“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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Attention and Charity: 15,000 x $.10 = $1500
(Note: because I’m an idiot, the original post contained a mathematical error which was, sadly, not a typo! Thank you to those of you who noted this! Let me add an additional question: does the sum donated change the analysis below? If it were $150 for 15,000 reblogs would it be more, less, or as meaningful as if it were $15 million for 15,000 reblogs?)
Is the following proposition ethical: For everyone who deletes their reblog of the previous charity offer and instead reblogs this, I will donate $.20 to the same charity (which -at the present rate- would cost me perhaps $3000 for rather massive exposure).
Objections to this offer:
(1) It is self-aggrandizing and self-promoting. Of course, this is true of the original offer as well, which features a URL in its image for a reason; the poster might just as easily have donated $1500 to the charity in question, but by making an event of it she accumulates attention, which has actual and potential value.
Thus: I am no guiltier of this than she; if self-promotion or self-satisfaction disqualifies charity -and this is a rather old question- we are both guilty for exchanging attention (and esteem) for material wealth. This is common in philanthropy: one gets one’s name on the building, one’s photo in the paper, and so on. If it is not objectionable in ordinary circumstances, what makes it so here?
(It is probable that all she really wanted was to have a bit of fun as she did something good, which I should stress is, to me, commendable).
(2) This erases another’s charity instead of supplementing it. When I saw the original offer, I thought: what would happen if I were right now to pose the same offer for another charity? Wouldn’t I be ignored as an absurd epigone? Yes, and that’s because this community cannot pay its attention (again, attention is a scarce commodity) to dozens of charity offers daily or weekly.
If I want to make a difference, and acquire attention, I cannot merely repeat her gesture; I must displace hers. In allocating attention, we focus on what demands it; this is why our media all attend to the outrageous, the controversial, and the extraordinary. This distorts our sense of reality, of course, but scarce commodities accumulate around what takes them. Hence: shameless celebrity behavior. What is unnoticed is irrelevant to a mediated reality.
Besides: it is ostensibly the case that what matters here is the charity, and my offer means twice as much money for that cause. Aren’t other considerations about attention, credit, Tumblarity, and so on merely vulgar distractions?
(3) This is mean. The person making the original offer is quite clearly a kind, benevolent, good-hearted person whose post will mean money for a cause none can oppose. It is unpleasant to interrogate such gestures -the greening of our avatars in support of Iran, the placing of bumper stickers on our cars to combat racism, the donating of money to one cause when another is more dire by this or that metric, in which most of us -myself included- participate.
But I surely cannot have been the only one to wonder about the exchange rate -$1500 for 15,000 reblogs- or the implicit values traded in such acts of philanthropy, or other associated issues of intent, attention-scarcity, charity prioritization, and more. Indeed, if I was I am sure that only demonstrates my own moral poverty and will be something you can pity, rather than rage at, I hope.
Comments? Thoughts? Is my hypothetical proposition ethical, and if not, why not? Is this the sort of issue one should simply not discuss, instead applauding any and all good deeds without questioning their motives or incidental consequences?
A Hierarchy of Differences
Someone I admire very much noted that when he meets someone, he categorizes their differences from him -“subconsciously,” without willing to do so- hierarchically:
- Sex
- Age
- Socioeconomic status
- Nationality
- Race
He writes that “if meeting a new person [he is] more conscious of the fact that she is a female than the fact that she is from [another country,” to take an example. I suspect that we all so-categorize, although I should emphasize that we might do so without judgment or prejudice (to any substantive degree); and we might most easily detect how we do so in our automatically-adopted postures, diction, tone, and attitudes. Around the elderly, we perhaps curse less; around the opposite sex, we perhaps are more nervous. Around the very poor, perhaps we’d not mention our blogs or iPhones.
I don’t wish to ask the rather political question of whether we consider new individuals categorically or not, as I consider it a probable fact of human nature that where we are aware of categories we use them to sort experiences, without malice. The struggle against bad categorical thought is as much about choosing categories we feel are just and useful as about erasing categories entirely. Of course, it is always best to consider individuals as individuals; and we do so once we know someone well.
Rather, my question is: What is your hierarchy? Is sex commonly first, for example, or is socioeconomic status more notable? Or does your hierarchy change contextually?
Japhetic Theory: Linguistics with Uncle Joe Stalin
It is probably worse than redundant to post something about linguistics so long as Tristn, Raynor, Simen, and others I admire are discussing the subject, but “like a child who wanders into the middle of a conversation” I had to share this:
Yesterday I followed a link from Gospel of Moll to a spectacularly deranged Rapture web site which, among other things, repeatedly referred to a forthcoming War of Gog and Magog. I was curious about Gog’s lineage -who wouldn’t be- and learned that he was a son of Japheth, who was a son of Noah, who built a floating zoo.
While reading about Japheth, I came across Japhetic Theory:
Japhetic theory is…a linguistic theory developed by the Soviet linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr (1864–1934). In linguistics it is consideredto be the equivalent of Lysenkoism in biology: a theory that was promoted and supported for ideological rather than scientific reasons, because it was thought to represent “proletarian science” as opposed to “bourgeois science.”
Error fascinates me most when it is driven by ideology, and Marr’s desperate attempts to apply Marxist ideas to linguistics exemplify academic derangement in a way I find delightful:
“He even claimed that the same social classes in widely different countries spoke versions of their own languages that were linguistically closer to one another than to the speech of other classes who supposedly spoke “the same” language.”
And:
“Marr also insisted that the notion that a people are united by common language was nothing more than false consciousness created by “bourgeois nationalism”.
To paraphrase Jackie Treehorn: Of course he did. But what is most amazing about Japhetic theory is not its stupidity, its pitiful role as lackey to Marxist ideology (however clearly that illustrates that Marxism and its associated theories were never “scientific,” despite their claims, as their teleological imperatives make testable hypotheses too dangerous), or even its name.
It is that it was rebutted, and thereby officially discredited, by Joseph Stalin, an academic event comparable to having one’s racist ideas about genetics contested by Adolf Hitler.
Stalin’s paper -probably ghostwritten- appeared in Pravda and can be read here. Linguists: watch your backs!
"Art is truth"; but can truth be political?
Andy Sturdevant of South 12th posted an excellent essay about John F. Kennedy’s assertion that “art is truth,” which comes from a speech Sturdevant excerpts, compares to Glenn Beck’s remarks on art, and partially disputes.
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth… In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society—in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.
Kennedy was likely contrasting the art of the West with Socialist Realism in particular, the Russian movement directed by the Soviet government to support official party policy. Art that didn’t directly support Communist principles or “inspire” the “workers” was considered not merely useless but bourgeoisie and reactionary. What was personal, individual, interior was deplored: “The private life is dead in Russia for a man with any manhood,” and this was true for the scribe as well as the soldier.
To be preoccupied with such a scale of life -love, death, family- in a time of global proletarian struggle was clearly anti-social solipsism, and therefore anti-Socialist sabotage. So Bulgakov is censored while Gorky thrives.
For many, particularly survivors of Soviet domination like Milan Kundera, the idea that politics is incompatible with art is axiomatic. But Sturdevant notes several artists, and there are many, who exemplify his claim that “Art canbe an ideological weapon in a free society, obviously, and there have been plenty of times in American history where it has been used as such.”
While I tend to dislike political art -which is not exploratory but expository, which does not seek truth but rather tells us where to find it, which is not existential but teleological (and therefore often dull and dated)- I am interested in what seems to follow from Kennedy’s claim. If art is truth and art cannot be political, is it fair to say that what is political is necessarily untrue?
I think it perhaps is, since what is political is aggregatory, reductive, and systematic, all qualities I associate with the subtle falsity of reason run amok. Kennedy seems to suggest as much when he says that truth emerges when the artist “remain[s] true to himself and… let[s] the chips fall where they may.”
That is: undirected fidelity to the individual, concern with the human, yields meaningful artistic truth. As all politics are teleological and subordinate the individual to theory, the chips cannot fall where they may. Their artificial arrangment may be moving, moralistically affecting, beautiful, but tied to the moment it won’t be enduring.
But that is just one view, and the point is: Sturdevant’s post is awesome.
“…the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he subscribes to the pessimism that sees in politics the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state.”
Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, quoted by Clive James. This is a remarkable distillation of what beliefs democratic government reflects. By ‘liberal,’ of course, Aron means the liberal humanist of the Western tradition, not specifically a leftist.
“Kierkegaard is a star, although he shines over territory that is almost inaccessible to me.”
Franz Kafka, to Oskar Baum. Kafka doesn’t mean that Kierkegaard illuminates a Christian world which is alien to his Judiasm; he elsewhere wrote that Kierkegaard “is on the same side of the world. He bears me out like a friend.”
Indeed, Kafka’s Judiasm had as its greatest effect his preoccupation with gnosis and textual indeterminacy, with an endless exegetical pursuit of truth long since vanished from the word and the world. To a lesser extent, it provided an atmosphere and some iconography for his mind, and no German-speaking Jewish man living in Prague in the early 20th century could escape the relentless othering that so dislocated and alienated him.
But reductive analyses fail clumsily with Kafka, who was a modernist writer more than a Jew or a neurotic or a Czech or a European or a mystic. It is in his modernism, which we largely share -post merely being a prefix- that we find what put the Kierkegaardian territory “almost” beyond reach:
For Kierkegaard the absurd -the suprarational- remained an alternative to the world of reductive, superficial reason; for Kafka, the absurd -the irrational- had become the world of superficial contemporaneity. What was transcendence for Kierkegaard was, in distorted form, a reality for Kafka: the senseless world of anti-rational, post-human social derangement.
The territory of religious commitment as a turning-against-the-world was almost inaccessible to Kafka, who saw the world turning against itself; Kierkegaard drew inspiration from Abraham’s irrational willingness to murder his son, while Kafka saw that soon, functionaries would commit atrocities by the millions without asking for a rationale.
This is why Kierkegaard is timeless -Wittgenstein said: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” Kafka, on the other hand, wasn’t a saint but a prophet: he saw as early as anyone what modernism meant: reason run amok and no solace beyond reason, no leap permitted.
(Note: the awesome Greg Brown and I have been arguing over whether fiction or non-fiction is superior, is more real, in Meaghano’s comments; I think Kafka’s prescience is a good example of why the novel will always illuminate more than the essay: we must imagine before we describe).
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted by AZspot and cited by Daniel Holter (who are both great). I have never cared for this form of analysis, which establishes a perceiving elect -generally the very educated- as capable of distinguishing ‘authentic’ happiness from suggestible, hypnotized ersatz-happiness. Note the wording: the clever leaders can trick people into “loving” their servitude.
A feat of some skill: the total manipulation of the rebellious, recalcitrant, omnivorously demanding, inconsistent, fickle human species! What brilliance these leaders possess, mastering mass psychology as none ever have from their smoke-filled rooms and lulling us all into our “false” happiness!
And only the hero-savant to tell us: “No, you’re not really happy! You’re not really free! You don’t want what you think you want, love what you think you love! Read my books and learn of your secret slavery!”
It is parlor-game intellectualism; Huxley will always have the trump card: “You only think you’re happy!” But if you have any respect for the individual, for the moral agency of man, you see at once how ludicrously elitist and epistemologically unjustifiable it is. If the individual says he loves his life and is happy, how can we falsify this claim? With Huxley’s aesthetics! “No one could be happy with such a life!”
But democracy means we accept that people are not all pleased by the same things, and Huxley’s vision of profound conditioning is merely a very fancy form of condescension and snobbery: the ordinary man, what a lump of clay his mind is! So easily tricked! And television: what trash!
This is the first step towards tyranny, of course: reduce the individual to the status of a passive and malleable animal. Shall he be rescued from the capitalist democracy he thinks he favors? A revolution may be needed! A war is already underway, it’s just undetected by the sheep! Violence may be required to free humanity, whether they think they’re enslaved or not, whether they want liberating or not!
(See also: A New Nadir’s very good response about Huxley and social criticism in general).
“Although he had received diagnoses for psychiatric illnesses, including bipolar disorder, a judge decided that Donald would get better care in the state correctional system than he could get anywhere in his county. That was two years ago. Donald’s confinement has been repeatedly extended because of his violent outbursts. This year he assaulted a guard here at the prison, the Ohio River Valley Juvenile Correctional Facility, and was charged anew, with assault. His fists and forearms are striped with scars where he gouged himself with pencils and the bones of a bird he caught and dismembered.”
Mentally Ill Offenders Strain Juvenile System - NYT. Because I am white and my family well-off, that I am bipolar has been a mostly personal struggle; had I been poor or a minority youth, I would be dead, in jail, or slowly winding towards the wretched conclusion of serious addictions.
My class has meant that my regularly insane behavior was excused, even romanticized: “Bright and disturbed, sadly; he’ll need our patience! An artistic sort!” A bright, disturbed black male will not receive the forbearance of the police, his teachers, his neighbors.
When I imagine what it would have been like to be as I was at sixteen, often quite deranged, locked in prison without the means to get treatment, without a support system to contextualize my infractions as “medical” rather than “moral,” without the tolerance of a society which looks to excuse what I do wrong, which wants to forgive me, I feel real despair.
I do not consider anything I’ve written above to reflect any political affiliation; I cannot imagine how it could be thought ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ Is it not a matter which ought to stir concern in anyone?
Terror and Torture
I am opposed to all forms of torture for many reasons. Nevertheless:
Two of my father’s colleagues were severely injured in the Jakarta hotel bombings, and while both are expected to survive they have suffered and will continue to suffer extraordinarily as innocent victims of a murderous act of premeditated violence. One has extensive burns and wounds over his face and body from flying glass; the other had a leg “shattered,” and both will need multiple operations. Of course: many others weren’t so lucky.
My father wrote to me today with the following questions, and should you like to answer them I’d be interested in your replies, but do keep in mind that to write something uncivil simply because we believe ourselves right exemplifies why discourse is usually fruitless. He wrote:
“Pause now to reflect for a moment on the days and nights (including no doubt today and tonight -right now) of pain and anguish these men are in for. Consider that there will be effects that last for the rest of their lives.
(1) Now tell me whether these considerations weigh or should weigh in how we think about the “enhanced” interrogation techniques used on Mullah Omar and other important terrorists likely to possess critical information.
(2) Is it relevant that, forced to choose, most of us would readily submit to water boarding and sleep deprivation before going through what the Americans and Indonesians are experiencing? If not, why not?
(3) Is it relevant that the victims of enhanced interrogation techniques can stop their ordeal by answering questions, but the victims of terrorist bombs can’t? Explain your answer.”
I have my own answers to some of these questions, and particularly the last one, but I am curious of yours. Lengthier comments are welcome here. Thoughts?
“Perhaps rationality isn’t enough.”
Robert McNamara, quoted by Errol Morris in his phenomenal NYT obituary on him: “McNamara in Context.” Morris’ profound moral gift is his insistence that we view all humans in context, from those some consider war criminals to holocaust-deniers to murderers; reading the comments on his piece, one can see how rare this gift is.
In the clarity of their own purported rationality, of their own pristine, crystalline worldview -their own systems, all failures of integrity- the harshest judges fail to learn the most important lesson McNamara, and Kennedy and Johnson and all the others, can teach: rationality isn’t enough, systems of analysis aren’t enough, belief isn’t enough to safeguard against the real essence of human existence: error.
How morally culpable is someone who is in error? How do we judge the mistaken? Does the intent to do good mitigate the accomplishment of evil? If it doesn’t, how do we make it less likely that we err? More democracy? More technocracy? More intellectualism? More emphasis on morality? Every answer has attendant historical disasters.
McNamara wanted desperately that we should learn from failed history, and in his memoir noted that because we are not omniscient we should never act violently when allies who share our morality tell us we are wrong to do so: error is too easy, and only a kind of democratic deference to others can restrain our stupidity. I would add, although he wouldn’t, that without omniscience we ought try -harder than we think reasonable- to not make irrevocable decisions involving human life. We should not kill; we should not put to death; we should not make war. We don’t know enough, cannot predict enough, and are wrong too often.
But -and I don’t mean this flippantly- it is easy enough to problematize that assertion, easy enough to see that it too could be wrong: what about the necessary war? And if there is a necessary war, is there a necessary murder, to use Auden’s regretted phrase? All human judgments are subjective assertions that strive towards objectivity; we all aspire to rationality, and sometimes must act on it whether it is sufficient or not.
(See this note, too, from Gospel of Moll: that McNamara attempted to answer these questions honestly did not protect him from grave error; if sincerity won’t, if intelligence won’t, if morality won’t, what will?)
GPOYW: Instantiation Edition with Wilbur Mills and Fanne Foxe. (First | Second)
I am always grateful to those who do more with this name than I do; I hope that, in decisive interactions, the cultural aura that surrounds it has been sufficiently enhanced by Haley Mills, C. Wright Mills, the Quasi-Honorable Semi-Judge Mills Lane, Sam Mills, military hero Gen. Mills, and others that otherwise suspicious interlocutors will give me the benefit of the doubt. A positive association with the original Parent Trap, for instance, could incline a policeman to overlook my poor driving.
I was pleased, then, to read about Wilbur Mills, a powerful Southern congressman, here photographed behind a plate that reads as I am addressed by a friend’s children: “Mr. Mills.”
Mills served in Congress from 1939 to 1977 and for eighteen years (1957-1975) was the chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a post he held longer than any other person in U.S. history. Mills was often termed “the most powerful man in Washington” during his tenure… His accomplishments in Congress included playing a large role in the creation of the Medicare program. Mills initially had reservations about the program because he was worried about the eventual cost, but eventually shepherded it through Congress and had a large hand in shaping its program. Mills was also acknowledged as the primary tax expert in the Congress and the leading architect of the Tax Reform Act of 1969. Mills favored a conservative fiscal approach, adequate tax revenue to fund government programs, a balanced budget, and also supported various social programs, especially Social Security Disability, adding farmers to Social Security, unemployment compensation, and national health insurance.
I hope there is something in there to satisfy readers of virtually all political inclinations. I felt proud to have an utterly incidental connection to this obvious hero of fiscal restraint, political compassion, and power-mongering ambition, until I came to this:
Mills was involved in a traffic incident in Washington, DC at 2 a.m. on October 9, 1974. His car was stopped by U.S. Park Police late at night because the driver had not turned on the lights. Mills was intoxicated, and his face was cut from a scuffle with Annabelle Battistella, better known as Fanne Foxe, a stripper from Argentina. When police approached the car, Foxe leapt from the car and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin in an attempt to escape… On November 30, 1974, Mills, seemingly drunk, was accompanied by Fanne Foxe’s husband onstage at The Pilgrim Theatre in Boston, a burlesque house where Foxe was performing. He held a press conferencefrom Foxe’s dressing room. Soon after this second public incident, Mills stepped down from his chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged his alcoholism, joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and checked himself into Palm Beach Institute at West Palm Beach.
This article is even better: black eyes, lies, obvious lunacy! I suppose that qualifies as additional context for the question of how much our names govern our lives, how much of an effect an idiosyncratic name can have on our development. I now consider myself, and Wilbur, mere victims of a name that wrought debauchery through us quite without our consent. Pity us!
“Another good thing about living in New Orleans these days, according to some: it’s a great refuge from the recession. The gyrations of the Dow, the collapse of General Motors, the prospect of regulating credit default swaps – even the collapse of the housing markets – mean little to most New Orleanians. The city operates at such a low level of economic activity that it never really prospers in good times or suffers in bad.”
The Way of the Bayou in the NYT, from my parents. Many are fond of attributing to their cultures -those of their cities, states, regions- the characteristics of their personalities, and I’m sure Stephen Pinker would reject it all out of hand, but: this article explains a significant portion of my worldview. It also explains why, despite its diminishing fortunes, New Orleans will always be an important city: it is the largest American city in which the war against “dollar and clock” has been won.
“New Orleanians have been guardians of tradition and masters of living in the moment — a lost art. Their preference for having more time than money was at the heart of what made that city so much fun to visit and so hard to leave.”
Long live the anti-revolution; long live the moment!
“Quoting Ferdowsi, the epic poet, he said, “If there is no Iran, let me be not.” Poets are the refuge of every wounded nation — just ask the Poles — and nowhere more so than here in this hour.”
Roger Cohen, whose column from Tehran is very moving. My father sent it to me, noting Cohen’s comment that he had previously “argued that, although repressive, the Islamic Republic offers significant margins of freedom by regional standards. I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.”
It is well to remember when contemplating the stability, prosperity, and cultural opening of authoritarian states like China that the arbitrary and ultimate power of the government means just that: we err if we relativize their freedom, as their freedom is contingent, illusory, unreliable. If threatened, such governments will do whatever they must to control their own people.
Cohen continues:
“Majir Mirpour grabbed me. A purple bruise disfigured his arm. He raised his shirt to show a red wound across his back. “They beat me like a pig,” he said, breathless. “They beat me as I tried to help a woman in tears. I don’t care about the physical pain. It’s the pain in my heart that hurts.”
He looked at me and the rage in his eyes made me want to toss away my notebook.
The column is worth reading, particularly for its scale and concerns: in the midst of it are individual, powerless people; in the face of it, journalism and poetry are at once essential and irrelevant. Power decimates their value, but crushed by power they are all we have left.
Should Empathy Have Been Invented?
From Figures in the Carpet, which I’ve referenced before:
“The distinction between sympathy and empathy -feeling with and feeling ‘into,’ with the greater intensity of identification with the object associated with the latter- is a product of early-twentieth-century psychology and aesthetic theory. Prior to Theodor Lipps’ invention of the concept of einfühlung, translated as empathy by E.B. Tichener in 1909, the idea was folded into the meaning of sympathy.”
Putting aside the interesting problem of how isomorphic our terms for feelings are to our feelings, the text continues:
“[Previously thinkers] configured the relationship between the psyche and the world of others in such a way that they saw no difference between the two modes of feeling. The invention of the concept of empathy actually redefined the meaning of sympathy by drawing a distinction where there had been none before, in effect defining sympathy as ‘not empathy.’”
It seems clear that this distinction is part of what might be termed a politico-aesthetic drift in culture away from hierarchies: sympathy is often related, unfairly in my view, to “pity,” which is rejected as being offensive to the pitied for its implied hierarchy of power and privilege. The essay in question refers to this as “the necessary inequality between those giving and receiving sympathy.”
Is this a case of (1) ideologically-driven language manipulation, occurring well in advance of any comparable change in the nature of human emotion or the structure of culture, (2) an appropriate reflection of our ambition to be democratic and non-judgmental, however far short we fall, (3) absurd, as one cannot invent the concept of a feeling, instead being able only to reframe the same human feelings in fashionable, but specious, verbiage, or (4) something else entirely?
(Answers will govern whether I continue to use the term ‘empathy’).
