotes!

Now I'm going to link two stories to my idea - originally typed in as a lark, myself in a sour mood - about "weaponizing" your personal drone. These two stories are about how security officials seem sorta panicky about how much cheaper and easier it has become to play with viruses. The squeamish may want to stop reading here and go on to the next blog.

Let us contemplate some rogue element - or just some crapped-upon nerds with a grudge - who stumble upon a particularly virulent, aerosolize-able form of the H1N1 or "bird flu." And then think of their own personal drones. Sorry, but I feel it's a public service:

See HERE.

See HERE.

Happy Holidays!

And now, because the wise AdSense people took all my ads (and revenue) away, for a reason not entirely clear to me, I turn to another sponsor, the good people at Grady's Oats. We'll be right back after this important message:

Ezra Pound and Conspiracy Theory
Last July I wrote a short piece on Pound and conspiracies. It recently occurred to me that what many writers have labeled Pound's "conspiracy theory of history" has at its roots something quite similar to Noam Chomsky's term "marginalization." This theory's engine is malign neglect, silence and indifference, mostly on the part of academics. In Donald Davie's book Ezra Pound, subtitled, "a major new study of the life and work of the great American poet," Davie writes about Pound's involvement with the esthetic movement of Vorticism, and how the ideas there were strongly influenced by Allen Upward, who had been influenced by Confucius and Mencius. Pound found that critics didn't understand Vorticism, and the more he tried to explain it, the more indifferent critics seemed. If Upward's work were disseminated and written and talked about, Pound thought, more people would understand this dynamic esthetic movement. Pound, since around age 15, had wanted to make a revolution in poetry, and thereby revolutionize civilization. Pound was in a hurry. Davie writes that Upward's 1908 book The New Word, chapters 13 and 14, give a pretty good explanation of what Pound meant by the "vortex." But the book didn't find large favor among the academic and publishing class, and for Pound this was a scandal.

Anyone who reads and studies Pound will find at minimum 25 more cases similar to this: great thinkers, thinkers who could shed light on the underlying problems of Western civilization, but have been shamefully neglected, and there must be...some reason!

Well, we know where Mad Ol' Ez ended up vis a vis monetary ideas, banking, usury, credit, etc.

However utterly noxious the antisemitism (and flat-out wrong ideas about jews running the banks, period), I assert that, with the 2008 crash, most of Pound's ideas about economics deserve another look.

I won't hold my breath.

A final word on Pound and conspiracy from Davie's book. After discussing critical neglect of Upward and Pound's anger about it, Davie writes, "It was a case like this, of the unconventional thinker effectively gagged by simple or deliberate neglect and indifference, which in later years converted Pound to a conspiracy theory of history, in which the worst, most murderous conspiracies were conspiracies of silence. Wyndham Lewis, though in one sense the whole vorticist program had been devised for his benefit, declared that he didn't understand what 'vorticism' meant. Pound understood; and if we don't, it is because we haven't looked where he told us to." - page 42, Ezra Pound, Davie


As with most conspiracy theories, I take an agnostic stand.

(There are some CTs I consider about 99.9998% likely to be wrong, such as the "Holocaust Revisionist" idea that the Holocaust never happened; the footage you've seen is faked; maybe a few hundred Jews actually died under Hitler. The Jews are trying to make us feel sorry for them, etc. What a denial of one's own humanity to agree to this idea! Robert Anton Wilson responded to these conspiracy theorists by asserting that there never was a World War II, or that Holocaust Deniers don't exist; the ones that think they do are only imagining their existence. If anyone ever wants to see virtuoso usage for satirical and rhetorical purposes of the reductio ad absurdum, read anything by Robert Anton Wilson.)

Pound's vexatious ideas, their emotional and intellectual tones, are almost always compelling to me, despite his "craziness," and I do think the academic class of intellectuals do have cliques and do often marginalize people and ideas, for not-very-intellectually-honest "reasons." They're only human, after all...The "neglect" and "indifference" Donald Davie mentions might be an unconscious response due to general trends in thinking among the relatively powerful literati and academia, but may also evince a demonstrable collective lack of imagination among a large percentage of comfortably-ensconced and attached-to-university-protocol thinkers and knowledge workers.

Maybe.

Brief Take on the Stickiness of Religion, 1965-2011

When I've read books written by academics and other "serious" highbrows that were published in the mid-1960s to early 1970s, I've always been struck by the idea that religion was on its way out in the First World, due to the forces of modernity. Philosophers, historians, sociologists of religion, and even religious thinkers themselves believed this. This appears to have been a widely-held view.

Some of the religious thinkers "liked" the idea that religion was on its way out, and the demise of religion was hailed by a seemingly large minority of highbrow religious thinkers because they - as I read them - saw the Churches as too demystified, too watered-down. They sought a renewed private or small-group mysticism, a renewal of the feeling of the mysterium tremendum.


The world was seen as rapidly secularizing, and most of the books I read from that period seemed to think this was not only accelerating, but inevitable, and basically a good thing for society. Of course there were many conservatives and religious thinkers who thought this was the harbinger of the end of the world, and there was some interesting writing on eschatology, from estimable people like Russell Kirk.

But yea, anyway...almost all those books and those great thinkers turned out to be wrong. Why?

One of the gods of sociology, Max Weber, thought that rationalization (which we would see as almost synonymous with modernization) would historically and progressively provide a "disenchantment of the world." Enlightenment rationality would further increase, and overarching collective myths that cohered and provided a consensus for all values and beliefs would weaken. The values and beliefs handed down to us would begin to seem less and less plausible, and maybe humanity would be forced to think for themselves?

No, how could that have been correct? But this view seems widely held by intellectuals during this period, of circa 1965-72 or so. (I have only read a few small stacks of academic books from this period, but this is augmented by intellectuals who have written books lately, who have reflected back on this period of the 1960s and confirmed what I'm saying here.)

                                                       The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago

Here's basically what I think went wrong in intellectual thought: they assumed this ongoing, accelerating process of rationalization would lead to more and more plurality, which would lead to more and more secularism.

And it seems modernity/rationalization does seem to lead to pluralism - more choices for "belief" - but pluralism did not inexorably lead to secularism. People indeed did have more and more choices, but quite often they chose religion.

Now, it seems I'm begging the question: why the stickiness of religion? Even in a vastly pluralistic society of choice? (Remind me to bring up Giambattista Vico's "conceit of scholars.")

I will leave this Q beggared, as my answers would be too windy right now, and I hope someone else has better answers than I do.

Mutt: This guy seems nuts to even think religion would go away. Both he and the 1960s intellectuals he vaguely says he's read.

Jute: Yep. Just another Internet pseudo-intellectual. Does he even realize no one really cared what the "intellectuals" - that group that Woody Allen compared to the Mafia: "They only kill their own" - thought, either in 1965 or now?

Mutt: Agreed. Hey, this new software that allows us to easily hack into some dipshit blogger's inane "observations" and add our own comment...this is pretty fun!

Jute: Totally worth the $2, even in today's money. I wonder what will go through his mind when he wakes up tomorrow and sees this? Hey! Let's go invade another blog, shall we? I'm drivin'.

Mutt: Shotgun!

*Mutt and Jute are kindly on loan from the good people over at Finnegans Wake, Universe Next Door Productions. Thanks to everyone! It's been quite a ride!

Chomsky Updates One of His Best Pieces

Noam Chomsky has written The Responsibility of Intellectuals, this time "Redux." And just in time for the 10th anniversary of the September 11th incidents. Only one shopping day left. Do you have enough coals for the barbecue? Make sure the kids have sunscreen on. And just think: college football is starting too!

Oh but yes: Noam Chomsky. His updated essay.


You can read the whole thing here. 


I have blogged about my own "Chomsky Problem" here, here, here, here, here, here, and (sorta) here. But this recent piece by Chomsky seems only tangentially related to my attempts to provide a solution to my own version of Paul Robinson's "Chomsky Problem."

Rather, this represents the Chomsky I most admire. (Actually, I admire him, period. I find him a fascinating thinker and the "Chomsky Problem" is an attempt to get at what I think is his major flaw, and I'm afraid I never really resolved the "problem." Please! Someone else: do a better job than I did!)

In 1966 Chomsky published a now-famous essay titled "The Responsibility of Intellectuals." When I read it first, around 1985 or so, it made total sense to me. It still does. And Chomsky's recent 9-11 "anniversary" redux-update makes as much sense to me. Any given reader of this blog who also reads Chomsky on intellectuals will come to their own conclusions. I'm giving myself away here: in this area of thought, I am right there with Noam, although I am not a privileged academic.

And, all of this aside for a moment to add something that pretty much went unsaid in all that Chomsky Problem blather I posted: what I perhaps most appreciate about Chomsky's critiques of The State and its crimes is his unique and very basic form of immanent critique: not so much in this essay, but almost all of his political writings he cites a State Department official or some other highly placed person in the State apparatus, and juxtaposes what was said with what was actually done. And he cites copiously. His style is fairly stripped-down academic, no fancy rhetoric. A notable lack of jargon. An odd tone of cold street-fightin' level rationality. As I understand it, immanent critique in its most basic form is something like, "You said X. But you did not-X, but Y, Q, and Z. How do you account for this?"

His many detractors - when they aren't crudely making stuff up about Chomsky - attack him for cherry picking his facts. But I have read Chomsky very closely, and while all of us are biased according to the sociology of knowledge, I think his basic method and citation-work is very sound, and always adds up to a penetrating and persuasive critique of state power.

Regarding intellectuals, Chomsky's work seems to me invaluable because his stance is so robust that, even if you disagree with him, you may learn much about your own stance towards the roles of intellectuals, or even what or who constitute the Intellectuals.

Where the New and Improved "Redux" essay really gets interesting, for me, is after the picture of John Dewey, where Chomsky points out that bin Laden actually achieved quite a lot of what he set out to do, and the oh-so predictable knee-jerk dullards who attack Chomsky (see the comments) need to realize Chomsky is not the only one here: do you think Michael Scheuer is a traitor too? Probably. "Murrrka Number One! Love it er leave it!" <yawn>

So enjoy the bunting and your flag and the endless TV specials about how the greatest country God ever saw fit to create is still strong and just filled with resolve, how we're all one and blah blah blah-dee fucking blah.

And if you hate Chomsky for saying what he writes (Just who do I think I'm writing to here? Only intelligent people read this blog, so I guess I'm blowing off steam over what I see as - laffingly - political reality), why don't you read Dana Priest and William Arkin's latest book, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State and tell us all how great the 9-11 response has been? There's $4,000,000,000,000 (that's TRILLION, friends and Fellow Murrrkins) we'll never see again. Funny how (really) no one in Congress has been harping on this, what with the Goddamned Deficit.

And Cheney, Bush, Rummy, Rice, Wolfowitz...are all running free.

Happy faux holiday. I'm sure the Patriot Act is keeping you all "safe."