Wolftrappe

2007-04-19T12:52:00.001-05:00

2007-04-07T09:02:00.000-05:00

THE PAINTINGS OF ADAM STENNETT: WORK REVOLVING AROUND MICE AND RATS

"For the past four years Adam has produced a body of work revolving around mice and rats. Small unnoticed moments, absurdity, sexual tension, humor and obliviousness are key components. He has participated in group shows in New York, London, Los Angeles and Moscow and has had three solo shows in NY in the last two years. "I intend for my work to give people a little shove out of their comfort zone, to encourage them to take a second look at things that are all around us, but we often prefer to ignore."

2007-04-06T12:28:00.000-05:00

"TALKING RIGHT": WHY THE LEFT IS LOSING, LINGUISTICALLY

2007-04-06T12:27:00.001-05:00

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
by George Orwell

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.

Professor Harold Laski
(Essay in Freedom of Expression )

2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate , or put at a loss for bewilder .

Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia )

3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side ,the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?

Essay on psychology in Politics (New York )

4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.

Communist pamphlet

5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Letter in Tribune

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution ) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed . Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line . Another example is the hammer and the anvil , now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc.,etc . The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill , a verb becomes a phrase , made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render . In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining ). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that ; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion , and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate , are used to dress up a simple statement and give an aire of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable , are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion . Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien r&eacutgime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung , are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g. , and etc. , there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous , and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard , etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality , as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes. As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

1. Could I put it more shortly?
2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases ( lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation ) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned , which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

2007-04-06T08:26:00.000-05:00

HOW THE PUBLIC LIBRARY BECAME HEARTBREAK HOTEL

Back in the 1950s, when every domestic scandal and nightmare, political or familial, wasn't the subject of a television show, the library was my peephole into the mysteries of the adult universe. The key question, when it came to interpreting the world back then, was this: Would the librarian who ruled over the juvenile section free you to enter the pay dirt of the rest of the library? Mine did. As a friend of mine, who arrived in this country as an immigrant at age 11, used to say of her library years, "I started with A." So did I. What an essential democratic institution the public library is.

Of course, today, the condition of America's public libraries is, at best, wildly variable. Some urban libraries of just the sort I used to haunt in my childhood have recently been losing out in the race for scarce tax dollars. They often face cuts in their hours, while their systems close branches and offer fewer services; others are carving out new roles for themselves as on-line information providers, advisers, and bustling cultural centers. So, while the bold architecture of the new main library in downtown Seattle has become a popular tourist attraction, libraries throughout the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast struggle to rebuild or just hang on.

Many public libraries are experimenting with new roles beyond the boundaries of story hour and homework help. Public access to the Internet and computers, for instance, is transforming our libraries into de facto e-government access points for such disparate services as disaster relief, Medicare drug plans, and even benefits for children and families. The Salt Lake City Public Library, the subject of today's Tomdispatch (and Library Journal's "2006 Library of the Year"), prides itself, for instance, on being a place "where democracy happens." It houses an NPR radio affiliate and a film center, as well as a coffee house and deli that encourage people to linger and talk.

But even if you are lucky enough to have one of these "catalytic" libraries in your neighborhood, rather than a branch that just shut down for lack of funds, there's a public-library challenge-cum-nightmare that is rarely acknowledged. As Chip Ward, a Tomdispatch regular who just retired as the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library System, makes clear below, public libraries have become de facto daytime shelters for the nation's street people; while librarians are increasingly our unofficial social workers for the homeless (and often the disturbed). It's a dirty little secret that tells us all too much about the state of our nation today. Tom

What They Didn't Teach Us in Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless
by Chip Ward

Ophelia sits by the fireplace and mumbles softly, smiling and gesturing at no one in particular. She gazes out the large window through the two pairs of glasses she wears, one windshield-sized pair over a smaller set perched precariously on her small nose. Perhaps four lenses help her see the invisible other she is addressing. When her "nobody there" conversation disturbs the reader seated beside her, Ophelia turns, chuckles at the woman's discomfort, and explains, "Don't mind me, I'm dead. It's okay. I've been dead for some time now." She pauses, then adds reassuringly, "It's not so bad. You get used to it." Not at all reassured, the woman gathers her belongings and moves quickly away. Ophelia shrugs. Verbal communication is tricky. She prefers telepathy, but that's hard to do since the rest of us, she informs me, "don't know the rules."

Margi is not so mellow. The "fucking Jews" have been at it again she tells a staff member who asks her for the umpteenth time to settle down and stop talking that way. "Communist!" she hisses and storms off, muttering that she will "sue the boss." Margi is at least 70 and her behavior shows obvious signs of dementia. The staff's efforts to find out her background are met with angry diatribes and insults. She clutches a book on German grammar and another on submarines that she reads upside down to "make things right."

Mick is having a bad day, too. He hasn't misbehaved but sits and stares, glassy-eyed. This is usually the prelude to a seizure. His seizures are easier to deal with than Bob's, for instance, because he usually has them while seated and so rarely hits his head and bleeds, nor does he ever soil his pants. Bob tends to pace restlessly all day and is often on the move when, without warning, his seizures strike. The last time he went down, he cut his head. The staff has learned to turn him over quickly after he hits the floor, so that his urine does not stain the carpet.

John is trying hard not to be noticed. He has been in trouble lately for the scabs and raw, wet spots that are spreading across his hands and face. Staff members have wondered aloud if he is contagious and asked him to get himself checked-out, but he refuses treatment. He knows he is still being tracked, thanks to the implants the nurse slipped under his skin the last time he surrendered to the clinic and its prescriptions. There are frequencies we don't hear -- but he does. Thin whistles and a subtle beeping indicate he is being followed, his eye movements tracked and recorded. He claims he falls asleep in his chair by the stairway because "the little ones" poke him in the legs with sharp objects that inject sleep-inducing potions.

Franklin sits quietly by the fireplace and reads a magazine about celebrities. He is fastidiously dressed and might be mistaken for a businessman or a professional. His demeanor is confident and normal. If you watch him closely, though, you will see him slowly slip his hand into the pocket of his sports jacket and furtively pull out a long, shiny carpenter's nail. With it, he carefully pokes out the eyes of the celebs in any photo. Then the nail is returned to his pocket, a faint smirk crossing his face as he turns the page to pursue his next photo victim.

Scenes from a psych ward? Not at all. Welcome to the Salt Lake City Public Library. Like every urban library in the nation, the City Library, as it is called, is a de facto daytime shelter for the city's "homeless."

Where the Outcasts Are Inside

In bad weather -- hot, cold, or wet -- most of the homeless have nowhere to go but public places. The local shelters push them out onto the streets at six in the morning and, even when the weather is good, they are already lining up by nine, when the library opens, because they want to sit down and recover from the chilly dawn or use the restrooms. Fast-food restaurants, hotel lobbies, office foyers, shopping malls, and other privately owned businesses and properties do not tolerate their presence for long. Public libraries, on the other hand, are open and accessible, tolerant, even inviting and entertaining places for them to seek refuge from a world that will not abide their often disheveled and odorous presentation, their odd and sometimes obnoxious behaviors, and the awkward challenges they present to those who encounter them.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America's public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

"Homeless" is a misleading term. We have homeless people in America today, in part, because we have no living wage, no universal healthcare, disintegrating communities, and a large population of working poor who can end up on the street if they lose one of their part-time jobs, experience an illness or an accident, or have a domestic crisis. For them, homelessness is generally temporary, probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There is little to distinguish such people from the rest of us and we usually do not notice their presence among us. Programs to help people in such circumstances may be inadequate -- and it is a shame they are needed at all -- but they usually work. For the people we point to on the street or in public places and normally identify as homeless, however, homelessness is a way of life and our best attempts to rescue them continually fail.

We commonly refer to them as "street people." We see them sleeping in parks, huddled over grates on sidewalks, resting or sleeping on subway cars, passed out in doorways, or panhandling with crude cardboard signs. Social workers refer to them as the "chronically homeless." Although they make up only about 10% of the total number of people who experience homelessness in a given year, they soak up more than half the dollars we spend on programs to address homelessness. There are at least 200,000 people across the nation living more or less permanently on the street, enough to fill a thousand public libraries every day.

Drunk as a Skunk

The term "chronically homeless" is also inadequate when it comes to describing these individuals -- it only tells you that their homeless state is frequent. It neither indicates why they are homeless and stay that way, nor says anything about their most salient characteristic: Most of them are mentally ill. The published data on how many homeless are considered mentally ill by those who study them varies widely from 10% to 70%, depending on whether all the homeless, or just the chronically homeless, are included (and depending on how you define illness or disability). How, for example, do you categorize alcoholics and drug addicts?

When Crash is sober, for instance, he reasons like you or me, converses normally, and has a good sense of humor. Unfortunately, he is rarely sober. In one of his better moments, he petitioned me to let him stay in the library even though he was caught drinking -- an automatic six-month suspension. "You know I'm a good guy and I don't bring that stuff into the library," he pleads. "C'mon, give me another chance."

Crash is sitting in his wheelchair in the foyer outside my office where I serve as the library's assistant director. It's hard for me to address Crash without staring at the massive scar on his face -- a deep crease that neatly divides it down the middle from scalp to chin. Unfortunately, his nose is also divided and the sides do not match-up, giving him an asymmetrical appearance like a Picasso painting on wheels.

"Alcoholics pass out in the library's chairs," I explain, "and if we can't wake you up we have to call the paramedics. If you piss your pants or puke, the custodians have to clean that up and they hate that. You guys fall down and knock things over. You're unpredictable when you drink. You disrupt others. Public intoxication is against the law..."

"Okay, okay," he interrupts me, "I get it. Hey, just thought I'd try and get back in is all -- no hard feelings, man."

No hard feelings I assure him. He smiles and we shake hands. I wish I could cut him some slack -- after dozens of confrontations with angry and threatening drunks, I appreciate a cheerful drinker like Crash -- but I can't afford to establish a precedent I can't keep. The rule is clear: no drinking in the library and no exceptions. As he waits for the elevator doors to open and take him down, I venture a question I've been holding onto for awhile. "I know it's none of my business, but how did you get that scar?"

"Car accident," he replies, "same one as put me in this wheelchair. That's why they call me Crash."

"Were you drinking?" I ask.

He shakes his head and sighs. "Drunk as a skunk… drunk as a skunk." As the elevator descends I think about just how hard it must be to be both wheelchair-bound and homeless. I wonder about the commonly held notion that alcoholics must "hit bottom" before they can rebound. Is there such a thing as bottom for guys like Crash? Is he any more capable of controlling his urge to drink than Ophelia can control the voices in her head?

Our condemnation of transient-style alcoholism is both hypocritical and snobbish. If you are unhappy and caught without a prescription in America, you self-medicate. Depressed lawyers do it with fine scotch. An unemployed trucker might turn to beer or meth. Anxiety-ridden teachers or waitresses might smoke pot or order just one more margarita. Indigent people who want relief from their demons drink whatever is available and affordable or swallow whatever pills come their way. Dr. Tichenor's mouthwash is a popular choice for street alcoholics and "Doc Tich," as the brand is commonly known, doesn't offer a pinot noir.

What Library School Didn't Cover

The strong odor of mouthwash on the breath of transient alcoholics who shelter with us is often masked by the overwhelming odor of old sweat, urine-stained pants, and the bad-dairy smell that unwashed bodies and clothes give off. It can take your breath away long before you can smell theirs.

The library wrestles with where to draw the line on odor. The law is unclear. An aggressive patron in New Jersey successfully sued a public library for banning him because of his body odor. That decision has had a chilling effect on public libraries ever since. When library users complain about the odor of transients, librarians usually respond that there isn't much they can do about it. Lately, libraries are learning to write policies on odor that are more specific and so can be defended in court, but such rules are still hard to enforce because smell is such a subjective thing -- and humiliating someone by telling him he stinks is an awkward experience that librarians prefer to avoid. None of this was covered in library school.

It's a chicken-or-egg world for the mentally-ill homeless. Are they on the street because they are immobilized by severe depression or is deep depression the consequence of being on the street? Any tendency towards a psychological problem is aggravated and magnified by the constant stress, social isolation, loss of self-esteem, despair, and relentless boredom of street life. Imagine the degradation of waiting an hour in the cold rain to get into a soup kitchen for a meal; the hassle of hunting endlessly for an unpoliced spot to sleep; the constant fear of being robbed or attacked by other street people; or the indignity of defecating in a vacant lot. It's a combination that would probably drive a mentally healthy person to psychosis and substance abuse. Street people, who suffer serious psychological disorders, are often substance abusers, too, and the drug that a psychotic person prefers, often matches the psychosis. I have learned, for example, that bi-polar users prefer cocaine when in their manic phases and schizophrenics gravitate, naturally enough, to hallucinogens.

Alcohol and drugs mix with depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, and paranoia in complex ways, so it is hard to pull any given disorder apart and understand just who this person in front of you, cursing or pleading or thrashing on the floor, may be. Public librarians, of course, are not trained to do this. We deal with behaviors that are symptomatic without understanding why someone is suffering or what we can do about it. And even if we did understand and had been trained for such situations, healing the homeless is not our mission. Taxpayers expect us to provide library services and leave the homeless to social workers. They give us resources only for one mission, not two.

What about those social workers then? They turn out to be too few, under-funded, over-worked, and overwhelmed. My initial unsuccessful attempts to get the social workers who operate the "homeless van" to stop in and assess a "regular" homeless patron who, we suspected, had suffered a stroke, reminded me that they had more pressing priorities. In the dead of winter, they struggle to get people sleeping in alleys or passed out on sidewalks indoors so they don't freeze to death. Theirs is an everyday "life or death" race. If a homeless guy is inside the library, then, "Hey, mission accomplished."

Navigating the Archipelago of Despair

A workshop I attended on treating Native Americans for alcoholism compellingly described how incorporating sweat lodges, healing ceremonies, and other elements from Native American culture into established treatment methods can improve their effectiveness for Native American patients. Of course, the social worker added, it's essential to provide a halfway-house option between rehab and release and that remains a huge problem. Typically, he told us, his clients wait three to six months to get into a halfway-house after rehab.

"And where do they go while they wait?" I asked, naively enough.

He shrugged and sighed. "Back with their drinking buddies in the park, under the bridge, wherever."

The inadequacy of existing resources and the absurdity of the conditions they endure are just part of the landscape, a given for social workers. Public librarians can cooperate with (and learn from) them, but we understand that they are overwhelmed and often unavailable. So, like it or not, we are ushered into the ranks of auxiliary social workers with no resources whatsoever.

Local hospitals are also uncertain allies. They have little room for the indigent mentally ill for whose treatment they often can't get reimbursed. So they deal with the crisis at hand, fork over some pills, and send the hopeless homeless on their way.

A manager at a shelter-clinic told me that he keeps a stash of petty cash handy because sometimes a taxi arrives at his door from one of the city's hospitals, carrying an incoherent patient without ID or any possessions other than the hospital gown he or she is wearing. When that happens, clinic workers are instructed to rush for the cab before it can unload its passenger and pay the driver to return to the hospital, puzzled cargo still in hand.

Throughout the fragmented system of healthcare for homeless people, from rehab to hospitals to jails, there are few ground rules or protocols for discharging the mentally ill and next to no communication between healthcare providers, police, social workers, and shelter managers in this archipelago of despair. Public librarians are out of the loop altogether; our role in providing daytime shelter for the homeless is ignored. When, in an attempt to build my own useful network, I attended conferences on homeless issues, I was always met with puzzlement and the question: "What are you doing here?"

"Where do you think they go during the day?" I would invariably answer.

"Oh, yeah, I guess that's right -- you deal with them, too," would be the invariable response, always offered as if that never occurred to them before.

Paramedics are caught in the middle of this dark carnival of confusion and neglect. In the winter, when the transient population of the library increases dramatically, we call them almost every day. Once, when I apologized to a paramedic for calling twice, he responded, "Hey, no need to explain or apologize." He swept his arm towards the other paramedics, surrounding a portable gurney on which they would soon carry a disoriented old man complaining of dizziness to the emergency room. "Look at us," he said, "we're the mobile homeless clinic. This is what we do. All day long, day after day, and mostly for the same people over and over."

Sanitizing Gels and Latex Gloves: Plying the Librarian's Trade

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it's downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.

And the costs could grow far beyond the measure of money. If an epidemic of deadly flu were to strike, if an easily communicable strain of tuberculosis or some other devastating disease emerges, paramedics will be overwhelmed by their homeless clients who are at high risk for such illnesses. People who drink until they pass out tend to aspirate and choke, and people who sleep outdoors at night breathe cold, damp air. People who sleep in crowded shelters breathe each other's air.

Serious respiratory problems among the chronically homeless in a shelter are as common as beer guts at a racetrack. If an epidemic strikes, the susceptibility of the homeless will translate into an increased risk of exposure for the rest of us and, eerily enough, our public libraries could become Ground Zeroes for the spread of killer flu. Librarians are reluctant to make plans for handling such scenarios because we do not want to convey the message that America's libraries are anything but the safe and welcoming environments they remain today.

But here's the thing: It's not just about libraries. The chronically homeless share bus stops, subways, park benches, handrails, restrooms, drinking fountains, and fast-food booths with us or with others we encounter daily, who also share the air we breathe and the surfaces we touch. When sick or drunk, they vomit in public restrooms (if we are lucky). Having a population that is at once vulnerable to disease and able to spread microbes widely to others is simply foolish -- and unnecessary -- public policy, but in the library we focus on more immediate risks. We offer our staff hepatitis vaccinations and free tuberculosis checks. We place sanitizing gels and latex gloves at every public desk. Who would guess that working in a library could be a hazardous occupation?

In Place of Snake-Pit Hospitals, Snake-pit Jails

Ultimately, the indigent mentally ill are criminalized. If their presence in our libraries is a common and growing problem that we librarians would like the rest of society to be aware of, acknowledge, and commit themselves to helping us solve, here is a secret we would like to keep to ourselves: We are complicit. No matter how conscientiously and compassionately we try to treat our mentally disturbed users -- and at the Salt Lake City Public Library we work very hard to be fair, helpful, and tolerant -- librarians often have no good choices and, in the end, we just call the cops.

Take, for example, the case of a young man who entered the library fuming and spitting racial and ethnic slurs. He loudly asked some Hispanic teenagers, who were doing their homework, when they crossed the border and they reported his rude behavior. When a security guard approached, the young man started yelling obscenities and then took a swing at him. To his credit, the guard backed off and tried to calm him; but, on the next lunge, the guard took the kid down, cuffed his hands behind his back, and called the police. They recognized him. He had been let out of jail just two days earlier. Putting him back there, staff members argued, obviously wasn't going to make a difference. Shouldn't he be taken to a hospital for treatment?

The police pointed out that he was simply too strong and violent to be handled at a hospital, so he would have to go to jail. While waiting to be taken away, the kid turned some corner in his mind and left sobbing.

His behavior was not a measure of his character or even of his civility, but of how severe his psychosis had become without treatment and under the stress of prison. The man was sick, not bad. If we accept that schizophrenia, for instance, is not the result of a character flaw or a personal failing but of some chemical imbalance in the brain -- an imbalance that can strike regardless of a person's values, beliefs, upbringing, social standing, or intent, just like any other disease -- then why do we apply a kind of moral judgment we wouldn't use in other medical situations? We do not, for example, jail a diabetic who is acting drunk because his body chemistry has become so unbalanced that he is going into insulin shock, but we frequently jail schizophrenics when their brain chemistries become so unbalanced that they act out, as if punishment were the appropriate and effective response to a mental disorder.

And the police aren't happy about their role either. Cities are responding to such problems with mental health courts and the like for sorting out the mentally disturbed from other prisoners. Salt Lake City now has a model program, but nationally there is a long way to go.

According to the Department of Justice, there are about four times as many people with mental illnesses incarcerated in America today as under treatment in state mental hospitals. Some jails devote entire wings to the mentally ill.

Jails, of course, are intended to control, intimidate, and humiliate. Such a dehumanizing environment can be especially devastating for the mentally ill. I am particularly wary when dealing with street people who are recently out of jail because they are likely to be in an especially agitated state. Of course, cops and jailers are no better trained or prepared than librarians to handle people with serious psychological problems. This is a bond we share -- our unacknowledged charge and our inevitable failure to meet it.

In the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, the discharged mentally ill began to be "deinstitutionalized" from crowded hospitals with "snake pit" conditions where they got inadequate treatment. They were supposed to be integrated into local communities and cared for by local clinics. That was the dream anyway, but such humane alternatives to indifferent hospitalization failed to materialize.

The clinics were never built and the communities that were supposed to embrace the mentally ill didn't get the memo. The safety net that was to catch them proved to be chockfull of holes. Instead, they migrated to urban psychiatric ghettoes -- alleys, parks, abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and flophouses. As housing became more competitive and costly in the 1990s, they were further compressed into the margins of society where their suffering festered like an open wound. Now, it is up to the police to re-institutionalize them -- but this time in snake-pit prisons where they generally receive no treatment at all. So, in the last couple of decades, we have exchanged revolving doors to padded cells for revolving doors to jail cells with steel bars.

The cost of keeping a mentally-ill person in jail is not cheap. In Utah, it turns out to be the yearly equivalent of tuition at an Ivy League college. For that kind of taxpayer money, we could get our mentally ill off the streets and into stable housing environments with enough leftover for the kinds of support services most of them need to stay off the street. Again, the right thing to do for them may also be the most practical choice for us. We could solve the problem for less than it costs to manage it. In the meanwhile, they will cycle between the jail and the library. Is it any wonder that they crave a calm and entertaining environment after weeks, months, or years of fear and noise in jail? From a taxpayer's perspective, however, it seems cheaper to warehouse them in the library, between stints in jail -- or simply to pay no attention to where they are at all.

Refusing Treatment

Even if treatment options were not so scarce and inadequate, many of the mentally ill would not get treatment because they refuse to be treated. Paranoia is rampant on the street and paranoid people do not willingly submit to strange doctors and nurses who might "implant" something in them -- or worse. The cops, paramedics, and social workers can't take a person to the hospital just because he is ranting incoherently. He has to be a danger to himself or others.

Committing the mentally ill, homeless or otherwise, to treatment facilities against their wills is a civil liberties conundrum. As a political activist with controversial ideas, I am sensitive to the issues raised when citizens are forced into treatment. Images of Soviet dissidents getting dragged into psych wards and drugged come immediately to mind. But when a person is hallucinating and clearly upset, it is hard to accept, as I have often heard from social workers and the police, that "nothing can be done."

Sid was in his twenties when he came to us -- a tall, lanky, blond kid with a scraggly beard who walked around rumpled and slump-shouldered, his head hung in a beaten-dog kind of way. He avoided eye-contact and was very quiet most of the time. He liked to read graphic novels and comic books. Occasionally, though, he would jump up and move quickly outside where he would shout and twitch uncontrollably. He seemed to sense when his Tourette's Syndrome would strike and wanted to spare us.

On his worst days, he was troubled by hallucinations and voices he would answer in exasperated whispers. The police told me he had been raped by other transients -- a common occurrence on the street, bound to aggravate and complicate existing psychological disorders. When addressed directly, Sid was unfailingly polite and soft-spoken. Sometimes, we saw him eating scraps from garbage receptacles. The library staff worried about him, replaced his clothes when they fell apart, and bought him food when he grew thin and pale.

Sid, however, refused treatment. The case could be made that Sid was a danger to himself. After all, he often wasn't coherent enough to acquire food for himself. But nobody made that case. One day Sid disappeared. Staff members looked for him on the street and asked other homeless patrons if they had seen him. No one knew a thing and we never saw him again. I often wonder what happened to him. I like to imagine that he was rescued by family members who had been looking for him. It's far more likely that Sid's demons led him to a bus and that he's wandering the margins of another alien city where "nothing can be done."

We see so much despair of Sid's sort among the lost souls who shelter at the library that, by winter's end -- our "homeless season" -- we often find ourselves hard put to cope with our own feelings of depression and frustration. As one library manager told me, "I struggle not to internalize what I experience here, but there are days I just go home and burst out in tears." She is considering leaving the profession.

Another colleague started out in social work and transitioned to a library career when she found she couldn't handle the emotional stress of dealing with her down-and-out clients. Imagine her surprise to rediscover her feelings of despair while working in the library. "I deal with the same clientele," she told me one day, "but now I have no way of making a difference. I still go home feeling sad and discouraged that, in a nation as rich and powerful as ours, we abandon mentally ill people on the streets and then resent them for being sick in public."

There is hope, however. After decades of studies by various task forces, followed by experiments by local governments, a consensus has emerged that the most effective way to help chronically homeless people is to stabilize them in housing first and then offer treatment. Social scientists and policy-makers have concluded, logically enough, that it is hard to "get better" while living in a stressful, demeaning, and unstable environment and easier to recover when one feels safe and secure.

This "housing first" strategy isn't cheap, but it is far more realistic and effective than requiring people to get better as a prerequisite for housing -- and it costs much less than failing the way we do now. Salt Lake County, like many local governments, has created a ten-year plan to end homelessness based on housing-first principles. The wheel of reform is moving slowly, however, and many people who need help now will suffer and die on the street before things can turn their way (if they ever actually do). And the librarians at the City Library and the good citizens of Salt Lake will watch them struggle daily, while waiting for saner policies to take hold.

Gaining the World and Losing Each Other

In the meantime, the Salt Lake City Public Library -- Library Journal's 2006 "Library of the Year" -- has created a place where the diverse ideas and perspectives that sustain an open and inclusive civil society can be expressed safely, where disparate citizens can discover common ground, self-organize, and make wise choices together. We do not collect just books, we also gather voices. We empower citizens and invite them to engage one another in public dialogues. I like to think of our library as the civic ballroom of our community where citizens can practice that awkward dance of mutuality that is the very signature of a democratic culture.

And if the chronically homeless show up at the ball, looking worse than Cinderella after midnight? Well, in a democratic culture, even disturbing information is useful feedback. When the mentally ill whom we have thrown onto the streets haunt our public places, their presence tells us something important about the state of our union, our national character, our priorities, and our capacity to care for one another. That information is no less important than the information we provide through databases and books. The presence of the impoverished mentally ill among us is not an eloquent expression of civil discourse, like a lecture in the library's auditorium, but it speaks volumes nonetheless.

The belief that we are responsible for each other's social, economic, and political well-being, that we will care for our weakest members compassionately, should be the keystone in the moral architecture of a democratic culture. We will not stand by while our fellow citizens are deprived of their fellowship and citizenship -- which is why we ended racial segregation and practices like poll taxes that kept disenfranchised Americans powerless. We will not let children starve. We do not consign orphans to the streets like they do in Brazil or let children be sold into prostitution as they do in Thailand. We are proud of our struggles to meet people's basic needs and to encourage inclusion. Why, then, are the mentally ill still such an exception to those fundamental standards?

America is proud of its hyper-individualism, our liberation from the bonds of tribe and the social constraints of traditional societies. We glorify the accomplishments of inventors, innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneers, and artists. But while some individuals thrive and the cutting edge of our technology is wondrous, the plight of the chronically homeless tells me that our communities are also fragmented and disintegrating. We may have gained the world and lost each other.

The Penan nomads of Sarawak, Borneo, members of an indigenous and primal culture, have no technology or material comforts that compare with our mighty achievements. They have one word for "he," "she," and "it." But they have six words for "we." Sharing is an obligation and is expected, so they have no phrase for "thank you." An American child is taught that homelessness is regrettable but inevitable since some people are bound to fail. A child of the Penan is taught that a poor man shames us all.

Ophelia is not so far off after all -- in a sense she is dead and has been for some time. Hers is a kind of social death from shunning. She is neglected, avoided, ignored, denied, overlooked, feared, detested, pitied, and dismissed. She exists alone in a kind of social purgatory. She waits in the library, day after day, gazing at us through multiple lenses and mumbling to her invisible friends. She does not expect to be rescued or redeemed. She is, as she says, "used to it."

She is our shame. What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy -- then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: "What are they doing in here?" "Can't you control them?" Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.

We will let Ophelia and the others stay with us and we will be firm but kind. We will wait for America to wake up and deal with its Ophelias directly, deliberately, and compassionately. In the meantime, our patrons will continue to complain about her and the others who seek shelter with us. Yes, we know, we say to them; we hear you loud and clear. Be patient, please, we are doing the best we can. Are you?

2007-04-04T21:25:00.000-05:00

FISHING WITH JOHN: AN ESSAY
by Michael Azzerad

At some point in their lives, probably every sleepless person has switched on the TV in the wee hours of a weekend morning and chanced upon a fishing show. Invariably, a beefy, half-forgotten retired athlete shares a boat with some laconic, baseball-hatted master of the piscatory art, patiently awaiting a bite. The pace is glacial, the visuals unmoving, the murmur of the narrative positively narcotic. It’s the visual equivalent of ambient music. When a hooked fish finally breaks the surface, it’s as momentous as when the creature bursts out of that guy’s stomach in Alien.

The comedic potential of this mise en scène did not go unnoticed by John Lurie. Watching some droll home videos of himself and his buddy Willem Dafoe fishing together, Lurie, a man who is nothing if not always thinking, swiftly came to a brilliant realization: Here was a way to deduct his vacations from his income tax! This was the genesis of Fishing With John.

Lurie has lead the legendary jazz group the Lounge Lizards for twenty years and starred in the Jim Jarmusch films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law. Both experiences probably taught him a little something about casting: Dennis Hopper, Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, Matt Dillon and Willem Dafoe may not be the first people to spring to mind if one were putting together a fishing show, but then that’s what makes Fishing With John so great.

Plunked down everywhere from Maine to Thailand, these sophisticates are escaping the hum and velocity of their lives and loving it. But they’re also kind of hating it—every guest expresses his misery and discomfort at some point, some more forthrightly than others. They are, so to speak, fish out of water. What makes Fishing With John special is the collision between the urban, urbane Lurie and his guests and the reality of their surroundings—witness Jim Jarmusch, clad all in Manhattan black, pondering the morality of fishing while riding on a sharkboat.

For a respite from all that nature—“A game of cards on dry land makes Tom feel much better,” says the narrator—these city boys do all the things the original fishing show guys were doing when the cameras weren’t rolling: drinking, smoking, gambling, playing ping-pong. But things really start to happen when they get out on the water, where, if you’ll notice, few fish are actually caught.

Sure, it’s about how it’s not the destination, it’s the journey, yadda, yadda, yadda, but there’s more. On one hand, with its parodies of bleak existential tropes, Fishing With John makes light of the tendency to read much into a blank slate; on the other, it’s a picaresque travelogue about camaraderie and interpersonal chemistry. Lurie and Dafoe banter about the homoerotic element of male friendships like two teenagers; Lurie impatiently yells at his friend Waits to “Row!” but endures being called “Johnny” by elder hipster statesman Hopper. He’s playful with his former boss Jarmusch and (barely) patient with the laconic Dillon.

The leisurely pace, unfurled with a musician’s sense of timing, owes a lot to Jarmusch’s bleak, deadpan directorial style. It’s why Fishing With John is still great even when the repartee is, shall we say, less than scintillating. Turns out there’s just something very funny about very interesting people having very dull conversations. For instance:

Jarmusch: “I’ll drive.”

Lurie: “You wanna drive?”

Jarmusch: “No.”

Much of show’s charm stems from its resemblance to a home movie—or maybe one of those TV blooper shows—with the guests’ charisma and notoriety replacing the familiarity of relatives and friends; that’s why their fishermanly bullshit sessions about things like armless truck drivers and colostomy bags are so entertaining. The show has subtly stacked the deck on several other levels, too: The cinematography is top-notch and the music, by Lurie himself, is superb (soundtrack available on Lurie’s label, Strange & Beautiful music).

Then there’s veteran narrator Robb Webb, who hits just the right tone of thoughtful wonderment even as he spouts platitudes, clichés and just plain nonsense like “I’d love a bite of your sandwich” just to see if we’re paying attention. The show is crammed with funny little asides, references and non sequiturs that fully reveal themselves only after repeated viewings. And just to emphasize the artifice, there’s the modernist touch of occasional absurd sight and sound gags like dog barking synchronized to the bouncing of a ping-pong ball.

Lurie tells Waits that if he lived in Jamaica, he’d probably make sculptures out of the stuff he found on the beach. It’s an apt metaphor for what he does with the show, reconfiguring scores of hours of raw videotape into a coherent creation, imposing at least some sort of structure onto these shaggy sea-dog stories.

But there’s only so much one can alter in post-production. The fact is, with a camera trained on them for days, there’s no way Lurie and his guests are going to be “on” for all of it. Within the uniquely intimate confines of a boat, their personalities (or lack thereof) stand in deep relief—they are cool, cranky, dull, spacey, scary. Even with no makeup or script, they’re still remarkably like the characters they portray on stage and screen. And therein lies the essential charm of Fishing With John—as Robb Webb puts it, these are real men doing real things.

2007-04-04T13:13:00.000-05:00

SHIVERS (1975): A DAVID CRONENBERG FILM
A review by Bob Stephens

Human sexuality has often provided a basis for horror in literature and cinema. For example, the figure of the male vampire represents the elegant circumvention of Victorian repression, the double standard that discriminated against women, and amnesia has been a nightmarish mechanism for post-coital forgetting, the costly denial of having participated in a taboo act.

Canadian director David Cronenberg, very aware of the subversive effect of such an approach, has made a career of specializing in the linkage of sex with horror. His 1975 movie "Shivers," which is being revived for a six-day run at the Roxie on Halloween, is a fine example of his idiosyncratic, morbid preoccupations.

In "Shivers," a group of apartment houses, separated by its island setting from a big city, is the location of a disturbing parasite infestation, one that involves the sexual transmission of some bloody, nastily phallic creatures.

As the infection spreads, Cronenberg opens up a world of terror in which incest, pedophilia, homosexuality and heterosexual lust are punished by a lethal disease. Though some viewers have complained that the director's attitudes are mere moralizations, they conveniently ignore his equally repellent victimization of the sexually innocent, the aged and the disabled.

"Shivers" exhibits the major characteristics of Cronenberg's canon, his use of architecture as reinforcement of the film's creepy tone and the deliberate reduction of men and women to a single, compulsively sexual aspect of their identities.

The array of dwellings in which the movie is set constitutes a self-contained environment as isolated from its surroundings as a science fictional space station or undersea laboratory are from Mother Earth or terra firma.

Sterile-looking, de-natured domiciles promise safety for their inhabitants, protection from the hazards of urban existence. Layer upon layer of glass walls also symbolize the transparency of false emotions and the strange separation of people who live in proximity to each other.

When security is violated and their living spaces are penetrated, the buildings' function is reversed: They no longer serve as fortresses and become, instead, inescapable traps. The huge structures have endless corridors, barren hallways like tunnels that turn back upon themselves, leading nowhere.

Though "Shivers" occasionally echoes a couple of its forerunners, "The Tingler" (1959) and "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), the film achieves its own peculiar power with one ingeniously lurid scene after another.

There's a variation on a common male fantasy of surreptitious rape, the pornographic presence of a serpent in a woman's bath tub; a man experiences autoerotic pleasure in the subcutaneous play of parasites inside his belly; a suggestive comparison of a parasite's ravenous appetite with the revolting gluttony of a man eating a cherry pie; and a sardonic woman who's always carrying a glass of rose-colored wine - a drink that foreshadows, in its pink contamination of pure water, the bloodshed to come.

Cronenberg is obviously an artist who exploits our disgust at the gore and goo of carnality, our shame over, and fear of, physical decay. (Is anything more frightening than the violent eruption of incomprehensible symptoms of an illness?) Furthermore, he detects in our vague anxieties an unacknowledged, horrifying sensuousness, a pathological confusion of sex with death that often haunts us.

Finally, "Shivers" is an unnerving vision that overwhelms the medical profession's complacent rationalism. It takes malicious pleasure in the transmission of a sexual plague by a simple, superficially harmless kiss. Perhaps the most oral of horror films, Cronenberg's work reaches its chilling climax as the fashionable housing project is transformed into a hive swarming with cries of a dreadful, undesirable ecstasy.

2007-04-04T11:41:00.000-05:00

JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL & ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMONOLOGY

2007-04-03T18:29:00.000-05:00

NYT'S TOM FRIEDMAN AND THE PUNDITS WILL BLAME US FOR IRAQ
by Matt Taibbi

"Secretary of State Rice said it was like Germany after World War II. I would say it was like Germany, but Germany of 1648, before it was a modern state, rather than Germany in 1948... We were able to rebuild Germany and Japan after WWII, but there are real differences with Iraq. We defeated them with large numbers of troops and we imposed an effective occupation. We never defeated the Sunnis of Iraq and we never imposed an effective occupation controlling the country. Moreover, Germany and Japan had a tradition of democracy and free markets that we could build on. Iraq had very little." -- New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman has been subdued lately. I get the feeling that he's taken some of the criticism of his nutty metaphors (I'm only one of a great many people who've been on him about this) to heart and decided to chill out, which in a way is kind of a shame. He's still an arrogant, wrong-headed prick, but he's no longer a walking literary time bomb like he used to be. I often feel now, like I did on the day Red Auerbach died, that the world has lost one of its leading lights.

I had high hopes a few weeks back when Friedman officially penned his five hundredth "Russia is finally turning the corner, because the middle class is really emerging there" piece. Russia and its middle class first started turning the corner during Clinton's first term. Anyway, the piece began it with the sentence, "Russia today is a country that takes three hands to describe. ..."

For three short paragraphs after that, the old magic came back. It was like watching Nolan Ryan's last no-hitter -- for one glorious day, the fastball went back up to 99 again. On the one hand, Friedman said, Putin's Russia can no longer be called democratic. On the other hand, Boris Yeltsin's version of democracy was a failure. This is the sentence that came next -- emphasis is mine:

And on the third hand, while today's Russia may be a crazy quilt of capitalist czars, mobsters, nationalists and aspiring democrats, it is not the totalitarian Soviet Union.

Even in remission, genius is genius. How do you get around the natural mathematical limitations of the construction, "On the one hand ... but on the other hand ..."? After all, we humans only have two hands. You or I would never have thought of it, but Friedman knew instinctively -- just add another hand!

But aside from that, the pickings have been slim in Friedman-land. That doesn't mean, of course, that he hasn't been wrong and stupid lately -- it just means he's been avoiding figures of speech. Most of what he's been doing since he got back from Russia is write columns complaining about the various unpredictable annoyances that are preventing the war in Iraq from being the smashing success it by all rights ought to have been. Last week, for instance, he wrote a piece called "The Silence The Kills" bemoaning the widespread failure of Arab cultures to condemn suicide bombers. The rhetorical crux of the piece rests upon the curious moral calculus that has defined the Bush presidency, a calculus I think is most easily expressed in haiku form:

The war in Iraq
A problem of perception
Terrorists are worse!

Friedman's haiku didn't scan -- it read like this: "Mr. Bush is losing a P.R. war to people who blow up emergency wards. Europeans are mute, lost in their delusion that this is all George Bush's and Tony Blair's fault."

What's amazing to me is that conservatives have been pushing this line of reasoning for five, six years now, and some people are apparently still buying it. Okay, yes, I jammed my own head up my ass -- but I didn't really, because look at how despicable the terrorists are! Why, they blew up a children's hospital! How could my own head be up my ass if terrorists can blow up a children's hospital? And the headless body points, gesticulates, etc.

Friedman, a former enthusiastic war apologist (for months before the invasion he applauded the crazy, nonsensical audacity of the war plan, likening it to a football Hail Mary pass -- "The Long Bomb," as he put it), went through his Hillary Clinton-like "Mistakes were made" about-face on the war issue last summer, in an impressively shameless column called "Time For Plan B." The piece was one of the most defiantly convoluted non-apologies in op/ed history, making sure to re-list at exhaustive length all the unassailably noble reasons Friedman supported the war ("Yes, I believe it was and remains hugely important to try to partner with Iraqis to create one good example in the heart of the Arab world of a decent, progressive state, blah blah blah ...") while also leaving no doubt whose fault it was that this excellent initiative foundered ("Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening").

I bring this up because Friedman's latest column, "Don't Ask, Don't Know, Don't Help," is yet another "the war should have worked" piece, and it's of a sort we're likely to see quite often in upcoming years.

What we have to remember about America's half-baked propaganda machine is that, dumb as it is, it always keeps its eye on the ball. The war in Iraq is lost, everyone knows that, but there are future wars to think about. When a war goes wrong, the reason can never that the invasion was simply a bad, immoral decision, a hopelessly fucked-up idea that even a child could have seen through. No, we always have to make sure that the excuse for the next war is woven into the autopsy of the current military failure. That's why to this day we're still hearing about how Vietnam was lost because a) the media abandoned the war effort b) the peace movement undermined the national will and c) the public, and the Pentagon, misread the results of the Tet offensive, seeing defeat where there actually was a victory.

After a few decades of that, we were ready to go to war again -- all we had to do, we figured, was keep the cameras away from the bloody bits, ignore the peace movement, and blow off any and all bad news from the battlefield. And we did all of these things for quite a long time in Iraq, but, maddeningly, Iraq still turned out to be a failure.

That left the war apologists in a bind. If after fixing all of the long-held Vietnam excuses Iraq could still blow up in our faces, that must mean that we not only misjudged Iraq, but we were wrong about why Vietnam failed, too. Now, if we're ever going to pull one of these stunts again, we're going to need to come up with a grander, even more outlandish excuse for why both wars were horrible, bloody failures. Who could come up with such an excuse? Well, a man who counts on three hands sure can. Here's Friedman quoting author Robert Hormats:

"In every major war that we have fought, with the exception of Vietnam, there was an effort prior to the war or just after the inception to re-evaluate tax and spending policies and to shift resources from less vital national pursuits to the strategic objective of fighting and winning the war," said Mr. Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International). He quotes Roosevelt's 1942 State of the Union address, when F.D.R. looked Americans in the eye and said: "War costs money. ... That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other nonessentials. In a word, it means an Œall-out‚ war by individual effort and family effort in a united country."

Ever heard Mr. Bush talk that way? After Pearl Harbor, Mr. Hormats noted, Roosevelt vowed to mobilize U.S. industry to produce enough weapons so we would have a "crushing superiority" in arms over our enemies. Four years after the start of the Iraq war, this administration has still not equipped all our soldiers with the armor they need.

In other words, both Vietnam and Iraq failed not because they were stupid, vicious occupations of culturally alien populations that despised our very presence and were willing to sacrifice scads of their own lives to send us home. No, the problem was that we didn't make an effort to "re-evaluate tax and spending policies" and "shift resources" into an "all-out" war effort.

The notion that our problem in Iraq is a resource deficit is pure, unadulterated madness. Our enemies don't have airplanes or armor. They are fighting us with garage-door openers and fifty year-old artillery shells, sneaking around barefoot in the middle of the night around to plant roadside bombs. Anytime anyone dares oppose us in the daylight, we vaporize them practically from space using weapons that cost more than the annual budgets of most Arab countries to design. We outnumber the active combatants on the other side by at least five to one. This year, we will spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined -- more than six hundred billion dollars. And yet Tom Friedman thinks the problem in Iraq is that we ordinary Americans didn't tighten our belts enough to support the war effort.

Friedman should be hung upside down and have holes drilled in his skull for even suggesting this, of course. We're talking about one of the richest men in media, a guy who in recent years got still richer beating the drum for this war from his $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot mansion in suburban Maryland. He is married to a shopping mall heiress worth nearly $3 billion; the Washingtonian says he is part of one of the 100 richest families in America. And yet he has the balls to turn around and tell us that the pointless, asinine war he cheerleaded for failed because we didn't sacrifice enough for it. Are you reaching for the railroad spike yet?

This being tax season, I want you all to think about this Friedman column as you prepare your returns, because I'll bet anything he's surfing ahead of a trend here. If the next president is John McCain, or even if it isn't, you can be damn sure that we're going to hear a lot about how we blew Iraq because there weren't enough troops or resources shifted into Iraq.

You're going to hear that we didn't have money to pay for body armor, when the reality is that the reason troops didn't have body armor in recent years is that congressmen robbed the operations and maintenance accounts of the defense budget to pay for earmarks/pork projects (they took $9 billion in pork and earmarks out of the O&M allotment in 2005, for instance). They robbed the part of the budget that paid for ordinary soldiers‚ gear so they wouldn't have to touch the F-22 Raptor, the CVN(X) aircraft carrier, or any of the other mega-expensive and mostly useless weapons programs. I mean, think about it -- how else can you spend $600 billion dollars on the military every year and not have body armor for the soldiers deployed at war? Somewhere, someone who doesn't need it has to be sucking up that money.

But trust me, the myth is going to be that you didn't cough up enough for the war. It's your fault we failed, not Tom Friedman's. So put all three of your hands in your pockets and dig out that change you're holding back. We'll need it for his next great idea.

2007-04-02T14:34:00.000-05:00

KANDINSKY'S ON WHITE II: MY FAVORITE PAINTING

2007-04-02T13:08:00.000-05:00

LEBBEUS WOODS: CONJECTURAL ARCHITECT

Lebbeus Woods (Lansing, Michigan, 1940 - ) is an American artist who envisions experimental environments rather than designing practical buildings, comparing his work to the visionary power of cinema. He was quoted saying "the interplay of metrical systems establishing boundaries of materials and energetic forms is the foundation of a universal science (universcience) whose workers include all individuals...."

The majority of his explorations deal with the design of systems in crisis: the order of the existing being confronted by the order of the new. His designs are politically charged and provocative visions of a possible reality, provisional, local and charged with the investment of their creators. He is best known for his proposals for San Francisco, Havana and Sarajevo included in the publication of Radical Reconstruction in 1997. Sarajevo after its civil war, Havana in the grips of the ongoing trade embargo, and San Francisco after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Woods studied architecture at the University of Illinois and engineering at Purdue University and first worked in the offices of Eero Saarinen, but in 1976 turned exclusively to theory and experimental projects. [1] He is currently a professor of architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City. In 1988 Woods co-founded RIEA, the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, a non-profit institution devoted to the advancement of experimental architectural thought and practice while promoting the concept and perception of architecture itself.

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no "sacred and primordial site." I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then "melt into air." I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhoutte against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.

More
His website (???)

SOME DRAWINGS

2007-04-02T12:41:00.000-05:00

HELIOPOLIS

2007-04-02T12:35:00.000-05:00

ANTONIO SANT'ELIA: VISIONARY ARCHITECT

Antonio Sant'Elia (April 30, 1888 - October 10, 1916) was an Italian architect. He was born in Como, Lombardy. A builder by training, he opened a design office in Milan in 1912 and became involved with the Futurist movement. Between 1912 and 1914, influenced by industrial cities of the United States and the Viennese architects Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, he began a series of design drawings for a futurist Città Nuova ("New City") that was conceived as symbolic of a new age.

Many of these drawings were displayed at the first and only exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze group (of which he was a member) exhibition in May/June 1914 at the "Famiglia Artistica" gallery. Today, many of these drawings are on permanent display at Villa Olmo, near Como.

The manifesto Futurist Architecture was published in August 1914, supposedly by Sant'Elia, though this is subject to debate. In it the author stated that "the decorative value of Futurist architecture depends solely on the use and original arrangement of raw or bare or violently colored materials". As described in this manifesto, his designs featured bold groupings and large-scale disposition of planes and masses creating a heroic industrial expressionism. His vision was for a highly industrialised and mechanized city of the future, which he saw not as a mass of individual buildings but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the "life" of the city. His extremely influential designs featured vast monolithic skyscraper buildings with terraces, bridges and aerial walkways that embodied the sheer excitement of modern architecture and technology.

A socialist as well as an irredentist, Sant'Elia joined the Italian army as Italy entered World War I in 1915. He was killed at Monfalcone. Most of his designs were never built, but his futurist vision has influenced many architects and designers.

SOME DRAWINGS

FULL GALLERY OF IMAGES

2007-04-02T12:28:00.000-05:00

THREE PAINTINGS BY GIORGO DE CHIRICO

Melancholy and Mystery of a Street

The Seer

The Disquieting Muses

2007-04-02T11:58:00.000-05:00

TOWARDS EXISTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE: REINVENTING THE SOUTH SQUARE

Despite a few startling aspects, the projects are no utopias. Utopia tends to objectivize a future by trespassing spatial duress. It tends to contemplate time and space as two totally independent principles, whereas they are absolutely consubstantial with one another.

They are far different from any projection of ideal social organizations or any painterly master plans; their numerous sketches, drawings, models and other simulation devices, would rather question again and again the interpenetrating of time and space, by phasing and integrating an uncertain future.

But the refusal of utopia does not prevent the projects from playing with the powers of the imaginary -not to enforce the imaginary like a solipsism, but to interbreed its powers with other more physical forces emerging from the territory. The will for shape has grafted either on the great geographic undulations that dig the soil out and cover it up with vegetation, or on the mechanical traffic flows and their tireless pulse of polluting vehicles; the graft also operates on the dynamism expressed through the inhabitants' urge for change.

All elements speak of force and power: architecture is not sheer technique trying and renewing efficient proven typologies. It had better bring back any moment the memory of multiple shelters such as were invented through the ages of animal and human construction -back from the first cave dwelling settlements to El Lissitzky's horizontal skyscrapers, from the Carnac menhirs to the latest orbiting stations. Nature as well, is neither considered like some collection of objects -made out of stones, trees, plants or animals -- nor like natura naturata, but rather like an endlessly budding natura naturans.

Those forces should be scraped against one another; the memory of the architectural field, with its amnesia and sudden recollections, is peculiarly mixed with this lingering movement of the tectonic plates that gradually shapes the ground with the help of water, wind, ice and natural flowering.

Let's break first the circle of vision, and grasp the flow and turbulence that secretly govern all human settings -as evaporation and condensation would make and unmake the clouds in the sky. The contemporary city must be conceived as the condenser for a new existential order.
Therefore, the projects are either wondering about the substance of space or assessing the manifold housing processes, associating them with cosmogonies.

Fracture, for instance, is experimenting with the void. It displays a space free of all functions -services, facilities, stores, car-parks, are all integrated into the buildings- where human bodies would merely pass by facing one another over bridges and footbridges. Just as if the visual space up aloft became the actual scene for potential encounters. A dysfunctional rift creates a point of friction full of potential, breaks the activity sectors apart and renews the tension between them all.

Urban jungle is more concerned about the solid earth. The project considers the soil not merely as a sensitive skin collecting objects, but as a specific substance either of a mineral and mechanical quality, or on the contrary, as a planted impenetrable element, or even as a substance scattered with threatening wild animals. The city is conceived anew like needlework, made out of spatial strips of distinct characteristics.

Stacking tries to set rules for the creation of an amniotic space that would carry out the brief -housings, stores, sports grounds, companies, etc- through stacking rather than casual juxtaposition. The layers in constant connection with each other would generate a three-dimensional space continuum, and foster interference and correspondence.

Other projects are undertaking new methods in regards to the urban and architectural construct.

In-ex, for example, offers the action of drilling as an alternative to assembling. Genuine anti-constructions are invented in reference to the prehistoric cave: underground rooms gradually release themselves from the ground and let their outer volumes stretch out to the open air, exhibiting them as the negative forms of their interior spatiality.

Reversal plays as well on the reference to Leibniz's monad that exposes itself to otherness from the very depths of itself: the project seeks to conceptualize a device that would have the usual inner spaces take place in the outside, and vice-versa. Dense and active constructions are erected on the limits of the parcel whereas the hollowed center is planted with trees; it looks as if an extrinsic element of the city had come upon its core.

Wall-Wall opposes an active and noisy wall to an empty silent ditch. It questions both ways, positive and negative, of closing off a space and delimiting an insularity. The discussion about the origin of architecture then opens to something else than roof and shelter: a visible or invisible delimitation.

There is no planning here, but some interactions that may cause the interference and bypassing within a space at peace in the midst of a jumbled city. Such interference may then induce irreversible injuries, allowing for the void to spring again, together with the open nomad citizenship yet to come.

from http://www.versailles.archi.fr

2007-03-27T14:46:00.000-05:00

HOW BUSH HELPED THE GOP COMMIT SUICIDE

2007-03-27T12:04:00.000-05:00

DEAD RINGERS: AN ESSAY
by Chris Rodley

"When was the last time a gynecologist was in a movie, even as a figure of fun? There’s something taboo there; something strange and difficult.” True to Cronenberg’s assertion, Dead Ringers is both wholly original and uniquely disturbing. It dares the very taste buds of cinema with concerns so far beyond the polite, and so far beneath the easy shock, it could have been made by an alien: a being with a healthy disregard for the normal operations of commercial cinema, but with a unique sense of the human condition.

Since 1976, audiences worldwide had been aware of Cronenberg as director of some of the most shocking, perverse, and original scenes of body horror ever conceived for the cinema. His early excoriating excursions into science and the flesh were often dismissed as low-budget “schlock horror” by conservative critical establishments. But Cronenberg had long since matured as a filmmaker, even as his obsessions remained intact. And over the years, in the tradition of Europe’s greatest auteurs, he had imposed an entirely new, hermetically sealed sensibility on cinema: Felliniesque, Bergmanesque, and now Cronenbergesque.

Dead Ringers’ starting point was the stranger-than-fiction real life story of identical twin gynecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus. Discovered partially decayed and almost naked in their New York apartment in 1975, they had died from barbiturate withdrawal.

While magazine articles and a semifictionalized book -- Twins -- intrigued film executives, they were nervous about the subject matter. Initiated in 1981, the movie was to pass through several script writers, potential backers, and one serious false start before Cronenberg eventually assumed the role of main writer and producer in 1988.

Dead Ringers eschews the cliché of the good twin/bad twin. In Cronenberg’s hands, Elliot and Beverly Mantle are one soul, split into two bodies and two mutually dependent minds at the point of conception. Issues of good and bad become issues of maleness and femaleness, here destructively divided. Elliot’s sexual and professional conduct is as confident and ruthless as Beverly’s is modest and sensitive. As both man and woman, they are a closed circuit, their stability precariously preserved by the virtue of their splendid isolation.

Patient Claire Niveau, a woman possessed of a wondrous but quite useless three-chambered womb, becomes the circuit breaker. Beverly’s love of her -— heart and soul -— reveals that the latter cannot be annexed. Separation can be a terrifying thing, and Beverly’s descent into mental collapse and drug addiction inevitably delivers both twins to a fate befitting all rare creatures.

Dead Ringers’ stunning trump card and major special effect is Jeremy Irons. Cronenberg had already relinquished his early visceral/visual techniques of blood and gore for an emotionally affecting cinema centered on the disintegration of the mind as opposed to the flesh. Irons’ portrayal of both Mantle twins is not only an acting tour de force, but also a realization of the director’s most heartbreaking testament to the mind/body split.

The movie is relentlessly interior in its depiction of personal chaos. We are allowed only two glimpses of the exterior world, in the first and penultimate scenes. Carol Spier’s brilliant production design keeps us locked in a strange, alien mindset purposefully reminiscent of an aquarium. Elliot and Beverly, far from being demystified, are viewed as exotic creatures by virtue of a cruel twist of biological fate. As Cronenberg has observed: “Dead Ringers is conceptual science fiction, the concept being: ‘What if there could be identical twins?’ I’m suggesting that’s impossible. I can imagine a world in which they are only a concept, like mermaids.”

Ambitious motion-control camerawork, allowing the seamless “twinning” of Irons, is both staggering and kept firmly in its place. Mere technology is never allowed to distract an audience from the film’s ultimate subject. This has little to do with twins or gynecology. Dead Ringers is a definitively melancholic meditation on our very existence—on the sadness of what Cronenberg has termed “unrequited life.” If the movie seems tantalizingly, even dangerously, personal, it is because it delivers its maker’s sensibility and aesthetic so directly and artfully. Its troubling existence is as cathartic as it is exhilarating.

Chris Rodley is an independent filmmaker and the editor of Cronenberg on Cronenberg and Lynch on Lynch.

2007-03-23T15:29:00.000-05:00

DEMOCRATS, DON'T WIMP OUT
by Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America and the author of the new book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, just released by John Wiley & Sons. The views expressed here are his own. (Copyright to Paul Waldman, TomPaine.com)

All over Washington, the sage barons of the establishment media are warning Democrats not to get cocky. Don’t move too fast, they say. Don’t push a bunch of wacky, left-wing ideas. Seek compromise, give ground, hew to the center, for only there lies the greatest prize of all: the praise of David Broder and Joe Klein, the nodding approval of the Washington Post editorial page, the admiration the Beltway cognoscenti reserve for those who know their place and know whose rings they should be kissing.

Bull. What Democrats need to do is spend the next two years crushing their opponents like bugs. It’s not about mercy, it’s not about manners, it’s about three fundamental goals: limiting the damage the Bush administration can do, passing whatever legislation they can in the short term to help the American public and laying the foundation for future progressive victories.

Democrats finally have the upper hand, and now’s the time to use it. Here are a few things they can do to get started.

1. Investigate—But Smartly

The combination of the most secretive administration in modern times and the most supine Congress in memory meant that Congressional oversight utterly disappeared over the last six years. Democrats have an obligation—to the people that elected them, and to democracy itself—to make up for lost time. Investigations should be rolled out on a carefully planned schedule, to maximize both news coverage and pressure on the administration.

But that doesn’t mean they should simply investigate anything and everything for no purpose other than laying siege to the White House. As the Boston Globe reported last November, when Bill Clinton was president the Republicans took 140 hours of sworn testimony on the pressing issue of whether the administration had mined the White House Christmas card list for potential donors. Yet they took only 12 hours of testimony on the Abu Ghraib scandal. “The government reform panel alone,” they wrote, “issued 1,052 subpoenas related to investigations of the Clinton administration and the Democratic National Committee from 1997 to 2002, and only 11 subpoenas related to allegations of Republican abuse.”

Democrats could distinguish themselves from the excesses and omissions of their predecessors by focusing on one new investigation to be started each month. Iraq, corruption and the administration’s unwillingness to abide by the Constitution are the three areas that most cry out for oversight—and it wouldn’t hurt to add an investigation of Republican dirty tricks during this past election (Rick Perlstein has a good rundown of the horrors that went on here.) Goodness knows, it won’t be hard to come up with 24 things to investigate between now and the 2008 election. Which leads us to…

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Pick Fights

The White House will resist any effort to subpoena documents and testimony on the matters Democrats want to investigate. So Democrats should let them. Let them proclaim that they are above the law. Let them initiate a constitutional crisis. Let them take it all the way the Supreme Court. The resulting controversy will help Americans understand the deep anti-democratic strain that rushes through the arteries of this administration like a virus.

And Democrats should find every opportunity they can to embarrass Republicans by forcing them into uncomfortable votes. On the first item on the Democrats’ agenda—raising the minimum wage—it looks as though President Bush is going to do what he often does when backed into a corner: surrender, then claim victory. Democrats should welcome his capitulation, but make sure to characterize it as such. Thanks for finally giving millions of hard-working Americans a break, Mr. President, but it’s too bad it took you six years and a thumping at the polls to be forced into it.

The prospects for another of their agenda items, enabling the federal government to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs under Medicare, look far tougher. But Democrats should wage the fight anyway. Two outcomes are equally likely: Either they won’t be able to pass such a bill in both houses, or they’ll pass a bill and Bush will veto it. Either way, it shows whose side they’re on, and whose side the Republicans are on.

Bush also said he wanted to reintroduce his plan to partially privatize Social Security. The defeat he suffered the first time around on this issue was one of the key events leading to the Democrats’ victory. It showed them that when they stay united and make a stand on fundamental progressive values, they win. It also showed them that they could ignore the pleas of the “sensible” centrist talking heads scolding them for not having a “plan” of their own. So they should dare Bush to try again. “Let’s talk about your Social Security privatization plan, Mr. President. Bring it on.”

3. Boycott Fox

The Fox News Channel has been a reliable megaphone for White House talking points, a veritable RNC house organ proclaiming that Republicans are noble public servants and Democrats are whiny hippies who, if not engaged in an actual conspiracy with al-Qaida, are certainly serving the ends of America’s enemies. It has also functioned as a safe haven for Republicans to run to when things look bad. Shoot a guy in the face, and you can do your first interview with Brit Hume, secure in the knowledge that he won’t ask any tough questions.

So Democrats should say the following to Fox: You want to spread GOP propaganda all day? Be our guest. After all, it’s a free country. But don’t expect any Democratic newsmakers to legitimize you with their presence. We’ll go on every other network, be interviewed by every legitimate news organization. But we don’t consider ourselves under any obligation to pretend that buffoons like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and John Gibson are news professionals who deserve a moment of our time. We’re not going to try to fight you; we’ll just act like you don’t exist.

This can be a lesson to the rest of the media—not a threat, but an indication that they need to change the way they think about Democrats. For years, journalists have looked on Republicans as tough, smart and skilled—in short, winners. Democrats, in turn, were viewed as wimpy, stupid and weak—losers. If Democrats want the media to treat them like winners, they should start acting accordingly. Stop worrying about getting reporters to like you, and start thinking about getting them to respect you. And if the David Broders of the world start complaining that you aren’t playing nice, that’ll be evidence that you’re doing something right.

4. Attack Conservatism

After President Reagan left office, a group of his supporters formed the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, whose goal was to get something—a school, a bridge, a building—named after Reagan in every county in every state in America. Their goal was not just to honor a man they revered but to elevate Reaganism. If Reagan can become the name on every public works project, he moves out of the realm of contestation to achieve the kind of status accorded to figures like Kennedy and Roosevelt. We don’t argue about whether Kennedy was a good president, we just accept it.

Democrats should do the same thing in reverse to the current president. The Bush Legacy Project should seek to make George W. Bush an albatross that can be strung around the neck of every Republican for many elections to come. They should continue to write books about how awful his presidency was, to heap ridicule on him, to make his name synonymous with incompetence and stupidity and corruption.

The message is this: When George W. Bush was president, conservatism failed and conservatism was rejected. Apart from “small government,” conservatives enacted much of what they had been clamoring for for years. They slashed taxes on the wealthy. They ballooned defense spending. They got their war on Iraq. They ignored or cut back regulations on the environment and workers’ rights. And what happened? The American people recoiled in disgust.

Democrats need to understand that they are engaged in a war of ideas, one that stretches far beyond any one Congress or presidency. In order to not just win today’s victory but to make tomorrow’s more likely, they have to continually discredit the other side’s ideology. The fact is that conservative governance failed, not because of a run of bad luck or a few bad apples, but because it is deficient at its core.

Democrats can and should use the excesses of the Republicans they defeated as bludgeons against them. Katrina. Terri Schiaivo. Jack Abramoff. Mark Foley. George W. Bush. These names should be strung around Republicans’ necks as often as possible, so Americans don’t forget why they voted Democratic in the first place.

Democrats should wake up every day thinking, “How can we keep Republicans on the run?” Never give them a moment’s rest, never let them advance their agenda, keep them on the defensive so they have to apologize for being the standard-bearers of a discredited ideology and a disgraced president. Do that, and every legislative battle and election to come will be that much more likely to swing in your favor.

2007-03-20T14:12:00.000-05:00

INTACTO: A FILM

Intacto is a film thriller first released in 2001, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.

It stars Leonardo Sbaraglia, Eusebio Poncela, Federico Mónica López, Antonio Dechent, and Max von Sydow.

The film depicts an underground trade in luck; where fortune flows from those who have less to those who have more. Rooted in magical realism, the premise purports that luck can be amassed and transfered as any other commodity.

The story follows several participants as they engage in literal games of chance, each one more risky than the last to eliminate the unlucky. The early rounds are quite simple (which one will a moth land upon, for example), yet as the tournaments continue they become more hazardous.

2007-03-20T14:10:00.001-05:00

THE NEW WEIRD
from Wikipedia

The New Weird is an avant-garde literary movement or literary genre that may or may not be presently in progress. The writers involved are mostly novelists who are considered to be parts of the science fiction or speculative fiction genres. The only author all critics agree on as a "New Weird" writer is China Miéville, who self-describes as such. Other writers who have been variously described as "New Weird" include Steve Cockayne, Storm Constantine, M John Harrison, Mary Gentle, Ian R. MacLeod, K.J. Bishop, Thomas Ligotti, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Kathe Koja, Hal Duncan, Justina Robson, Steph Swainston, and Jeff VanderMeer.

There is considerable debate about whether or not New Weird is a movement amongst like-minded authors, or merely a label that has been applied to them after the fact to describe perceived similarities between their works. Many of the authors who are associated with the movement either disavow belonging to it, or simply don't care what categorical labels their readers craft to name their work. Some also question how it differs, if at all, from slipstream. On a panel at the 2005 Armadillocon, writer and critic Lawrence Person, while denying it was a useful critical category, suggested that New Weird uses genre tropes but doesn't worry which genre it's pulling its tropes from, mixing together science fiction, fantasy and horror.[1]

The core idea most frequently ascribed to New Weird is that literature should transcend the genre in which it is written. Writers are encouraged to blur the borders between genres. The genres most frequently used in New Weird writings are science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Opponents of New Weird note that the divisions of genre are built for a reason and that the traditional divisions of genre are based on which types of ideas work best together. Other opponents claim the genres of horror, science fiction, and fantasy have always been one genre. Supporters speculate that the New Weird will become an important part of literary tradition.

This genre ultimately has its roots in pulp author and legendary horror icon Howard Phillips Lovecraft, whose specific brand of story is often referred to as a "weird tale." Weird tale as a label evolved from the magazine Weird Tales which published most of Lovecraft's work during his lifetime, as well as numerous other works written in a similar vein. Lovecraft's stories often combined fantasy elements, existential and physical terror, and science fiction devices. Lovecraft has influenced countless authors and artists including Stephen King, Clive Barker, Roger Zelazny (The Chronicles of Amber), Chris Carter, Anne Rice, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Jordan, the Wachowski Brothers, and even Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. Ghostbusters, for example, contains the monstrous Zuul and the "gateway to our world" (a fantasy element), proton packs (science fiction), and ghosts (horror). The interaction of fantasy-horror elements with science fiction technologies is a popular idea in a great deal of contemporary fiction.

A further influence on the genre, especially in the case of China Miéville, is Michael de Larrabeiti's Borrible Trilogy. The first volume of the trilogy was initially published in 1976, and mixes realist and fantasy genres with the classic children's adventure story, such as Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines, and subsersive, pseudo-anarchist political themes.

Consider also Stephen King's mammoth Dark Tower saga. It is set in a parallel universe where Gunslingers are the last knights of a fallen utopia, and the last Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, is out to save Mid-World from the fall of the Dark Tower, the hub of all existence. He is beset by a demon called the Crimson King and his friends include a recovering drug addict, a schizophrenic civil rights activist, a reincarnated 12-year-old boy, and a hybrid between a raccoon and dog called a "bumbler", named "Oy," after his bark.

In Italy the most important representative of the New Weird is novelist and historian Valerio Evangelisti, who has been developing his own fictional world, based on medieval history, science-fiction, fantasy, horror and gothic since 1994.

The Television series Doctor Who has always contained a combination of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Other cited television examples include Farscape and The X-Files for examples of New Weird. Writer/director James Gunn claimed that his film Slither was a genreless return to the "weird tale" of Lovecraft. The film combined elements of horror, comedy, family drama, and science-fiction.

Consider also K A Applegate's Everworld series, which mixes high fantasy with science fiction.

A critical anthology on the new weird has been announced by Jeff VanderMeer, to be published in the Spring of 2008 by Tachyon Publications.

2007-03-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

"JUNGLE MIND": NEW WEIRD, I THINK WE'RE THE SCENE
by Michael Cisco

Literary history is heavily invested in scenes and schools, portable assemblies (Surrealists, Romantics, Beats) put together by critics. Hindsight naturally makes this assembling work easier, at least in part because the mill of arguments will have ground to a halt (it’s easier to snapshot a stationary object), and the vast profusion of determinative details that are so easily missed and which no one point of view, I think, can encompass, have been forgotten. Arguments about the meaning of a movement are any movement’s primary content, regarded as something bigger than the sum of its parts; the questions and answers, the political map of positions, usually turn out to be more important than any resolution posited at the time, or, to put it better, those resolutions in the moment, rather than eliminating questions or arguments, join them in a general manifold. Trying to name and adequately describe the scene as it unfolds in the present is like cutting cookies out of the fog, but perhaps that irreducible vagueness should encourage people to try.
Now there is the sense of a trend, loosely identified with a heterogenous company of writers as varied in their works as China Miéville and Jeffrey VanderMeer. For the sake of keeping ourselves in circulation, we might provisionally describe this as a tendency toward more literarily sophisticated fantasy. In bookstores, Fantasy means the Piers Anthony/J.R.R. Tolkein section; the word is an abbreviation for a standard content, like a brand. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Alice in Wonderland, The Golden Ass, Gulliver’s Travels or Naked Lunch are not shelved there, although they are all fantasies. This has everything to do with selling books, making sure the buyer finds what he or she is looking for, and reflects no judgement with regard to the literary status of this or that work of fantasy. A certain amount of work is produced specifically for the purpose of stocking shelves in the Fantasy section, where the index of novelty is best kept low. The serendipitous constellation of contemporary fantasy writers that belong to or generate the “new weird” seem generally and in varying proportions to blend the influences of genre writing and literary fantasy, and to weave in non-fantastic signals as well.
Poetry restores language by breaking it, and I think that much contemporary writing restores fantasy, as a genre of writing in contrast to a genre of commodity or section in a bookstore, by breaking it. Michael Moorcock revived fantasy by prying it loose from morality; writers like Jeffrey VanderMeer, Stepan Chapman, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Nathan Ballingrud, are doing the same by prying fantasy away from pedestrian writing, with more vibrant and daring styles, more reflective thinking, and a more widely broadcast spectrum of themes.
Every year The New Yorker releases its new fiction issue, profiling the important new writers, and every year they get it mostly wrong. An inessential, NPR tepidness prevails, and this is plainly not where it’s at. Lucius Shepard’s Handbook of American Prayer is where it’s at. Handbook, Veniss Underground, The Troika, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Etched City, My Work Is Not Yet Done, are not examples of good fantasy writing or good genre writing, but they are examples of good writing. Fantasy writing is no more inherently inessential than any other variety, and no more inherently escapist, either. What makes writing escapist is not a matter of whether or not it involves magic but whether or not it involves something meaningful. Fantasy writing is if anything increasingly relevant because it involves building and representing the whole world, fantasy worlds, sci-fi worlds, hidden gnostic horror worlds. This proliferation of worlds seems to me to be bound up with the extent to which the world has become immersed in trademarked representation.
The “New Weird,” as I’ve said, is a topic for critics and not so much for writers. Nothing could be more unenlightening or useless than a New Weird manifesto. What strikes the observer is precisely the spontenaiety with which so many different writers, pursuing such obviously disparate literary styles, should vaguely intersect in this way. Instead of a set of general aims, we have a great proliferation of correspondences on a more intimate level, like a sprawling coincidence of idiosyncratic choices. Mapping out a scheme won’t yield us much insight into what’s going on, although it might add something interesting of its own. The richness of this new writing recommends a depth-diving model rather than a breadth-sweeping one, such that none of its variety or perversion is planed out. The writing in question is more extensively and usefully defined by the unconscious or spontaneous choices the authors are making than by the directed ones; maybe this is most often the case. Certainly, none of the writers thus far invoked have, to my knowledge, set out to be “New Weird” writers, in the way that Andre Breton et al set out to be Surrealists.
Why pronunciations and definitions, if not to elicit counter claims? Sometimes it seems as though the winners in these matters prevail more as consequence of sheer exhaustion, which can mean a depletion of the store of endurance but just as readily of the store of interest, so that the received definition of any given wave is the final score in a game called on account of rain and indefinitely, maybe permanently, postponed thereafter. The New Weird has come into being, such as it is and whatever it should be, on its own and not by dint of any decision or program, so the attribution of decisions and schemes to it ought to be seen as prescriptions rather than as descriptions. This is only a problem if the prescription is mistaken for a description, that is to say, X, precisely because he believes the New Weird is such and such, doesn’t say this is what it “should be,” he says rather “this is what it is.”
It’s not as though literature preserves a province unto itself, and that genre stands in compartments below the level of general literature. All works of literature will express characteristics of genre. In his prologue to The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Borges touches on the tendency to disparage the adventure story, the mystery story, and contrasts them to the “formless” modern psychological novel. The formless psychological novel is a genre which, moreso at the time in which Borges was writing and somewhat less so now, ascended to pre-eminence on the smouldering remains of other genres. It may be that, in order to exist, genres may engage in a weird disembodied war that cannot be entirely explained in market or in aesthetic terms. More likely, this war is a blind for something more frankly political.
The distinction between genre literature and general literature is bogus, at least in any non-colloquial sense of these terms. What is “general literature”? If we begin to define it, even assuming this definition can be uncontroversial, we are already outlining tendencies or rules which are indistinguishable in kind from those that are used to define genre literature. The distinction between genre and general is an evaluation from the outset, and not an innocent differentiation. The “New Weird” might be better defined as a refusal to accept this evaluation of imaginative literature, whatever form it may take. So it is not for reasons of influence alone that such authors as Borges, Calvino, Angela Carter, are invoked by many of those in the imaginative camp, but also because these authors are obviously both fantastic and literary. Each after their own fashion, as you would expect.

2007-03-20T14:02:00.000-05:00

STORIES FROM JEFF VANDERMEER'S CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN (EXPANDED EDITIONS)

Dradin, In Love - a novella by Jeff VanderMeer
The Release of Belacqua - a short story by Jeff VanderMeer
in the hours after death - a short story by Jeff VanderMeer
The Man Who Had No Eyes - a short story by Jeff VanderMeer

I'm back from vacation, by the way.

2007-02-16T12:23:00.000-05:00

THE GORGIAS
from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Gorgias is one of Plato's most bitter dialogues in that the exchanges are at times full of anger, of uncompromising disagreement, plenty of misunderstanding, and cutting rhetoric. In these respects it goes beyond even the Protagoras, a dialogue that depicts a hostile confrontation between Socrates and the renowned sophist by the same name.[24] The quarrel between philosophy and rhetoric shows itself as an ugly fight in the Gorgias.

What is the fight about? Socrates asks Gorgias to define what it is that he does, that is, to define rhetoric. And he asks him to do it in a way that helps to distinguish rhetorical from philosophical discourse: the former produces speeches of praise and blame, the latter answers questions through the give and take of discussion (dialegesthai; 448d10) in an effort to arrive at a concise definition, and more broadly, with the intent to understand the subject. The philosopher is happy to be refuted if that leads to better understanding; wisdom, and not reputation, is the goal (457e-458a).

Gorgias is forced by successive challenges to move from the view that rhetoric is concerned with words to the view that its activity and effectiveness happen only in and through words (unlike the manual arts) to the view that its object is the greatest of human concerns, namely freedom. Rhetoric is “the source of freedom for humankind itself and at the same time it is for each person the source of rule over others in one's own city” (452d6-8). This freedom is a kind of power produced by the ability to persuade others to do one's bidding; “rhetoric is a producer of persuasion. Its whole business comes to that, and that's the long and short of it” (453a2-3). But persuasion about what exactly? Gorgias' answer is: about matters concerning justice and injustice (454b7). But surely there are two kinds of persuasion, one that instills beliefs merely, and another that produces knowledge; it is the former only with which rhetoric is concerned. The analogy of this argument to the critique of poetry is already clear; in both cases, Socrates wants to argue that the speaker is not a truth speaker, and does not convey knowledge to his audience. As already noted, Socrates classifies poetry (dithyrambic and tragic poetry are named) as a species of rhetoric. It's goal is to gratify and please the spectator, or differently put, it is just a kind of flattery. Strip away the rhythm and meter, and you have plain prose directed at the mob. It's a kind of public speaking, that's all (502a6-c12).

The rhetorician is a maker of beliefs in the souls of his auditors (455a3-4). And without that skill — here Gorgias begins to wax at length and eloquently — other arts (such as medicine) cannot do their work effectively (456bff). Rhetoric is a comprehensive art. But Gorgias offers a crucial qualification that turns out to contribute to his downfall: rhetoric should not be used against any and everybody, any more than skill in boxing should be. Although the rhetorician teaches others to use the skill justly, it is always possible for the student to misuse it. This is followed by another damaging admission: the rhetorician knows what justice, injustice, and other moral qualities are, and teaches them to the student if the student is ignorant of them (460a). It would follow that, in Socrates' language, the true rhetorician is a philosopher; and in fact that is a position Socrates takes in the Phaedrus. But Gorgias is not a philosopher and does not in fact know — cannot give an account of — the moral qualities in question. So his art is all about appearing, in the eyes of the ignorant, to know about these topics, and then persuading them as is expedient (459d-e). But this is not something Gorgias wishes to admit; indeed, he allows himself to agree that since the rhetorician knows what justice is, he must be a just man and therefore acts justly (460b-c). He is caught in a contradiction: he claimed that a student who had acquired the art of rhetoric could use it unjustly, but now claims that the rhetorician could not commit injustice.

All this is just too much for Gorgias' student Polus, whose angry intervention marks the second and much more bitter stage of the dialogue (461b3). A new point emerges that is consistent with the claim that rhetoricians do not know or convey knowledge, viz. that it is not an art or craft (techne) but a mere knack (empeiria, or experience). Socrates adds that its object is to produce gratification. To develop the point, Socrates produces a striking schema divided into care of the body and care of the soul. Medicine and gymnastics truly care for the body, cookery and cosmetics pretend to but do not. Politics is the art that cares for the soul; justice and legislation are its branches, and the imitations of each are rhetoric and sophistry. As medicine stands to cookery, so justice to rhetoric; as gymnastics to cosmetics, so legislation to sophistry. The true forms of caring are arts (technai) aiming at the good; the false, knacks aiming at pleasure (464b-465d). Let us note that sophistry and rhetoric are very closely allied here; Socrates notes that they are distinct but closely related and therefore often confused by people (465c). What exactly their distinction consists in is not clear, either in Plato's discussions of the matter, or historically. Socrates's polemic here is intended to apply to them both, as both are (alleged) to amount to a knack for persuasion of the ignorant by the ignorant with a view to producing pleasure in the audience and the pleasures of power for the speaker.

Socrates' ensuing argument with Polus is complicated and long. The nub of the matter concerns the relation between power and justice. For Polus, the person who has power and wields it successfully is happy. For Socrates, a person is happy only if he or she is (morally) good, and an unjust or evil person is wretched — all the more so, indeed, if they escape punishment for their misdeeds. Polus finds this position “absurd” (473a1), and challenges Socrates to take a poll of all present to confirm the point. In sum: Plato's suggestion is that rhetoric and sophistry are tied to substantive theses about the irrelevance of moral truth to the happy life; about the conventionality or relativity of morals; and about the irrelevance of the sort of inquiry into the truth of the matter (as distinguished from opinions or the results of polls) upon which Socrates keeps insisting. Socrates argues for some of his most famous theses along the way, such as the view that “the one who does what's unjust is always more miserable than the one who suffers it, and the one who avoids paying what's due is always more miserable than the one who pays it” (479e3-6). And if these hold, what use is there in rhetoric? For someone who wishes to avoid doing himself and others harm, Socrates concludes, rhetoric is altogether useless. Tied into logical knots, Polus succumbs.

All this is just too much for yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, Callicles. The rhetoric of the Gorgias reaches its most bitter stage. Callicles presents himself as a no-holds-barred, bare knuckled, no obfuscation real-poliltik figure. Telling it like it is, he draws a famous distinction between nature and convention, and advances a thesis familiar to readers of Republic books I and II: “but I believe that nature itself reveals that it's a just thing for the better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the worse man and the less capable man. Nature shows that this is so in many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than they” (483c8-d6). This is the “law of nature” (483e3; perhaps the first occurrence in Western philosophy of this famous phrase). Conventional talk of justice, fairness, not taking more than is your share, not pursuing your individual best interest — these are simply ways by which the weak seek to enslave the strong. The art of rhetoric is all about empowering those who are strong by nature to master the weak by nature.

Callicles' famous diatribe includes an indictment of philosophy as a childish occupation that, if pursued past youth, interferes with the manly pursuit of power, fosters contemptible ignorance of how the real political world works, and renders its possessor effeminate and defenseless. His example is none other than Socrates; philosophy will (he says prophetically) render Socrates helpless should he be indicted. Helplessness in the face of the stupidity of the hoi polloi is disgraceful and pathetic (486a-c). By contrast, what would it mean to have power? Callicles is quite explicit: power is the ability to fulfill whatever desire you have. Power is freedom, freedom is license (492a-c). The capacity to do what one wants is fulfillment in the sense of the realization of pleasure. Rhetoric is a means to that end.

The quarrel between rhetoric and philosophy, thus understood, ultimately addresses a range of fundamental issues. “Rhetoric” is taken here to constitute an entire world view. Its quarrel with philosophy is comprehensive, and bears on the nature of nature; the existence of objective moral norms; the connection (if any) between happiness and virtue; the nature and limits of reason; the value of reason (understood as the rational pursuit of objective purpose) in a human life; the nature of the soul or self; and the question as to whether there is a difference between true and false pleasure, i.e., whether pleasure is the good. It is striking that while Socrates wants to contrast “rhetorical” speech-making with his own approach of philosophical dialogue,in practice the differences blur. Socrates too starts to speak at length, sounds rhetorical at times, and ends the discussion with a myth. Callicles advances a substantive position (grounded in a version of the distinction between nature and convention) and defends it. These transgressions of rhetorical genres to one side, from Socrates' standpoint the ultimate philosophical question at stake concerns how one should live one's life (500c). Is the life of “politics,” understood as the pursuit of power and glory, superior to the life of philosophy?

Readers of the dialogue will differ as to whether or not the arguments there offered decide the matter. The nub of the debate is as current today, both in academic and non-academic contexts, as it was in Plato's day.[25] Even though poetry is here cast as a species of rhetoric, a good deal of work would have to be done to show that the substantive theses to which poetry is committed, according to the Republic, are the same as the substantive theses to which rhetoric is committed, according to the Gorgias.

Is all of rhetoric bad? Are we to avoid — indeed, can we avoid — rhetoric altogether? Even in the Gorgias, as we have seen, there is a distinction between rhetoric that instills belief, and rhetoric that instills knowledge, and later in the dialogue a form of noble rhetoric is mentioned, though no examples of its practitioners can be found (503a-b). The Phaedrus offers a more detailed explanation of this distinction.

The text of Gorgias

2007-02-15T16:55:00.000-05:00

POSTMODERN WARFARE: THE IGNORANCE OF OUR WARRIOR INTELLECTUALS
by and copyright by Stanley Fish

Who would have thought, in those first few minutes, hours, days, that what we now call 9/11 was to become an event in the Culture Wars? Today, more than nine months later, nothing could be clearer, though it was only on September 22 that the first sign appeared, in a New York Times opinion piece written by Edward Rothstein and entitled "Attacks on U.S. Challenge the Perspectives of Postmodern True Believers." A few days later (on September 27), Julia Keller wrote a smaller piece in the Chicago Tribune; her title (no doubt the contribution of a staffer): "After the attack, postmodernism loses its glib grip." In the September 24 issue of Time, Roger Rosenblatt announced "the end of the age of irony" and predicted that "the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life" would now have to change their tune and no longer say that "nothing was real" or that "nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously." And on October 1, John Leo, in a piece entitled "Campus hand-wringing is not a pretty sight," blamed just about everything on the "very dangerous ideas" that have captured our "campus culture"; to wit, "radical cultural relativism, non-judgmentalism, and a postmodern conviction that there are no moral norms or truths worth defending."

Well, that certainly sounds bad--no truths, no knowledge, no reality, no morality, no judgments, no objectivity--and if postmodernists are saying that, they are not so much dangerous as silly. Luckily, however, postmodernists say no such thing, and what they do say, if it is understood at all, is unlikely to provoke either the anger or the alarm of our modern Paul Reveres. A full account or even definition of postmodernism would be out of place here, but it may be enough for our purposes to look at one offered by Rothstein, who begins by saying that "Postmodernists challenge assertions that truth and ethical judgment have any objective validity." Well, it depends on what you mean by "objective." If you mean a standard of validity and value that is independent of any historically emergent and therefore revisable system of thought and practice, then it is true that many postmodernists would deny that any such standard is or could ever be available. But if by "objective" one means a standard of validity and value that is backed up by the tried-and-true procedures and protocols of a well-developed practice or discipline--history, physics, economics, psychology, etc.--then such standards are all around us, and we make use of them all the time without any metaphysical anxiety.

As Richard Rorty, one of Rothstein's targets, is fond of saying, "Objectivity is the kind of thing we do around here." Historians draw conclusions about the meaning of events, astronomers present models of planetary movements, psychologists offer accounts of the reading process, consumers make decisions about which product is best, parents choose schools for their children--all of these things and many more are done with varying degrees of confidence, and in no case is the confidence rooted in a conviction that the actor is in possession of some independent standard of objectivity. Rather, the actor, you or I or anyone, begins in some context of practice, with its received authorities, sacred texts, exemplary achievements, and generally accepted benchmarks, and from within the perspective of that context--thick, interpersonal, densely elaborated--judges something to be true or inaccurate, reasonable or irrational, and so on.

It seems, then, that the unavailability of absolutely objective standards--the thesis Rothstein finds repugnant and dangerous--doesn't take anything away from us. If, as postmodernists assert, objective standards of a publicly verifiable kind are unavailable, they are so only in the sense that they have always been unavailable (this is not, in other words, a condition postmodernism has caused), and we have always managed to get along without them, doing a great many things despite the fact that we might be unable to shore them up in accordance with the most rigorous philosophical demands. One of the things we might be doing, for instance, when we're not doing philosophy, is condemning someone or some group, though Rothstein seems to think that we can't do that unless we have all our philosophical ducks in a row--and in the right row. Thus, he says, given postmodernist assumptions, "one culture, particularly the West, cannot reliably condemn another," which means, according to him, that we in the United States cannot reliably condemn those who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again, it depends on what you mean by "reliably," a word that takes us right back to "objective" and to the argument I have been making. If by "a reliable condemnation" you mean a condemnation rooted in a strong sense of values, priorities, goals, and a conviction of right and wrong, then such a condemnation is available to most if not all of us all of the time. But if by "a reliable condemnation" you mean a condemnation rooted in values, priorities, and a sense of right and wrong that no one would dispute and everyone accepts, then there is no such condemnation, for the simple reason that there are no such universally accepted values, priorities, and moral convictions. If there were, there would be no deep disputes.

Now, I would not be misunderstood. I am not saying that there are no universal values or no truths independent of particular perspectives. I affirm both. When I offer a reading of a poem or pronounce on a case in First Amendment law, I do so with no epistemological reservations. I regard my reading as true--not provisionally true, or true for my reference group only, but true. I am as certain of that as I am of the fact that I may very well be unable to persuade others, no less educated or credentialed than I, of the truth so perspicuous to me. And here is a point that is often missed, the independence from each other, and therefore the compatibility, of two assertions thought to be contradictory when made by the same person: (1) I believe X to be true and (2) I believe that there is no mechanism, procedure, calculus, test, by which the truth of X can be necessarily demonstrated to any sane person who has come to a different conclusion (not that such a demonstration can never be successful, only that its success is contingent and not necessary). In order to assert something and mean it without qualification, I of course have to believe that it is true, but I don't have to believe that I could demonstrate its truth to all rational persons. The claim that something is universal and the acknowledgment that I couldn't necessarily prove it are logically independent of each other. The second does not undermine the first.

Once again, then, a postmodern argument turns out to be without any deleterious consequences (it is also without any positive consequences, but that is another story), and it certainly does not stand in the way of condemning those who have proven themselves to be our enemies in words and deeds. Nor should this be surprising, for, after all, postmodernism is a series of arguments, not away of life or a recipe for action. Your belief or disbelief in postmodern tenets is independent of your beliefs and commitments in any other area of your life. You may believe that objectivity of an absolute kind is possible or you may believe that it is not, but when you have to decide whether a particular thing is true or false, neither belief will hinder or help you. What will help you are archives, exemplary achievements, revered authorities, official bodies of evidence, relevant analogies, suggestive metaphors--all available to all persons independently of their philosophical convictions, or of the fact that they do or do not have any.

In the end, the post-9/11 flap about postmodernism is the blowing of so much smoke, sound and fury signifying very little apart from the ignorance of those who produced it. There's no there there. This is not true, however, of what succeeded that flap in the popular and semi-popular media, the question of whether this is or is not a religious war. That question was asked against the backdrop of the Bush Administration's desire that the war not be characterized as a religious one. Any public embrace of Samuel Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis would have at least three bad consequences. First, key Islamic nations could not be persuaded to support, or at least to refrain from denouncing, U.S. military operations. Second, millions of U.S. citizens of the Islamic faith would be come the large core of an antiwar coalition. And lastly, the United Nations would become polarized along religious lines, with the possible result that any U.S. attack would be censured. In the context of these and related anxieties, the official party line emerged almost immediately: Although Al Qaeda said that its warriors did what they did in the service of Allah, theirs was a perverted version of the Islamic faith, and therefore their claim to be acting in its name was false and illegitimate; they simply did not represent Islam and had misread its sacred texts.

If you think about it for a moment, this is an amazing line of argument that begs the questions contained in its assertions. Who is it that is authorized to determine which version of Islam is the true one? What religious faith has ever looked outside the articles of its creed for guidance and correction? What is the difference between the confident pronouncements that the Al Qaeda brand of Islam is a deviant one and the excommunications and counter-excommunications of Catholics and Protestants, and within Protestantism of Baptists, Anglicans, Lutherans, not to mention Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, and Mennonites? Merely to pose these questions is to realize that the specification of what a religion is and the identification of the actions that may or may not be taken in its name are entirely internal matters. This is, after all, the point of a religion: to follow a vision the source of which is revelation, ecclesiastical authority, a sacred book, a revered person. One who adheres to that vision does not accept descriptions or evaluations of it from non-adherents citing other revelations, authorities, and texts; and the fact that non-adherents regard some of the convictions at the heart of the vision as bizarre, and regard the actions generated by those convictions as inadvisable or even evil, is merely confirmation, again from the inside, of the extent to which these poor lost souls are in the grip of error and too blind to see. What this means (and here we link up with the worries over postmodernism) is that in matters of religion--and I would say in any matter--there is no public space, complete with definitions, standards, norms, criteria, etc., to which one can have recourse in order to separate out the true from the false, the revolutionary from the criminal. And what that means is that there is no common ground, at least no common ground on which a partisan flag has not already been planted, that would allow someone or some body to render an independent judgment on the legitimacy of the declarations that issue from Bin Laden and his followers about the religious bases of their actions.

Indeed, only if there were such a public space or common ground could the question "Is this a religious war?" be a real question, as opposed to a tendentious thesis pretending to be a question, which it is. That is to say, the question "Is this a religious war?" is not a question about the war; it is the question that is the war. For the question makes assumptions Al Qaeda members are bound to reject and indeed are warring against: that it is possible to distinguish between religious and non-religious acts from a perspective uninflected by any religion or ideology; or, to put it another way, that there is a perspective detached from and above all religions, from the vantage point of which objective judgments about what is and is not properly religious could be handed down; or that it is possible to distinguish between the obligations one takes on as a person of faith and the obligations one takes on in one's capacity as a citizen; i.e., that it is possible to go out into the world and perform actions that are not related, either positively or negatively, to your religious convictions. And these assumptions make sense only in the context of another: that religion is essentially a private transaction between you and your God and therefore is, at least in principle, independent of your actions in the public sphere, where the imperatives you follow might be political, economic, philanthropic, environmental--imperatives that could be affirmed or rejected by persons independently of their religious convictions or of their lack of religious convictions.

What I have rehearsed for you, in a nutshell, is the core of what has been called America's "Civic Religion," a faith (if that is the word) founded on the twin rocks of Locke's declaration that "the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth" and Jefferson's more colloquial version of the same point: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty Gods or no Gods; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Jefferson's further contribution is the famous "Wall of Separation," a metaphor that has lent constitutional force to the separation of church and state, even though it is not in the Constitution. In combination, these now canonical statements give us the key distinction between the private and the public, which in turn gives us the American creed of tolerance. It goes like this: If you leave me free to believe whatever I like, I'll leave you free to believe whatever you like, even though in our respective hearts we regard each other's beliefs as false and ungodly. We can argue about it or privately condemn each other, but our differences of belief shouldn't mean that we try to disenfranchise or imprison or kill each other or refrain from entering into relationships of commercial and social cooperation. Let's live and let live. Let's obey the civil, nonsectarian laws and leave the sorting out of big theological questions to God and eternity.

All of that is precisely what adherents of the Al Qaeda version of Islam hate and categorically deny, which is why the question "Is this a religious war?" will make no sense to them, or, rather, will make only the sense of a question issuing from an infidel who is by definition wrong and an enemy. Not only do Bin Laden and company fail to make the distinction between religious and civil acts; they regard those who do make it as persons without a true religion. If you're really religious, you're religious all the time, and no act you perform--even the act of having or not having a beard--is without religious significance and justification. It is the dividing of one's life into the separate realms of the public and private that leads, say the militants, to a society bereft of a moral center and populated by citizens incapable of resisting the siren call of excess and sin.

This refusal of Al Qaeda-style Islam to honor the public/private distinction is the essence of that faith, and not some incidental feature of it that can be dispensed with or moderated. Commentators who pronounced on the question "Is this a religious war?" tended to see this and not see it at the same time. They noted the fact but then contrived to turn it into a correctable mistake, either by using words like "criminal," "fanatic," and "extremist" or by implying that the non-emergence of the public/private distinction is some kind of evolutionary failure; they want to be like us, but they don't yet know how to do it. Thus R. Scott Appleby, a professor at Notre Dame and an expert on religion and violence, notes (in the November 2001 issue of Lingua Franca), with an apparently straight face, that "Islam has been remarkably resistant to the differentiation and privatization of religion that often accompanies secularization ... and has not undergone a reformation like the one experienced by Christianity, which led to a pronounced separation of sacred and secular." ("What's the matter with these guys? Why can't they get with the program?") But of course there is nothing remarkable in a faith's refusal of a transformation that would undo it. Privatization and secularization are not goals that Islam has yet to achieve; they are specters that Islam (or some versions of it) pushes away as one would push away death.

Appleby's characterization of Islam as a religion stuck in some stage of arrested development and self-blocked from reaching maturity is matched by Andrew Sullivan's condescending description of Islam (in the October 7 issue of The New York Times Magazine) as "a great religion that is nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration of other ascendant and more powerful faiths." Presumably, a good dose of John Stuart Mill or John Rawls would do the trick and move Islam along on the way to health and modernization.

When Sullivan says of Islam that it is "a great religion," he means a potentially great religion. Islam will be fine when it rids itself of its impurities, the chief impurity being a stubborn insistence on a fidelity to a set of particular beliefs. In the morality Sullivan shares with Appleby, particularity is a sin, because it sets up barriers between persons devoted to different particulars. The better way is the way of generality, of a religious sense so large and capacious that anything and everything can be accommodated within it. The only problem with such a religion would be its total lack of content, but as it turns out that is just what Appleby, Sullivan, and company really want. It is instructive to watch them as they take the heart out of religion in the name of religion--or, as they put it, "true religion." Of course you can't have a true religion without a false religion. A false religion, Jane Eisner tells us in the Philadelphia Inquirer of October 14, is a religion that has "failed to master modernity," and the sign of this failure is its insistence on a single creed in an age of pluralism. The true religion is what Eisner calls "the American national religion," which she describes as "our nonsectarian belief in the freedom of the individual to think, speak, and act in his or her best interests." Here Eisner is either disingenuous or unaware of the implications of her own language. By nonsectarian belief she would seem to mean, and probably thinks she means, belief not limited to any particular religious denomination; but what the phrase really means in the context of her essay is a belief in the evil of any sectarian belief whatsoever, of any belief that asserts itself strongly and is jealous of its priority. She is not, as she would have it, defending all beliefs against an intolerant exclusionism but attacking belief in general, at least as it commits you to the truth of a conviction or the imperative of an action. The only good belief is the belief you can wear lightly and shrug off when you leave home and stride into the public sphere.

This is surely what Sullivan means (whether he knows it or not) when he declares that this "is a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity." A faith at peace with freedom and modernity is a faith that has given up its franchise and has made itself into something occasional and cosmetic. It is only in the name of such a faith--emptied of all content and committing you to nothing but the gospel of non-commitment--that Sullivan can say, again with a straight face, that by denying "the ultimate claims of religion" we "preserve true religion itself"; that is, we preserve this vague, nonbinding, light-as-air spirituality, the chief characteristic of which is that it claims--and believes--nothing.

Although it may not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism. In both instances, what is feared is the absence of a public space or common ground in relation to which judgments and determinations of value can be made with no reference to the religious, ethnic, racial, or national identities of the persons to whom they apply. It should, to Sullivan's way of thinking, be obvious to all, including those Muslims not blinded by fanaticism, that Bin Laden and his followers are criminal terrorists and not religious freedom fighters; and if they quote the Koran at us and rehearse histories in which we are the oppressors and villains, that just means that they are misreading their own scripture and distorting their own history, and we have the experts at Johns Hopkins, George Washington, and Yale universities to prove it. This can't be a religious war. It must be a war of common sense or common ground against the fanatical and the irrational.

What must be protected, then, is the general, the possibility of making pronouncements from a perspective at once detached from and superior to the sectarian perspectives of particular national interests, ethnic concerns, and religious obligations; and the threat to the general is posed by postmodernism and strong religiosity alike, postmodernism because its critique of master narratives deprives us of a mechanism for determining which of two or more fiercely held beliefs is true (which is not to deny the category of true belief, just the possibility of identifying it uncontroversially), strong religiosity because it insists on its own norms and refuses correction from the outside. The antidote to both is the separation of the private from the public, the establishing of a public sphere to which all could have recourse and to the judgments of which all, who are not criminal or insane, would assent. The point of the public sphere is obvious: it is supposed to be the location of those standards and measures that belong to no one but apply to everyone. It is to be the location of the universal. The problem is not that there is no universal--the universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication.

What to do? Well, you do the only thing you can do, the only honest thing: you assert that your universal is the true one, even though your adversaries clearly do not accept it, and you do not attribute their recalcitrance to insanity or mere criminality--the desired public categories of condemnation--but to the fact, regrettable as it may be, that they are in the grip of a set of beliefs that is false. And there you have to leave it, because the next step, the step of proving the falseness of their beliefs to everyone, including those in their grip, is not a step available to us as finite situated human beings. We have to live with the knowledge of two things: that we are absolutely right and that there is no generally accepted measure by which our rightness can be independently validated. That's just the way it is, and we should just get on with it, acting in accordance with our true beliefs (what else could we do?) without expecting that some God will descend, like the duck in the old Groucho Marx TV show, and tell us that we have uttered the true and secret word.

The distinction I am trying to make here is not between affirming universals and denying them but between affirming universals because you strongly believe them to be such and affirming universals because you believe them to have been certified by an independent authority acknowledged by everyone. Andrew Sullivan teeters between these different affirmations when he declares in the concluding paragraph of his essay that "We are fighting not for our country ... or for our flag. We are fighting for the universal principles of our Constitution." Is Sullivan here identifying and standing by his conviction of what the universal principles are, or is he claiming that it is not his conviction but the world itself that has identified them? If he is doing the first, he is acknowledging that this is a religious war and that it is our religion (embodied, he thinks, in the Constitution) against theirs, not their religion against common sense. If he is doing the second, he is saying that this is a war between the world's religions and those crazy outlaws the world universally condemns. His penultimate sentence removes the doubt: "We are fighting for religion against one of the deepest strains in religion there is." The deepest strain in a religion is the particular and particularistic doctrine it asserts at its heart, in the company of such pronouncements as "Thou shalt have no other Gods before me." Take the deepest strain of religion away, as Sullivan wants us to do, and what remains are the surface pieties--abstractions without substantive bite--to which everyone will assent because they are empty, insipid, and safe.

It is this same preference for the vacuously general over the disturbingly particular that informs the attacks on college and university professors who spoke out in ways that led them to be branded as outcasts by those who were patrolling and monitoring the narrow boundaries of acceptable speech. Here one must be careful, for there are fools and knaves on all sides. On the fool side, there is the case of Richard Berthold, the hapless University of New Mexico professor of history who said in class, on September 11, "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote"--and then in the wake of the subsequent protest acknowledged that he had been a jerk to say it, but, after all, "the First Amendment protects my right to be a jerk." Well, yes and no; the First Amendment does protect him from prosecution by the government--unless his form of jerkiness could be characterized as libel, incitement to violence, or treason--but it does not necessarily protect him from disciplinary action by his university if it can be determined that what he said amounted to using class time and state dollars to propagate his own political views and thereby undermined his ability to fulfill his appointed duties.

On the knave side, there is the politically murky but conceptually clear case of Sami Al-Arian, a professor of computer engineering at the University of South Florida, who has been sent a letter of dismissal because he appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, a crime of which I am also guilty. The university says that he is being dismissed not because of the views he expressed over a decade ago but because the public airing of them produced a hostile response that took the form of threats from individuals, potential donors, politicians, and trustees; but this is what is known as the "heckler's veto" argument--speech is to be silenced or punished because of the actual or potential hostile response to it--an argument rejected by a long line of Supreme Court decisions and almost certain to be rejected again.

Closer to my home, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have been more adept than South Florida in dealing with the cases of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn--one-time Weathermen, fugitives, and most-wanted celebrities, and now married, middle-class, and distinguished professors--who are under fire for actions performed thirty years ago and no longer the object of judicial attention. As both universities saw, the only question is whether Ayers and Dohrn are currently living up to their contractual duties and doing their jobs; and since the evidence says clearly that they are, there is no case. Contrition for acts long past and not presently under indictment is not a legal or even a moral requirement for university teaching.

It would be pleasant to linger over these and other cases and tease out the doctrines they illustrate, but what finally interests me about them is their link to the pattern I have been describing, the pattern of demonizing the particularism of local and partisan perspectives (either philosophical or religious) in favor of a general perspective that claims to be universal and has the advantage of disturbing no one because it is at once safe and empty. The effort of those who would silence or dismiss professors who cross some invisible line is at bottom an effort to narrow the range of what can be said to a rote patriotic discourse that is a form of cheerleading rather than serious thought. This is in fact the naked thesis of Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism by former secretary of education--and author, at least by his own claim, of all the Virtues--William Bennett. In this book we learn that the problems not only of the current moment but of the last forty years stem from the cultural ascendancy of those "who are unpatriotic" but who, unfortunately, are also "the most influential among us." The phrase "among us" is a nice illustration of the double game Bennett plays throughout the book. On one reading, "the diversity mongers [and] multiculturalists," mistaken though they may be in their views, are part of "us"; that is, they are citizens, contributing to a national dialogue in ways that might provoke Bennett's disagreement but contributing nevertheless in the spirit of deliberative democracy. On another reading, however, these cultural relativists are "among us" as a fifth column might be among us, servants of an alien power who prosecute their subversive agenda under the false colors of citizenship. That the second is the reading Bennett finally intends (though he wants to get moral credit for the first) is made clear when he charges these peddlers of "relativism" with unpatriotism, and in that instant defines a patriot as someone who has the same views he has.

This also turns out to be Bennett's definition of honesty and truth-telling. As the remedy for what he and his allies see as the moral enervation of the country, Bennett urges "the reinstatement of a thorough and honest study of our history," where by "honest" he means a study of history that tells the same story he and his friends would tell if they were in control of the nation's history departments. Unfortunately (at least as he sees it), history departments are full of people like Columbia's Eric Foner, who draws Bennett's ire for wondering which is worse, "`the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.'" Bennett calls this sentiment "atrocious rot." Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but even if it were atrocious rot, it could be honest atrocious rot; that is, it could be Foner's honest attempt, as a citizen and historian, to take the truthful measure of what the events of September 11 and their aftermath mean. But Bennett's epistemology does not allow for the possibility that someone could honestly put forward as the truth of a matter an account that differed from his. If Foner and all the other "Foners of the United States" say things about American history that do not square with the things Bennett and Donald Kagan (his hero-historian) say, it must be because they are self-conscious enemies of the good and the true. They are not merely mistaken (which is how we usually characterize those on the opposite side of us in what John Milton called the "wars of truth"); they are "insidious," they are engaged in "violent misrepresentation," they practice "distortion," they "sow widespread and debilitating confusion," they "weaken the country's resolve," they exhibit "failures of character," they drown out "legitimate patriots" (guess who), they display a "despicable nature," they abandon, yes, "the honest search for truth."

This long list of hit-and-run accusations is justified in Bennett's eyes because the persons at whom it is directed would give different answers than he would to questions still being honestly debated after these many months. It is one thing to believe, and believe fervently, that someone has got something wrong; it is quite another to believe that the someone you think to be wrong is by virtue of that error unpatriotic, devoted to lies, and downright evil. It has often been the case that religions have identified sacred texts and sacred persons as the repositories of wisdom and truth and have consigned to the deepest circles of hell persons who read from another book or assert truths contrary to those declared necessary for salvation. But I did not know that there was now a Book of Bennett, and that the teachers and intellectuals who inhabit our universities were obliged to rehearse its lessons and recite its catechisms, lest they be drummed out of the Republic and cast into outer darkness. Live and learn.

There is a tension in Bennett's book--one common to jeremiads on the right--between his frequent assertions that our cultural condition couldn't be worse and his equally frequent assertions that the vast majority of Americans thinks as he does. How can the enemy at once be so small in number and so disastrously effective? The answer is to be found in the fact that this small band controls our colleges and universities, and the result is the "utter failure of our institutions of higher learning," a failure the product of which is a generation of college students ignorant of our history and imbued with the virus of "cultural and moral relativism." What to do? One proposal put forward by some of Bennett's allies--and a surprising one given the free-market propensities of this crowd--amounts to affirmative action for conservatives. If the professoriate is predominantly liberal, let's do something about it and redress the imbalance. (Does this sound like multiculturalism and diversity?) David Horowitz--once a virulent left-wing editor of Ramparts and now a virulent right-wing editor of Heterodoxy--complains, for example, that there are "whole departments in the social sciences where there are no conservatives," despite the fact that "the point of a university is that it should be a place of dialogue" (as long, presumably, as it is not a dialogue about this war, in which case what we want is uniformity of opinion, one-sided opinion). But if the university is a place of dialogue (and I certainly think it is) it is supposed to be a dialogue between persons of differing views on disciplinary issues--Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost? Is there such a thing as Universal Grammar? What historical factors led to the Reform Bill of 18327 Could World War I have been avoided?--and not a dialogue between persons who identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans. That dialogue takes place in the arenas of elections, lobbying, and political fund-raising, and while there may be some overlap between academic disagreements and disagreements in the realm of partisan politics, the overlap is not structural, even if it is statistically significant; moreover, altering it is not an academic imperative, because it is not the business of the academy to assure proportional representation of different political positions.

But what about affirmative action? someone might ask. By this argument, it isn't the business of the academy to assure proportional representation of women, blacks, and Hispanics either. No disciplinary concern demands such a correction, so what's the difference?

The difference is an historical one. For decades and indeed centuries, women, blacks, and Hispanics have been actively excluded from the academy, and while one might debate whether or not universities have an obligation to redress past inequities, the effort to do so can be given at least a plausible historical justification. No such justification is available to support affirmative action for conservatives, who have never been excluded, and in fact were once greatly in the ascendancy, and who are no longer in the ascendancy in some disciplines because they have chosen to go into others. It would be interesting to study why humanities departments do not by and large attract the politically conservative, but I would bet that such a study would not reveal that they have been denied entry or badly treated when they have attained it. The case for bringing more conservatives into the humanities and social sciences is a nonstarter.

The second, and related, argument invoked to justify the current spate of professor-bashing has a bit more going for it, as evidenced by the fact that it has been made across the political spectrum, from Stanley Kurtz, a contributing editor for the National Review, to David Glenn, writing in The Nation. It is the argument that the professoriate is reaping what it sowed in those years when so many of its members (including, no doubt, some now facing criticism and discipline) worked for the implementation of campus speech codes. The chickens are just coming home to roost. (Exactly the line of thought so vehemently rejected by the gatekeepers of our patriotism.)

Aside from a certain historical inaccuracy--most speech codes were never implemented, and none has survived judicial scrutiny--the logic deployed by Kurtz and Glenn is flawed in what should now be seen as a familiar way: it depends on a general equivalence that takes no notice of the relevant historical differences. The equivalence is supposed to be between disciplining and/or stigmatizing persons because they have produced speech hurtful to women, blacks, Hispanics, and gays, and disciplining and/or stigmatizing persons because they have produced speech deemed to be politically inappropriate. If you were for the first kind of regulation, the logic goes--i.e., if you supported speech codes--you have no complaint when you become the object of the second. But this works only if one assumes that all restrictions on expression have the same status (a universalizing, flattening assumption that generated the category of reverse racism), and that assumption runs up against the tradition of the First Amendment, in which one restriction--the restriction on speech critical of government policies--has always been regarded as a violation of the amendment's core.

What this means is that restraints on political speech and restraints on what has been called hate speech are simply not the same thing--one restraint nullifies the First Amendment at its heart, while the other is arguably faithful to its spirit, though the point is contested--and are not interchangeable as pieces of cultural currency. The real equivalent to hate-speech restriction would have to be a restriction on a form of speech that, like hate speech, has a disputed constitutional status. So if a professor were for speech codes but against restrictions on pornography, he might be asked to address what would seem to be a contradiction. But there is no contradiction in being against restrictions on speech critical of the government and in favor of restrictions on pornography, because speech critical of the government stands alone as indisputably protected and therefore cannot be in a relation of equivalence to speech of any other kind. No matter what those professors thought or didn't think about speech codes, their right to be critical of their government remains their undoubted possession. That is what the Constitution says and has always said.

A summary, then, and a scorecard: Is postmodernism either dead or one of the causes of our present distress? No. Is this a religious war? You bet. Are professors as a class unpatriotic and thus deserving of the condemnation William Bennett and so many others rain down on them for the crime of saying things these pundits don't like? No again. Can the complex reality of particular situations be captured by the abstract vocabulary of so-called universals? No, in thunder.

2007-02-15T16:41:00.001-05:00

DUELING PENS: A FRIENDLY EXCHANGE ABOUT UNFRIENDLY WORDS
FROM here

Civil Liberties invited Professor Stanley Fish of Duke University and
ACLU Vice President Franklyn S. Haiman to comment on each other's
new books, both of which explore the subject of hate speech. The
"reviews" are followed by the authors' replies.

There's No Such Thing As Free Speech ... And It's A Good Thing Too
by Stanley Fish. Oxford University Press. 1994. 332 pages.

Civil libertarians are likely to assume from this book's title, as I
did, that it would make them mad as hell. If so, they would be surprised.
Apart from only two chapters on freedom of speech (one of which provides
the book's provocative title) that do, indeed, raise my hackles, I found
much that was agreeable in this collection of superbly crafted speeches
and articles by Duke University English and Law Professor Stanley Fish.
In 16 other chapters devoted to issues such as affirmative action,
multiculturalism and philosophy of law, I discovered what I regard as a
truly liberal perspective.

That characterization will probably raise Professor Fish's hackles
for, although he casts a plague on the houses of both liberalism and
conservatism, he is especially venomous toward the former. This may be
due in part to a tendency we sometimes have to be harder on our friends
than on our enemies. But mostly it is because of his strange definition
of liberalism, which creates a stereotype that in no way resembles my own
concept of it. He claims, for example, that an "impossible dream of
liberalism" is to behave as if there were no history, no context to one's
actions, and he then asserts that, since this is inconceivable,
"Liberalism Doesn't Exist" (title of chapter 10). He also contends that
there is a contradiction between liberalism and conviction or passion, and
persists in maintaining, as in a previous interchange between us in the
Boston Review, that there is no such thing as an open mind, but only
closed or empty ones.

Besides my denial of his unsupported assertion that liberals seek to
escape from their history, my knowledge from experience that liberalism
can be as passionate a conviction as any other, and my utter rejection of
his view that unless one locks one's basic beliefs irrevocably into one's
mind everything in it will spill out, I cannot help but wonder why he
feels it necessary to attack liberalism so feverishly if it doesn't even
exist.

From his premise that the "American mind, like any other, will always
be closed," and his "first law of tolerance-dynamics" that "tolerance is
exercised in direct proportion to there being anything at stake," Fish
proceeds to repudiate the advice of Voltaire that we should defend to the
death the right to speak of those whose views we despise. Instead, he
endorses restrictions on racist communication (thus critical of the court
decisions regarding Skokie), on the intentional infliction of emotional
distress through speech (thus condemning the Supreme Court's decision in
Hustler v. Falwell), and on pornography (thus supporting the views of
Catherine MacKinnon that were rejected in American Booksellers Association
v. Hudnut).

On all of these free speech issues I could not disagree more. And
contrary to his assumptions, this is not because of some unexamined,
unarticulable faith in the First Amendment that ignores the fact that
speech may sometimes have harmful psychological consequences, nor because
I view freedom of speech as an end in itself rather than a means to some
greater good. Rather, it is because I differ with him profoundly on what
that greater good is. For Fish it is a set of substantive humanistic
values, laudable though they be, that he would impose coercively on others
because he believes those values to be right. For me it is a belief that
the greatest good for the greatest number is more likely to emerge from a
process of unfettered discussion and persuasion, even if sometimes
emotionally repulsive, than from the imposition of the values of those who
happen to be in power at a given time and place.

I find it ironic that Fish does not share my view on this, given the
attraction he himself has to vehement and often caustic argumentation, as
explicitly avowed and amply demonstrated in his book. Among other things,
for example, he notes with apparent pride how he maintained an entirely
cordial social relationship over meals and on the tennis court with Dinesh
D'Souza as he went from campus to campus with him in a series of debates
on political correctness, multiculturalism and affirmative action, in
which he mercilessly ripped Mr. D'Souza and his neo-conservative views to
shreds. Professor Fish's speeches in those debates constitute five
chapters, which I read with great delight and in almost complete
agreement. Space does not permit me to explain how I found myself in
sympathy with many of the views expressed in other chapters as well, the
two on freedom of speech unequivocally excepted.

One final quibble. I cannot fathom how he could lump Nat Hentoff in
with William Simon, William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Hilton Kramer and
Dinesh D'Souza as one who would "put those women and blacks and gays in
their proper places, at your feet." Just because Nat is a near-absolutist
on the First Amendment? Perhaps Professor Fish's stereotypes have once
again led him astray.

-- Franklyn S. Haiman
John Evans Professor Emeritus of Communication Studies,
Northwestern University

Fish replies: Franklyn Haiman disclaims any "unexamined, unarticulable
faith in the First Amendment," but then announces just such a faith when
he declares his "belief that the greatest good for the greatest number is
more likely to emerge from a process of unfettered discussion and
persuasion." Nowhere does Mr. Haiman tell us how this process works; what
is it about "unfettered discussion" that makes it a better vehicle for the
emergence of value than the exercise, by responsible (in two senses)
persons of substantive judgment? The usual answer to this question begins
with the Holmesian observation that judgment is variable not only between
persons but in the life of the single person who may discard tomorrow the
viewpoint he would impose today. Why institutionalize a value that in
time might well be rejected by those who now urge it most strongly? Isn't
it the case, as Holmes put it, that "the ultimate good desired is better
reached by the free trade in ideas"? But if our present problem is that
no one an be trusted to specify what the "ultimate good" is, how is it
that anyone will be able to recognize the ultimate good when and if it
appears? And why should it appear at all if the free trade in ideas is
undirected and random in its outcomes, as it must be if "free" is taken
seriously? These questions might receive intelligible answers if the
vision underlying the free trade theory were theological, if, like Milton,
we believed in the process because of a prior belief in a God who was at
once guiding it and waiting to embrace us, suitably transformed, at its
end. But no such "faith," to use Haiman's word, informs First Amendment
rhetoric, which is militantly secular and hostile to theological
imperatives. To be sure, First Amendment rhetoric has its own imperative
-- not "be ye perfect," but "be ye autonomous" -- but that imperative is
as empty as the process it supposedly mandates (autonomous for what?), and
until someone shows me what good (ultimate or not) it generates, and by
what means, I'll put my faith in the convictions that grip me, and put my
efforts into trying to get those convictions enacted into law. If this
means the imposition of my values on others, I prefer it to the imposition
on me of the values thrown up by a process that is either guided by
nothing or guided by forces and agents hiding behind it even as they
preach the false (because impossible) gospel of neutrality.

"Speech Acts" And The First Amendment
by Franklyn S. Haiman. Southern Illinois University Press. 1993. 103 pages.

Franklyn Haiman is wrong about speech act theory, but he is right to
criticize the appropriation of that theory by some legal academics, and
therefore his analysis of First Amendment jurisprudence is pretty much on
target. Haiman is misled into thinking that speech act theory rests on a
distinction between "pure speech" -- speech primarily expressive or
descriptive or assertive -- and "speech acts" -- speech that is a form of
behavior and brings about changes in the world. There is support for this
account of the theory in the opening chapters of J. L. Austin's How To Do
Things With Words, where Austin distinguishes (for example) between my
reporting that a marriage has occurred and saying "I do" in the
appropriate circumstances. "When I say, before the register or altar, 'I
do', I am not reporting on a marriage; I am indulging in it."

That, however, is only half of the story, for after having introduced
the distinction between "pure speech" and a "speech act" Austin undoes it
in the direction of the latter, discovering in the course of his
discussion that assertions, descriptions and expressions, no less than
orders, promises and threats, are part of an effort to do something. An
utterance is never simply words; it is a component in a "total speech
act," an act that is purposive and contemplates consequences; "once we
realize that what we have to study is not the sentence but the issuing of
an utterance in a speech situation, there can hardly any longer be a
possibility of not seeing that stating is performing an act."

I find Austin's analysis entirely persuasive, which means I believe
that there is no pure speech, only speech acts, only speech that spills
out into the world and alters it. Haiman believes the opposite, that
there is only "pure speech," symbolic as opposed to non-symbolic behavior
which changes nothing without the addition of "human agents who are
persuaded, for whatever reasons, to act on" it. But despite the sharpness
of our difference on this point, we finally end up in the same place
because we share an opponent, the person who thinks that one can formally
(by linguistic cues) distinguish mere speech from speech acts, and then
use the distinction to mark off protected speech from speech the state
might regulate.

Haiman's objection to this move is exactly on point: a statement that
takes the form of a threat as in "If you come near me, I'll hit you" might
not, in a particular situation, either be intended as such or received as
such; and therefore the determination of whether it is a threat in any
serious (and culpable) sense could not stop at noting the form of the
utterance, but would have to go on to ask questions about the context of
its production and reception.

But if assessing the real world force of an utterance depends on such
an extended inquiry, then the "a priori" division of utterances into pure
speech and speech acts would "seem to be a fruitless enterprise" since it
won't have told you what you want to know. You might as well, says
Haiman, view the utterance "simply as speech" and get on with your
investigation of the work it does in the world. And I would add, with a
difference that is finally inconsequential, you might as well view the
utterance "simply as action" and get on with your investigation of what
kind of action it is and whether or not its effects warrant state
attention. From apparently opposing directions, Haiman and I will both be
engaged in the task of identifying the factors in play and weighing the
costs and benefits of permitting or restraining certain forms of
behavior.

The question we both will be asking, whether we pose it to something
called speech or something called action, will be the same: "What harm
does the behavior in question do to other people"? To the question asked
by categorizing theorists -- is this utterance one we should regulate or
protect? -- both Haiman and I will say "it depends"; it depends on any
number of things, on the "seriousness" of the harm, on whether it is
"direct and immediate or indirect and remote", on whether it is
psychological or physical, and, if it is psychological, whether the
psychological effect is so debilitating that judicial attention is
warranted. It is possible that in the course of making these
determinations Haiman and I would end up on different sides of a
particular issue (although on the issues of sexist speech, hate speech and
enhanced penalties for hate crimes we come down just about in the same
place), but we would not differ in our commitment to balancing the
competing interests that can be located in any situation that rises to the
threshold of First Amendment notice. Balancing, of course, is a notion
distressing to many because it admits political considerations into an
area that should, we are told, be a forum of principle. But political
considerations are always there whether they are acknowledged or not, and
it is to Haiman's credit that he acknowledges them even to the extent of
naming consensus and enforceability as criteria for deciding when it would
be wise or unwise to regulate. It is a pleasure to read someone almost as
unprincipled as I am.

-- Stanley Fish
Arts and Sciences Professor of English and
Professor of Law at Duke University

Haiman replies: I am delighted to learn that Stanley Fish would "come down
just about in the same place" as I do with respect to hate and sexist
speech. Either I have grossly misread what he says in his book, or he has
changed his mind on the subject or his chapters on freedom of speech were
uncharacteristically lacking in clarity.

He contends that I am wrong in claiming that speech act theory
distinguishes certain kinds of utterances from others on the basis of
their alleged capacity to change their environment. But he finds this to
be an inconsequential difference between us since we both end up with
essentially the same conclusions when deciding if restrictions on speech
are justified, whether the particular expression at issue is classified as
pure speech or a speech act. He does concede that the uses made of speech
act theory by some legal scholars may justify my critique, and he
apparently shares that concern.

I am likewise prepared to make a concession -- namely, that from a
certain perspective, such as his, it is reasonable to regard all speech as
a form of action that may have consequences in the physical world. What I
find unacceptable about his argument, however, is that obliterating the
line between speech and action, such as the line I draw between symbolic
and nonsymbolic behavior, is, or should be, of no significance in our
decision-making regarding the scope of constitutionally protected speech.
Indeed, this argument seems in direct contradiction to his book's
eloquently pithy analysis of the meaning of the First Amendment:

No one would think to frame a First Amendment that began
'congress shall make no law abridging freedom of action'; for
that would amount to saying 'Congress shall make no law,' which
would amount to saying 'There shall be no law.' ... If the First
Amendment is to make any sense, have any bite, speech must be
declared not to be a species of action, or to be a special form
of action lacking the aspects of action that cause it to be the
object of regulation.

I can only conclude from this passage, which I endorse with
enthusiasm, that if Fish finds my distinction between symbolic and
nonsymbolic behavior to be wanting, he must either come up with some other
principle to distinguish behavior that is protected by the First Amendment
from that which is not or abandon the First Amendment altogether. If he
chooses the latter course he would then have to decide, in every case,
whether the so-called speech act was to be punished or not, and he would
have to do so in the same way he would do it with non-speech acts. I
cannot agree to that kind of blank check balancing of speech against other
competing social interests, and I can never be that "unprincipled" in my
commitment to the First Amendment.

2007-02-15T16:07:00.000-05:00

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE SPEECH": AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY FISH
with Peter Lowe & Annemarie Jonson ,© here

Q : Professor Fish, what do you mean when you say that there is no such thing as free speech?

A : Many discussions of free speech, especially by those whom I would call free speech ideologues, begin by assuming as normative the situation in which speech is offered for its own sake, just for the sake of expression. The idea is that free expression, the ability to open up your mouth and deliver an opinion in a seminar-like atmosphere, is the typical situation and any constraint on free expression is therefore a deviation from that typical or normative situation. I begin by saying that this is empirically false, that the prototypical academic situation in which you utter sentences only to solicit sentences in return with no thought of actions being taken, is in fact anomalous. It is something that occurs only in the academy and for a very small number of people.

Therefore, a theory of free speech which takes such weightless situations as being the centre of the subject seems to me to go wrong from the first. I begin from the opposite direction. I believe the situation of constraint is the normative one and that the distinctions which are to be made are between differing situations of constraint; rather than a distinction between constraint on the one hand and a condition of no constraint on the other. Another way to put this is to say that, except in a seminar-like situation, when one speaks to another person, it is usually for an instrumental purpose: you are trying to get someone to do something, you are trying to urge an idea and, down the road, a course of action. These are the reasons for which speech exists and it is in that sense that I say that there is no such thing as "free speech", that is, speech that has as its rationale nothing more than its own production.

Q : In your work you have stated that free speech must be understood against a background of the originary exclusion which gives it meaning. What are the conditions giving rise to this originary exclusion?

A : Before I got into the First Amendment or free speech business I was for many years and still am a teacher of English Renaissance poetry and prose, especially that of John Milton. Milton's contribution to the history of the discussion of free speech and censorship is of course the Areopagitica, published in 1643, a vigorous and eloquent protest against a licencing law passed by the parliament.

Much of the Areopagitica is a celebration of toleration in matters of expression, for reasons that have now become more familiar to us: the more information the better able are we to choose wisely; the more information the better are we able to exercise our intellects so that they become more refined and perceptive. Another part of Milton's argument is that when something is suppressed it does not go away. It just takes on a romantic underground life and flourishes rather than being brought to the light of day where it might be refuted. All of these are today familiar arguments and components of free speech rhetoric.

There is one part, however, of Milton's Areopagitica that is rarely noticed in such discussions and when noticed is noticed with some embarrassment. About three quarters of the way through the tract Milton says, "Now you understand of course", and the tone in his prose suggests that he assumes that most of his readers have always understood this, "that when I speak of toleration and free expression I don't mean Catholics. Them we extirpate".1 Milton's admirers, especially those who have linked him to John Stuart Mill as one of the cornerstones of the free speech tradition, have difficulty with this passage and attempt to explain it away by saying that Milton, because of the limitation of his own historical period, was not able to see what we are able to see. The idea is that our conception of free speech is more capacious, more truly free, than this because we do not have an exclusion up our sleeves, ready to be sprung.

But the difference between Milton and us is a difference in what we would exclude from the zone of "free speech", not a difference between exclusion and inclusion. When Milton names Catholic discourse as the exception to his toleration he does so because in his view Catholic speech is subversive of everything speech, in general, is supposed to do -- keep the conversation going, continue the search for Truth. In short, if speech is really to be free in the sense that he desires, Catholics cannot be allowed freely to produce it. This might seem paradoxical, but in fact it is Milton's recognition of a general condition: free speech is what's left over when you have determined which forms of speech cannot be permitted to flourish. The "free speech zone" emerges against the background of what has been excluded. Everyone begins by assuming what shouldn't be said; otherwise there would be no point to saying anything.

Another example: one of the foremost proponents of free speech in this country is Nat Hentoff, a journalist well known for his jazz criticism and who has also taken up the cause of free speech no matter how disreputable or offensive the speech in question. But about two years ago he recanted, when he drew the line at campuses allowing certain forms of anti-semitic speech to flourish. Disciples of a certain Muslim group came to campuses and began to talk about "bagel eating vermin who had escaped from caves in the middle ages and were now, as then, infecting the world". Hentoff said this has gone too far. My point is that everyone has such a trigger point, which is either acknowledged at the beginning or emerges in a moment of crisis.

There is no-one who believes that everything should be said. Most of us today would not say, "Well, of course, you understand I don't mean toleration of Catholics". But we would say things like, "I don't mean toleration of neo-nazis" or "I don't mean toleration of discourses advocating child molestation". There is no-one in the history of the world who has ever been in favour of free speech.

Q : You have also referred to speech being only intelligible against a background of what isn't being said, the background of what already has been silenced. What is the silence you're talking about?

A : The silence has to do with the shape of any discourse. As Hobbes brilliantly points out again and again in his Leviathan, thought of a sequential and rational kind can only proceed when some set of stipulated definitions has been put at the beginning and established. Unless you have definitions of your topic, of your subject, demarcations of the field that you are about to explore, you cannot proceed because you have no direction. Hobbes also points out that such stipulative definitions are necessarily exclusionary. They exclude other possibilities, other possible ways of defining the field from which you might then have proceeded; since speech and reasoning can only occur when something is already in place and since the something that is already in place will be in place of something else that could have been in place, that something else which isn't there is the silent background against which the discourse resounds.

Q : You have written that speech is never a value in and of itself but is always produced within the precincts of some assumed conception of the good to which it must yield in the event of conflict. Could you elaborate on this notion?

A : That's a wordy way of simply saying that when you talk you're talking in the service of something. In any normal situation you speak for a reason: to inform, to command, to acquiesce, to ask a question, to further an agenda, to close an agenda down. Another way to put this is to say that speech and communication are the signs of our distance from the condition we would most like to inhabit.

In paradise or in heaven (I speak here only through report and not direct experience), discursive speech is unnecessary because everyone is already in the place he or she would desire to be, allied in a perfect and an indistinguishable way with the good. Therefore there is no reason to say anything to anyone; because again the only reason to say something to someone else is to advance both of you in the direction you desire. But in heaven, everyone is at the place of optimal desire so it is imagined in great literature like Milton's Paradise Lost not as a scene of communication, but as a scene of celebration. Heaven's inhabitants express themselves as a chorus all of whose members sing the same song, and sound a note that is repetitive, ritual and ceremonial -- in short a long endless amen or hallelujah. It is only in Heaven that speech is free and spontaneous, because it doesn't mean anything; it doesn't have to mean anything. In this vale of tears, speech means, has a purpose and when we feel this purpose threatened by some of speech's forms, we will always curtail it.

Australia does not have such a principle of free expression such as the First Amendment enshrined in its Constitution. In what sense is it necessary or desirable for speech to be protected under a Constitution?

A : There is an important sense in which speech requires constitutional protection. Discussions of the First Amendment are often discussions about the history of the First Amendment: the reasons for which it was first instituted. One position, championed in the last thirty years by Judge Robert Bork who was famously denied a position on the Supreme Court, is that the original intention of the framers of the First Amendment was to protect political speech and therefore to prevent the government from silencing its own critics. It is Bork's view that the protection of political speech should mark the limits of First Amendment protection and therefore First Amendment protection should not be extended to slander, pornography, vituperation, and other socially undesirable forms of expression. I agree with Judge Bork. It seems to me that the First Amendment's protection of political speech is critical in a society which does not want its government to perpetuate by a number of illegitimate means the silencing of its critics.

This view of the First Amendment, a view that thought of the scope of its protection rather narrowly, was pretty much the standard view until the 1950s and 1960s. It is only since that time that a view of free speech protection which I would call libertarian has arisen and more or less won the field. By libertarian I mean a view of the First Amendment which privileges and values expression in and of itself independently of any real world consequence the speech might have.

Before the '50s and '60s there were a number of balancing tests that were at the heart of First Amendment jurisprudence; the rights of individuals to free expression were recognized but they were balanced against other rights and values. And so you had a series of formulae put forward by the courts designed to instruct you in how to balance various interests. One famous formula, put forward by Oliver Wendell Holmes in a series of cases in the beginning of the twentieth century, was the test of 'clear and present danger', which meant that expression was to be allowed in the service of robust and wide open debate in a democratic society up to the point where it seemed that the effect of that expression might constitute a danger to the very democratic process that was allowing it. Not surprisingly, both sides were dissatisfied with this formula. One side feared that with a 'clear and present danger test' in force some might be tempted to see the clear and present danger so early on that it amounted to censorship, others feared that a clear and present danger test if adhered to might lead to recognizing the danger only when it had materialized and it was too late to do anything about it.

Whichever side of this particular debate you might be on I think my point holds -- there was a sense of balancing the rights of individuals to freely deliver their opinions against the desires and needs of the society and the community. Since the '50s and '60s that second pole has dropped out and more and more you get a First Amendment rhetoric of individual liberty which has the effect of producing a roster of First Amendment heroes, who gain that status by uttering the vilest statements that can be imagined in situations designed to cause harm, embarrassment, and psychological damage to others. These persons are then put forward as representing the best instincts of the American experiment.

In this particular version of the First Amendment you get points (a) for being as vile as possible, and (b) for championing the rights of those you consider vile. This is a view associated in this country with the American Civil Liberties Union, an organisation whose project is to go out and find things it hates and then grow them.

Q : But isn't it the case that, sometimes, the best principles which underpin many social justice and equity issues are raised for consideration and debate only when the worst cases are involved?

A : I don't believe in such things as principles, if by that word you mean abstract rules which will apply to any number of fact situations while not being attached to any of them. Whenever such a "principle" is formulated it seems to me to have only two possible shapes: either it's perfectly empty because it is formulated at so high a level of generality -- "be ye perfect" -- that nothing or everything follows from it; or it is full of an agenda that has not yet announced itself and so is not a principle -- in the claimed sense -- at all. Nevertheless, the rhetorical weight of so called principles is considerable. If you can get the right "principles" on your side, if you can announce your own program and wrap it literally in the flag of the right high- sounding phrases, you can have a great advantage over your opponents. That is why, even though I am always arguing against the coherence of most First Amendment arguments and doctrines, I never urge people to stop using First Amendment formulas -- because they have so much resonance. Freedom of speech, individual rights, the establishment of autonomy, the freedom from governmental restraint -- these are magic phrases. The trick is to take those magic phrases and fill them in with the content that will then generate the outcome that you desire.

Q : You have written that free speech is a conceptual impossibility as the condition of speech being free in the first place is unrealizable. Why is this so?

A : The condition of speech being free is not only unrealizable, it is also undesirable. It would be a condition in which speech was offered for no reason whatsoever. Once speech is offered for a reason it is necessarily, if only silently, negating all of the other reasons for which one might have spoken. Therefore the only condition in which free speech would be realizable is if the speech didn't mean anything. Free speech is speech that doesn't mean anything.

Once meaning, assertion, predication get into the act the condition of freedom has already been lost and, as I would say, well lost because you want speech to mean something; you don't want to live in a world where people's utterances are weightless -- neither commit to anything, nor illuminate or challenge you in any way. The impossibility of free speech is one of the happy facts of our condition and not a fact to be lamented. There's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too.

2007-02-15T15:36:00.001-05:00

CONDEMNATION WITHOUT ABSOLUTES
by and copyright by Stanley Fish

CHICAGO -- During the interval between the terrorist attacks and the United States response, a reporter called to ask me if the events of Sept. 11 meant the end of postmodernist relativism. It seemed bizarre that events so serious would be linked causally with a rarefied form of academic talk. But in the days that followed, a growing number of commentators played serious variations on the same theme: that the ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country's resolve. The problem, according to the critics, is that since postmodernists deny the possibility of describing matters of fact objectively, they leave us with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back.

Not so. Postmodernism maintains only that there can be no independent standard for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one. The only thing postmodern thought argues against is the hope of justifying our response to the attacks in universal terms that would be persuasive to everyone, including our enemies. Invoking the abstract notions of justice and truth to support our cause wouldn't be effective anyway because our adversaries lay claim to the same language. (No one declares himself to be an apostle of injustice.)

Instead, we can and should invoke the particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend.

At times like these, the nation rightly falls back on the record of aspiration and accomplishment that makes up our collective understanding of what we live for. That understanding is sufficient, and far from undermining its sufficiency, postmodern thought tells us that we have grounds enough for action and justified condemnation in the democratic ideals we embrace, without grasping for the empty rhetoric of universal absolutes to which all subscribe but which all define differently.

But of course it's not really postmodernism that people are bothered by. It's the idea that our adversaries have emerged not from some primordial darkness, but from a history that has equipped them with reasons and motives and even with a perverted version of some virtues. Bill Maher, Dinesh D'Souza and Susan Sontag have gotten into trouble by pointing out that "cowardly" is not the word to describe men who sacrifice themselves for a cause they believe in.

Ms. Sontag grants them courage, which she is careful to say is a "morally neutral" term, a quality someone can display in the performance of a bad act. (Milton's Satan is the best literary example.) You don't condone that act because you describe it accurately. In fact, you put yourself in a better position to respond to it by taking its true measure. Making the enemy smaller than he is blinds us to the danger he presents and gives him the advantage that comes along with having been underestimated.

That is why what Edward Said has called "false universals" should be rejected: they stand in the way of useful thinking. How many times have we heard these new mantras: "We have seen the face of evil"; "these are irrational madmen"; "we are at war against international terrorism." Each is at once inaccurate and unhelpful. We have not seen the face of evil; we have seen the face of an enemy who comes at us with a full roster of grievances, goals and strategies. If we reduce that enemy to "evil," we conjure up a shape- shifting demon, a wild-card moral anarchist beyond our comprehension and therefore beyond the reach of any counterstrategies.

The same reduction occurs when we imagine the enemy as "irrational." Irrational actors are by definition without rhyme or reason, and there's no point in reasoning about them on the way to fighting them. The better course is to think of these men as bearers of a rationality we reject because its goal is our destruction. If we take the trouble to understand that rationality, we might have a better chance of figuring out what its adherents will do next and preventing it.

And "international terrorism" does not adequately describe what we are up against. Terrorism is the name of a style of warfare in service of a cause. It is the cause, and the passions informing it, that confront us. Focusing on something called international terrorism — detached from any specific purposeful agenda — only confuses matters. This should have been evident when President Vladimir Putin of Russia insisted that any war against international terrorism must have as one of its objectives victory against the rebels in Chechnya.

When Reuters decided to be careful about using the word "terrorism" because, according to its news director, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, castigated what he saw as one more instance of cultural relativism. But Reuters is simply recognizing how unhelpful the word is, because it prevents us from making distinctions that would allow us to get a better picture of where we are and what we might do. If you think of yourself as the target of terrorism with a capital T, your opponent is everywhere and nowhere. But if you think of yourself as the target of a terrorist who comes from somewhere, even if he operates internationally, you can at least try to anticipate his future assaults.

Is this the end of relativism? If by relativism one means a cast of mind that renders you unable to prefer your own convictions to those of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began. Our convictions are by definition preferred; that's what makes them our convictions. Relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger.

But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary's shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end, because it is simply another name for serious thought.

2007-02-15T15:30:00.000-05:00

HOW THE RIGHT HIJACKED THE MAGIC WORDS
by and copyright by Stanley Fish

DURHAM. N.C. When the verdict in the first Rodney King beating trial was announced many were amazed at the acquittal of the police officers, especially since their actions had been filmed by an amateur photographer. How could a jury ignore the evidence of its own eyes? A part of the answer emerged in the account of the defense strategy. It had two stages. First, the film was slowed down so that each frame was isolated and stood by itself. Second, the defense asked questions that treated each frozen frame as if everything in the case hung on it and it alone. Is this blow an instance of excessive force? Is this blow intended to kill or maim?

Under the pressure of such questions, the event as a whole disappeared from view and was replaced by a series of discontinuous moments. Looking only at individual moments cut off from the context that gave them meaning, the jury could not say of any of them that this did grievous harm to Rodney King. This strategy - of first segmenting reality and then placing all the weight on individual bits of it - is useful whenever you want to deflect attention away from the big picture, and that is why it has proved so attractive to those conservative Republicans who want to roll back the regulatory state. On every front, from environmental protection to affirmative action, large questions of ecology and justice are pushed into the background by the same segmenting techniques that made it easy for the jurors in Simi Valley to forget it was a beating they were seeing.

As examples, consider two cases recently decided by the Supreme Court. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home, the question was whether an E.P.A. regulation against "taking" an endangered species includes acts of "habitat modification" or whether words like "take" and "harm" refer narrowly to single assaults on single animals by single hunters.

Those taking the broader view agree that when you destroy the last remaining ground on which the piping plover breeds, you make it "impossible for any piping plovers to reproduce." Those on the other side, the side of developers and logging interests, reply that no single plover will have been targeted and no living plover injured.

"Taking," they insist, describes only "acts done directly and intentionally to particular animals." One side recognizes indirect effects caused by large-scale patterns of action taking place over time. The other side recognizes only effects caused in a particular moment by the intentional behavior of individuals. Beginning from these two perspectives - not on the issue, but determinative of the way the issue will be framed and seen -- the two sides come to predictably opposing conclusions.

Just about everything remains the same when the topic is affirmative action. In Adarand v, Pena, the question was whether the policy of giving financial incentives to prime contractors who hire minority subcontractors is constitutional. Those in favor of the incentives justify them by invoking constitutional history and the history of discrimination in the contracting industry. They remind us, in Justice John Paul Stevens words, that the "primary purpose of the Equal Protection Clause to end discrimination of the former slaves," and they report that even today certain groups remain entrenched in the building trades while ethers are virtually shut out.

Those opposed to the incentives reject arguments from history and specifically reject the argument that historical patterns of discrimination have impaired the life chances of African-Americans as a group. They say it is individuals, not groups, that are protected by the Constitution, and they would allow remedies for discrimination only in cases where there has been "an individualized showing" of harm, a harm inflicted discreetly on a specific person by a specific agent at a specific time.

The idea is that even though different histories may have brought us here, we are new all Individuals who enter life's race with equal opportunities and therefore any injury we suffer (at least if the law is going to recognize it) is injury done to us by an individual and not by impersonal forces either in the past or present. Harm in this model can only be imagined as a discrete event: you hit me over the head with a baseball bat. No Rube Goldberg accounts of cause and effect allowed.

The Rodney King beating, endangered species, affirmative action - - three very different issues, but all subject to the same analysis which reaches the same conclusion: either a particular person at a particular moment did it or no one did it. Blows can only kill one by one, and not in relation to other blows in a sequence. Birds can only he taken one by one and not by the destruction of the environment essential to their survival. Persons can only be discriminated against one by one, and not by the massive effects of longstanding structural racism.

One more example to clinch the point. In the first aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing, rumors of an Arab suspect were followed by the usual mutterings about an Islamic terrorist culture, but when Timothy McVeigh surfaced, talk of holding culture responsible was strongly denounced by the very same people engaging in it because the culture now under the spotlight was their own.

Immediately Mr. McVeigh was detached from everything and everyone around him and proclaimed to be "merely an individual", and more pointedly, an individual "kook," someone acting out of some inner and private compulsion and not in response to the values and goals of any group.

He may have worn the same clothes as those other guys, and held the same views, and listened to the same radio stations, and read or wrote the same anti-government pamphlets, and marched in the same woods with the same guns, but what he did (if he did it) he did entirely on his own, uninfluenced by anyone or anything. Just as we are to believe that Rodney King received each blow in isolation, and the piping plover experienced no harm when its habitat was degraded, and minority subcontractors suffered no disadvantage by centuries of exclusion from the trades they were now "free" to enter.

The question is, why do arguments like these often have so much force? At first glance it seems odd, Even bizarre, to discount the cumulative effects of many blows, or to deny that habitat degradation constitutes a harm to individual birds, or to announce that massive patterns of societal discrimination leave minorities in the same position as everyone else, or to decide that white Timothy McVeigh talks like a militia member, walks like a militia member, thinks likes militia member and hates like a militia member, what he does has nothing to do with the militia culture.

How is the trick done? Well, first of all by a sleight of hand. The eye is deflected away from the whole -- history, culture, habitats, society and the parts, now freed from any stabilizing context, can be described in any way one likes - but why is the sleight of hand successful? Why don't more people see through it?

Because it is performed with the vocabulary of America's civil religion - the vocabulary of equal opportunity, color-blindness, race neutrality and, above all, individual rights. This was also the vocabulary of civil rights activists, anti-McCarthyites and liberals in general, many of them are now puzzled and even defensive when they hear their own words coming out of the mouths of their traditional opponents.

Their mistake is to assume that the words mean what they did in 1960, when in fact they have been repackaged and put in the service of the very agenda they once fought, When the goal was to end Jim Crow practices that kept blacks in the back of the bus and out of schools, "individual rights" was a powerful slogan in support of change. But now "individual rights" operates to maintain the status quo by ruling out as a consideration the very history that made the phrase a rallying cry in the first place.

When the goal was to make discrimination illegal, "color-blind" meant removing the obstacles to full citizenship, but "color-blind" now means blind to the effects of what has been done in the past to people because of their color, When the goal was to provide access to those long denied it, "equal opportunity" was a weapon against old habits and vested interests, but new those same interests have learned how to say "equal opportunity" and mean maintenance of all conditions that still make it a myth.

Liberals and progressives have been slow to realize that their preferred vocabulary has been hijacked and that when they respond to once-hallowed phrases they are responding to a ghost now animated by a new machine, The point is not a small one, for in any debate, especially one fought in the arena of public opinion, the battle is won not by knock-down arguments but by the party that succeeds in placing its own spin on the terms presiding over the discussion.

That's what the conservatives in and out of Congress have managed to do with old war horses like "individual" and so long as they are allowed to get away with it, the opposition will spend its time insisting that it too is for the individual or for color-blindness or equal opportunity - and before we know it all the plovers will be dead and all the subcontractors will once again be white.

2007-02-14T17:39:00.000-05:00

DAMIEN HIRST FINALLY GOOD FOR SOMETHING
from the BBC

One of the biggest and most complete giant squids ever found is on display at London's Natural History Museum.

Measuring a monstrous 8.62m (28ft), the animal was caught off the coast of the Falkland Islands by a trawler.

Researchers at the museum undertook a painstaking process to preserve the giant creature, which is now on show in a 9m- (30ft-) long glass tank.

Giant squid, once thought to be sea serpents, are very rarely seen and live at depths of 200-1,000m (650-3,300ft).

They can weigh up to a 1,000kg; the largest ever spotted measured a vast 18.5m and was found in 1880 off Island Bay in New Zealand.

"Most giant squid tend to be washed up dead on beaches, or retrieved from the stomach of sperm whales, so they tend to be in quite poor condition," explained Jon Ablett, the mollusc curator at the Natural History Museum who led preservation efforts.

As a result, finding such a large, complete specimen was something of a rarity, he said.

Archie the squid

The team nicknamed the creature Archie, after its Latin name Architeuthis dux, but it may have to revise this after finding out that the squid is probably female.

It took several months to prepare the squid for display.

"The first stage was to defrost it; that took about four days. The problem was the mantle - the body - is very thick and the tentacles very narrow, so we had to try to thaw the thick mantle without the tentacles rotting," Mr Ablett told the BBC News website.

The scientists did this by bathing the mantle in water, whilst covering the tentacles in ice packs, after which they injected the squid with a formol-saline solution to prevent it from rotting.

The team then needed to find someone to build a glass tank which could not only hold the huge creature, but could leave the squid accessible for future scientific research, and they decided to draw upon the knowledge of an artist famed for displaying preserved dead animals.

"We contacted Damien Hirst's group after seeing their animals preserved in formalin. They put us in touch with a company who could make these tanks," explained Mr Ablett.

The squid now resides in a glass tank, filled to the brim with preservative solution, and is one of 22 million specimens that can be seen as part of the behind-the-scenes Darwin Centre tour of the Natural History Museum.

2007-02-13T15:03:00.000-05:00

THOMAS LIGOTTI
(My favorite horror writer.)

Thomas Ligotti (b. July 9, 1953, Detroit, Michigan) is a writer of horror stories.

Something of a cult figure, Ligotti is rather little known, but has seen high praise as one of the most effective and unique horror writers of recent decades: The The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction"[1]; another critic declared "It's a skilled writer indeed who can suggest a horror so shocking that one is grateful it was kept offstage."

Overview

Ligotti attended Macomb County Community College between 1971 and 1973 and graduated from Wayne State University in 1977.

Ligotti began his publishing career in the early 1980s with a number of short stories published in various American small press magazines.

His unique and affecting tales gathered a small following. Ligotti's relative anonymity and reclusiveness led to speculation about his identity: Was Ligotti a pseudonym used by a prominent literary writer? Were his stories in fact collaborations of multiple authors? In an introduction to a 1996 collection of Ligotti fiction, The Nightmare Factory, Poppy Z. Brite mentioned these notions, with a rhetorical question: "Are you out there, Thomas Ligotti?"

In recent years, Ligotti has conducted interviews and disclosed some details of his background. For twenty-three years Ligotti worked as an Associate Editor at Gale Research (now the Gale Group), a publishing company that produces compilations of literary (and other) research. In the summer of 2001, Ligotti quit his job at the Gale Group and moved to south Florida. His favorite music is generally instrumental rock. Nevertheless there are still some who question Ligotti's actual existence and--in a fittingly Ligottian notion--claim these biographical details are part of an extended literary conspiracy. If so, however, it is a conspiracy that does not hesitate to hold e-conversations in Ligotti's name.

Ligotti's worldview has been described as profoundly nihilistic (though he's wary of the label, stating "'Nihilist' is a name that other people call you. No intelligent person has ever described or thought of himself as a nihilist", and has stated he has suffered from anxiety for much of his life; these have been prominent themes in his work.

Ligotti generally avoids the explicit violence common in some recent horror fiction, preferring to establish an intensely disquieting, pessimistic atmosphere through the use of subtlety and repetition. He has cited Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Bernhard, Edgar Allan Poe, Bruno Schulz, E. M. Cioran and William S. Burroughs among his favorite writers. There are similarities between some of Ligotti's work and the subtly disturbing stories of Robert Aickman, as well. H.P. Lovecraft is also an important touchstone for Ligotti: a few stories, The Sect of the Idiot, in particular, makes explicit reference to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and one, The Last Feast of Harlequin, was dedicated to Lovecraft.

Ligotti has explored metafictional notions in several stories: "Notes on the Writing of Horror" and "Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror" both begin as advice for prospective writers of horror fiction, but gradually become uniquely Ligottian exercises in quietly disturbing fiction.

Ligotti has stated he prefers short stories to longer forms, both as a reader and writer, though he has recently written a novella, My Work Is Not Yet Done.

Ligotti has collaborated with the musical group Current 93 on the albums In A Foreign Town, In A Foreign Land (1997, reissued 2002), I Have A Special Plan For This World (2000) and This Degenerate Little Town (2001) all released on David Tibet's Durtro label. Tibet has also published several limited editions of Ligotti's books on Durtro Press. Ligotti also played guitar on Current 93's contribution to the compilation Foxtrot, an album whose proceeds went to the treatment of musician John Balance's alcoholism.

Critical analyses of Ligotti's work can be found in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001), as well as in a critical anthology assembled by Darrell Schweitzer, a fan of Ligotti.

Reviews

Critical opinion of Ligotti has generally been favorable. The New York Times Book Review wrote "If there were a literary genre called 'philosophical horror,' Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe would easily fit within it" and praised his "provocative images and a style that is both entertaining and lyrical".

He has often been favorably compared to Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka and H.P. Lovecraft.

Thomas Ligotti Online
"It's all a matter of personal pathology": An Interview
Literature Is Entertainment or It Is Nothing: An Interview
Another interview about My Work Is Not Yet Done

2007-02-11T17:04:00.000-05:00

PHILOSOPHY MAY GO EXTINCT SOONER THAN THOUGHT
from the BBC

'Thoughts read' via brain scans

Brain scan 'can read your mind'

2007-02-10T11:45:00.000-05:00

AN EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY PRIMER

Link

2007-02-10T11:22:00.000-05:00

RUSE'S DARWINIAN ETHICS AND MORAL REALISM
by John Mizzoni, from here

I. Introduction

With the human genome project compelling us to come to grips with our biology, the attempt to explain the nature of morality in biological terms becomes all the more tempting. Nowadays there are many moral theorists who are thinking about the relationships between the nature and origin of ethics and human biological evolution. In the light of human biological evolution what (if anything?) can we say about the ultimate nature of ethics?

There are some moral philosophers (e.g., Thomas Nagel) who believe that evolutionary considerations are irrelevant to a full understanding of the foundations of ethics.[1] Other moral philosophers (e.g., J.L. Mackie) tell quite a different story.[2] They hold that the admission of the evolutionary origins of human beings compels us to concede that there are no foundations for ethics. But the philosopher that I will focus on in this paper is Michael Ruse, whom Holmes Rolston III calls, "the most celebrated philosopher in the world for his untiring effort to join biology and ethics".[3] Ruse has published widely on the topic of evolutionary ethics and what it entails about the foundations of ethics.[4]

According to Ruse, evolutionary ethics is "the project which argues that for a full understanding of the nature and grounds of morality one must turn to the process and theories of the evolutionist".[5]

It is Michael Ruse who has been especially active in promoting the abandonment of the traditional understanding of evolutionary ethics as a competitive ethic to evolutionary ethics as a cooperative ethic. To mark the distinction between these two approaches Ruse refers to the traditional account as "evolutionary ethics" and his newer account as "Darwinian ethics".[6]

I agree with Ruse that evolutionary considerations should be looked at when thinking about the nature and origin of morality. But I think Ruse goes awry with his account of Darwinian ethics when he alleges that an evolutionary understanding of ethics and morality discredits the objectivity and foundations of ethics. In metaethical terms, Ruse maintains that an evolutionary understanding of ethics leads us to metaethical skepticism and metaethical subjectivism. But I will argue that he has not successfully made his case that Darwinian ethics is most consistent with skepticism and subjectivism. I will argue that the Darwinian ethics that Ruse defines and argues for is in fact most consistent with a metaethical view known as moral realism, and further, that Ruse's efforts to defend Darwinian ethics actually help to support and give empirical evidence for moral realism.

II. Moral Realism

In this section I'll briefly describe moral realism as a metaethical theory and how it differs from moral skepticism and moral subjectivism. Here I'll draw on David O. Brink's work on moral realism. Brink has offered a helpful characterization of moral realism. First he defines realism as a view that holds

"(a) there are facts of kind x, and (b) these facts are logically independent of our evidence, i.e. those beliefs which are our evidence, for them."[7]

In my view, these two claims capture what realists have in mind. Take an example of scientific realism: there are facts concerning our genetic make-up, and these facts are logically independent of our evidence, opinions, and beliefs. A century ago we didn't have knowledge of genes because we didn't have enough evidence to posit the existence of genes. Yet there were still facts obtaining concerning our genes. They were still passing from one generation to the next even though we as human cognizers were not aware of their existence. As we have accumulated evidence concerning genes we have discovered facts about them. Now to talk of moral realism is to say

"(a) there are moral facts, and (b) these facts are logically independent of our evidence, i.e. those beliefs which are our evidence, for them."[8]

Just as we can accumulate evidence to make scientific discoveries, moral realists believe that we can accumulate evidence to make moral discoveries. The upshot of moral realism is that there are objective moral facts; as a metaethical theory it is the view that at bottom ethics is objective, factual, and discoverable. Moral realism is thus opposed to the view that ethics at bottom is subjective, conventional, illusory, affective and constructed.

To say that ethics is ultimately subjective, illusory, and affective is to say that it is dependent upon individual subjects or agents. To say that ethics is ultimately conventional and constructed is to say that it is dependent upon social groups. Although moral realists can grant that ethics does contain a subjective, conventional, constructed, affective, and sometimes illusory character, yet they will assert that beneath all of the diversity surrounding human behavior there are moral facts and objectivities that are factual and discoverable. These moral facts and truths are ultimately independent of the subjective, conventional, affective, etc.; they are not ultimately dependent on the beliefs and opinions of subjects or social groups.

III. Ruse's Darwinian Metaethics, (Contingent) Human Nature, and Relativism

Ruse's Darwinian account of the nature and origins of ethics is what he calls a Darwinian metaethics.

Ethics is part of our human nature, says Ruse. "Humans share a common moral understanding. This universality is guaranteed by the shared genetic background of every member of Homo sapiens. The differences between us are far outweighed by the similarities...There is, therefore, absolutely nothing arbitrary about morality, considered from the human perspective."[9]

Because there is an objective human nature there can be objective moral facts. To claim there are objective moral facts and to claim that these facts obtain whether or not we believe them or currently have evidence for them is the view otherwise known as moral realism.

Ruse's Darwinian ethics, it seems, would qualify as moral realism. What Ruse adds to the traditional strategy of rooting ethics in human nature are the concepts of genes, epigenetic rules, innate dispositions, and capacities.

"Once we grasp the full import of the epigenetic rules-innate constraints rooted in the genes and put in place by natural selection-powerful light is thrown on human knowledge and morality."[10]

"Once it is granted that innate constraints rooted in human nature have been put in place by natural selection, an element of contingency is brought in. After all, morality is only an effective adaptation. The Darwinian...ties morality tightly to contingent human nature."[11]

"Had evolution taken us down another path, we might well think moral that which we now find horrific, and conversely. This is not a conclusion acceptable to the traditional objectivist."[12]

Ruse seems to think that this admission of the contingency of human nature (thereby human morality) will strike traditional moral philosophers with horror. If we understand Aristotle and Aquinas as traditional objectivists (which I think we should), would they find the contingency of human nature and human morality horrific? I don't see why they would. Aristotle says to understand ethics as rooted in human nature; if human nature were different then the shape of Aristotle's virtue ethics would be different. And Aquinas, as two commentators have noted, concedes that if our nature were different then our duties would be different.

In order to hold moral realism (or objectivism as Ruse calls it) one need not assume that human nature necessarily had to be what it currently is. All that is required is that human nature is universal species-wide, and this is exactly what Ruse's Darwinian ethics provides for moral realists.

If human nature is universal then there would presumably be moral facts about human nature and with their research into innate moral dispositions and capacities Ruse and other Darwinians can help to fill out more precisely what those moral facts are. That moral facts are contingent because human nature is contingent is not at variance with moral realism. As David Brink succinctly puts it, "The truth of moral realism turns on the existence of moral facts, not their modal status".[13]

Ruse states clearly that the contingent status of human nature and morality does not consequently align Darwinian ethics with metaethical relativism

"...note that the Darwinian's position does not plunge him/her into wholesale ethical relativism...Against this, the Darwinian recognizes that there are indeed differences from society to society, and also within societies, particularly across time. However, these are readily (and surely properly) explained in the way that most moral theorists would explain them, as secondary, modified consequences of shared primary moral imperatives."[14]

"The differences between us are far outweighed by the similarities...I did not choose my moral code. For the Darwinian, the very essence of morality is that it is shared and not relative. It does not work as a biological adaptation, unless we all join in."[15]

Because Darwinian ethics denies that ethics is ultimately grounded in one's culture, Darwinian metaethics is not relativistic.

Metaethically speaking, Darwinian ethics seems to be in keeping with moral realism.

IV. Darwinian Metaethics and Moral Realism: Objectivity, Independence, and Redundancy

Given the aspects of Ruse's Darwinian ethics that I've sketched, why would Ruse claim that "we must conclude that not only is Darwinian ethics a subjectivist ethics, it is one which positively excludes the objectivist approach"?[16]

The answer lies in Ruse's understanding of the objectivity of ethics. In his discussion of metaethics Ruse makes two related assumptions. He assumes that anyone who claims that ethics is objective and anyone who maintains moral realism is

(i) thereby committed to non-naturalism, and (ii) thereby committed to viewing ethics as fixed and eternal.

But both assumptions are unwarranted. We can think of the example of Aristotelian ethics. It makes perfect sense to say that Aristotle approached ethics naturalistically but we could also interpret Aristotle as having recognized objective moral facts. As Ruse himself admits, morality is grounded in human nature and so if there are objective facts about human nature then presumably there are objective facts about morality. If human nature is contingent, i.e., could have been different, then ethics is contingent, i.e., could have been different. The upshot is that moral realism is workable as a naturalistic metaethic and that moral realism is sanguine about moral contingency. Here is how Ruse sees things, however:

"We must ask whether, to the Darwinian, morality is--because of the science, must be taken as-something objective, in the sense of having an authority and existence of its own, independent of human beings? Or whether morality is--because of the science, must be taken as--subjective, being a function of human nature, and reducing ultimately to feelings and sentiments--feelings and sentiments of a type different from wishes and desires, but ultimately emotions of some kind?"[17]

"Nor can one readily see how the objectivist might patch up the situation, making his/her position compatible with evolutionism. At least, this seems impossible, so long as one locates the foundation of morality in some sort of extra-human existence, like God's will or non-natural properties."[18]

"But what this all means is that there is not and cannot be any objective, extra-human morality."[19]

Notice how he assumes that something objective is something that exists independent of human beings and something that is subjective is a function of human nature.

The other unwarranted metaethical assumption Ruse makes is the supposition that those who maintain an objective ethics thereby maintain that ethics is eternal, cosmically fixed, necessary, and non-contingent. He alleges that "...the "objectivist" tends to think of such [moral] norms as fixed and eternal," as "eternal verities perceptible thought intuition" and "morality as a set of objective, eternal verities".[20] If the moral realist is concurring with Ruse that ethics is grounded in human nature then a moral realist does not need to make such extravagant assumptions. There is no reason to assume that belief in the objectivity of ethics and belief in objective moral facts grounded in human nature entails non-naturalism or eternal moral norms. To build these elements into moral realism and then to knock it down because of these elements amounts to attacking a straw man.

Ruse's two unwarranted assumptions about moral objectivity are also apparent in the one main argument that Ruse makes against the moral realist (whom he calls the objectivist). Michael Bradie calls it the "redundancy argument against objective values".[21] Here is Ruse's first formulation of the argument:

"At the least, the objectivist must agree that his/her ultimate principles are (given Darwinism) redundant. You would believe what you do about right and wrong, irrespective of whether or not a "true" right and wrong existed! The Darwinian claims that his/her theory gives an entire analysis of our moral sentiments. Nothing more is needed. Given two worlds, identical except that one has an objective morality and the other does not, the humans therein would think and act in exactly the same ways. Hence the objective foundation for morality is redundant."[22]

This formulation of the redundancy argument makes the assumption that objectivists must construe ethics as non-natural or extra-human. From the perspective of someone who holds that objective morality is grounded in objective human nature this argument misses its mark. From a naturalistic perspective, what could it possibly mean to have two worlds that are identical yet one has an objective morality and the other does not?

An objective morality understood naturalistically is one that is rooted in human nature. Would the two worlds have identical human natures? If they do have identical human natures then on this naturalistic account it's impossible for one world to have an objective morality and the other world not to. On the other hand, if the two worlds have two different human natures then the two worlds are not identical! In neither case is objective morality shown to be redundant, it is always rooted to the human nature contingently obtaining in the world in which it is found.

The redundancy argument only works and makes clear sense if you construe objective morality as hovering outside the natural order of things like a third wheel just waiting for Ockham's razor to come along. The trouble that Ruse is having in fairly characterizing and fairly critiquing moral objectivity stems from a mistaken assumption concerning the independence criterion of objectivism. When a Platonic moral realist says that moral facts are independent from human beliefs and evidence, this is (on a traditional reading of Plato) a metaphysical claim. But when a naturalistic moral realist says that moral facts are independent from human beliefs and evidence, this is only a logical claim. This distinction should not be foreign or unfamiliar to Ruse. Look at how he uses the independence criterion when he describes the common (modern) way of distinguishing facts and values, and simultaneously reveals his commitment to a scientific realism. He says that:

"Facts are statements about the way things are: they are objective, independent of human experience. Science aims to be about facts: descriptions and understandings. This applies to Darwinian evolutionary theory. Values are about the way things ought to be: they are more subjective, they refer to human feelings and senses of obligation or judgment."[23]

When he says that scientific facts are "objective, independent of human experience" does he mean extra-human in the sense that these facts are non-natural entities hovering outside the natural realm independently existing apart from human experience? No, not at all. He means that scientific facts obtain whether individuals believe in them or not. He himself in this context understands the independence criterion as making a logical distinction between what exists and our beliefs about what exists.

Ruse is trying to use Ockham's razor to cut out objective values, but with a naturalistic objective morality there's nothing for him to cut out. The only thing that he could cut out is his contention that there are "innate constraints rooted in the genes and put in place by natural selection".[24] No doubt there are theorists who are skeptical about these innate moral constraints, but Ruse and E.O. Wilson believe that there is growing empirical evidence for these genetically based dispositions and constraints on morality.

Before I leave the redundancy argument I'd like to consider a different and more colorful version of it, one that works against objectivism if and only if we accept Ruse's unwarranted supposition that objectivists comprehend ethics as a set of eternal, non-contingent, fixed verities.

"Suppose we had evolved in a rather different way. Suppose, to take an extreme example, we had evolved from termite-like creatures, rather than from savanna-dwelling primates. Termites need to eat each others' faeces, in order to regain certain parasites used in digestion, which are lost during the termites' periodic moults. With such a background as this, our highest ethical imperatives might be very strange indeed. We would live our lives in blissful ignorance of what God or objective morality truly willed."[25]

This is a version of the redundancy argument because he is claiming that if we had evolved differently then it is possible that our morality would now be different and hence appeals to an "objective morality" would be beside the point, i.e., redundant. But if we purge the assumption of eternal, non-contingent, fixed verities from our understanding of objectivism, and interpret objective ethics as simply ethics as rooted in universal human nature, here is what we are left with: Under Ruse's hypothetical scenario our human nature would be different, so our morality would be different.

It does not at all follow that we would live in ignorance of what objective morality required. Our objective morality, i.e., morality grounded in our universal human nature, would involve those behaviors that would contribute to our well-being as termite-like beings. There is no redundancy of objective morality if we understand objective morality as referring to and rooted in our contingent, yet innate, dispositions and capacities. Once we purge objectivism of metaphysical extravagances then the redundancy argument turns out to be attacking a straw man.

V. Objectivity, Error, and Illusion

There is one other key element of Ruse's Darwinian ethics. Ruse believes that it is acceptable to talk about morality as if it is objective and he acknowledges that moral discourse has an objective feel to it. Yet he cannot accept that morality is indeed objective because in his mind that would commit him to a non-naturalistic and non-contingent account of ethics. Ruse thus feels compelled to reject objectivism in favor of (not relativism of course, but) subjectivism.

If subjectivism is true, however, then how could the Darwinian explain the surface appearance of objectivity? Following J.L. Mackie, Ruse adopts what is called in metaethics, an error theory. Yes, morality seems to be about objective moral facts and truths but the objectivity and truth in morality is illusory, it is an error to take the prescriptive, categorical, and objective feel of morality as face value reflections of what morality actually is. According to Ruse,

"The Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity."[26]

"We may have choice about whether to do right or wrong, but we have no choice about right and wrong themselves. If morality did not have this air of externality or objectivity, it would not be morality and (from a biological perspective) would fail to do what it is intended to do...In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes."[27]

The way that Ruse (following Mackie) maintains that ethics is full of error and illusion and yet still manages to take ethics seriously is to distinguish metaethics from substantive (normative) ethics. They allege that one can hold a metaethical skepticism while accepting a normative approach such as utilitarianism or deontology.

But given what Ruse has said about innate moral dispositions hard-wired into human nature I don't think it is fitting for him to call himself a metaethical subjectivist or a metaethical skeptic. As in the quotation above, an error theorist must hold that morality merely has an "air of objectivity" while deep down it is illusory or subjective. With Ruse's insistence that morality is grounded in human genetic nature one must strain to imagine why he would regard morality as having merely an air of objectivity-he says morality is rooted in the genes of all human beings, how much more objective do we have to get?

VI. Conclusion

Darwinian ethics emphasizes that ethics is a cooperative strategy that is deeply rooted in the contingent nature of the human species. Darwinian ethics vindicates common sense morality by saying it is rooted in our genes, innate dispositions and capacities, and that there are innate constraints on our human behavior. Darwinian ethics is fully naturalistic and incompatible with relativism. When taken together, these features of Darwinian ethics do not comport with error theory, subjectivism, or relativism. These elements comport most agreeably with a naturalistic moral realism. Ruse and Wilson are doing important work by bringing empirical findings to light that are relevant to moral philosophy. I just wish that they would realize that in so doing, they are advancing the position of naturalistic moral realism not metaethical skepticism. When I reflect on their work in developing a Darwinian perspective on ethics and their insistence that "the differences between us are far outweighed by the similarities"[28] I don't have reason to be skeptical about the ultimate foundations of morality, on the contrary, I have reason to be optimistic that there is indeed a shared universal human nature and therefore a shared deep structure to morality. [29]

2007-02-08T15:46:00.000-05:00

POSTMODERN ETHICS: RICHARD RORTY & MICHAEL POLANYI
by John Rothfork, from here

In this essay I hope to answer some of the charges made against postmodernism in general and against Richard Rorty's work in particular by critics who often feel caught in the position of being attracted by the philosophical allure of postmodern epistemology but angry at finding themselves on a slippery slope sliding towards what they fear is moral decay and intellectual anarchy. Christopher Norris' prolific work may speak for many who feel this way. In "Consensus 'Reality' and Manufactured Truth" (Southern Humanities Review, 26.1; Winter, 1992), Norris excoriated the least restrained -- or most poetic -- member of the French postmodern contingent, Jean Baudrillard, for being so caught up in his enthusiasm for the simulated "realities" of computer "worlds" that he found it difficult to tell the difference between an arcade game, CNN programming, and the actual military event of the Persian Gulf War. The consequence was a loss of moral judgment. In "'New Times,' Postmodernism, and the Politics of Distraction" (Southern Humanities Review, 26.3; Summer, 1992) Norris argued that postmodernism is a "convenient alibi for thinkers with a large (if unacknowledged) stake in the 'cultural logic of late capitalism'" (269). The suggestion is that moral judgment is subsumed by ideological rhetoric.

Among the postmodern crowd, Rorty is notoriously forthright about his politics. Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarian program are obvious points of origin for Rorty's political outlook. Utilitarian ethics presumes that moral discussion originates from the point of view of the individual ego. It consequently construes all values as personal possessions. Marxism, Christianity, Confucianism, and other similarly comprehensive outlooks, believe that utilitarianism is mistaken in this. Thus Marxism begins by recognizing that, strictly speaking, individuals do not atomically exist: "the real nature of man is the totality of social relations" (Marx, 83). Hence values are social and cannot be adequately defined by an inventory of personal possessions. Quality of life cannot be measured by a bank account or by similarly assessing personal possessions, including, perhaps, how a person is progressing in her self-chosen (arbitrary) life project or "idiosyncratic fantasy" (Contingency, 42). Somehow the public dimension must also be assessed, not as utilitarians would do this -- to reduce obstacles to private projectss -- but in the sense of measuring dedication to a goal, such as justice, or realization of other social values. This may be overly obvious and old fashioned, but I think it helps to see that Rorty and many of his critics often take contrary or incommensurate ethical stands. Professing in the utilitarian model, Rorty says "the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that the goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard 'bourgeois freedoms'" (Contingency, 84). A contrary response might object that too much is hidden by the glib qualifier, "to the best of his or her abilities"; that too much in the moral realm is assumed to be a matter of personal choice and that what is required -- for truth, if not justice -- is much more discussion and consequent recognition of how social contexts affect this process; that the process is not so much "self-creation" as social creation. This opens up the values-as-social dimension and ultimately redefines the ethical outlook as incommensurate with utilitarianism.

Thomas Kuhn explains in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which offers a postmodern notion of science, that a paradigm (e.g. utilitarianism) is only rejected for reasons that arise internally. Most often an anomaly arises which ultimately forces believers to convert to another paradigm to resolve the anomaly. Rather than argue across paradigm boundaries about which community -- Christians, Muslims, Confucians, Marxists, or capitalists -- exclusively offers real truth and justice, I wish to pursue an interparadigm discussion, focusing on an apparent anomaly in postmodernism which threatens its viability. That problem or anomaly is whether postmodernism can sustain a positive ethics immune to the caustic action of its methods, which dissolve epistemological claims about truth and metaphysical claims about substantive entities, like God or Reason. Must not ethical claims also similarly dissolve into arbitrary personal tastes, idiosyncratic fantasy, and social whims? Norris (again speaking for many others) believes this is why postmodernism is at a dead-end: "My point in all this is that ontological skepticism -- of the sort now de rigueur among 'advanced' cultural theorists -- necessarily gives rise to such disabling consequences in the ethico-political sphere" ("Truth, Ideology, and 'Local Knowledge': Some Contexts of Postmodern Skepticism," Southern Humanities Review, 28.1; Spring, 1994: 26). Even those who praise Rorty's work in epistemology and hermeneutics feel that his ethics is merely an unavoidable entailment. For example, in a recent collection of twenty essays on Rorty's work, there is only one devoted to ethics and in that essay the authors profess: "What is most admirable about Rorty, we feel, is the courage, integrity and clear-sightedness with which he bites the bullet and draws out the inevitable consequences of anti-foundationalism for moral and social thought." The authors regret being logically compelled to follow Rorty in this direction, saying, "what we find admirable we also find deeply troubling" (Guignon and Hiley, 343-4). Having explained how they think Rorty is confused between existentialism and communitarian concerns (358), they reject his morality as hopelessly relative: "it becomes difficult to make sense of why we have the commitments we have or why we should take one path into the future rather than another" (361). At the end of his excellent new book (1994) on Rorty, David Hall also feels frustrated, saying that "what he provides us is broadly irrelevant to interactive public discourse. What we are finally offered . . . [is] Richard Rorty's tabletalk" (236). Hall admires this as elegant, but seems to regret a loss of philosophical rigor and certainty: "he employs the art of contextualization characteristic of the aesthetic rather than the strictly logical thinker" (220). Hall fears that this will have the effect of shifting moral discourse in the direction of private taste and consequently abandoning public life to various, arbitrary technical procedures: "a mishmash of midrange narratives which account for this or that institution, discipline, or movement" (234). Hall's fear -- if I have correctly stated it -- is well founded, for Rorty is not ambiguous on this point: "the ironist's final vocabulary can be and should be split into a large private and a small public sector, sectors which have no particular relation to one another" (Contingency, 100). The split is irremediable because the ironist or postmodernist recognizes the contingency of her beliefs and does not think that these can point to some transcendental (hence public) foundation. On the public side, Rorty invokes Jean-Jacques Rousseau's conception of sovereignty: "A liberal society is one which is content to call 'true' (or 'right' or 'just') whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be, whatever view wins in a free and open encounter" (Contingency, 67).

Anyone who knows Rorty's work, knows that he cannot invoke an ethics claiming an absolute foundation in a set of principles (as in religion), or in a process (as in Kant's categorical imperative), or in claims about human nature (as in utilitarianism and existentialism. My interpretation of Rorty as utilitarian should not be pressed here to make Rorty carry all the philosophical baggage associated with the historical position). The only choice left seems to be relativism and even here there are epistemological difficulties. In an essay on Thomas Kuhn and his conception of incommensurate paradigms, Rorty confessed: "As far as I can see, relativism (either in the form of 'many truth' or 'many worlds') could only enter the mind of somebody who, like Plato and [Michael] Dummett, was antecedently convinced that some of our true beliefs are related to the world in a way in which others are not" (Papers, 1: 51). The point is that such putative "knowledge" is impossible, since knowledge can only be gained through an actual language or historically concrete paradigm. Most readers fail to follow the epistemological subtlety or cogency of this argument -- that there must be "operational logic" or a literal level from which to launch "relative" metaphors or alternative interpretations -- and continue to fear a slide into a moral relativism in which every perspective or interpretation is equal. Charles Taylor implies as much, saying "that although this 'consequence of pragmatism' might be distasteful, it is inseparably linked to the whole position" (Taylor, Epistemological Tradition, 259; see also Sources of the Self where he says: "The utilitarian Enlightenment . . . speaks from a moral position which it can't acknowledge," because its purpose is to debunk naive belief in moral statements that presume unassailable religious authority; 339-40).

I hope to argue that there is firm ground for pragmatist ethics in this slender point about operational logic. This ground can be traced back to Aristotle and his conception of an irreducible efficient cause (see Dreyfus, 233). The Hungarian physician, physicist, and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, wrote a great deal about how Aristotle's efficient cause works to create "personal knowledge" or "embodied knowledge" or "knowledge as performance." Charles Taylor advocates the same pragmatic epistemology and could be paraphrasing Polanyi when he writes: "Our understanding itself is embodied. That is, our bodily know-how, and the way we act and move . . ." (Dialogical Self, 309). I believe this provides better ground to recognize something common among all human beings than Norris' more abstruse accounts of language or deep grammar ("Truth," 13-23). The idiom, "personal knowledge," suggests that knowledge is never entirely a state of mind, but always originally grounded in embodied action. Embodied experience is profoundly subjective, yet as knowledge it is necessarily public; something discussible. Polanyi was, after all, a physical scientist. Equal stress must be put on both terms -- "personal" and "knowledge" -- to avoid reductionism in either direction: into fuzzy subjectivism and taste or sterile formalism. In this pragmatic epistemology, knowledge is embodied in human experience and performance, never reified in Platonic abstractions or in a list of moral principles; nor can it be easily relegated, in the other direction, to idiosyncratic fantasy or individual taste. Can an ethical theory be built on such small epistemological ground?

Realists who profess in some realm of transcendentals believe that something like what I am purposing is the trick pulled by Rorty and other postmodernists: that they raise "certain purely heuristic [epistemological] principles (such as the 'arbitrary' nature of the sign and the idea of language as a system of differences 'without positive terms') into a high point of doctrine absurdly remote from the way that language actually functions in a real-world social and material context" ("Politics," 245). Consequently, Norris feels that postmodernism "amounts to little more than a pretext for ignoring the [Real] material, structural, and socioeconomic factors that have produced this latest 'pathological' episode" ("Politics," 262); or, as he puts it more generously in his latest essay, "this [procedure] is fine up to a point" ("Truth," 10). This is a moment of definition or conversion; certainly we have touched a paradigm boundary here. I hope to now avoid taking up the complex, but increasingly familiar, postmodern analysis of language. I will be content with sketching Michael Polanyi's efforts to create an ethics from personal knowledge or embodied experience (see also Charles Taylor's, The Ethics of Authenticity, 1991) and suggesting that despite their differences on questions of human nature and epistemology, Polanyi's notion of ethics as performative knowledge is congenial and useful to Rorty, and may ultimately provide the ground for postmodern ethics.

It is perennially fashionable to claim that Americans have no values (utilitarian greed being descriptive rather than normative) or that traditional (usually religious) values are in imminent danger of total erosion. Allan Bloom's recently popular book, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), promotes the second charge in regard to higher education; that it is in danger of trivialization. Bloom blames Nietzsche for the putative fact that among Americans, "Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact" (143). I wish to argue the reverse: that Americans have deeply held beliefs, which are difficult to recognize or deliver up for a Platonic examination, because they are possessed in an Aristotelian sense as performative knowledge. A second issue complicates this. For there is currently a fight in America over the operational logic or vocabulary which enables public or ethical discourse to proceed. The fight is over how we -- as women, Native American Indians, Budddhists -- talk about our ethical performative knowledge. One side hopes to conserve modernist terminology and the serious principles it articulates. Others, like Rorty, find the old lectures irrelevant and monotonous. Consequently the conservatives see Rorty and other postmodernists as threats; as iconoclasts, anarchists, juveniles, or -- at the least -- as irreverent. The tacit demand is that they must take seriously the traditional vocabulary of ethics or forfeit the right to speak publicly. The modernists fear that their enemies are trivializing a great and serious tradition that should be revered. The links in this Great Chain of Being comprise such things as Platonism, Christianity, German philosophy, and Marxist justice. It is significant that Saul Bellow wrote the foreword to Bloom's book. For Bellow and Bloom are allies in the cause of modernist seriousness. Self-consciously dedicated to inviolate principles, they are offended by postmodern frivolity. When Nietzsche, and those who further his cause, offer non-traditional metaphors, scholars like Bloom see an attack on what they consider to be the sacrosanct objects that lie behind their modernist terminology, the Platonic transcendentals that their words hope to denote and to which these men are seriously devoted.

The preferred tactic of postmodernists is to avoid engagement, to talk about something else, often something silly or entertaining to break the tension, which, because it is so deadly serious, ultimately threatens coercive violence. One sees this in the fiction, for example, of Kurt Vonnegut and Milan Kundera. By the way, Rorty has a laudatory essay on Kundera's fiction, nominating his works as preferable to those of Heidegger, because, "What the novelist finds especially comic is the attempt to privilege one [set of] descriptions, to take it as an excuse for ignoring all the others" (Papers, 2: 74). More concretely, Kundera's early fiction suggested that when confronted by the duress of orthodoxies, such as Cold War Marxism or capitalism, one would do well to avoid either submission or rebellion by changing the vocabulary in which life is rendered meaningful; changing the discussion, for instance, to one of love, romance, or -- as it is more likely to be expressed by Kundera's characters -- chasing women. I want to consider Rorty's work because, unlike postmodern novelists, he does not so quickly change the vocabulary. A considerable part of Rorty's fame comes from his polite and patient attempts to answer the modernist invective against postmodernism. It is difficult to be content with postmodern advice to forget the consoling, but dangerous, rituals that devotion to explicit principles offers; to accept "that liberal democracies might work better if they stopped trying to give universalistic self-justifications, stopped appealing to notions like 'rationality' and 'human nature' and instead viewed themselves simply as promising social experiments" (Papers, 2: 193). Those of us who trust Rorty's advice, do not expect people involved in such experiments to be unprincipled nor to be mired in the philosophic swamp of moral relativism. We expect them to discover the principles that are important in their lives through their own experience rather than by taking principles off the shelf; out of some philosophy text or from a sermon or political speech.

A generation ago (1953), the Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote that, "The man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling" (Mind, 29). Milosz implied that Americans were too literal minded, too conservative, and not well enough versed in postmodern examples of social and ethical contingency. He testified that many East European intellectuals found it difficult to believe that Americans, who seemed so modern when it came to refrigerators and automobiles, could be so backward in regard to philosophy and logical consistency. In places like Warsaw, Milosz says he was sometimes asked: "Are Americans really stupid?" (Mind, 25). Like Polanyi, Professor Milosz adroitly suggested that it was this very backwardness -- which both writers associate with a stubborn and deep faith in Christianity -- that saved the Anglo-Americans from becoming enthusiastic partisans for the principles of Nazism or Stalinism. I think both writers, especially Milosz, found something intriguingly similar between the inarticulate Christian faith of common people in the Anglo-American world and the equally inarticulate Christian faith of peasants in Eastern European and Russia. This being the case, how could the societies have gone in such polemically different historic directions? And if it was Christian faith that saved the West from concentration camps and gulags, why would we consider giving up the faith that saved us for the insipid satisfactions of academic philosophy, much less the Brahminic lectures of Rorty? Milosz suggested that the kaleidoscope of European enthusiasms for modern philosophic programs in the twentieth century incubated a profound relativism and cynicism. Two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and other lesser traumas sensitized Europeans to the notion that tomorrow they may have to renounce today's enthusiasm for yet another novelty. Thus, Europeans developed a cautious rationalization in regard to all belief. To non-Americans, this cynicism may resemble Rorty's epistemological caution. Milosz suggested that European political tragedies had the effect of destroying all sense of trust and community. Eastern Europe was left with a sophisticated relativism, a pervasive cynicism, and unavoidably, a sense of nostalgia for what it could no longer bring itself to believe. Sneering at the British and Americans for being too stubborn to abandon their old fashioned and philosophically backward beliefs, they nonetheless envied their stable communities of law, science, technology, commerce, and even art and entertainment. What was nearly impossible for them to understand was how such communities came into existence and were sustained. As good philosophers, they looked for principles.

Although he did not identify Nietzsche as the villain, Milosz' charge was the same as Allan Bloom's: "Today man believes there is nothing in him, so he accepts anything" (Mind, 81). Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Lev Tolstoy before him, Milosz was nostalgic for the cultural bulwark of Christian belief. Of course he was not a theologian and consequently not greatly interested in the terms of Christian faith. At the end of his book, Milosz sentimentalizes the state of belief itself, saying "the superstition of Polish women gathering herbs to make charms, the custom of setting an empty plate for a traveler on Christmas Eve betoken inherent good that can be developed." In contrast, he claims that "in the circles in which my friend lives, to call man a mystery is to insult him" (Mind, 249). As Plato told us, principles must be clear cut. When the day-to-day tacit process of belief, decision, dedication, and community involvement breaks down, principles often assume an exaggerated, even a salvific, importance. For they promise to restore the very thing that was lost. The problem is that what was lost was not a principle, but a lived way of life, embodied knowledge, for which the principle is, at best, an abstraction, at worst, a caricature. In any case, this sentimental attachment is too poetic to deal with pragmatically; it cannot be the focus for social development. Milosz can be powerfully graphic in illustrating the terror of Nazism and Stalinization -- as when he conjures the uncanny feeling of how a familiar street suddenly seems alien because many of the cobblestones have been turned on edge by machine gun bullets -- but for many American readers, and certainly American pragmatists, Milosz becomes obscurantist when he turns to nostalgia, to hopes of making Christian metaphors as powerfully vivid to bourgeois Americans as they were to Milosz himself and his comrades when they faced terror and death. The same difficulty is present in Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn. Over thousands of pages, they try to convince readers that the highest moral position, perhaps even the only authentically moral position, is that of standing in front of the firing squad; being crucified like Jesus in defense of a principle. The contemporary Russian wryly comments that we only discover our beliefs when they are imperiled: "When things are bad, we are not ashamed of our God. We are only ashamed of Him when things go well" (Gulag, 3: 104). Rorty would say, that is exactly the way things should be; that rendering tacit values into a set of principles can be caused, no doubt, by terror, but that this experience is not the paradigm model of morality. Nonetheless, moralists like Bloom follow Dostoyevsky's religious existentialism to infer that Americans are morally dim-witted and ultimately without values. Milosz laments that "in the countries where Christian churches thrive there are practically no genuinely Christian novels" (Emperor, 80). From their East European and Russian pulpits it appears that American capitalists snore away like contented hogs in warm mud. The non-utilitarian moralists are provoked to hysterical self-righteousness when writers like Rorty shrug their shoulders. Thus Milosz informs us that "any normal human being who reads these Russian writers [Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak] in America, for instance, must have one dominant feeling -- that of shame," because Milosz says, we lead frivolous, narcissistic lives, ignoring our clear moral duty to come to the aid of our Christian brothers and sisters, who are the victims of a palpable evil (Emperor, 79).

Many American intellectuals are cowed by this culturally familiar Jewish and Christian ritual of repentance. They may not fall to their knees to profess their guilt, but they can be expected to mumble apologies, offer small donations, and wiggle into the anonymity of the back pews. Rorty's suggestion is that we should not be so eager to either capitulate or change the subject as to change the way the subject is talked about. He bluntly admits that "Pragmatists would prefer to have no high altars, and instead just have lots of picture galleries, book displays, movies, concerts, ethnographic museums, museums of science and technology, and so on -- lots of cultural options but no privileged central discipline or practice" (Papers, 2: 132). Undoubtedly, Milosz and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky's Underground Man would find this vapid. We could almost mistake Milosz for Johnathan Edwards when he thunders: "How deluded are those respectable citizens who, striding along the streets of English or American cities, consider themselves men of virtue and goodness!" (Mind, 122). Solzhenitsyn is also contemptuous, saying that from the gulag, "the fine words of the great humanists will sound like the chatter of the well-fed and free" (v 3: 235). As Milosz says, if we Americans were normal human beings, instead of capitalist ideologues, we would be ashamed.

Well, we are well-fed and free; and the zek does not possess moral superiority simply by being in the gulag, any more so than did his counterpart, the monk, by being in the monastery. One can almost play Rorty's part, innocuously asking: "What is the point here? To get the zek out of prison or to join him in doing penance?" Being well-fed and free are not gratuitous qualities that, like coal or petroleum, one nation may be lucky enough to possess, while another nation can only envy its neighbor's luck. From the utilitarian view, being well-fed and free are cultural attainments. The Trinidadian writer V. S. Naipaul recognizes the outraged, if confused, sense of justice voiced by many in the postcolonial world, especially the Islamic world, who seem to think that military weapons and all kinds of technological products are somehow gratuitous; that like coconuts, they just grow naturally (Among the Believers, 79, 135). If that were the case, then perhaps it would be unjust for one part of the globe to hoard these. Morality would suggest a more equal distribution, although there are not many who argue this in regard to oil. Naipaul's advice is for the moralists and prophets to learn a second language; to quit praying and preaching, and to begin professing in the tenets of the Enlightenment, especially those devoted to science and productive of technology and capitalist business. Until they do so, the cultural products they desire, and denounce, will continue to be luxury imports produced by the Great Satan. In an especially illuminating part of his book, David Hall suggests that we can learn much about Rorty's program by considering "a strand of modernity he effectively omits from his Grand Narrative," that of the worldly philosophers -- Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Ben Franklin -- who seek to define values in terms of private property or personal possessions (41-42). This is the implicit context for nearly everything Rorty says, but I believe Hall is right in suggesting that we easily and repeatedly forget this context. Rorty can hardly be more explicit about his social philosophy. Can any reader can miss his bald declaration of political commitment -- bluntly admitting his advocacy for American "Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism" (Papers, 1: 197-202) when he perfectly well knows that intellectuals today, more often than not, use each of these four terms pejoratively -- or his adulation, for example, of John Dewey as a champion for American political values?

The European claim against America has long been that it lacks a deeply serious (public) culture. From the discipline of philosophy, the charge is that Americans have no real philosophy and consequently no real principles. Rorty simply considers this a compliment rather than a criticism (see, for example, "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," Papers, 1: 175-196). Rorty might easily have counter-attacked by suggesting that it was European dedication to philosophic principles and systems that, in some measure, led to concentration camps and gulags. Trust Rorty to be more polite. He agrees with the European assessment, but interprets the significance as an American, saying, "The typical German story of the self-consciousness of the modern age (the one which runs from Hegel through Marx, Weber, and Nietzsche) focuses on figures who were preoccupied with the world we lost when we lost the religion of our ancestors. But this story may be both too pessimistic and too exclusively German" (Papers, 2: 171). Rorty wants to change the terms of the discussion: from Greek and German metaphysics toward French elegance, English bluntness, and ultimately into the vocabulary offered by American postmodern pragmatism. One can easily imagine the gleam in Rorty's eye and the exasperation of his opponent when he counters the charge of superficiality, saying: "there is a moral purpose behind this light-mindedness. The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological topics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world's inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality" (Papers, 1: 193). Here Rorty advances the cause of the Enlightenment against the moral and philosophical pretensions of modernism as much as against less sophisticated and more obvious forms of intolerance and fundamentalism. His program is light-minded because Rorty hopes that society "can be 'poeticized' rather than as the Enlightenment hope[d] . . . it can be 'rationalized' or 'scientized' (Contingency, 53).

Even so, the charge is often thought to remain unanswered: American culture is mere entertainment and Americans have no principles beyond (private/capitalist) self-indulgence. Rorty is happy to agree and to also tease and incite serious-minded moralists like Bloom. In so doing Rorty tacitly smuggles in his own moral reason for indulging in light-mindedness. The light-minded tone of Rorty's essays -- his charming voice, and disarming directness -- tacitly does much of the hard work of pragmatism by deflecting attention and argument away from the modernist focal point, which is fixed on the transcendental objects of the argument. Rorty charms and entertains us. The urbane, witty, and elegant style of his essays is all we get. Trying to reduce them to a set of principles and graduate-student notes does not work. For nothing is proved with Germanic thunder and finality. We do not leave the lecture room feeling we have done a good day's work and that we have gotten an inch or two closer to the Truth. Hopefully, we enjoyed the lecture and consequently are ready to work for social projects that promise more such occasions. The postmodern principle comes as almost an unnecessarily blunt afterthought: "It is important to emphasize at this point that there is no hidden power called Being which designed or operated the escalator. Nobody whispered in the ears of the early Greeks, the poets of the West. There is just us, in the grip of no power save those of the words we happen to speak" (Papers, 2: 36).

Rorty and the postmodernists seek to turn the tables on Heidegger and Milosz, charging them with being too literal minded and self-indulgently nostalgic. Following Rorty's lead in comparing the irony of Kundera to the nostalgia of Heidegger, Hall says: "There is no surer way of telling the . . . bad guys than to note that the black hats [are] abetted by a brooding nostalgia" (124). When attacked, modernists typically respond in moral dudgeon, which ironically sets Rorty's self-composure and elegance in high relief. (His model here is Bertrand Russell.) The audience withers in vicarious guilt and fear at the end of Solzhenitsyn's immense three volume Gulag Archipelago when the Russian inveighs: "All you freedom-loving 'left-wing' thinkers in the West! You left laborites! You progressive American, German, and French students! As far as you are concerned, none of this amounts to much. As far as you are concerned, this whole book of mine is a waste of effort. You may suddenly understand it all someday -- but only when you yourselves hear 'hands behind your backs there!' and step ashore on our Archipelago" (Gulag, v 3: 518). Conjuring such terrifying moral threats in Kansas or California, it is difficult not to be hurried into Solzhenitsyn's false dilemma: that either you get religion and fight the devil or lazily saunter down the road with him to the gulag. This moral choice is as American as Johnathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. The underlying logic (commitment to salvific principles) is distinctly Protestant. The Calvinist work ethic is bent into a shape required by the Cold War. It is difficult to sound resolute by responding in Enlightenment fashion, saying that in fact Americans are fighting the devils of fundamentalism and hysteria when they seem to be doing nothing more than indulging themselves and having a good time. Such an attitude must appear to those fighting for their very lives as a maddeningly frivolous denial of moral responsibility.

Rather than quote Rorty again to continue this endless argument, between the ardent and the frivolous, I want to bring Michael Polanyi and his Aristotelian nuance into the discussion, both to support the ethical and political responsibility of Rorty's position and to claim that Polanyi has one or two ideas that are useful to Rorty and postmodernism, especially his tensional ethics, which allows for both tolerance and unconditional commitment. Like Milosz, Polanyi puzzled over why Europe fell prey to the tragic vocabularies of fascism and Marxism while England and America did not. Polanyi thought that "The consummation of this destructive process was prevented in the Anglo-American region by an instinctive reluctance to pursue the accepted philosophic premises to their ultimate conclusions" (Meaning, 10). But why? Instinct is hardly an answer. Obviously, culture and values were at issue. Was it because people in these regions were less philosophically adept than in Europe, so that they ironically escaped out of backwardness, living in "a nineteenth-century mode of life" (Mind, 29)? In a way, Polanyi thought so. He suggested that the Catholic and Orthodox churches bred a near fatal conditioned response to institutional directives, rather than nurturing a Protestant shift of responsibility for values to the process of personal judgment. Catholicism and Orthodoxy kept their congregations as dependent as children, while Protestantism, recognizing adolescence (in this metaphor), tried to aid its charges in the struggle to become adult. When traditional religious metaphors eroded to the point of irrelevance and transparency, European ex-Catholics and ex-Orthodox Christians took up the serious texts of Nietzsche and Marx, being unprepared to read them in any other fashion than as scripture. In contrast American Protestants had three hundred years of experience in arguing over such texts. American zealots seldom engaged in violence, not only because any specific sect was inevitably in the minority and because many American immigrants had fled European religious violence, but also because Protestant theology identified such fanaticism as idolatry or self-deception. If one's faith is properly centered in God, "the spirit of Protestantism involves a willingness to live at risk" in regard to history (Brown, 40). Obviously the Protestant spirit does not foster other worldly mystical disengagement, but it does curb the demanded by Milosz, Solzhenitsyn, Bloom, and other such moralists for unconditional dedication to a specific (one is tempted to say, "relative") social or political program.

If Polanyi is correct about this, one questions why Lutheran Germany was such easy prey for the rhetoric of Nazism. The answer is found not only amid the traumatic whirlwind of dislocations suffered by Germans in this century, but also in the suggestion that Lutheranism, as the initial indictment of Catholicism, was not sufficiently radical. In regions where it replaced Catholicism, Lutheranism remained similarly monolithic and culturally pervasive. Worst of all, it conserved and perhaps even intensified the dependence of common people on the institution of the church and the paternalistic guidance of the pastor. In contrast to German Lutheranism, Anglo-American Protestantism quickly splintered into scores of competing denominations. Even when a believer inherited the creed of her parents, she was obligated to make her own individual decision and personal declaration in front of the assembled congregation. Thus one can feel the anxiety in Sam Sewell's adolescent daughter from the relevant pages of his diary. I think Polanyi was largely correct when he said: "The speculative and practical restraints which saved liberalism from self-destruction in the Anglo-American area were due in the first place to the distinctly religious character of this liberalism" (Meaning, 11). Unlike Polanyi, Rorty and I do not see some special virtue at work here; or rather we do, but what we see is an Aristotelian ethics at work rather than the hand of God. Anglo-American restraint was less due to the recognition of Christian principles and more the result of experience, habit, and culturally self-evident ethnocentric practices. I am not denigrating the moral significance of this stand against tyranny in the least (which is what Bloom and the conservatives often hear), but I am seeking to demythologize it, to remove the transcendental claim, which is the same claim at work in Solzhenitsyn's work: that unless we accept the whole set of familiar metaphors about Christ and doing Christ's work, our lives cannot be redeemed, cannot be compassionate, or even significant. Despite his admirable, life-long effort to explicate how tacit knowledge works in the area of scientific culture, Polanyi sometimes forgot to fully notice how performative knowledge also works in democratic societies in the areas of value and politics. Like Milosz, he was nostalgic for familiar metaphors and the bulwark of serious principles. Thus Polanyi blamed the French Enlightenment for destroying not just corrupt religious institutions and customs, but for destroying the very attitude of religious trust and belief. Confusing Platonic principles with Aristotelian processes of ethics, he claimed that the "new and fiercer Enlightenment" of our century continued "to strike relentlessly at every humane and rational principle rooted in the soil of Europe" (Meaning, 19). Perhaps, but the mystery Polanyi recognized was that Americans remained unresponsive. Why? After all, Americans, much more than the French or the English, are heirs to Enlightenment and utilitarian thinking. Americans fought the Axis powers, recognizing their European vocabulary and dedication as alien, but apparently not because of a self-conscious commitment to a contrary modern philosophic program, nor entirely out of the old fashioned religious motives that Polanyi expected and Solzhenitsyn demands.

I know we are encroaching on territory that invites platitudes and confessions of belief, such as we have heard from Milosz and Solzhenitsyn. I will try to answer the gambit in a way that I hope will illustrate why postmodernists refuse to offer a set of principled beliefs. One would have liked to have asked Professor Polanyi about American popular culture and the life of common folks, even as it was thirty years ago, especially because he had the opportunity to experience something of it in the decade of the sixties as a visiting professor at several American universities. The proposition is amusing because we know the answer: he would have been contemptuous. In his brief preface, Harry Prosch, who edited the essays in the tersely titled book, Meaning, claims that Polanyi's essays illustrate "how the modern mind has destroyed meaning" and how Polanyi's work offers a "restoration of meaning" (Meaning, x). The first part of this -- "how the modern mind has destroyed meaning" -- could serve as an epigram for Allan Bloom's book. It is intriguing to conjure up the image of three old, fragile, white-haired gentlemen (borrowing the setting from Saul Bellow's wonderful novel, Mr. Sammler's Planet): Mr. Sammler and Professors Milosz and Polanyi, holding hands for mutual support, timidly shuffle along the ghetto streets of Philadelphia or Chicago, aghast at the squalor, violence, and ignorance they find everywhere. "Can this really be America?" they wonder. "What has happened? Where is the land of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln or even Carl Sandburg?" They came out looking for principles. They are heart-struck with disappointment and quick to cast blame while indulging in nostalgia for Norman Rockwell and an intellectually Disneyfied portrait of a lost America.

Rorty would suggest that such talk about principles is best forgotten or left to politicians to use in campaign speeches where we recognize the rhetoric for what it is. Let old men lament with each other about the illusions of their youth. If they must, let them talk to historians, but not infect youth with illusory ideals to sacrifice their still callow lives for. At its best, such talk is aesthetically amusing. It offers the young a vocabulary of love, like Arthurian romance and Wagnerian opera. At worst, such deadly serious talk about religious and philosophic principles has created havoc in Europe this century. It gave youth nothing but a vocabulary of illusion and death. Solzhenitsyn quotes a figure of sixty-six million victims among Soviet citizens alone from 1917 to 1959 (v 2: 10). Milosz counts the number of victims on all sides as "two or three hundred million, more or less" (Mind, 235). Ironically, they both argued for even more corpses. Solzhenitsyn confesses that he and others in the gulags longed for nuclear war to annihilate the Soviets and as for the cost on the other side, "Well, the free never spared us a thought!" He confesses to being "appalled myself when I remember now the false and baneful hopes we cherished at the time. General nuclear destruction was no way out for anyone" (v 3: 47). Even now, one can be moved and nearly convinced by reading Mussolini, whose voice provided only a minor note, but whose ideas are powerful partly because we recognize the distorted shape of Plato in his fascism. Rorty's comment about the issues of social philosophy, so desperately fought over this century, is typically noncombatant and urbane in a light-minded way. He says: "You wish that the leaders of successful revolutions had read fewer books which gave them general ideas and more books which gave them an ability to identify imaginatively with those whom they were to rule" (Papers, 2: 80). The conservatives may lament that Rorty's pragmatic wish is light-minded and advocates a moral erosion and loss of lofty principles. But if the price of these principles is the number of corpses counted by Solzhenitsyn and Milosz, is it not morally permissible to ask if these principles are worth the cost? This is a variant of the Enlightenment era question asked against Christianity and European religious wars, which as we see in the Balkans (and elsewhere in the world) continue to pile corpses on the altar of religious principles. Of course the conservative response attributes such tragedy to insufficient seriousness, bad study habits, or half-baked ideas. Thus Milosz bitterly comments that "The leaders of the twentieth century, like Hitler for instance, drew their knowledge from popular brochures" (200). The inference is that Hitler was a bad scholar. Milosz would have recommended more serious works of philosophy and religion and a better model of Plato's philosopher-king. Rorty's advice is to drop the whole program; replace it with entertainment. Teach students the novels of Charles Dickens and Milan Kundera. If you insist on teaching Plato and Calvin and Marx, offer their texts as novels, not prophecy. The last thing needed is yet another set of serious principles to club people with. In so far as Rorty can admit to holding an ethical principle, this is it: "prevent yourself from slipping into a political attitude which will lead you to think that there is some social goal more important than avoiding cruelty" (Contingency, 65). If you insist that such an injuction must be grounded in a transcendent authority before it makes sense, what can we say? Only that you sound epistemologically obsessional.

Like Milosz and Solzhenitsyn, Polanyi professed in traditional Christian metaphors as revelatory of an absolute reality, which, among other functions, provided sure ethical and political foundations. For example, Polanyi talked about "The ever-unquenched hunger and thirst after righteousness which our civilization carries in its blood as a heritage of Christianity" (Meaning, 20). The metaphors and urgency date passages like these as World War Two propaganda. Polanyi's real legacy is found in his lengthy description of scientific judgment in Personal Knowledge (1958), which might plausibly be called a Protestant description of science, because it relies on individual judgment and conscience to discern the truth. Truth is not apprehensible as a principle. It can only be possessed through a process of personal judgment. Polanyi's talk about epistemology sounds very much like theology when he says, for example: "into every act of knowing there enters a tacit and passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known" (Personal Knowledge, 312). But Polanyi was no mystic inclined to use a German philosophical vocabulary. He would have been uncomfortable with the vagueness of Paul Tillich. As a research chemist he felt compelled to save the objective reality of the objects of science from total dissolution into metaphors, paradigms, discourse, and the perspectives illustrated in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Polanyi insisted, that for a scientist, "the object of his pursuit is not of his making. His acts stand under the judgment of the hidden reality he seeks to uncover." The scientist's knowledge comprises "personal judgments exercised responsibly with a view to a reality with which he is seeking to establish contact" (Meaning, 194). We know Polanyi was a Christian (he was a member of the Church of England), and ultimately his need for a realist metaphysics, something that the scientific numbers and terms really correspond to, caused him to adopt Stoicism; the metaphysical position that says the logos is both a mental order and an empirically discernible order. Thus Polanyi claimed that "a scientific proposition" was "an aspect of nature seeking realization in our minds" (Science, Faith, and Society, 35).

Such belief is attractive because it offers a metaphysical foundation for Christian metaphors. Nonetheless, Rorty, Kuhn, and other postmodernists would consider subscribing to such ideas as epistemological self-deception, like being so captivated by Thomas Jefferson's metaphors and Norman Rockwell's paintings that you go out looking for overt, photographable correspondences on the street. You should better understand how language or painting works. Polanyi should have known better because of his sophisticated talk about the tacit dimension and his understanding of how Aristotle's efficient cause operates epistemologically. Perhaps it is forgivable for Polanyi to have claimed in his last work, published more than a decade after Kuhn's immensely popular work, that "Thomas S. Kuhn's book On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions brought further confirmation of my views in detail" (Meaning, 56-7); but he was flat wrong. Kuhn explicitly denied realism -- the idea that there is some transcendental, prelinguistic reality which corresponds to our terminology -- and obviously would have nothing to do with Polanyi's Stoical ideas about the logos as "nature seeking realization in our minds." Perhaps Polanyi was thinking about Kuhn's detailed confirmation that science is a culture with a sociology and history like any other culture; that science is personal knowledge. Rorty quickly dissolves the focus of the argument, pointing out that "We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there" (Contingency, 4-5).

If Polanyi offered nothing to the postmodernists in his metaphysics, and perhaps only a flawed epistemology, he presented something really useful to them in his social philosophy, specifically locatable in an essay titled, "The Free Society," which comprises the last chapter of his most daring book, Meaning. (There is argument over how much that book is the result of Harry Prosch's editorial hand.) We might expect a chemist who professed a Stoic metaphysics and who was militantly Christian, to drift off to the right towards some type of fundamentalism. In part, I think it was the ominous shadow of Stalin that prevented Polanyi from indulging his nostalgia for principles and absolutes; and of course his sophisticated epistemology militated against this. Whether from the challenge of Thomas Kuhn in the area of the philosophy of science -- which is, as we have seen, unlikely -- or from the threat of totalitarianism, whatever the source, Polanyi recognized a number of discrete, discursive communities identifiable as autonomous professions. I would like to interrupt orchestrating this imagined dialogue between Rorty and Polanyi to stretch the associations you may have for this term, profession.

Before the Reformation, a profession was a public declaration of faith; specifically, it referred to the vows made on entering a religious order. The term grew more elastic after Martin Luther proclaimed that the monastic and priestly vocations of those consecrated to God were not inherently superior modes of life, and that God called people to all worthy occupations. Still, the professions of the sixteenth century were elitist, comprising theology, law, medicine, and, in the higher ranks, arms. A peasant may have had a vocation, a calling from God, to till the earth, raise a family, and prepare for the next world, but he would not have claimed these as a profession. Yet even the peasant had a tacit profession as a Christian. Because religion was the only important dimension of life in the medieval world view, a profession was synonymous with a declaration of Christian faith. I want to call your attention to the reductive nature of this outlook; the assumption that there is one fundamental vocabulary or context in which to evaluate the things that are ultimately, professionally, important. In part, John Dewey, and his disciple, Richard Rorty, conserve this reductionism, switching terminology to say that in a free society, everyone's profession is, inescapably, citizenship. For some period, we are all called to public life because it is the cost of indulging our private concerns in peace and prosperity.

Professionals have principles or standards. Initially these may be implied and tacit. But when they are perceived -- usually by the recognition that something has gone wrong and a tacit expectation of professional responsibility has not been met by a physician or a military officer, for example -- then law suits are filed and the courts force the issue to explicitly define principles of professional conduct. Something similar occurred in the Reformation when Martin Luther and others perceived that things had gone awry in the Christian program. Although the Reformation revised the notion of profession, it sought to retain the essential concept. For example, Protestants talked about the universal priesthood of believers, meaning that any Christian might perform priestly functions for another Christian, thereby revising the Catholic notion of priesthood as a specialized, consecrated profession.

Renaissance thinkers like Bacon (1561-1626) and Descartes (1596-1650) proposed an entirely new model based in reason instead of faith. By the seventeenth century, the common trait among the professions of theology, law, and medicine was a methodological reliance on reason. In the eighteenth century, the age of the Enlightenment, Europe and America explicitly professed an unconditional belief in the power of abstract and systematic thought to render the metaphors of divinity, justice, beauty, and health discernibly present in this life. Secular universities quickly responded to this paradigm shift in our Western dual heritage, consigning religious discourse to the background and putting the vocabulary of reason into the foreground of the curricula. The university was not a monastery; research, not prayer, was its focal point. Thus professors came to be identified as those who demonstrably put their faith in reason. They were not priests but mathematicians and scientists. They could not save your soul, but they offered to improve your quality of life through the effects of medicine, engineering, economics, and politics. As early as 1580 John Lyly wrote that there were two famous universities in England "for the profession of all sciences" (Eupheus). A similar commitment was articulated more than three hundred years later in The Life of Reason (1906), written by the American philosopher George Santayana, who said: "to live by science requires intelligence and faith, but not to live by it is folly" (The Philosophy of Santayana, 331). Einstein professed something of the same sort, proclaiming: "A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people" (The World As I See It, 28).

What I sought to trace was the mutation of faith from medieval Christianity to the Enlightenment; from reliance on one fundamentalism or set of principles to another. Christians thought the voice of God was discernible in Gregorian chants or in the ritual of the Mass or in the parables of the New Testament. Descartes and Newton told us God's language was mathematical physics. The vocabularies changed but the psychology remained the same; there was an expectation for a single true community and language; a nostalgia for a totalizing structure.

Now consider the early American experience in which Separatists and Puritans argued with Anglicans, Presbyterians and Baptists, and then splintered into Quakers, Methodists, Unitarians and a hundred other groups. Each community was surrounded by comparatively indifferent European immigrants, Native American Indians, and, in the South, African slaves. Rigors of physical survival gave way to frontier concerns for enterprise, profit, and progress. Each of these concerns gave rise to communities that spawned their own texts, elevated their own authorities, and offered their distinctive explanations; and none of them had to fight against a monolithic, entrenched historical authority, such as an established church or hereditary aristocracy. The point is that Americans have had a comparatively long experience of multiple, over-lapping, and loosely defined professions, both in the contemporary sense of the term and the old sense. We have also been content to try to assess the worth of professional claims by pragmatic effects rather than by recourse to a single authority, no matter how august.

I now wish to return to Polanyi's essay, "The Free Society," in which he says: "What needs to come into the picture of a viable free society is a traditional devotion to the spiritual objectives, such as truth, justice, and beauty -- those that require for their pursuit free, self-determinative communities: of scientists, scholars, lawyers, and judges, artists of all sorts, and churchmen" (Meaning, 203). Hall reminds us that these categories descend from Kant: "Art, religion, science, morality are the cultural interests with respect to which our modern sensibility has been expressed. Kant's three critiques assessed the construction of and response to the scientific, ethical, and artistic spheres of cultural life" (32). Nonetheless, Polanyi's statement is not identical with Kant's. For in the older system, the philosopher (the knower) remains the arbitrator of value, who only leases space to amateurs to dabble in the realms of feeling and willing. Ultimately it is not the artist, but the aesthetician (psychoanalyst, etc.), who knows what is going on in the realm of feeling; not the mystic or hierophant, but the theologian who knows. Polanyi demands real autonomy for each realm. He reiterates what I think is crucially important to Rorty and the advocates of postmodern social theory: "These enclaves of freedom -- science, the law, art, and so forth -- will have to consist of autonomous circles of men, free from public control . . . they must be little republics of their own" (Meaning, 204). On this point, Polanyi and Rorty are both disciples of John Dewey and it is on this point of social philosophy, on the requirements for a free society, that I claim Polanyi has something to offer Rorty. Rorty and Kuhn can extract nearly the same point from epistemology on the basis of the incommensurability of paradigms. But this discussion leads to a kind of epistemological reductionism, to a swamp where the last move is to admit relativism. Polanyi makes a different point, suggesting that inside their admittedly relative structures, scientists, artists, and other professionals have every right to presume the truth and speak with confidence and authority. Because one tool or vocabulary cannot do everything is no reason to say that it cannot do anything.

Polanyi adumbrates four or five irreducible communities which minimally constitute a free society. There is the community of reason and science dedicated to the truth. Sometimes Polanyi failed to sufficiently differentiate the educational community from that of science. There is a political community of law dedicated to justice. There is an aesthetic community dedicated to amusement and beauty. And there is a religious community dedicated to the meaning of human existence. It is no accident that these constitute the schools or departments of a university, which is the paradigm model, replacing the church, for Enlightenment society. When any one of these communities claims pre-eminence and usurps or absorbs the functions of other communities, free society is imperiled. The essential requirement for a free society is tolerance, even at the expense of ambiguity and anxiety and the charge that no one seems to be in command or that no one can explain the essential principles that define society. Citizens of a free society must be confident enough of the quality of their social life not to collapse at the first indictment that they are unprincipled and do not really believe in anything. A free society does not want and cannot tolerate prophets. If we must have them, they must be rendered in shades of irony along the lines illustrated by David Hall who calls Rorty a prophet. In the traditional sense, Americans do not want to be holy, if that means following an imposed set of principles. We want to be free. This does not illustrate an absence of belief, as Milosz and Solzhenitsyn suspect, but in fact a definitive American profession in citizenship which, as John Dewey knew, cuts deeper than even our commitment to the more easily discerned communities of church, law, or truth. Rorty proclaims that "we heirs of the Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or [Ignatius] Loyola as . . . 'mad.' We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens" (Papers, 1: 187). This is not exactly a principled exclusion, for example, on the basis of religion. We Americans marginalize these voices and reject the demands of these self-righteous prophets simply because we cannot talk to them. They are not interested in the terms of democratic citizenship. We know their fundamentalist commitments to principles, which they will not concede are open for discussion, precludes them from respecting our independent judgment. They will not listen to us. They simply want to give orders in the name of God or Reason or the Will to Power or Dialectic Materialism. I repeat, they are not interested in citizenship in a free society where power is garnered by persuasion and pragmatic effects. To believers in more metaphysically oriented systems, this must appear as trivial, deluded, or hypocritical for they do not really want a public dimension to life; they want their private dedication to subsume the public.

What is most difficult for non-Americans to perceive or, having perceived, to understand, is how Americans juggle competing or even contradictory loyalties to different communities. Or when they catch Americans switching from the idioms and rhythms of one community to another, they charge us with having superficial loyalties or not enough sense to understand what our commitments entail. They assume we are relativists who really don't care enough about the truth to be consistent. Our response is democratic: to suggest that as a democratic people, Americans are hard to sell on the notion that any single community or paradigmatic discourse can claim to exclusively possess the truth. The caricature of the wry and skeptical Vermont Yankee or the Missouri farmer who is as stubborn as his mule and has to be shown, perhaps more often than the mule, before he believes, is something distinct from both the cynic and the zealot. These cartoons illustrate a cultural dividing line, a shared outlook about the ineradicable importance of independent judgment that is more reliable in defining who or what an American is than perhaps any other feature; and the Protestant genealogy of this characteristic is clear. Dostoyevsky's Underground Man promised that he would break out the windows of utopia to prove his freedom. Similarly, Americans do not want zealots and party men or unquestioning followers for any program. It is simply inimical to our national character. We consent to being ciphers in no process, not even to Kant's Reason, much less some set of principles derived by reason. Our Declaration of Independence holds out the caveat of social dissolution, which is equally applicable to the Constitution, when a text or program loses the force of persuasive self-evidency. We will not be compelled or enslaved by any single social structure or vocabulary. In this sense, the postmodern attitude is not an esoteric European philosophy, but an American Protestant cultural trait.

All fundamentalists and reductionists and grand theoreticians are on the other side of this debate; including those in our midst who elevate private concerns about religion or race or gender to annul their commitment to citizenship. We cannot convince them of the truth of the pragmatist position. We can only hope to entice them. Rorty suggests that the multiple communities he alluded to by talking of galleries, books, movies, concerts and science constitute an ecology of a free society where truth is more evident in the discourse among all communities, rather than inside any one of them. Naturally, Rorty would prefer to exchange the word truth for something like interesting or rich. Although we can appreciate the philosophic reasons for his preference, we feel that the moral warrant for the program of a free society suffers an erosion. It does not seem capable of standing up alongside claims of historical necessity or God's will. This is where I think turning to Polanyi again pays off by keeping Solzhenitsyn from grabbing the pulpit.

We know that pragmatists and postmodernists do not believe that any one paradigm can claim to possess the truth (or be the truth instead of an interpretation) and are consequently labeled relativists and accused of being fair weather patriots for all causes. But this assumes that our pragmatist is lounging around outside any and all paradigms. And we know that this is epistemologically nonsensical, for it would preclude any language and consequently any judgment. As Rorty and Kuhn and Foucault and Wittgenstein and so many other contemporary philosophers have endlessly told us, you cannot speak unless you speak in a specific language; there is simply no way to escape involvement in some concrete community. Once involved in a paradigm, we can respond to its demand for unconditional and exclusive commitment to its focal point or goals. For example, as scientists we can be unconditionally committed to the discovery of truth about the nature of empirical experience without the slightest regard for religion or politics. Conversely, our commitment to justice in political discourse cannot be collapsed into a derivative effect of religion or (economic) science without a consequent loss. We see the effect of this in what was Yugoslavia today. Only the fanatic or lunatic refuses to leave one paradigm for another. The person who denies the legitimacy of a religious vocabulary to render meaning from human existence does so only by insisting on translating things into the vocabulary offered by his preferred paradigm. Such people invert the order of using paradigms to interpret experience. They insist that the model is somehow more fundamental than the experience it seeks to interpret. If we believe in the autonomy of paradigm communities, we recognize this for what it is: an act of superstition, personal failure, and potential violence. We do not want to live among such people, even when they promise to make us holy and righteous.

An unconditional claim is not the same thing as an exclusive claim. In the laboratory I can be unconditionally committed to the truth. In church I can be unconditionally committed to a Christian sense of meaning. One does not preclude or invalidate the other. Nor does being involved in both communities result in a tepid relativism. The recognition of paradigm communities intervenes to fill the gulf between isolated individuals, with their private ethics or self-indulgent projects, and the nation or humanity, with its minimal restraints on public behavior. Because the distance appears impossible to bridge, many critics assume that Rorty falters on the contradiction that: "The concerns of private morality . . . have no bearing whatsoever on public morality" (Guignon and Hiley, 351). David Hall offers a more complex and nuanced discussion of these polarities, which he also identifies as crucial. One of the points he makes is this: that private life offers "a formal freedom, empty in the sense that only a very few will be able to exercise it in a . . . meaningful manner. And the autonomy is, for most, a blind autonomy, unguided by a sense of relevance" (37). My first response is to say, "turn on the television!" It's filled with shows like Oprah where thousands of ordinary people (that is to say, not academic philosophers) interrupt one another to tell us about their fantasies and projects. Of course, their stories are anything but polished or professional, but does this warrant the judgment that their lives are empty or irrelevant? I think Hall's statement denotes a nostalgia for Philosophy, for the Philosopher as Romantic hero who does not just live, but knows; and because he knows, he should tell the rest of us how to live ("The unexamined life isn't worth living"). It also seems not to fully recognize factors like Aristotle's efficient cause, "personal knowledge," and most of all, an involvement in concrete communities, which always precede -- or at least alternate with -- private fantasy. Both portraits -- of empty isolation and an ant scurrying in monolithic anthill in response to someone else's commands -- are false exaggerations that rely on Platonic abstractions to render static metaphors of identity. Neither offers a convincing choice to explain our lives; and together they present only a false dilemma. Private and public morality impinge on paradigm communities which confer learned identities. The very terms of ethical discourse are not gratuitous. We learn to make ethical judgments by virtue of involvement in specific communities. Our private concerns generally focus on clashes among the identities or roles we have by virtue of our public involvements. Freud needs to be balanced by Confucius here; Western philosophy with Asian outlooks.

Because Americans are experienced in adopting roles and following scripts in several communities, most of us recognize when the discussion in a particular paradigm threatens to become coercive and end in demagoguery. Thus, when religion devolves into fanaticism, our experience in political justice restrains us. In another direction, when religion devolves into magic and superstition, our experience in science prompts us to look for an exit. The fundamentalist and the foreigner may mistake this self-possession and balance for indecision, indifference, eclecticism, or timidity. It is none of these. It is the posture of American liberal belief. Rorty says that when the logic of a paradigm seems to compel us to goose-step into an extreme position, "democracy takes precedence over philosophy" (Papers, 1: 192). I am asking you not to salute just yet. Instead we should ask, "Why? What is so special about democracy? Like Socrates, we would like to know what it is, in principle." The answer cannot be rendered as a principle. It can only be novelistically illustrated by descriptions of personal knowledge; which is exactly what Plato did in his early dialogues focusing on (civic) friendship in Lysis, (civic) piety Euthyphro, and (civic) courage in Laches.

Sometimes the clash between paradigm commitments is very difficult to resolve. Abortion rights in America illustrate the difficulty of resolving the claims of citizenship and religion. Isn't this irresolution logically embarrassing? This is largely the presumption of serious-minded thinkers and Christians like Solzhenitsyn and at times it is shared by Polanyi and Milosz. Rorty's postmodernism can give no principled answer because it does not profess in essences or any prelinguistic reality. The best that Rorty can say is something like this: "Followers of Dewey like myself would like to praise parliamentary democracy and the welfare state as very good things, but only on the basis of invidious comparisons with suggested concrete alternatives, not on the basis of claims that these institutions are truer to human nature, or more rational, or in better accord with the universal moral law, than feudalism or totalitarianism" (Papers, 1: 211). Americans prefer the charge of being called bad philosophers to being model inmates of a gulag even when the sign over the entrance claims it to be utopia. More abstractly, the point is that any human being's deepest moral dedications are a matter of personal, performative knowledge rather than a matter of following principles.

Following the lead of Polanyi, I would like to propose a minimal list of professions that constitute an ecology of irreducible paradigms necessary to constitute a free society. In this sketch, you are free to propose additional communities, but not to subtract any of these five, nor to so privilege one community that it subverts the autonomy of others. The paradigm of science requires a belief in truth and a commitment to discover it. Each paradigm has its own meta-discourse. Thus, we may be skeptical about the whole enterprise and the notion of truth, as we find in Thomas Kuhn's work. But, to actually do science, seems to require the tacit, operational beliefs that Polanyi identified. The truth that science seeks is rational knowledge about the nature of things that can be empirically experienced.

Although education is also interested in truth, its unconditional concern is for the growth and development of the student. Education has two primary functions: to train students in the methods and skills required by the professions they aspire to; and to clarify values. The fine arts speak with an emotional directness, the humanities with reflection; both clarify values. When this function is neglected, by being subsumed in other communities, science is in danger of becoming pseudo-religion, technology is in danger of becoming pseudo-politics; and ultimately the "truth" otherwise available in this community is sacrificed to ideology.

The profession of law is dedicated to justice. Whereas science and education pursue the products of the mind, the law and the church also recognize the irreducibility of the will. In law the ideals of justice are tempered with the reality of power. Nonetheless, there is a profession or belief in justice and a commitment to its actualization that elevates the activities of judges and legislators from a fight over power to a profession. Like scientists and educators, they do not merely pursue ends by any available means, but struggle to create justice from the tacit dimension of their experience, through personal belief, conscience, creativity, and judgment. Finally, we know all too well what happens when the paradigm dedicated to justice is subsumed by the paradigms of (Marxist) science or religion.

The paradigm of religion (I would include Marxism here) is dedicated to that which is so elemental and inescapable in human experience that its recognition has the power to arrest our habits and transform the quality of our lives. It is differentiated from education because it calls for more than knowledge; it calls for decision. It is differentiated from law because its ideal is not justice but compassion. It is differentiated from science because it seeks, not the truth about the nature of things, but to perceive the depth of human existence.

Finally there is an aesthetic community, which is always the first to be attacked by the serious-minded. Plato's hope to control or even eradicate this community was ironically undermined by his own unsurpassed artistry. Freud's work testified to how primal this community is, which at first sight appears so innocuous and easy to manipulate.

I know these descriptions sound naive or perhaps worse yet, Platonic. They are only meant to be crudely drawn maps, like the ones you might drawn to show someone how to get to your house. What counts are the actual aesthetic or religious or scientific communities and that you become involved in the discussions offered by these communities, instead of remaining out in the lobby and carping about why you do not want to go in or how the structure is bound to fail. I grant that once inside, for example, the paradigm of American politics and law, there is immense opportunity for criticism. Pragmatists can not sell ideas or distant promises to forestall criticism. What we wish to do is largely replace all the talk from the outside about why the paradigm cannot work (and if it seems to, how the effect is illusory) with technical or operational talk inside the paradigm about which part to replace or how to realign various parts. This is familiar from Foucault's studies on prisons and insane asylums, but unlike Rorty, Foucault feels more than a bit cheated by the epistemic limits (this is also Rorty's assessment of Foucault: see, Contingency, 64-5).

Rorty defends autonomous communities because he considers each loss a public diminishment, an impoverishment that takes us a step closer to imprisonment in a bleak fundamentalist cell. His argument is ethical: "we think of our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such sharing" (Papers, 1: 33). Polanyi's argument for sustaining multiple communities is epistemological as well as ethical. Ian Barbour, a contemporary American philosopher of science, elaborates Polanyi's point that some scientific problems resist reductionist explanations and are soluble only by relying on complementary models; such as in the physics of light, which requires that light be considered both a wave phenomenon and particulate. To understand the nature of life in a free society requires involvement in multiple, complementary communities. There is no other way to know it. It is not reducible to a set of disembodied principles any more so than is knowing how to ride a bicycle. Those in America or Europe who chose to incarcerate themselves in fundamentalist communities, whether religious, scientific, or even artistic, fail Rorty's and Dewey's requirement. They are not really fellow citizens. They do not live in an operational democracy -- even though other people may define them as legal citizens of a state professing in democratic principles -- but in a self-chosen totalitarianism. They are not fellow citizens with whom one can discuss the quality of public life because their presumption is that the relevant factors are beyond such naive discussion and subsequent control.

Idealists, or those who are devoted to transcendentals, discount the value of personal knowledge or knowledge as performance -- operational knowledge acquired in actual communities and in lowly popular culture, such as television -- because it threatens to vitiate metaphysical principles and, worse yet, to dissolve principles in contingency and ambiguity. Sensitive to the moral drift into a fog of relativism, Norris says postmodernism promulgates "the idea that there is really no difference between things as they seem, things as they are, and things as they might be" ("Politics," 243). Pragmatists see exactly the reverse. We see hundreds of actual communities arguing with each other about differences that each community takes seriously. Idealists refuse to accept concrete communities at face value, as being dedicated to exactly the ends to which they say they are dedicated. Because they know, for example, the Truth about Christian eschatology, they view the activities and concerns of those involved in the communities of art, science, business, or law as illusory in their own terms and worthwhile only as they contribute toward or detract from the Last Judgment. In a more sophisticated, but essential identical, model, the true believer confronts the would-be pragmatist with a false dilemma: you either profess in the monolithic system or you have nothing. Thus Norris talks about "the collapse of truth and reason," ("Truth," 21). Pragmatism does not concede to these terms. The pragmatist lives in multiple, concrete communities. Rorty says that in losing faith in the cosmic structure, it "does not seem to us to entail that we face an abyss, but merely that we face a range of choices" about which actual communities to become involved in (Papers, 2: 132). We say, it is the fundamentalist who cannot discern paradigm boundaries and consequently insists that there are none; that it is all or nothing.

To clarify my argument, I want to return again to the often heard charge that Rorty and American pragmatism and postmodernism are necessarily relativistic and consequently have few, if any, ethical beliefs. David Hirsch's book, The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz (1991), articulates the charge bluntly: "The inability of European postmodernist literary theorists and their followers in this country to face the implications of the recent cultural past of Nazism and of genocide committed on, and in full view of, the European continent, has rendered contemporary criticism incapable of dealing with the human dimension in literature" (115-16). He charges that "Derrida and the other defenders of [Paul] de Man want to keep playing the game of pretending that moral issues are, after all, only a matter of rhetoric" (82); and he identifies Rorty as one of the pack of intellectuals who fail to condemn Nazism and the holocaust in the traditional religious language that Hirsch demands (84-5). Hirsch recommends a list of second rate writers on the basis of their clear moral didacticism and offers a new Index of proscribed authors: "Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, among others, who seem to have experienced nothing, and who are therefore condemned to think in a moral vacuum" (165). A professor at Brown University, Hirsch is better educated than most fundamentalists; and although his book has different villains, it offers the same argument as Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) and before that of Tolstoy's What is Art (1896): that neither aesthetics nor philosophy should be autonomous, but subservient to moral discourse.

In fact, Rorty has often responded to the charge that postmodernism has no ethics and informs us that John Dewey was also criticized because: "he gave us nothing with which to 'answer the Nazis'" (Papers, 1: 42; see also Westbrook, 510-23). Rorty rehearses the epistemological reasons why pragmatists and postmodernists cannot invoke the metaphors that critics like Hirsch and Allan Bloom demand: because they do not believe in the literal reality of the God or transcendental values that the metaphors supposedly correspond to. They do not believe "the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks called 'facts'" (Contingency, 5). This is not the same thing as saying pragmatists have no values. But we have been over that. What Rorty failed to say in his essay on "Science as Solidarity" and what so intrigued Polanyi in his essay on "The Eclipse of Thought," is that the Americans and the British did not just find extremist European vocabularies non-engaging and unconvincing, but went to war against totalitarian states in the forties, when they theoretically might have been expected to collaborate or at least remain indifferent and aloof in their relativism and "shop-keeper mentality." If we do not seek to dissolve the question in the solvent of historical forces -- supposing that Americans at the time were in the grip of compelling forces they did not recognize -- we might well ask about the basis of their commitment. How was it grounded? Rorty's point on this issue clarifies that one can fight to preserve a concrete benefit while stopping short of claiming that it is transcendental; that one could fight to preserve life as one had lived it in actual American communities, however shabby, against the threat of loss represented by the enemy, without necessarily claiming to be doing God's will or devolving into jingoism. One is not compelled to resist fanaticism with a counter fanaticism.

I would like to try to answer the charge of having no ethics worthy of the name, on Rorty's behalf, by again invoking Polanyi and repeating that his epistemology of "personal knowledge" is essentially Protestant. In his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky has the Grand Inquisitor say that man "prefers even death to freedom" (307). Instead of truth articulated in science, we crave miracles. Instead of values clarified in education, we want mystery. Instead of justice rendered through law, we prefer authority. And instead of meaning created by involvement in a religious community, we demand dogma. We want clear-cut principles to explain experience. These temptations are most alluring when the relevant communities have no autonomy or have atrophied. This has often been the basis of the charge by the West against Russia: that it has virtually no institutional traditions of autonomous communities dedicated to law, education, science, or commerce; and that as a consequence Russian history has swung between enthusiasm for some principle or conception and despair and brutality when it fails to regulate life. In the European view, Ivan is wrong to suggest that the flaw is exclusively in human nature. The problem is often locatable in concrete human communities. As the Enlightenment suggested, the problem is not so much an incorrigible propensity to do evil as it is a matter of simple impoverishment. Americans, like everyone else, have lapses and failures in these directions, but these are not our national faults. As street crime and the proliferation of handguns illustrate, our tendency is toward anarchy and granting too much freedom to the individual, rather than fascism and building totalitarian structures. Thus Sinclair Lewis caught us better in Babbitt and Main Street with their portraits of individual greed and shallow pleasures than in It Can't Happen Here or even Elmer Gantry, which illustrate social dangers. Like Jack London's, Iron Heel, Lewis' It Can't Happen Here is a dystopian novel about the possible rise of fascism in Depression era America, which, because it so goes against the grain of American character, is one of his least read books. We are more apt to recognize ourselves in texts focusing on the process of individual development, written by Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman or Twain; or in a text like The Courage to Be where Paul Tillich defines courage as "the power of life to affirm itself in spite of ambiguity"; that is, in spite of the fact that we are incapable of articulating the Platonic principles that are suppose to make life worth living. In the past, this confidence relied on Christian metaphors to at least stake out the territory of importance. The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr clarifies how courage has been grounded in faith: "In Christianity the unique individual finds the contingent and arbitrary aspects of his existence tolerable because it is related to, judged and redeemed by the eternal God, who transcends both the rational structure and the arbitrary facts of existence in the universe" (86). Postmodernism is self-conscious about these metaphors and prefers to drop all the talk about depending on God or any other transcendental, but it wishes to conserve the process of free discussion and personal judgment. It wishes to be Protestant, even though it hopes to avoid going to church, because it recognizes that in so doing, we run the risk of privileging one community over others. To further loosen the values and process here from religious language, consider that Polanyi's description of science as personal knowledge is significantly similar. In championing Dewey as a saint of American democracy or comparable to Socrates in Athens, Rorty is open to the charge that more seems to be at stake than merely the minimal housekeeping of utilitarian social theory. I have tried to illustrate that what is at stake are a number of contingent, dynamic, and concretely limited communities, which are something different than either the working out of monolithic principles (Christian eschatology, economic determinism, etc.) or the mechanical effects of social contracts arbitrarily written by absolutely atomic authors; and that it is in these actual communities where moral life is lived out, rather than in moments when principles are announced or analyzed.

The final point I would like to make concerning Rorty's ethics is encapsulated in his claim that: "We shall not need a picture of 'the human self' in order to have morality" (Papers, 2: 160). I think the logic here is convincing only in the light of Polanyi's explanation that the deepest values of liberal society are tacit. Because we live them, we do not need to ritually profess them, as though we only longed for them as heavenly rewards. When they work, they are invisibly part of the background. Rorty confesses: "we should be more willing than we are to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far" (Consequences, 210). Only when the virtues of this system, centering around our experiences of freedom, are imperiled, do Americans become self-conscious and feel the need to be militant in their defense. Otherwise there is little need to ritually celebrate the democratic picture of the human self rendered in something like a Norman Rockwell painting. It is enough to get busy with the concrete details or operational logic that improve the quality of life, to be involved in what Dewey called, "the meaning of the daily detail." It is enough for democratic society to assert "itself without bothering to ground itself" by recourse to a traditional religious vocabulary or the grandiloquent metaphysical terminology supplied by European philosophy (Papers, 2: 176). Interestingly, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged something like this point, though it is also understandable that the tragedies of his life compelled him to write the books that seem to be so mistrustful of the process. He said that life in the gulags "Gradually . . . disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts" (v 2: 615). I can all but see Michael Polanyi nodding in assent, commenting that this is an apt paraphrase of what he meant by his iconographic term, personal knowledge. But I must let Rorty speak the last sentence. He might quietly comment that: "One can want to relieve suffering without having an interesting answer when Socrates asks you why you desire this" (Papers, 2: 198).

2007-02-08T15:30:00.000-05:00

HOW MANY GRAINS MAKE A HEAP?
by Richard Rorty, from here

‘I had hoped my department would hire somebody in the history of philosophy,’ my friend lamented, ‘but my colleagues decided that we needed somebody who was contributing to the literature on vagueness.’

‘The literature on what?’ I asked.

‘Dick,’ he replied, exasperated, ‘you’re really out of it. You don’t realise: vagueness is huge.’

My friend’s judgment is confirmed by Scott Soames’s 900-page history of analytic philosophy. In an epilogue titled ‘The Era of Specialisation’, Soames cites ‘the investigation of vague predicates’ as an area of philosophical inquiry that has ‘exploded in the last thirty years’. The intensity with which such specialised inquiries are being pursued is, he says, indicative of the fact that ‘the discipline itself – philosophy as a whole – has become an aggregate of related but semi-independent investigations, very much like other academic disciplines.’

Soames welcomes this change. He ends his book by saying that ‘what seems to be the fragmentation in philosophy found at the end of the 20th century may be due to more than the institutional imperatives of specialisation and professionalisation. It may be inherent in the subject itself.’ Philosophers used to think that the point of their discipline was to attain a synoptic vision – to see how everything hangs together. But, Soames seems to suggest, they may finally be disabusing themselves of this millennia-long misunderstanding of their own enterprise.

To see what philosophy may look like in the future, consider the problem that gave rise to the huge literature on vagueness: the paradox of the heap. Soames formulates it as follows: ‘If one has something that is not a heap of sand, and one adds a single grain of sand to it, the result is still not a heap of sand . . . if n grains of sand are not sufficient to make a heap then n+1 grains aren’t either.’ So it seems that ‘no matter how many grains of sand may be gathered together, they are not sufficient to make a heap of sand.’

Some philosophers, such as Crispin Wright, respond to this paradox in the spirit of Wittgenstein. They argue that (as Soames puts it) ‘the rules governing ordinary vague predicates simply do not allow for sharp and precise lines dividing objects to which the predicates apply from objects of any other sort.’ Others, such as Timothy Williamson, hold (again in Soames’s words) that ‘vague predicates are in fact perfectly precise – in the sense that there are sharp and precise lines dividing objects to which they truly apply from objects to which they truly do not – but it is impossible for us ever to know where these lines are.’

An educational administrator (a dean in the US, a pro-vice-chancellor in Britain), asked to ratify the appointment of someone who has produced a brilliant new theory of heaps, might be tempted to ask whether this sort of thing is really philosophy. Most analytic philosophers would think this a dumb question – as silly as whether inquiry into the neural processes of squids is really biology. Fruitful work in an academic discipline is whatever those trained in that discipline find it important to do. Outsiders do not get to kibitz. But suppose the dean remains obdurate. I know that biology has not reached the stage of decadent scholasticism, she might say, if only because biological research links up with medical progress. The biology department, she continues, had no trouble explaining to me why the work of their squid-neurone specialist might eventually culminate in a cure for Parkinson’s Disease. I expect something similar from the philosophy department. I am told that many philosophy professors in France and Germany think that Anglophone philosophy has lost its way: that it no longer has any relevance to anything else in the intellectual world, and that its hyper-professionalism is a symptom of senescence rather than of robustness. I also hear that the undergraduates keep complaining that your department never gives courses on the philosophers whom they want to hear discussed. Before I ratify the proposed appointment, I need to be told why I should disregard such rumours.

Faced with such obduracy, the head of the philosophy department might look around for a book that will straighten the dean out, one that will help her understand why analytic philosophy is (whatever disgruntled foreigners and disappointed undergraduates may say) a very good thing, deserving not only of autonomy, but of enthusiastic encouragement. Soames’s book will not serve this purpose. It is a book for insiders. If you do not know before reading it why the philosophers whose work Soames treats at length – Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Stevenson, Ross, Quine, Ryle, Strawson, Hare, Malcolm, Austin, Grice, Davidson and Kripke – are thought important, you may still be baffled after finishing the second volume. People who are already convinced that the questions Russell asked about the relation between language and reality were good ones will get a lot out of Soames’s careful and perspicuous accounts of what is living and what is dead in the work of Russell’s successors. But those who first need to be persuaded that Russell steered philosophy onto the right track, and that ‘Continental’ philosophers remain on the wrong one, will get no help.

Soames does little to tell us what counts as ‘philosophical analysis’ – what makes ‘analytic’ an appropriate word to describe the movement whose course he traces. He is content to define that movement as ‘a certain historical tradition in which the early work of G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein set the agenda for later philosophers’. He goes on to say that ‘philosophy done in the analytic tradition aims at truth and knowledge, as opposed to moral or spiritual improvement . . . the goal in philosophy is to discover what is true, not to provide a useful recipe for living one’s life.’ But ‘attempting to discover what is true’ is not a helpful way to specify what analytic philosophers do; even Heideggerians would say the same.

Soames’s book is not a dramatic narrative, but rather a staccato series of summaries of a philosopher’s view, followed by accounts of what he got right and where he went wrong. Thus Russell and Ayer were right in thinking it important to follow Leibniz, Hume and Kant in distinguishing between necessary and contingent truths, but they were wrong to insist that analytic truths (‘All bachelors are unmarried’ or, in times past, ‘Marriage is between a man and a woman’) are the only necessary truths there are – that all necessity is a matter of how people have decided, at least for the moment, to use words. They were right in thinking that ‘facts about the meanings of our words and the information semantically encoded by our sentences are . . . real and important.’ But they thought, wrongly, that we have ‘epistemically privileged access’ to what our words mean and what our sentences say.

Others, notably Quine, realised that we had no such access, but wrongly inferred from this that there are no such things as ‘meanings’ to be isolated and analysed. Quine thought that we should set aside Russell’s distinction between analytic truths, which are true ‘by virtue of the meanings of terms’, and synthetic truths, which signify contingent matters of empirical fact. He urged that we substitute a distinction of degree, between relatively uncontroversial assertions and relatively controversial ones, for the previous distinction of kind.

Quine’s repudiation of Russell’s central doctrine was of a piece with the line of thought – ‘Don’t look for the meaning; look for the use’ – pursued in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. That book was sceptical about the ‘analytic’ approach to philosophy that had appealed both to Russell and to the younger Wittgenstein. The confluence of Quinean and Wittgensteinian lines of thought – found, for example, in the work of Donald Davidson – created a philosophical climate in which the very idea of ‘necessary truth’ was viewed with scepticism.

But the climate suddenly changed, thanks to Kripke. Celebrating the entrance of his hero on the philosophical scene, Soames for once allows himself a bit of drama: ‘With the publication in 1951 of his celebrated article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”,’ Quine ‘became the dominant philosopher in America, which he remained until January of 1970, when Saul Kripke . . . gave the three lectures at Princeton that became Naming and Necessity.’

Soames regards the deposition of Quine and the enthronement of Kripke as a great intellectual advance. What he calls Kripke’s ‘discovery of the necessary a posteriori’ – the observation that the truth of sentences like ‘Whales are mammals’ and ‘Water is H2O’ is neither contingent nor knowable by examining the uses of words – is ‘one of the great philosophical achievements of the 20th century’. ‘No single insight,’ he continues, ‘has been more important in gaining the perspective needed to understand and critically evaluate the philosophical tradition stretching from Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, through logical positivism and the ordinary language school, to Quine, Davidson and Kripke himself. Without Kripke’s discovery, the history told in these pages would have been very different; indeed, these volumes would scarcely have been possible.’ Soames gives Kripke most of the credit for ‘the two most important achievements that have emerged from the analytic tradition’ from 1900 to 1975: namely, ‘(i) the recognition that philosophical speculation must be grounded in pre-philosophical thought, and (ii) the success achieved in understanding, and separating from one another, the fundamental methodological notions of logical consequence, logical truth, necessary truth, and a priori truth’.

To understand what was so daring and startling about Kripke’s lectures of 1970, one has to appreciate that Quine thought only an old-fashioned Aristotelian essentialist would insist on distinguishing between necessary and contingent truths. Essentialists believe that some properties of things are intrinsic to them, that they would not be the same things if they lacked those properties. Quine agreed with Russell that this notion of intrinsic nature is a relic of pre-scientific thought (though, admittedly, one that is preserved in the speech of the vulgar). Ever since Newton replaced the Aristotelian thing-nature model of scientific explanation with a law-event model, this notion has been obsolete. Once Aristotle’s spell had been broken, Quine thought, everybody should have been willing to concede that lines between essence and accident were arbitrary. If drawn at all, they should be drawn with an eye for pragmatic convenience.

Kripke was the first important analytic philosopher to insist that the plain man was quite right in remaining an essentialist, and that it was high time that philosophers showed proper respect for intuitions that are, in Soames’s phrase, ‘grounded in pre-philosophical thought’. ‘Water is H2O’ is a necessary truth, for if the chemical constitution of a given fluid were not H2O it would not be water. It is not just that we might not call it water; it would not be water. It has, in Locke’s terminology, a real, not just a nominal, essence. We had not always known that this particular chemical composition was intrinsic to the nature of water, but now we do. So our knowledge of a necessary truth is a posteriori, a result of empirical inquiry.

Before Kripke, most analytic philosophers would have said that all essences were merely nominal. That is, they thought that the question of whether water was ‘essentially’ H2O, or whether something with much the same properties but a different chemical composition might also be water, was uninteresting, because merely verbal. (This is also the view of most non-analytic philosophers: Heideggerians treat talk of real essences as part of the discredited onto-theological tradition, and Derrideans as a distressing symptom of phallogocentrism.) On a pre-Kripkean view, it may indeed be found convenient to find a word other than ‘water’ for the strange new substance, but there are no deeper reasons – nothing like what Kripke had dubbed ‘metaphysical necessity’.

Darwin was generally thought to have struck a blow against Aristotelian essentialism by showing that the lines between biological species had not been drawn by God, and that species kept mutating into different species. But Kripke argued that one could accept Darwin’s story but still say that ‘Whales are not fish’ is a necessary a posteriori truth. For whales would not be whales if they did not have a certain DNA sequence, just as water would not be water if it were not made of hydrogen and oxygen. Microstructure is a tip-off to intrinsic nature, not just a pragmatically useful redescription of things that were originally identified by their macrostructural properties.

Kripke thought that their refusal to take natural kinds seriously showed that everybody from Russell to Quine had been arrogantly turning their backs on what Soames calls ‘the great mass of ordinary, pre-philosophical convictions arising from common sense, science and other areas of inquiry’ – convictions that philosophy cannot ‘overturn wholesale’. A typical result of this arrogance was Quine’s claim that everything we talk about – water, electrons, numbers, mountains, you, me, the Olympian deities – is just a pragmatically convenient ‘posit’. This looked to Kripke, as it does to Soames, like frivolous paradox-mongering. The popularity of such frivolity in the winter of 1970 was, Soames thinks, a sign that analytic philosophy was in dire need of reform.

To succeed in demonstrating Kripke’s importance, however, Soames would have to tell us more about how the discovery of the necessary a posteriori has changed things. He frequently remarks, at the end of a chapter, that the pre-Kripkean philosopher he has just polished off has confused necessary truth with analytic truth. But he often fails to make clear what revisions that philosopher would have been forced to make if he had written after the discovery of the necessary a posteriori. For example, would Ryle’s anti-Cartesian polemic have been seriously weakened if he had accepted the Kripkean point that the connection between a mental state and a neural state might be necessary without being knowable a priori?

It would also have been useful if Soames had been more specific about how the Kripkean revolution has changed the agenda of philosophical inquiry. He does not try to relate the necessary a posteriori to the literature on vagueness, or to another of his examples of the vigour of contemporary analytic philosophy, ‘the explosion of philosophical and logical work on the Liar done in the last thirty years’. (The ‘Liar’ is shorthand for the various paradoxes created by assertions that comment on their own truth: e.g., ‘This sentence is false,’ which is true if false and false if true.) It is hard to see how to reconcile the thesis that Kripke made a decisive difference to analytic philosophy with Soames’s claim that ‘it is a mistake to look for one big, unified picture of analytic philosophy in this [post-Kripkean] era.’

My own sense of the matter is that the discovery of the necessary a posteriori has not made the big difference that Soames attributes to it, and that it is unlikely to do so. I do not see much evidence that analytic philosophers are using different ‘fundamental methodological notions’ from those they were using before 1970. My impression is that now, 35 years after the Kripkean revolution, a lot of philosophers would say to Kripke: We see your point about the Aristotelian intuitions of the plain man, and so we are willing to go along with you in calling ‘Water is H2O’ and ‘Whales are not fish’ necessary truths. We hereby abjure the claim that necessity is, if anything, analyticity. But so what? What follows? What have you done except alter our use of the term ‘necessity’ so that we now sound a bit less paradoxical?

As I see it, Kripke’s lectures in 1970 aroused the interest they did not because people cared all that much about which truths should be called necessary and why, but because they cared a lot about whether truth is correspondence to reality. Philosophers are still, just as they were in Russell’s day, very worried about whether there is any clear sense in which our beliefs about the world are like maps – whether they are somehow isomorphic to the pre-existing contours of reality (whether, in Plato’s metaphor, they ‘cut nature at the joints, like a good butcher’).

Common sense takes for granted that there is such isomorphism – that just as bits of a reliable map can be paired off with bits of a landscape, so the terms of a true scientific theory can be correlated with features of the way things really are. But those who think that all essences are nominal point out that such pairing was easier when, as in Aristotle’s time, the objects of scientific inquiry were observable things such as stars and animals. It got harder when Newton began talking about unobservables such as force, mass, and acceleration, and harder still when Planck began talking about quanta. Is ‘force’ the name of a natural kind? Is ‘Hilbert space’? Do these terms cut nature at the joints? Who knows? How could it matter? The more unobservables science posits, the less relevant the notions of ‘mapping’ and ‘corresponding to reality’ seem.

However, many philosophers fear that if we cannot specify some sense in which our scientific theories map onto reality in the same way as do perceptual reports (‘the cat is on the mat’), we are in danger of losing touch with the world. We may be tempted to become instrumentalists, people who think that we should accept scientific theories simply because they give us what we want (roughly, prediction and control of the environment), rather than because we think they accurately represent the real. For those who had such fears, Kripke’s neo-Aristotelian outlook had great appeal. Quine’s holistic claim that ‘the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science’ (rather than individual words or sentences) had done a lot of damage to the notion of ‘correspondence’. So had Kuhn’s denial that scientific progress is a matter of getting closer and closer to the true nature of things. Kripke’s willingness staunchly to oppose the drift toward pragmatism that characterised analytic philosophy during the 1960s won him an enthusiastic audience.

The controversy between realists, who think that the notion of truth as correspondence to reality can be saved, and pragmatists, who regard it as hopeless, seems to me much more fruitful than the question of whether ‘Water is H2O’ is a necessary truth. The debate about the utility of the ‘map’ metaphor has been going on for a long time now, and shows no signs of abating. It seethes beneath the surface of discussions of many seemingly unrelated questions. One such question is the nature of vague predicates. Timothy Williamson ends his much discussed book Vagueness with arguments against the ‘nominalist’ suggestion that ‘properties, relations and states of affairs are mere projections onto the world of our forms of speech,’ and concludes that ‘our contact with the world is as direct in vague thought as it is in any thought.’ Crispin Wright takes up the topic of vagueness not because he cares deeply about how many grains it takes to make a heap but because doing so helps him formulate a view about the extent to which mastering a language can be treated as a matter of obedience to semantical rules – rules about how to line words up with things. It is an underlying concern with the question of whether and how language gets in touch with the world that has made vagueness a hot topic. Perceived relevance to such larger questions enables philosophers who specialise in heaps to shrug off the suggestion that they are trivialising a discipline that once had considerable cultural importance (and, in some countries, still does).

To my mind, the story of 20th-century analytic philosophy (including the role of Kripke in that story) is best told by highlighting questions about whether truth is a matter of correspondence, about what is and is not ‘out there’ to be corresponded to, and about whether there is any sense in which thought makes ‘direct contact’ with reality. So I regret that Soames’s history shoves these issues into the background. But perhaps correspondence is just my hobbyhorse, as necessity is his.

However that may be, his book embodies an energetic, sustained, and praiseworthy effort to tell a story that has not previously been told in the same detail. Other versions of that story will doubtless appear before long. There will probably be one which attempts to rebut Soames’s criticisms of Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson, and which treats Kripke’s revival of essentialism as a short-lived, reactionary fad. Another will tell a story that revolves around philosophy of mind rather than philosophy of language, and so focuses on figures whom Soames does not discuss (Sellars, Putnam, Chomsky, Dennett and Fodor, for example). We can also expect, sooner or later, a history of the analytic movement that deplores the situation Soames describes (accurately) when he writes: ‘Gone are the days of large, central figures, whose work is accessible and relevant to, as well as read by, all analytic philosophers. Philosophy has become a highly organised discipline, done by specialists primarily for other specialists.’

As these diverse narratives appear, we shall become better able to evaluate Soames’s suggestion that such specialisation is ‘inherent in the subject itself’, and that the day of synoptic philosophical visions is over. We shall also be in a better position to foresee which 20th-century Anglophone philosophers will continue to be read. Nobody in 1904 would have predicted that Frege and Nietzsche were the only two philosophers of the late 19th century whose writings would still be studied intensively in 2005. We are in no position to tell which, if any, of the figures whom Soames discusses will still seem important in 2105. It is anybody’s guess whether analytic philosophy will burst the boundaries of the English-speaking world and become dominant in universities around the globe, or whether the work of some synoptic visionary will persuade young philosophers in Britain and the US to turn their backs on the movement that Russell initiated. Someday – but not for quite a while – intellectual historians will be in a position to render judgment on the question of whether that movement succeeded in bringing quasi-scientific rigour to philosophy, or instead ran out into the sands.

2007-02-08T14:33:00.001-05:00

RICHARD RORTY: AN OVERVIEW

The best overview of Richard Rorty and his philosoph I've read yet

2007-02-08T14:31:00.002-05:00

FAITH IN THE TRUTH
by Daniel Dennett, from here

Is science a religion?

Is mathematics a religion at all? Is it science? One often hears these days that science is "just" another religion. There are some interesting similarities. Established science, like established religion, has its bureaucracies and hierarchies of officials, its lavish and arcane installations of no utility apparent to outsiders, its initiation ceremonies. Like a religion bent on enlarging its congregation, it has a huge phalanx of proselytizers--who call themselves not missionaries but educators.

An amusing fantasy: an ill-informed observer witnesses the intricate, formal teamwork that goes into preparing a person for the arcane paraphernalia of positron emission tomography--a PET scan--and decides it must be a religious ceremony, a ritual sacrifice, perhaps, or the investiture of a new archbishop. But these are superficial appearances. What of the deeper similarities that have been proposed? Science, like religion, has its orthodoxies and heresies, doesn't it? Isn't the belief in the power of the scientific method a creed, on all fours with religious creeds in the sense that it is ultimately a matter of faith, no more capable of independent confirmation or rational support than any other religious creed? Notice that the question threatens to undermine itself: by contrasting faith with independent confirmation and rational support, and denying that science as a whole can use its own methods to secure its own triumph, it pays homage to those very methods. There seems to be a curious asymmetry: scientists do not appeal to the authority of any religious leaders when their results are challenged, but many religions today would love to be able to secure the endorsement of science. A few have names that proclaim that desire: Christian Scientists, and Scientologists, for instance. We also have a word for science worship: "scientism." Those are accused of scientism whose enthusiastic attitude towards the proclamations of science is all too similar to the attitudes of the devout: not cautious and objective, but adoring, uncritical or even fanatical.

If the scientists' summum bonum or highest good is truth, if scientists make truth their God, as some have claimed, is this not just as parochial an attitude as the worship of Jahweh, or Mohammed, or the Angel Moroni? No, our faith in the truth is, truly, our faith in the truth--a faith that is shared by all members of our species, even if there is great divergence in approved methods for obtaining it. The asymmetry noted above is real: faith in the truth has a priority claim that sets it apart from all other faiths.
The priority of truth

Right now, as I speak, billions of organisms on this planet are engaged in a game of hide and seek. It is not just a game for them. It is a matter of life and death. Getting it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount importance to every living thing on this planet for more than three billion years, and so these organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out about the world they live in, discriminating friends from foes, meals from mates, and ignoring the rest for the most part. It matters to them that they not be misinformed about these matters--indeed nothing matters more--but they don't, as a rule, appreciate this. They are the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely designed to get what matters right but when their equipment malfunctions and gets matters wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for noticing this, let alone deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly. The difference between how things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them as it can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. The recognition of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery. A few other species--some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even some birds--shows signs of appreciating the phenomenon of "false belief"--getting it wrong. They exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps even some sensitivity to their own errors as errors, but they lack the capacity for the reflection required to dwell on this possibility, and so they cannot use this sensitivity in the deliberate design of repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear or hiding gear. That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.

We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food laid by for winter? Have I miscalculated? Is my mate cheating on me? Should we have moved south? Is it safe to enter this cave? Other creatures are often visibly agitated by their own uncertainties about just such questions, but because they cannot actually ask themselves these questions, they cannot articulate their predicaments for themselves or take steps to improve their grip on the truth. They are stuck in a world of appearances, making the best they can of how things seem and seldom if ever worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly are.(1)

We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. There may be an Island of the Colour-blind (allowing Oliver Sacks his usual large dose of poetic license), but no Island of the People Who Do Not Recognize Their Own Children. The Land of the Liars could exist only in philosophers' puzzles; there are no traditions of False Calendar Systems for mis-recording the passage of time. In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.

Indeed saying would not go at all without the ideal of truth. But no sooner had truth-telling been invented than ways of exploiting this presumption were discovered as well: lying, mainly. As Talleyrand once cynically put it, language was invented so that we could conceal our thoughts from each other. Truth-telling is, and must be, the background of all genuine communication, including lying. After all, deception only works when the would-be deceiver has a reputation for telling the truth.(2)

Flattery would truly get you nowhere without the default presumption of truth-telling: cooing like a dove or grunting like a pig would be as apt to curry favor.

The world of non-human animals has often discovered the possibility of false advertising. Where there are poisonous species, truly warning would-be predators of their danger with their bright colors, there are very often non-poisonous species who mimic these bright colors, getting cheap protection thanks to a deceptive practice. But would-be liars among the animals have also discovered an enforcer of truth: the Zahavi principle. As the biologist Amotz Zahavi has argued, only costly advertising wears its credibility on its sleeve, because it can't be faked. For instance, in the competition for mate choice, suitors with cumbersome antlers, peacock tails, or other handicaps are in effect saying: "I am so good that I can afford this huge cost and still survive." Competitors are forced to indulge in this extravagant outlay or go mateless. Non-human species, then, are often blindly guided down the straight and narrow path to veridicality; we alone among the animals appreciate truth "for its own sake." And--thanks to the science we have created in the pursuit of truth--we alone can also see why it is that truth, without being appreciated or even conceived of, is an ideal that constrains the perceptual and communicative activities of all animals.

We human beings use our communicative skills not just for truth-telling, but also for promise-making, threatening, bargaining, story-telling, entertaining, mystifying, inducing hypnotic trances, and just plain kidding around, but prince of these activities is truth-telling, and for this activity we have invented ever better tools. Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science.

Science as the technology of truth

Try to draw a straight line, or a circle, "freehand." Unless you have considerable artistic talent, the result will not be impressive. With a straight edge and a compass, on the other hand, you can practically eliminate the sources of human variability and get a nice clean, objective result, the same every time.

Is the line really straight? How straight is it? In response to these questions, we develop ever finer tests, and then tests of the accuracy of those tests, and so forth, bootstrapping our way to ever greater accuracy and objectivity. Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results.

It is not just the implements, the physical tools of the trade, that are designed to be resistant to human error. The organization of methods is also under severe selection pressure for improved reliability and objectivity. The classic example is the double blind experiment, in which, for instance, neither the human subjects nor the experimenters themselves are permitted to know which subjects get the test drug and which the placebo, so that nobody's subliminal hankerings and hunches can influence the perception of the results. The statistical design of both individual experiments and suites of experiments, is then embedded in the larger practice of routine attempts at replication by independent investigators, which is further embedded in a tradition--flawed, but recognized--of publication of both positive and negative results.

What inspires faith in arithmetic is the fact that hundreds of scribblers, working independently on the same problem, will all arrive at the same answer (except for those negligible few whose errors can be found and identified to the mutual satisfaction of all). This unrivalled objectivity is also found in geometry and the other branches of mathematics, which since antiquity have been the very model of certain knowledge set against the world of flux and controversy. In Plato's early dialogue, the Meno, Socrates and the slave boy work out together a special case of the Pythagorean theorem. Plato's example expresses the frank recognition of a standard of truth to be aspired to by all truth-seekers, a standard that has not only never been seriously challenged, but that has been tacitly accepted--indeed heavily relied upon, even in matters of life and death--by the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or do you know a church that keeps track of its flock, and their donations, without benefit of arithmetic?)

Yes, but science almost never looks as uncontroversial, as cut-and-dried, as arithmetic. Indeed rival scientific factions often engage in propaganda battles as ferocious as anything to be found in politics, or even in religious conflict. The fury with which the defenders of scientific orthodoxy often defend their doctrines against the heretics is probably unmatched in other arenas of human rhetorical combat. These competitions for allegiance--and, of course, funding--are designed to capture attention, and being well-designed, they typically succeed. This has the side effect that the warfare on the cutting edge of any science draws attention away from the huge uncontested background, the dull metal heft of the axe that gives the cutting edge its power. What goes without saying, during these heated disagreements, is an organized, encyclopedic collection of agreed-upon, humdrum scientific fact.(3)

Robert Proctor usefully draws our attention to a distinction between neutrality and objectivity. Geologists, he notes, know a lot more about oil-bearing shales than about other rocks--for the obvious economic and political reasons--but they do know objectively about oil bearing shales. And much of what they learn about oil-bearing shales can be generalized to other, less favored rocks. We want science to be objective; we should not want science to be neutral. Biologists know a lot more about the fruit-fly, Drosophila, than they do about other insects--not because you can get rich off fruit flies, but because you can get knowledge out of fruit flies easier than you can get it out of most other species. Biologists also know a lot more about mosquitoes than about other insects, and here it is because mosquitoes are more harmful to people than other species that might be much easier to study. Many are the reasons for concentrating attention in science, and they all conspire to making the paths of investigation far from neutral; they do not, in general, make those paths any less objective. Sometimes, to be sure, one bias or another leads to a violation of the canons of scientific method. Studying the pattern of a disease in men, for instance, while neglecting to gather the data on the same disease in women, is not just not neutral; it is bad science, as indefensible in scientific terms as it is in political terms.

The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered. The methods of science, like everything else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself--nothing is off limits to scientific questioning. The irony is that these fruits of scientific reflection, showing us the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes used by those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it a privileged status in the truth-seeking department--as if the institutions and practices they see competing with it were no worse off in these regards. But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history.

What difference in these institutions can explain this fact? It is, quite clearly, the leverage provided by the scientists' faith in the truth. Consider Richard Feynman's diagrams in quantum electrodynamics, for instance.(4)

When I first encountered them, they seemed like numerology to me, ludicrously unlikely guides to truth, more like dealing Tarot cards or casting lots than science. It seemed strange that such a weird process would yield the truth--but it does work, and the reason why it works can be understood (with effort!). And because it works, and can be proven to work, yielding results of dazzling precision and accuracy, it has become an accepted part of orthodox scientific method. And if casting lots or astrology could be demonstrated to yield results of similar accuracy, they too could be accommodated, along with the theory of why they worked, in orthodox science. But of course no such methods have ever been vindicated. Scientists have faith in the truth, but it is not blind faith. It is not like the faith that parents may have in the honesty of their children, or that sports fans may have in the capacity of their heroes to make the winning plays. It is rather like the faith anybody can have in a result which has been independently arrived at by ten different teams.

Epistemology: trying to tell the truth about truth

The ultimate reflexive investigation of investigation occurs in that branch of philosophy known as epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Here too controversies at the cutting edge have created a scale effect, a distortion that has often led to misinterpretations. Agreeing that truth is a very important concept, epistemologists have tried to say just what truth is-- without going overboard. Just figuring out what is true about truth turns out to be a difficult task, however, a technically difficult task, in which definitions and theories that seem at first to be innocent lead to complications that soon entangle the theorist in dubious doctrines. Our esteemed and familiar friend, truth, tends to turn into Truth--with a capital T--an inflated concept of truth that cannot really be defended.

Here is just one of the paths that leads to difficulty: suppose knowledge consists of nothing but true propositions believed with justification. And then suppose that true propositions, unlike false propositions, express facts. What are facts? How many facts are there? (Tom, Dick, and Harry are sitting in a room. There's one fact. In addition to Tom, Dick, Harry, the room they are sitting in and whatever they are sitting on, we seem to have a plethora of other facts: Dick is not standing, There is no horse on which Tom is riding, and so forth, ad infinitum. Do we really need to countenance an infinity of further facts alongside the rather minimal furnishings of this little world?) Were there facts before there were fact-finders, or are they rather like true sentences (of English, French, Latin, etc.), whose existence had to await the creation of human languages? Are facts independent of the minds of those who believe the propositions that express them? Do truths correspond to facts? What do the truths of mathematics correspond to, if anything? The categories begin to multiply, and no unified, obvious, agreed upon story about truth emerges. (5) Skeptics, seeing apparent pitfalls in any absolute or transcendental version of truth, argue for milder versions, and their opponents argue back, showing the flaws in the rival attempts at theory. Unremitting controversy reigns.

This modest but intermittently brilliant investigation of the very meaning of the word "truth" has had some mischievous consequences. Some have thought that the philosophical arguments showing the hopelessness of the inflated doctrines of truth actually showed that truth itself was nothing estimable or achievable after all. Give it up, they seem to be saying. Truth is an unachievable and misguided ideal. Then those who have gone on searching for an acceptable, defensible doctrine of truth appear to be clinging to a creed outworn, avowing a religion that they cannot secure by the methods of science itself. Epistemology begins to look like a mug's game--but only because the observers are forgetting all the points about truth that both sides agree upon. The effects of this distorted vision can be unsettling.

When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.

At that moment I perceived a gulf between us that I had only dimly seen before. It struck me at first as simply the gulf between being serious and being frivolous. But that initial surge of self-righteousness on my part was, in fact, a naive reaction. My sense of outrage, my sense that my time had been wasted by this man's bizarre project, was in its own way as unsophisticated as the reaction of the first-time theater-goer who leaps on the stage to protect the heroine from the villain. "Don't you understand?" we ask incredulously. "It's make believe. It's art. It isn't supposed to be taken literally!" Put in that context, perhaps this man's quest was not so disreputable after all. I would not have been offended, would I, if a colleague in the Drama Department had come by and asked if he could borrow a few yards of my books to put on the shelves of the set for his production of Tom Stoppard's play, Jumpers. What if anything would be wrong in outfitting this fellow with a snazzy set of outrageous epistemological doctrines with which he could titillate or confound his colleagues?

What would be wrong would be that since this man didn't acknowledge the gulf, didn't even recognize that it existed, my acquiescence in his shopping spree would have contributed to the debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion of a valuable distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and participants, don't see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and therein lies the problem. The sad fact is that in some intellectual circles, inhabited by some of our more advanced thinkers in the arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naiveté, made possible only by flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power. Like many another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else knows how to discover the truth either.

Among those who contribute to this problem, I am sorry to say, is an earlier Amnesty Lecturer in Oxford, my good friend Dick Rorty. Richard Rorty and I have been constructively disagreeing with each other for over a quarter of a century now. Each of us has taught the other a great deal, I believe, in the reciprocal process of chipping away at our residual points of disagreement. I can't name a living philosopher from whom I have learned more. Rorty has opened up the horizons of contemporary philosophy, shrewdly showing us philosophers many things about how our own projects have grown out of the philosophical projects of the distant and recent past, while boldly describing and prescribing future paths for us to take. But there is one point over which he and I do not agree at all--not yet--and that concerns his attempt over the years to show that philosophers' debates about Truth and Reality really do erase the gulf, really do license a slide into some form of relativism. In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just "conversations," and there are only political or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing conversation.

Rorty has often tried to enlist me in his campaign, declaring that he could find in my own work one explosive insight or another that would help him with his project of destroying the illusory edifice of objectivity. One of his favorite passages is the one with which I ended my book Consciousness Explained (1991):

It's just a war of metaphors, you say--but metaphors are not "just" metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them? [p.455]

"I wish," Rorty says, "he had taken one step further, and had added that such tools are all that inquiry can ever provide, because inquiry is never 'pure' in the sense of [Bernard] Williams' 'project of pure inquiry.' It is always a matter of getting us something we want." ("Holism, Intrinsicality, Transcendence," in Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and his Critics. 1993.) But I would never take that step, for although metaphors are indeed irreplaceable tools of thought, they are not the only such tools. Microscopes and mathematics and MRI scanners are among the others. Yes, any inquiry is a matter of getting us something we want: the truth about something that matters to us, if all goes as it should.

When philosophers argue about truth, they are arguing about how not to inflate the truth about truth into the Truth about Truth, some absolutistic doctrine that makes indefensible demands on our systems of thought. It is in this regard similar to debates about, say, the reality of time, or the reality of the past. There are some deep, sophisticated, worthy philosophical investigations into whether, properly speaking, the past is real. Opinion is divided, but you entirely misunderstand the point of these disagreements if you suppose that they undercut claims such as the following:

Life first emerged on this planet more than three thousand million years ago.

The Holocaust happened during World War II.

Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at 11:21 am, Dallas time, November 24, 1963.

These are truths about events that really happened. Their denials are falsehoods. No sane philosopher has ever thought otherwise, though in the heat of battle, they have sometimes made claims that could be so interpreted.

Richard Rorty deserves his large and enthralled readership in the arts and humanities, and in the "humanistic" social sciences, but when his readers enthusiastically interpret him as encouraging their postmodernist skepticism about truth, they trundle down paths he himself has refrained from traveling. When I press him on these points, he concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been duly entered. This serviceable, modest concept of truth, Rorty acknowledges, has its uses: when we want to compare two maps of the countryside for reliability, for instance, or when the issue is whether the accused did or did not commit the crime as charged.

Even Richard Rorty, then, acknowledges the gap, and the importance of the gap, between appearance and reality, between those theatrical exercises that may entertain us without pretence of truth-telling, and those that aim for, and often hit, the truth. He calls it a "vegetarian" concept of truth. Very well, then, let's all be vegetarians about the truth. Scientists never wanted to go the whole hog anyway.

The truth can hurt

Everybody wants the truth. If you wonder whether your neighbor has cheated you, or if there are any fish in this part of the lake, or which way to walk to get home, you are interested in truth. Why, though, if truth is so wonderful, and so obtainable, is there so much antagonism towards science? Everybody appreciates truth; not everybody appreciates the truth-finding tools of science.

Some, it seems, would prefer other, more traditional methods of getting at the truth: astrology, divining, soothsayers and gurus and shamans, trance-channeling, and consulting a variety of holy texts. Here the verdict of science is so familiar that I hardly need repeat it: as entertainments or stretching exercises for the mind, these various activities have their merits, but as truth-seeking methods, none can compete with science, a fact regularly conceded, tacitly, by those who defend their favorite alternative practice by citing what they claim to be scientific support--what else?--of its claims to power. One never encounters a believer in trance-channeling enlisting the support of an association of astrologers, or a College of Cardinals, but every shred of putative statistical evidence, every stray physicist or mathematician who can be found to offer friendly testimony, is eagerly brandished.

Why, then, if science is regularly appealed to even by those who seek to spread the word about alternatives, is there also so much dread? The answer is well known: the truth can hurt. Indeed it can. That is no illusion, but it is sometimes denied or ignored by scientists and others who pretend to believe that truth above all is the highest good. Surely it is not. I can easily describe circumstances in which I myself would lie or suppress the truth in order to prevent some human suffering. An old woman at the end of her days, living her life vicariously through tales of the heroic achievements of her son--are you going to tell her when he is arrested, convicted of some terrible crime, and humiliated? Isn't it better for her to leave this world in ignorant bliss? Of course it is, say I. But note that even here, we have to understand these cases as exceptions to the rule. We couldn't give this woman the comfort of our lies if lies were the general rule; she has to believe us when we talk to her.

It is a fact that people often don't want to know the truth. It is a more unsettling fact that people often don't want other people to know the truth. It darkens counsel to attempt to transform these facts into support for the fatuous idea that faith in the truth is itself a culture-bound, parochial, or in any way optional human attitude. The father of the accused who sits listening in court to the testimony, the woman who wonders if her husband is cheating on her--they may well not want to know the truth, and they may be right not to want to know the truth, but they believe in the truth. Very clearly they do; they know that the truth is there to be shunned or embraced, and that it matters. That's why they may well not want to know the truth. Because the truth can hurt. They may manage to deceive themselves into thinking that their attitude towards the truth on this occasion reflects ill on truth, and truth-finding and truth-seeking itself, but if so, this really is self-deception. The most they can hope to cling to is that there may be good reasons, the best of reasons--in the court of truth, note--for sometimes suppressing or ignoring the truth.

Should we not, then, consider suppressing the truth on a large scale, protecting various threatened groups from its corrosive effects? Consider what inevitably happens when our scientific culture, and its technology, is introduced to populations that have hitherto been spared its innovations. What effects will cellular telephones and MTV and high tech weaponry (and the high tech medicine to deal with the effects of the high tech weaponry) have on the underdeveloped peoples of the Third World? Many destructive and painful effects, no doubt. But we don't have to look at electronic wizardry to see the damage that can be done. Tijs Goldschmidt, in his fascinating book, Darwin's Dreampond (1996), tells of the devastating effects of introducing the Nile perch into Lake Victoria: the amazing species flock of cichlid fish was nearly extinguished in a few years, a catastrophic loss--for biologists, but not necessarily for the people who lived on its shores and who now could supplement their subsistence diet with the bounties of a new fishery. Goldschmidt also tells, however, of a similar cultural effect: the extinction of traditional Sukuma baskets.

These watertight baskets were woven by women and used at celebrations as vessels for consuming vast quantities of pombe, a millet beer. . . . Blades of grass dyed with manganese were woven into the baskets in geometric patterns with a symbolic significance. It wasn't always possible to find out what the patterns meant because the arrival of the mazabethi--the aluminum dishes named after Queen Elizabeth that had been introduced on a large scale under British rule--had signified the end of the masonzo culture. I spoke to an old woman in a little village who, after more than thirty years, was still incensed about the mazabethi. . . . "Sisi wanawake, we women, we used to weave baskets while sitting around and chatting with each other. I don't see anything wrong with that. Each woman did her best to make the most beautiful basket possible. The mazabethi put an end to all that." [p.39]

Even more sad, I think, is the effect reported of the introduction of steel axes to the Panare Indians of Venezuela.

In the past, when stone axes were used, various individuals came together and worked communally to fell trees for a new garden. With the introduction of the steel ax, however, one man can clear a garden by himself. . . . collaboration is no longer mandatory nor particularly frequent [emphasis added]. (Katharine Milton, "Civilization and Its Discontents," Natural History, March, 1992, pp.37-42.)

These people lose their traditional "web of cooperative interdependence," and they also lose a great deal of the knowledge they have amassed over centuries, of the fauna and flora of their own world. Often their very languages are extinguished, in a generation or two. These are great losses, without any doubt. But what policies should we adopt regarding them?

First, we should take note of the obvious: when traditional cultures encounter Western culture, the traditionalists enthusiastically adopt almost all the new practices, the new tools, the new ways. Why? Because they know what they have always desired, valued, wished for, and they find that these novelties are better means to their own ends than their old ways. Steel axes replace stone axes, outboard motors replace sails, modern medicine replaces witch doctoring, transistor radios and cellular phones are eagerly sought. These people turn out to be no better than we are at foreseeing the long-term effects of their choices, but on the basis of the information they consider, they choose rationally.

Yes, there are times, to be sure, when their innocence is taken advantage of by meretricious "advertising" cunningly aimed at their sheltered appreciation of the possibilities life has in store. But notice that this deplorable tactic is not the special province of those who would exploit them. Those who would protect them from modern technology are apparently prepared to grit their teeth and lie to them on a large scale: "Conceal your high tech wonders from them! If you must give them something, palm off some shiny beads, or other tidbits that they can readily incorporate into their traditional culture."

Is this any way to treat adult members of our species? Do we not all have, among our human rights, the right to know the truth? It is shockingly paternalistic to say that we should shield these people from the fruits of civilization. What, are they like elephants, to be put in a preserve? I recommend that we treat them as we treat our own citizens: we offer them all the truth-seeking tools in our kit, so that they can make an informed choice--if they so choose. To be sure, that course of action is a one-way street. Once they have been so informed, we have already violated their pristine purity. There's no going back.

You can't have it both ways. If these are human adults, then they have a right to know, do they not? Would you really advocate taking steps to prevent them from educating themselves? Educating themselves will turn them into something radically different. They will lose many of their old ways. Some of this will be good riddance, and some, no doubt, will be tragic. But what standard would you use to anchor the "right" ways for them? The ways of the last hundred years, or of last ten years, or of the last ten millennia? And more pressing, what would give us the right in the first place to treat them differently from the way we treat our own citizens?

Who cries out for this self-imposed restraint, by the way? Who beseeches us to button our "imperialist" lips and keep our so-called scientific truths to ourselves? Not, typically, the people, but rather, their self-declared spiritual leaders. It is they, not their flocks, who demand that their flocks be shielded from the corrosive and irreversible influences of our scientific culture of truth. Those people who work in "cultural studies," and others who fly the banner of multiculturalism, should linger thoughtfully over the following suggestion: their well-meaning policy of tolerance for traditional policies that deny free access to the truth-seeking tools of science is often--more often than not, I would judge--a policy in the service of tyrants.

In our culture, the idea of informed consent is one of the cornerstones of liberty. In other cultures, the very idea of informing the people so that they might consent or not is viewed with hostility. The next century will, I hope, sweep away this hostility. Indeed, I think it will become more and more impractical for political leaders to preserve the uninformedness of their people. All we need do is just keep putting out the word, clearly and with scrupulous concern for telling the truth. There is really nothing new in this suggestion. Institutions such as the BBC World Service have been doing just that, with tremendous success, for decades. And year after year, the elite in every nation in the world send their children to our universities for their educations. They know, perhaps better than we ourselves appreciate, that the science and technology of truth-seeking is our most valuable export.

References

Akins, 1990, "Science and Our Inner Lives: Birds of Prey, Bats, and the Common Featherless Biped," in M. Bekoff and D. Jamieson, eds., Interpretation and Explanation in the Study of Animal Behavior, Vol 1, Boulder, CO: Westview, pp.414-427.

Dawkins, Richard and Krebs, John, 1978, "Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation," in J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies, eds., Behavioral Ecology, Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, pp.282-309.

Dennett, Daniel, 1991, Consciousness Explained, New York and Boston: Little, Brown; London: Allen Lane.

Feynman, Richard, 1985, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton Univ. Press.

Goldschmidt, Tijs, 1996, Darwin's Dreampond, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hauser, Marc, 1996, The Evolution of Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Milton, Katharine, 1992, "Civilization and Its Discontents," Natural History, March, 1992, pp.37-42.

Rorty, Richard, 1993, "Holism, Intrinsicality, Transcendence," in Bo Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell.

notes

1. The world of appearances for each of them has been vigorously biased by natural selection in the direction of their narrow best interests. Which facts do they find? Their sense organs--and their information-gathering behaviors using these sense organs--have been tuned to "narcissism" (Akins, 1990) designed to exaggerate, smear, discount, and in other ways adjust or edit their gifts of meaning in favor of life-preserving interpretations. This does not prevent them from tracking facts. Rather, it determines that the facts they track are those with a built-in perspective, thus not "here is water" in the chemist's sense, but in the thirsty organism's sense that glosses over the niceties of definition and ignores impurities up to the point where they become a health issue. Exactitude of definition, or the "transduction" of a "natural kind" has never been one of Nature's goals. Failure to appreciate this point has led to a cottage industry of philosophical fantasy (about Twin Earth, XYZ, and other chimeras).

2. Richard Dawkins and John Krebs (1978) opened up the field of theoretical investigation of this side of communication. See Marc Hauser, The Evolution of Communication (1996) for a masterful overview of the empirical and theoretical work in the field.

3. Even supposedly trained observers--such as those working in the new fields of "Science Studies" or the sociology of science--often overlook this mountain of quiet results, concentrating their attention on the noisy and exciting moments. In anthropology generally, this is a well recognized problem of observer bias. Consider: you have obtained a grant to study some relatively exotic human group, and you spend several years far from home, enduring hardships, tedium, and isolation. You would surely find it extremely hard to contemplate the prospect of coming back with the following discovery: they're pretty much just like us. Or worse: they actually do just what they say they do. Why worse? Because if you, the anthropologist, can't offer an account that contradicts or otherwise improves on the account we already have from their own mouths, it seems you have been wasting your time--and our grant money. There is, then, a natural, even reasonable, human bias in favor of concentrating on the extraordinary, in hopes of finding something riveting, something new, something surprising to repay the effort of the investigation.

4. The classic explanation is Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Princeton Univ. Press, 1985.

5. If you think, impatiently, that there is an obvious way of cutting through this Gordian knot, wonderful. Write up your solution and submit it to a philosophy journal. If you're right, you'll become famous for solving problems that have stymied the cleverest epistemologists for years if not centuries. But be forewarned: it was just such brave convictions that led most of us into this discipline.

2007-02-08T14:31:00.001-05:00

POSTMODERNISM AND TRUTH
by Daniel Dennett, from here

Here is a story you probably haven't heard, about how a team of American researchers inadvertently introduced a virus into a third world country they were studying.(1) They were experts in their field, and they had the best intentions; they thought they were helping the people they were studying, but in fact they had never really seriously considered whether what they were doing might have ill effects. It had not occurred to them that a side-effect of their research might be damaging to the fragile ecology of the country they were studying. The virus they introduced had some dire effects indeed: it raised infant mortality rates, led to a general decline in the health and wellbeing of women and children, and, perhaps worst of all, indirectly undermined the only effective political force for democracy in the country, strengthening the hand of the traditional despot who ruled the nation. These American researchers had something to answer for, surely, but when confronted with the devastation they had wrought, their response was frustrating, to say the least: they still thought that what they were doing was, all things considered, in the interests of the people, and declared that the standards by which this so-called devastation was being measured were simply not appropriate. Their critics, they contended, were trying to impose "Western" standards in a cultural environment that had no use for such standards. In this strange defense they were warmly supported by the country's leaders--not surprisingly--and little was heard--not surprisingly--from those who might have been said, by Western standards, to have suffered as a result of their activities.

These researchers were not biologists intent on introducing new strains of rice, nor were they agri-business chemists testing new pesticides, or doctors trying out vaccines that couldn't legally be tested in the U.S.A. They were postmodernist science critics and other multiculturalists who were arguing, in the course of their professional researches on the culture and traditional "science" of this country, that Western science was just one among many equally valid narratives, not to be "privileged" in its competition with native traditions which other researchers--biologists, chemists, doctors and others--were eager to supplant. The virus they introduced was not a macromolecule but a meme (a replicating idea): the idea that science was a "colonial" imposition, not a worthy substitute for the practices and beliefs that had carried the third-world country to its current condition. And the reason you have not heard of this particular incident is that I made it up, to dramatize the issue and to try to unsettle what seems to be current orthodoxy among the literati about such matters. But it is inspired by real incidents--that is to say, true reports. Events of just this sort have occurred in India and elsewhere, reported, movingly, by a number of writers, among them:

Meera Nanda, "The Epistemic Charity of the Social Constructivist Critics of Science and Why the Third World Should Refuse the Offer," in N. Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths about Science, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp286-311

Reza Afshari, "An Essay on Islamic Cultural Relativism in the Discourse of Human Rights," in Human Rights Quarterly, 16, 1994, pp.235-76.

Susan Okin, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?" Boston Review, October/November, 1997, pp 25-28.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality, London and New Jersey, Zed Books Ltd. 1991.

My little fable is also inspired by a wonderful remark of E. O. Wilson, in Atlantic Monthly a few months ago: "Scientists, being held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful." Actually, of course, we are all held responsible for what we say. The laws of libel and slander, for instance, exempt none of us, but most of us--including scientists in many or even most fields--do not typically make assertions that, independently of libel and slander considerations, might bring harm to others, even indirectly. A handy measure of this fact is the evident ridiculousness we discover in the idea of malpractice insurance for . . . . literary critics, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, cosmologists. What on earth could a mathematician or literary critic do, in the course of executing her profession duties, that might need the security blanket of malpractice insurance? She might inadvertently trip a student in the corridor, or drop a book on somebody's head, but aside from such outré side-effects, our activities are paradigmatically innocuous. One would think. But in those fields where the stakes are higher--and more direct--there is a longstanding tradition of being especially cautious, and of taking particular responsibility for ensuring that no harm results (as explicitly honored in the Hippocratic Oath). Engineers, knowing that thousands of people's safety may depend on the bridge they design, engage in focussed exercises with specified constraints designed to determine that, according to all current knowledge, their designs are safe and sound. Even economists--often derided for the risks they take with other people's livelihoods--when they find themselves in positions to endorse specific economic measures considered by government bodies or by their private clients, are known to attempt to put a salutary strain on their underlying assumptions, just to be safe. They are used to asking themselves, and to being expected to ask themselves: "What if I'm wrong?" We others seldom ask ourselves this question, since we have spent our student and professional lives working on topics that are, according both to tradition and common sense, incapable of affecting any lives in ways worth worrying about. If my topic is whether or not Vlastos had the best interpretation of Plato's Parmenides or how the wool trade affected imagery in Tudor poetry, or what the best version of string theory says about time, or how to recast proofs in topology in some new formalism, if I am wrong, dead wrong, in what I say, the only damage I am likely to do is to my own scholarly reputation. But when we aspire to have a greater impact on the "real" (as opposed to "academic") world-- and many philosophers do aspire to this today--we need to adopt the attitudes and habits of these more applied disciplines. We need to hold ourselves responsible for what we say, recognizing that our words, if believed, can have profound effects for good or ill.

When I was a young untenured professor of philosophy, I once received a visit from a colleague from the Comparative Literature Department, an eminent and fashionable literary theorist, who wanted some help from me. I was flattered to be asked, and did my best to oblige, but the drift of his questions about various philosophical topics was strangely perplexing to me. For quite a while we were getting nowhere, until finally he managed to make clear to me what he had come for. He wanted "an epistemology," he said. An epistemology. Every self-respecting literary theorist had to sport an epistemology that season, it seems, and without one he felt naked, so he had come to me for an epistemology to wear--it was the very next fashion, he was sure, and he wanted the dernier cri in epistemologies. It didn't matter to him that it be sound, or defensible, or (as one might as well say) true; it just had to be new and different and stylish. Accessorize, my good fellow, or be overlooked at the party.

At that moment I perceived a gulf between us that I had only dimly seen before. It struck me at first as simply the gulf between being serious and being frivolous. But that initial surge of self-righteousness on my part was, in fact, a naive reaction. My sense of outrage, my sense that my time had been wasted by this man's bizarre project, was in its own way as unsophisticated as the reaction of the first-time theater-goer who leaps on the stage to protect the heroine from the villain. "Don't you understand?" we ask incredulously. "It's make believe. It's art. It isn't supposed to be taken literally!" Put in that context, perhaps this man's quest was not so disreputable after all. I would not have been offended, would I, if a colleague in the Drama Department had come by and asked if he could borrow a few yards of my books to put on the shelves of the set for his production of Tom Stoppard's play, Jumpers. What if anything would be wrong in outfitting this fellow with a snazzy set of outrageous epistemological doctrines with which he could titillate or confound his colleagues?

What would be wrong would be that since this man didn't acknowledge the gulf, didn't even recognize that it existed, my acquiescence in his shopping spree would have contributed to the debasement of a precious commodity, the erosion of a valuable distinction. Many people, including both onlookers and participants, don't see this gulf, or actively deny its existence, and therein lies the problem. The sad fact is that in some intellectual circles, inhabited by some of our more advanced thinkers in the arts and humanities, this attitude passes as a sophisticated appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge claims. In fact this opinion, far from being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naiveté, made possible only by flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power. Like many another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently generalize from their own cases and conclude that nobody else knows how to discover the truth either.

Among those who contribute to this problem, I am sorry to say, is, my good friend Dick Rorty. Richard Rorty and I have been constructively disagreeing with each other for over a quarter of a century now. Each of us has taught the other a great deal, I believe, in the reciprocal process of chipping away at our residual points of disagreement. I can't name a living philosopher from whom I have learned more. Rorty has opened up the horizons of contemporary philosophy, shrewdly showing us philosophers many things about how our own projects have grown out of the philosophical projects of the distant and recent past, while boldly describing and prescribing future paths for us to take. But there is one point over which he and I do not agree at all--not yet--and that concerns his attempt over the years to show that philosophers' debates about Truth and Reality really do erase the gulf, really do license a slide into some form of relativism. In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just "conversations," and there are only political or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing conversation.

Rorty has often tried to enlist me in his campaign, declaring that he could find in my own work one explosive insight or another that would help him with his project of destroying the illusory edifice of objectivity. One of his favorite passages is the one with which I ended my book Consciousness Explained (1991):

It's just a war of metaphors, you say--but metaphors are not "just" metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought. No one can think about consciousness without them, so it is important to equip yourself with the best set of tools available. Look what we have built with our tools. Could you have imagined it without them? [p.455]

"I wish," Rorty says, "he had taken one step further, and had added that such tools are all that inquiry can ever provide, because inquiry is never 'pure' in the sense of [Bernard] Williams' 'project of pure inquiry.' It is always a matter of getting us something we want." ("Holism, Intrinsicality, Transcendence," in Dahlbom, ed., Dennett and his Critics. 1993.) But I would never take that step, for although metaphors are indeed irreplaceable tools of thought, they are not the only such tools. Microscopes and mathematics and MRI scanners are among the others. Yes, any inquiry is a matter of getting us something we want: the truth about something that matters to us, if all goes as it should.

When philosophers argue about truth, they are arguing about how not to inflate the truth about truth into the Truth about Truth, some absolutistic doctrine that makes indefensible demands on our systems of thought. It is in this regard similar to debates about, say, the reality of time, or the reality of the past. There are some deep, sophisticated, worthy philosophical investigations into whether, properly speaking, the past is real. Opinion is divided, but you entirely misunderstand the point of these disagreements if you suppose that they undercut claims such as the following:

Life first emerged on this planet more than three thousand million years ago.
The Holocaust happened during World War II.
Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald at 11:21 am, Dallas time, November 24, 1963.

These are truths about events that really happened. Their denials are falsehoods. No sane philosopher has ever thought otherwise, though in the heat of battle, they have sometimes made claims that could be so interpreted.

Richard Rorty deserves his large and enthralled readership in the arts and humanities, and in the "humanistic" social sciences, but when his readers enthusiastically interpret him as encouraging their postmodernist skepticism about truth, they trundle down paths he himself has refrained from traveling. When I press him on these points, he concedes that there is indeed a useful concept of truth that survives intact after all the corrosive philosophical objections have been duly entered. This serviceable, modest concept of truth, Rorty acknowledges, has its uses: when we want to compare two maps of the countryside for reliability, for instance, or when the issue is whether the accused did or did not commit the crime as charged.

Even Richard Rorty, then, acknowledges the gap, and the importance of the gap, between appearance and reality, between those theatrical exercises that may entertain us without pretence of truth-telling, and those that aim for, and often hit, the truth. He calls it a "vegetarian" concept of truth. Very well, then, let's all be vegetarians about the truth. Scientists never wanted to go the whole hog anyway.

So now, let's ask about the sources or foundations of this mild, uncontroversial, vegetarian concept of truth.

Right now, as I speak, billions of organisms on this planet are engaged in a game of hide and seek. It is not just a game for them. It is a matter of life and death. Getting it right, not making mistakes, has been of paramount importance to every living thing on this planet for more than three billion years, and so these organisms have evolved thousands of different ways of finding out about the world they live in, discriminating friends from foes, meals from mates, and ignoring the rest for the most part. It matters to them that they not be misinformed about these matters--indeed nothing matters more--but they don't, as a rule, appreciate this. They are the beneficiaries of equipment exquisitely designed to get what matters right but when their equipment malfunctions and gets matters wrong, they have no resources, as a rule, for noticing this, let alone deploring it. They soldier on, unwittingly. The difference between how things seem and how things really are is just as fatal a gap for them as it can be for us, but they are largely oblivious to it. The recognition of the difference between appearance and reality is a human discovery. A few other species--some primates, some cetaceans, maybe even some birds--shows signs of appreciating the phenomenon of "false belief"--getting it wrong. They exhibit sensitivity to the errors of others, and perhaps even some sensitivity to their own errors as errors, but they lack the capacity for the reflection required to dwell on this possibility, and so they cannot use this sensitivity in the deliberate design of repairs or improvements of their own seeking gear or hiding gear. That sort of bridging of the gap between appearance and reality is a wrinkle that we human beings alone have mastered.

We are the species that discovered doubt. Is there enough food laid by for winter? Have I miscalculated? Is my mate cheating on me? Should we have moved south? Is it safe to enter this cave? Other creatures are often visibly agitated by their own uncertainties about just such questions, but because they cannot actually ask themselves these questions, they cannot articulate their predicaments for themselves or take steps to improve their grip on the truth. They are stuck in a world of appearances, making the best they can of how things seem and seldom if ever worrying about whether how things seem is how they truly are.

We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. There may be an Island of the Colour-blind (allowing Oliver Sacks his usual large dose of poetic license), but no Island of the People Who Do Not Recognize Their Own Children. The Land of the Liars could exist only in philosophers' puzzles; there are no traditions of False Calendar Systems for mis-recording the passage of time. In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.

We human beings use our communicative skills not just for truth-telling, but also for promise-making, threatening, bargaining, story-telling, entertaining, mystifying, inducing hypnotic trances, and just plain kidding around, but prince of these activities is truth-telling, and for this activity we have invented ever better tools. Alongside our tools for agriculture, building, warfare, and transportation, we have created a technology of truth: science. Try to draw a straight line, or a circle, "freehand." Unless you have considerable artistic talent, the result will not be impressive. With a straight edge and a compass, on the other hand, you can practically eliminate the sources of human variability and get a nice clean, objective result, the same every time.

Is the line really straight? How straight is it? In response to these questions, we develop ever finer tests, and then tests of the accuracy of those tests, and so forth, bootstrapping our way to ever greater accuracy and objectivity. Scientists are just as vulnerable to wishful thinking, just as likely to be tempted by base motives, just as venal and gullible and forgetful as the rest of humankind. Scientists don't consider themselves to be saints; they don't even pretend to be priests (who according to tradition are supposed to do a better job than the rest of us at fighting off human temptation and frailty). Scientists take themselves to be just as weak and fallible as anybody else, but recognizing those very sources of error in themselves and in the groups to which they belong, they have devised elaborate systems to tie their own hands, forcibly preventing their frailties and prejudices from infecting their results.

It is not just the implements, the physical tools of the trade, that are designed to be resistant to human error. The organization of methods is also under severe selection pressure for improved reliability and objectivity. The classic example is the double blind experiment, in which, for instance, neither the human subjects nor the experimenters themselves are permitted to know which subjects get the test drug and which the placebo, so that nobody's subliminal hankerings and hunches can influence the perception of the results. The statistical design of both individual experiments and suites of experiments, is then embedded in the larger practice of routine attempts at replication by independent investigators, which is further embedded in a tradition--flawed, but recognized--of publication of both positive and negative results.

What inspires faith in arithmetic is the fact that hundreds of scribblers, working independently on the same problem, will all arrive at the same answer (except for those negligible few whose errors can be found and identified to the mutual satisfaction of all). This unrivalled objectivity is also found in geometry and the other branches of mathematics, which since antiquity have been the very model of certain knowledge set against the world of flux and controversy. In Plato's early dialogue, the Meno, Socrates and the slave boy work out together a special case of the Pythagorean theorem. Plato's example expresses the frank recognition of a standard of truth to be aspired to by all truth-seekers, a standard that has not only never been seriously challenged, but that has been tacitly accepted--indeed heavily relied upon, even in matters of life and death--by the most vigorous opponents of science. (Or do you know a church that keeps track of its flock, and their donations, without benefit of arithmetic?)

Yes, but science almost never looks as uncontroversial, as cut-and-dried, as arithmetic. Indeed rival scientific factions often engage in propaganda battles as ferocious as anything to be found in politics, or even in religious conflict. The fury with which the defenders of scientific orthodoxy often defend their doctrines against the heretics is probably unmatched in other arenas of human rhetorical combat. These competitions for allegiance--and, of course, funding--are designed to capture attention, and being well-designed, they typically succeed. This has the side effect that the warfare on the cutting edge of any science draws attention away from the huge uncontested background, the dull metal heft of the axe that gives the cutting edge its power. What goes without saying, during these heated disagreements, is an organized, encyclopedic collection of agreed-upon, humdrum scientific fact.

Robert Proctor usefully draws our attention to a distinction between neutrality and objectivity.(2) Geologists, he notes, know a lot more about oil-bearing shales than about other rocks--for the obvious economic and political reasons--but they do know objectively about oil bearing shales. And much of what they learn about oil-bearing shales can be generalized to other, less favored rocks. We want science to be objective; we should not want science to be neutral. Biologists know a lot more about the fruit-fly, Drosophila, than they do about other insects--not because you can get rich off fruit flies, but because you can get knowledge out of fruit flies easier than you can get it out of most other species. Biologists also know a lot more about mosquitoes than about other insects, and here it is because mosquitoes are more harmful to people than other species that might be much easier to study. Many are the reasons for concentrating attention in science, and they all conspire to making the paths of investigation far from neutral; they do not, in general, make those paths any less objective. Sometimes, to be sure, one bias or another leads to a violation of the canons of scientific method. Studying the pattern of a disease in men, for instance, while neglecting to gather the data on the same disease in women, is not just not neutral; it is bad science, as indefensible in scientific terms as it is in political terms.

It is true that past scientific orthodoxies have themselves inspired policies that hindsight reveals to be seriously flawed. One can sympathize, for instance, with Ashis Nandy, editor of the passionately anti-scientific anthology, Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity, Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988. Having lived through Atoms for Peace, and the Green Revolution, to name two of the most ballyhooed scientific juggernauts that have seriously disrupted third world societies, he sees how "the adaptation in India of decades-old western technologies are advertised and purchased as great leaps forward in science, even when such adaptations turn entire disciplines or areas of knowledge into mere intellectual machines for the adaptation, replication and testing of shop-worn western models which have often been given up in the west itself as too dangerous or as ecologically non-viable." (p8) But we should recognize this as a political misuse of science, not as a fundamental flaw in science itself.

The methods of science aren't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible. Just as important: there is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered. The methods of science, like everything else under the sun, are themselves objects of scientific scrutiny, as method becomes methodology, the analysis of methods. Methodology in turn falls under the gaze of epistemology, the investigation of investigation itself--nothing is off limits to scientific questioning. The irony is that these fruits of scientific reflection, showing us the ineliminable smudges of imperfection, are sometimes used by those who are suspicious of science as their grounds for denying it a privileged status in the truth-seeking department--as if the institutions and practices they see competing with it were no worse off in these regards. But where are the examples of religious orthodoxy being simply abandoned in the face of irresistible evidence? Again and again in science, yesterday's heresies have become today's new orthodoxies. No religion exhibits that pattern in its history.

1. Portions of this paper are derived from "Faith in the Truth," my Amnesty Lecture, Oxford, February 17, 1997.
2. Value-Free Science?, Harvard Univ. Press, 1991.

This is the final draft of a paper given at the 1998 World Congress of Philosophy. Daniel Dennett's most recent book, Freedom Evolves, has just been published by Viking Press.