On Ralph Ellison And The Meaning Of Huckleberry Finn

https://quillette.com/2020/12/28/i-was-never-more-hated-than-when-i-tried-to-be-honest/

…the dialogue between Huck and Jim, the former slave Huck befriends, captures something real that expands the reader’s moral sense:

“Huck’s relationship to Jim… is that of a humanist; in his relationship to the community he is an individualist. He embodies the two major conflicting drives in 19th century America. And if humanism is man’s basic attitude toward a social order which he accepts, and individualism his basic attitude toward what he rejects, one might say that Twain, by allowing these two attitudes to argue dialectically in his work of art, was as highly moral an artist as he was a believer in democracy.”…

I digress from the main thrust of this fine overview essay.

The above quoted is but a small part of this good biographic and thematic overview of Ellison. But as to one of my favourite books, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, I don’t precisely recognize the distinction Ellison draws between the humanist in Huck’s relationship with Jim and the individualist in Huck’s stance towards the community.

For Ellison, Huck as humanist shows in his basic attitude toward a social order he accepts; and as individualist, Huck is negative in his basic attitude toward what he rejects.

If I understand what Ellison means, then I’d argue he has things mistaken. I’d argue there is no social order Huck accepts and that his individualism and humanism, which is to say, respecting and loving Jim in pure friendship and treating him as an equal, happen and can only happen in their best moments on the raft going down the Mississippi, when they are both away from the social order that deforms them.

Before he gets on the raft in the novel’s first part, then when he periodically gets off the raft in the novel’s picaresque part and then again when he finally leaves the raft, the tentacles of his social deformation and ongoing involvement in a pervasively and fundamentally racist society immediately squeeze the individualism and humanism of idyllic life on the raft out of him.

That is why in Twain’s savage social excoriation evident in the novel’s poorly understood last part, Huck allows himself to fall under Tom Sawyer’s poisonous, racist sway. So fallen under, Huck willingly participates in Tom Sawyer’s make believe plot to rescue a tragically and falsely enchained Jim who by right, both immediately legal and universally moral, should never have been enchained and who should and could have been freed from the start.

The tragedy and savagery lie in the contrast between Huck and Jim in their best moments beautifully and nobly together as equals on the raft and the pitiful state Jim is reduced to when falsely enchained. This is what racism does to the beauty, nobility and innocence of loving and equal human relationship in friendship set apart from what deforms it.

The white supremacist society Twain excoriates, peopled by ostensibly well meaning whites who live and breathe their racism in the unthinking core of themselves and in their every external act and in the social structures they create, exemplifies, unlike present North American society, what Critical Race Theory theorizes.

In opposition to Ellison’s notion of Huck’s basic attitude toward a social order he accepts, the fact of the novel is that there is none. This is why Huck, at novel’s very end, says,

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before."

The ending implicates no acceptable social order. Just the opposite, such an order is inconceivable to Huck. The best to be said is that he’s broken past the bonds that have tied him to the racism of his society and that have constituted him. He does so by rejecting his society as such. But he has no nuanced consciousness of what his final decision involves.

Getting back to Ellison and Kronen, though, the spirit of Ellison’s comment gets closer to the deepest meaning of Huckleberry Finn than does most of the academic criticism of it. And in that proximity is Ellison’s own complex, large-visioned liberal humanism through which Kronen so aptly takes us.

Exchange On Issue Of Human Exceptionality

Human Exceptionalism

L:

A funny thing, though I'm not saying this applies to her at all, is that often people who like to think of human beings as a part of nature, or who should be a part of nature, are also people who don't like to think of human beings as simply one species of animal among many.

Me:

Just on your first paragraph, if I’ve unpacked it right, it’s that often people who like to think we’re part of nature also don’t like to think that we’re just one species among others. I can quite readily see those paradoxical attitudes. It struck me while I was unbundling what you wrote that our more greatly evolved consciousness and even more our self consciousness almost necessarily, almost by definition—and maybe we can in principle dispense with the “almost”—set us apart in a special way among all species. In this sense, we’re the America of species, exceptional. Yet, we easily can think that and also think we’re part of nature.

L:

On that first paragraph -- sure the human species is "exceptional", but so are giraffes or ants. Giraffes have exceptionally long necks, ants have chemical communication systems, we have sound-based communication systems -- that's it, as far as I can see, "Smart"? --  bah, humbug. It's not to say that sound-based communication hasn't had a big impact, but it is to say, first, be careful of a long-standing hubris that falsely lifts us out of nature, as though poised between beast and angel, and second, understand that it's speech, and the "culture" that follows from that peculiar trick, that distinguishes human beings, not the "big brain" that is simply what's needed for speech. 

Sorry for the semi-rant -- just that I think the "oh sure we're part of nature, but we're better than nature" attitude is both manifestly self-contradictory and misguided.

Me:

Disagree about our species exceptionalism.

For one thing, that we’re dominant makes us so. But as I noted our dominance can be couched in our understanding that we’re part of what we dominate, all species in context greater than any 1 of us. 

Not good or bad as such, just superior.

All animals are unique as species and within species I’d imagine each, say, ant is in its ultimate infrastructure unique. So that’s not a good argument against our exceptionalism. Taken to an extreme, it beggars relative judgment. For example, if we have different breeds of dogs and one breed simply does dog things better than other breeds, then we’d not hesitate to say, I wouldn’t think, it’s an exceptional breed. 

After all, what does exceptional mean but outstanding, as in standing out. And for species, the test is dominance, I’d argue. 

L:

Exceptional doesn't mean "outstanding" in my understanding, whether in species or nations (see "American exceptionalism")-- it just means not typical, as in an exception to a rule. But if, as you say, each species is unique, then every species is an exception in its unique way. As for dominance, I'm just dubious -- the ant biome apparently outweighs the human by many orders of magnitude, and even our gut bacteria might have a better claim on dominance, but I don't much mind it either way. The main point is just not to let it go to our head and lead us to think that we're not just another animal species or, the same thing, to think that we're above nature.

Me:

Not to quibble but:

much greater than usual, especially in skill, intelligence, quality, etc.: 

an exceptional student

exceptional powers of concentration

The company has shown exceptional growth over the past two years.

Synonyms

especial formal

special  (NOT USUAL)

 Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

good or important because of unusual qualities 

• specialAre you doing anything special for your birthday?

• exceptionalTheir standard of acting was very high but there was one exceptional performance.

• outstandingHe accepted an award for outstanding achievement in baseball.

• extraordinaryHer capacity to remember things is extraordinary.

• deluxeThe salesman tried to sell us the deluxe model.

and 

out·stand·ing

/ˌoutˈstandiNG/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

1. 1. 
exceptionally good."the team's outstanding performance.

 I think on all this exceptional means more than just not typical; it includes both unusually good and outstanding as inclining to superiority. We wouldn’t say, “X who always  runs last is an exceptional runner,” even though always running last might at least in one sense be atypical.

I agree that we ought not let what we think we are go to our heads but I still think we’re paradoxical in our self conception when don’t let that go to our heads: we can perceive our selves as superior, as up there over species in some great chain of being and at the same time we can understand ourselves as but a part of nature, the latter not excluding the former. As my friend once said, though not precisely on point: 

“What a piece of worke is a man! How Noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In forme and mouing

how expresse and admirable! In Action, how like an Angel in apprehension, how like a God!

The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

L:

Don't want to quible either, but you're citing one meaning which is not what I'm meaning: 

ex·cep·tion·al

/ˌikˈsepSH(ə)n(ə)l/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

1. unusual; not typical."crimes of exceptional callousness and cruelty"


Similar:
unusual
uncommon 

abnormal
atypical
extraordinary

As always, though, semantic differences, unless they're the topic themselves, are wastes of time. If we use your meaning, I just think it's misapplied in this case -- to me, it now has a kind of antique humanism about it, and I think even your friend, if read in context, understood how illusory such rhapsodizing is. In general, I don't think using a word like "paradox" lets you escape simple old contradiction.    

Me:

I’d thought you’d said that “exceptional” *just* means “not usual” and that you were excluding it having other meanings. In response I tried to show it has a more encompassing definition that includes how I was using it in relation to human exceptionality in the animal kingdom. 

Don’t fight it man, we’re species-wise marked for greatness, ‘the ecstasy of victory, the agony of defeat,” as Roone Arledge had his CBS answers say. Hey, what other animals have pro sports, the Olymipics, quarks, professional wrestling or a guy wearing a sign walking around yelling, “Eat at Joe’s”? 

The issue, though, isn’t the meaning of exceptional but whether we in all our glory and tragedy are the superior species. Use any word you like for superior, say exceptional for example, or outstanding, the precise word doesn’t matter, the underlying point does.

 Speaking for my friend, if we consider our glory side, then his point about us as the manifestation of that glory is quite well taken. Why his words are not precisely on point is that he, too quickly for our purposes, simply bypasses us as just one of many, and descends immediately to our dustiness. 

But even in the evil that men do from your local murder to your massive genocide, from your conflagatory wars to your potential to destroy all life on the planet our superiority is manifest as well. As I noted, the test is the potential for dominance, which is not a normative judgment. 

All of this is not an anachronistic vestige of humanism. It’s a clear eyed look at who and what we are.

I’m not seeing any contradiction. And I’m not using that useful “paradox” as a rhetorical dodge to escape contradiction impaling me, as you suggest I am. A paradox is an apparent contradiction. I think you’re impaled on the apparent. There’s no logical necessity to someone thinking he’s exceptional that requires him to see himself as not part of the team. He might see himself as not a part of it but he doesn’t have to. And so you have the paradox: his understanding that compared to the rest of his team he’s outstanding, he stands out, he’s, if you will, exceptional, coupled with his understanding he’s part of a team for all his self understood exceptionality. And he can go two ways on that: he can be a team player; or he can be a sheer hot dog. 

L:

" All of this is not an anachronistic vestige of humanism. It’s a clear eyed look at who and what we are."

No, sorry, I think it's kind of old-fashioned. That sort of "we're the greatest!" boosterism went out in the 19th century. It's been replaced now, of course, by "we're the worst!" of the 21st century "wokesters" ("woke" like the living dead are woke), which is even sillier -- the simple fact of the matter is that we're a species of animal that's acquired the trick of using sounds to communicate. That's a good trick, no doubt, and it's given us cities and art, and just lately some 7 billion in population, but that's only doing what a cultural animal can do, and we shouldn't let it make us giddy, or turn us into a "sheer hotdog" -- which, I'm saying, is a feature of those who insist we're above the animals.

Me:

We’re the only cultural animal in a certain understanding of culture.

We’re the only animal that can build cities out of our consciousness. And we measure other species by other species by their proximity to ours special attributes. 

You can call it a trick but that’s just one way of looking at it and when it claims exclusivity, then it’s but an arbitrary way of looking at it. 

We as superior is a clear eyed look because we come to this judgment about ourselves by surveying the field. If superior beings to us come to us, we’ll judge them as superior to us, that evident in their accomplishing what we cannot and in their ability if so inclined to dominate us. That likely would be a result of their greater cognition, the same measure that ups us the lower species. 

Here’s another line of argument in a question for you. When you see an ant or some roach or some spider, don’t you get rid of it, benignly or malevolently as you will, and perceive it as some lower form of thing that’s but pesky to you? IOW, don’t you as you go about feel yourself abrim with your own specialness compared to the dog or cat or rabbit or something in a zoo that you might see on or off a leash? I’d think you do in the sense that I think we all do. 

And if so, aren’t you arguing against your innate sense and experience of yourself, just the way people claim we have no free will when their deepest innate sense and experience of themselves tell them they’re chalk full of it?

L:

Okay, I guess it comes down to what Tyller Cowen often calls "mood affiliation", and the whole "superior", "dominant", etc. mood isn't one I'm drawn to. I get rid of creepy-crawlies when I can, but just because I don't like them -- it would seem absurd to me to compare myself to them as "lower". Nor do I feel abrim with my specialness in seeing other mammals -- you're projecting. But regardless of mood, the main thing I think is quite important is simply that the human is not some kind of being that's above or out of nature, and in that sense it's worth emphasizing our own animality.

Me:

Perhaps a happy resolution.

I agree with your last thought on what’s important. 

I’ll leave the rest of it for two reasons: I’d basically be repeating myself; and let’s not poke this happy resolution and risk saddening it.

Cheers, buddy. 

And a shout out from George ‘the Animal’ Steele, the British Bulldog and the Junkyard Dog, pro rasslin’ greats no longer with us. 

Marilyn Bowering’s Poem Cove And My Note On It

Cove

Marilyn Bowering

You, age, you are not cheerful,

Though we don’t know how to avoid you.

—Dòmhnall mac Fhionnlaigh nan Dàn 

The cove of my heart

where the swans swam,

the sun glassed

and alive on the waves.

A boat scraped ashore,

and friends now distant,

stepped onto an island.

Seated under the tree-roofed sky,

the hills to uphold me,

the mist for company,

and a dog on watch,

what could be better?

Traffic sullies the quiet,

the trees empty of birdlife:

I will not say more about age,

but why take everything

by force,

and leave us blind

to the Milky Way?

Comment mine:

A cove is a small sheltered bay. So the poet speaks of a cove of her heart, a place about which she feels intimately  reminiscent. She speaks of it within the context of the saying heading the poem, about the inexorable advance of not-to-be-cheered aging.

Note the shifting verb tenses through the poem from past to present.

The poet reminisces fondly about scenes from that cove. But then, after the first sentence, she recalls hearing a boat scraping the shore of an island, I presume a different place from the cove, which introduces a discordant note. And so nostalgic reminiscence gives way to her remembered sad sense of distant friends who stepped onto “an island,” “island” suggesting distance and estrangement and leading to the poet now being alone. 

Now, reminiscing gives way to present description: the poet is sheltered by trees; supported by the hills; the mist, sadly, is her company; her dog watches. What, she asks, could be better, a question tinged with both present contentment and lonely sadness. What could be better, the answer may be, what once was. 

Still, even if nothing is better, her moment of contentment gives way to the sadness of aging in the midst of modern development altering her heart’s cove. The poet notes the traffic sullying, that is to say, befouling, “the quiet” and “the trees empty of bird life.” So, no longer, it seems, do swans swim in the cove. No longer does the poet feel the sun “glassed and alive on the waves.” One would have to feel more alive oneself to feel and perceive that.

But, she says, she will speak no longer of aging. Rather, she confronts the violence, “force,” of endings taking all away and leaving us insensate within and to our galaxy. 

Not for nothing does the poet refer to it as the “Milky Way,” which metaphor, after all, is humans making localizing poetry out of our surrounding galactic vastness, as if the galaxy was a bucolic path somewhere pleasantly nearby . This poetry making, and all else, will be taken away from us. 

So the poem ends, does it not, with a final, piercing question of lament, a final, brief cri de couer?

A Short Note On The Last Lines Of William Blake’s Poem The Little Black Boy

 On that last line, I guess the assumption is that the little white boy, going in, will think of the little black boy as the other, or an other. 

The very last line follows a sequence of lines when, in the little black boy’s projection of what will be, of what he has learned from his mother, they are free from the clouds of their skins, black and white, and they then frolic like lambs—white things: they “joy.”

But the little white boy even then is still immersed in his innocence. He needs the little black boy to shade him until he can bear God’s heat such that he can get to bear the heat, be closer to God, lean in joy upon their “fathers knee.” 

Then the little black boy, seeming to replicate his mother’s nurturing of him, will stroke the little white boy’s silver hair, in a continued loving and generous way. So that then, the little white boy, now having accommodated experience, which is to say, the heat, will see that the little black boy is just like him and will then love the little black boy. 

So, on this way of seeing it, the little white boy is being brought along to understand the holy truth of their essential sameness and then to love the little black boy all thanks to the little black boy’s loving, nurturing generosity.

What strikes me, though, following the sequence of the these concluding lines this way, is that they are shot through with terribly biting bitterness compared to the unstinting reality then of slavery and whites’ view of blacks as inferior to them. Which also lays in heart breaking poignancy along with the bitter irony given what the little black boy imagines as against the impregnably harsh reality of things.

My Savage Dislike Of David Fincher’s Movie, Mank

 Well, my cinephile friend, here’s a harshly opposite take. We saw two different films.

I wrote this to a friend:

....Thanks Larry.

Well, you only have a solid 20 minutes you’ll never get back. I have about 130 of them. The “craft” and the “techniques” of the movie meant 0 to me. It’s an inert film and I had to force myself to watch it, my trouble being the longer I watched it, the more I felt like I had invested myself in it and, so, was determined to see it through. Generally, it repeats itself, sometimes seems confusing and is dull.

Basically, I just didn't like any of the characters, including Mank. Well, maybe the secretary. And as for the endless smart-alecky one-liners, I think the screen writers need to learn that less is more. I’m unclear what the audience is to get from it, much less its takeaway besides maybe some admiration for its showy craft. It’s such a talky movie,  seemingly made by someone insistent on relaying a mess of detail.

So much mushy padding. For me, the film sinks into its abundant windy talking, which immobilizes the movement of things, whether giving us once-(in)famous men or the governor’s race. The cold emotionlessness of it all, matched by the hazy black and white, helps inform the inertness.

I guess Fincher thought he had to pay homage to Citizen Kane by also doing fancy-schmancy, to borrow your words, technical things. But they didn’t mean anything to me in Kane either, a film I dislike. Also, for me, Mank, to repeat, is an exercise in showy inertness. As you say, “a pack of quipping sleazebags mouthing off in choreographed one-liners, fancy-shmancy camera angles, back and forth story line  and of course the usually pretentious black and white.”

The film comes across to me overall like a washed out made for TV movie. As for you, the black and white and white doesn’t  serve it well for me either, only enhances how maddeningly dull and faded it all is. As you say, the characters are off putting, basically uninteresting when not repulsive. 

The scenes between “Mank” and Hearst’s squeeze, Marion Davies, which even the very few panning critics hail, seem staged, uninteresting and unnatural to me, as does the scene when the drunken Mank shocks everybody at Hearst’s costume party with his drunken story of Hearst as a failed Don Quixote. I simply fit that scene into my overall distaste for the movie and the characters. 

The whole thing with Upton Sinclair’s shot at becoming governor is distracting.

And how ironic it is that the scene involving the roomful of brilliant wits,  Kaufman, Perelman, Hecht and the others, including Mank, falls flatter than a collapsed soufflé. Nothing said by any of them is memorably sharp or witty. 

I didn’t fast forward anything. I figured that for whatever penance I have to do in this life, I’d get a head start on it by submitting myself fully to the film’s 2 hours plus...

I’d give it 5.2 out of 10. 

P.S.  The organ grinder and the monkey parable is big in Mank. He’s the monkey. But, metaphorically, whom does Mank think he forces to play music when he dances? Hearst, it seems, but why? What does Mank falsely imagine he forces Hearst to do, the way the monkey in the parable thinks he forces his guy to play music because he dances? I see 0. Does the parable even work?

As I have it, the point of the parable is that the monkey delusionally thinks the organ grinder plays because he, the monkey, dances when the truth is the reverse. In the movie, near the end, Hearst relays the parable in full text to Mank.

So, I guess it can be seen in different ways in relation to the movie.

As I see it, Mank is the monkey. I’m not sure who the organ grinder is, though I think it’s likely Hearst. (I can see an argument that it’s Welles, and even an argument that Welles is the monkey and Mank is the grinder.) But if Hearst is the organ grinder, I can’t for the life of me see what Mank might falsely think he’s doing that makes Hearst, in the parable’s terms, play music on his organ to Mank’s dancing. 

One further thought: maybe there’s a case to be made that Hearst is the monkey thinking he can control Mank, use him for his own entertainment, while Mank, in writing a screenplay for a movie that builds Hearst down into Kane, acknowledged by many to be the greatest movie ever made, in that sense gets the last word...

Coleman Hughes On Black Fragility

https://www.city-journal.org/white-fragility

The point is, inverting the theory of “white fragility,” that in reading the dos and don’ts of how we fragile whites all imbued with inescapable racism, what emerges is a racist conception of blacks that in effect makes for black fragility. We are to do nothing that would trigger any black folks. We’re just basically to nod and agree with any black person we speak to because our racism is pretty well insinuated in virtually anything we say and do. This is a racist conception of black peoples because it presents them as child like in their inability to interact as adults with white people. So they must be accommodated and tiptoed around as though they were fragile, sensitive cases.

Coleman Hughes says it better and more fully than my small synopsis.

Some Back And Forth On Robert Frost’s Poem “Provide Provide” With A Reference Or Two To Life Itself

 Provide Provide

Robert Frost

The witch that came (the withered hag)

To wash the steps with pail and rag,

Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.

Too many fall from great and good

For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.

Or if predestined to die late,

Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!

If need be occupy a throne,

Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;

Others on simply being true.

What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard,

Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

Me:

There seems a purposefully calculated sing song quality in “Provide Provide” that I don’t immediately get. I’m not sure “satiric” is le mot juste, maybe it is, but neither that notion nor the poem is simple minded. 

R:

It's ironic advice and the nursery rhyme metre implies that it is simple-minded, but the last stanza is deeply sad and deeply true, for it is better to have bought friends than none, but it is also very very sad, even pathetic. The confident tone of the speaker who gives the advice expresses the attitude of people who have a fairly shallow view of things---that money, fame, power and being good are tickets to happiness---and that is mocked, but the last stanza is different.  There Frost speaks.   

Me:

Sounds good about the poem.

I’ll have a closer look at it. 

I just went through it quickly. 

R:

It's even more cunning that I thought.  For example, using the words "witch" and "withered hag" are taken from fairy tales, but are based on the ugliness that comes with old age especially for women and especially poor women.  Frost knew, even then, that the fairy tale diction covered but also expressed an ugly reality.  The current way women work to counter this is the billions spent on facial things from creams to surgery.  Better to go down dignified with as much youthful appearance as one can manage, than take no effort at all, which makes it clear how bad it is.  I think the male equivalent is loneliness.  Thus the sex trade.   

Me:

It seems to me he’s saying that when you come down to it,  in the end, nothing helps. I can’t see the last three lines as Frost genuinely speaking, compared to what precedes them. I see nothing dignified in having paid for friends by your side. For the appearance may be that that the person dying has friends, but s/he’ll  know s/he doesn’t since s/he bought them. The last stanza seems to me the culmination of the mordant mockery of the entire poem. It seems to me the growing articulation of an, you’ll forgive me, an eschatologically nihilistic view that casts its negation back on everything that precedes it. And I just wonder whether the poem’s sing song quality expresses the childishness of thinking anything otherwise.

R:

I think he has some sympathy for our sad efforts to mitigate.  If he doesn't, he should.  It is a worse poem if you are right. 

It is better to go down dignified with boughten friendship than none at all.  It is sentimental to think that there is not some pragmatism in our choice of friends.  For example, one usually chooses people who will not be dependent on one.  

Me:

One argument for how I see the continued mordancy in the last stanza is that the whole poem is full of these mock absurd suggestions as to how to try to beat the hard end: die early; die in state; own the stock exchange; occupy a throne; buy friends. They’re all cut from the same mordant cloth. You could argue “boughten friends” are in the realm of possibility while the preceding suggestions are fanciful as beyond reach. But then I’d say two things: one, that that, rather, heightens the hopelessness; and two, it’s hard to imagine it being within reach to buy a retinue of friends who will lend one the final illusion of dignity. That seems fanciful too.

That in life we have a variety of reasons for our variety of friends doesn’t, I don’t think, justify reading Frost as finally genuine in the last stanza. And, in any event, in life, those varieties wouldn’t in principle include a bought and paid for “friendship.” Purchase is to friendship as purchase is to love: the former in each instance exposes the pretence of the latter. No paid for whore is any man’s lover.

R:

But the guys keep paying for companions, and the women keep getting face lifts, etc.  But, as I said you may be right, but then Frost's attitude is to my mind misguided.  You seem to agree with it as you understand it.

Me:

No I don’t. 

I just have a view of the poem. 

And I think you may be right as well. 

Reasonably different readings of it about which we can reasonably disagree, both of us, as always, being reasonable.

Except I do agree beyond the poem that there’s no real dignity to be had in bought friends at any point in life. That only gets one the illusion of dignity and should be of no comfort to the payor. Don’t know what plastic surgery has to do with it. It’s in life not comparable to buying friends. In the poem it slenderly is. 

R:

What do you make of the lines, "some have relied on what they knew, others on being simply true, what worked for them might work for you."  Nice as those things may be, they cannot buy protection against the ravages of time?  

Me:

Good that you key in on these lines. I hadn’t fixed on them. They add something to the poem’s meaning, a truly dignified way out. 

I read them as they literally read: some have relied on what they knew to assuage the hardness of their end, others by simply being true, as in being honest and authentic. And, the speaker suggests, that if one tries either, it might make the end manageable.It has worked for others, after all. “Simply” here and the homely virtues of “true” and relying on what one knows all form such a pointed contrast with the inauthentic means of trying to beat time. Better to meet time than to try to beat time.

The next stanza reverts to getting beyond one’s simple virtuous, authentic self in order to beat time’s works by  wanting to cling to past celebrity—“starred.”  (And note the link between “starred” and “The picture pride of Hollywood.”) But that won’t do.  No memory of past fame, celebrity can help, “atone,” in dealing with later disregard or staves off the difficulty, “hard,” of the end. 

“atone,” with its religious connotation, suggests that there is something morally wrong in “later disregard” such that memory of past glory provides no amends. “atone” is odd here. I think it’s used by the speaker with bitter irony to suggest some have grievously mistaken their past celebrity and fame as something divine when in the end, as in life’s end and as in ultimately, it’s nothing.  

So, embedded in all the mordancy is the possibility of a way out, of a way of being able better to meet one’s end, by relying on what one knows, with “knew” charged with positive meaning, or by simply being true. 

The reversion applies to those who won’t follow the ways suggested in the fifth stanza. And in the last stanza, buying friends as the means to an illusion of a final dignity at life’s end is a final icily bitter swipe at those who would forgo either relying on what they know or simply being true.

So, then, it’s in the fifth stanza where the speaker is most genuine and straightforward, not mockingly absurd, blackly comic or mordant.

What do you think?

R:

Sort of.  Yes, those are virtues, but the word "worked" implies that the person reading the lines will be good in hopes that it will "work" to mitigate the possible awful end.   Neither knowledge nor having been good will "work."  Those are virtues that are, as they say, their own reward.  

And I have had the experience of people resenting needing my help.  

So, I'll say that advice is no better than the others.  

However, I now think the force of the poem is greater if one sees it your way.  It is directed at people with a rosy view of life, and he doesn't want to leave any escape hatches.  If people try those things out of desperation, they have already learned the lesson the poem teaches rosy-viewed silly people.  So one can sympathize with them outside the poem, as it were.  

Me:

You make a good point about the reader being advised as to what has “worked,” with emphasis on “worked.”

So, with that in mind, things do get more complex. 

Presumably, the successful exemplars of relying on what one knows or simply being true weren’t being instrumental; it seems they came to what they did naturally. But, even with them, there’s a contrast between those who “relied on what they knew,” with “relied,” which can be read in two ways, lightly intimating a means to an end, and those who “simply” were true, ie, were just this way, without such intimation, without relying on anything for anything.

And, as you note, the advisees, all readers, are being introduced to how to get right in order better to meet our/their ends.

But, in disagreement with your view that this advice is no better than the others, I ask, so what if “worked” suggests some instrumentality, some means to an end? The point, I’ll repeat, isn’t beating time; it’s meeting time.

There’s no shame in getting good advice and trying to get it inside oneself. “Worked” suggests the possibility of success in following the advice. And in following it, one will differentiate oneself from those who seek false or artificial means of beating down the hardness of their ends and in that are subject to the speaker’s ridicule and mock and mocking advice. But there exists no ridicule or mockery in the fifth stanza as I now read it, thanks in part to what you‘ve highlighted. 

R:

We disagree about "work."  It's as sceptical of the rosy view as the others.  Here is a paraphrase.  "You people with a rosy view, you think what goes around will come around, which is dumb, but people have tried it and maybe it worked for them so maybe it will work for you."  To believe those things will work means that people would have great incentives to be good from an instrumental view.  But one is as likely to profit from being worse than most people as better than most.  (Being stupidly bad is another matter.)  

Me:

We do disagree about it. The very meaning of the poem belies any notion of “one likely to profit from being worse...” And I can’t see stanza 5 having anything to do with a “rosy view.” There are no rosy views, just hard ends and for most the illusions that precede them. The way to be is to be simply true and or to rely on what one knows. We’re left to fill in the content of “true” and “knew.” 

A clue to that content comes from what is put against them in the poem—the ridiculous, the fake, the false, the meaningless, the “boughten,” the unreal. In contrast to all that unreality, “worked” is a humble, prosaic notion that is consistent with knowing true things and simply being true, I continue to argue. 

They are both a good way to live and provide the possibility of better meeting the inexorably sad facts of life’s end.

R:

The poem is then an expression of the most commonplace humanism.  Power and money and celebrity are false gods, but goodness and honesty are true gods and will save you.  There is a Frost who was perfectly capable of saying such things.  I've mentioned Jarrell's essay "The Other Frost" before.  It is about such poems as "Provide, Provide."  Here is the phrase in which he labels the attitude of the poem:  "unsparingly truthful:"  ie there are no remedies.  None.  One may have been wise to be good and true, but it does not protect against the miseries of aging.  

I was wrong to give us an out, I think you are too. 

Me:

I was wrong when I said there’s an out.

Rather, there’s a better way than others to meet one’s end.

“Out” wasn’t a slip of the tongue. 

It reflects an undeveloped view of the poem.

I think thanks to this exchange my view is now more developed.

A more prosaic sense of what’s possible in meeting the end is what’s possible, can work, and I sense the content of “true” and “knew” includes some coming to terms before the fact with what the end brings. 

So it’s not protection as a shield warding some thing off; it’s rather a right way of seeing and being that eases the end’s reality some. That would seem to fit within Randall Jarrell’s notion of “unsparingly truthful,” which need not consign one to 0 but misery. 

R:

I think Frost shares your view and mine that knowing and being true are superior to the other stuff, but I think he thinks and I know I think that neither helps to ward off the misery of old age.  (Not of course that it always is miserable, but it can always be what what ends up with).  

In any case we are both now certified to teach the poem.  

Me:

I’ve enjoyed this ego-less exchange.

It’s been a lot of fun. 

R:

Yup, me too. 

On The 3d Season Finale Of Fargo With Brief Reference To 2nd Season Finale Of Undercover

 Spoilers Alert:

I just finished watching virtually in succession the finales of Fargo, 3d season, 4th season still to be watched, and then a day later of Undercover, 2nd and last season to date.

I liked a lot the extremely quirky first 2 seasons of Fargo, but I thought the quirkiness jumped the shark, so to say, and outdid itself not in good way. 

There is individual good acting, especially David Thewlis as the villain. He is incredibly effective. And some of the writing/talking is strong and interesting, especially from Thewlis. But the story as a whole never grabbed me. The rich brother is finally  uninteresting and his feud with his poor parole officer brother didn’t sustain my consistent interest.

It bugged me how how weak the woman sheriff is in her role compared to the sheriffs’ strengths in the first 2 seasons. 

But what bugged me most is the finale, way too drawn out with not enough going on, way too tongue in cheek, with that Coen brothers-like smart assery that tends to subvert the believability of the story and our suspension of disbelief even while Fargo wants to claim it. That, btw, has bugged me about some of the Coen’s movies. 

What bugged me most about the finale, however, is its incomplete ending, leaving it up in the air as to whether the sheriff, now Homeland Security agent, prevails or whether V.M. Varga, now Mr. Rand, does. It’s a weak tea version of the damnable instant fade to black in the last scene of the last episode in the last season of The Sopranos, of which I remain highly critical as a cop out. Same frustration with the finale of 3d season Fargo. 

I’m not saying every work, book, film, tv show, play, needs a tied up ending. Just the opposite. I’m good with ambiguous endings but they have to be earned by the work. Where, though, there is, as in the case of The Sopranos and Fargo 3d season finales, something discrete and specific that will definitely occur, that discrete, specific thing have been built up over the course of the work, and then it’s simply denied to us, leaving us in effect hanging, then that’s just the creators breaking faith with their audience. 

Otoh, the last episode of the 2nd season of Undercover is a comparative pleasure. No ironic subversion in it. Just straight non-ironic story telling with no supercilious, smart ass, subversive attitude hovering over the story. By my lights, much to be preferred. 

Sophia Coppola’s ‘On The Rocks’ As A Mediocrity

I once read a dolt’s sum up of Nelson Mandela: “He had his good points and his bad points.” The dolt got properly yelled at. Heroic giants aren’t in sum up reducible to their warts, if any there be. Mediocrities are. Which is a long way round to saying,  Sophia Coppola’s On The Rocks, which I just watched, is mediocre. 

It has a few good points, like Bill Murray in toto, some funny instances and a nice, gauzy sense of affluent New York. 

But it has more duds, an in toto flat affect, lifeless Rashida Jones—even when she bounces back, one emotionally true scene where she excoriates Bill Murray, which is afterwards ruined by it being without consequence, a double ending unsatisfying patness, one between wife and husband, the other between daughter and father. 

Other duds include the sophomoric dialogue between father and daughter about the perennial questions of love, marriage, and men and women, which is more canned, contrived and trite than anything else and, generically, a vacuum sealed cinematic world that doesn’t allow in even the tiniest oxygenated speck of real muck, and, so, is unknowingly smug in its own insular, affluent liberal certainties. 

On Samuel Moyn On Hannah Arendt As Applied To Trump

 The essay: 

 https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/hannah-arendt-misunderstood-philosophy-fascism-authoritarianism-trump

Me:

I’ll give this a shot. 

I do believe Moyn argues that while Trump, more “charlatan” than “dictator,” is not comparable to Hitler just as Trump’s America is not remotely comparable to Hitler’s Germany, still Trump and Trump’s America are sufficiently odious that both Americans and non Americans are complicit in his ascendancy. 

Candidly, I’m not sure Moyn means to spread the blame for Trump to non Americans, but that reading seems implicit in his wanting to apply Arendt’s castigation to the age of Trump: 

... Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American...

After all, it’s Arendt’s argument with reference to Hitler that the net of complicity is extremely wide, indeed universally wide.

Moyn writes:

... Those who were not in Germany but condemned it from the outside were going to be tempted to punish the bad Germans. But the truth is that their crimes (while they of course deserved prosecution) spread complicity far and wide. Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame...

and a bit further down:

... Even in the face of Nazism, Arendt insisted that responsibility allowed no one to say “I am not like that.” Compared to those with vengeful zeal for the punishment of Nazi perpetrators (which she supported), Arendt praised those “who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race.” The trouble was that their shame at their own humanity was still a “non-political” insight...

One thing I take from these two passages is that Arendt held that until the evils giving rise to and manifest in Nazism are erased from the planet, then we as humans are guilty whenever it or anything akin to it occurs, even if our connection to the depredation is beyond remote. What else can it mean to say,... Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame...?

The implication seems to me to be, we all have the capacity either for evil or the weak moral will that allows it, and we all are,  in a sense, “good Germans.” If I’m misreading the case Moyn makes for what Arendt held, then I’ll be happy to be corrected.

So, having tried to get at what Moyn and what Arendt via Moyn argue, I must say I find it ludicrous, especially, and now being a touch ad hominem, coming from a woman who tried post war to rehabilitate Heidegger, her pre war lover. 

First, I argue Moyn gives the game away conceding to Trump more charlatanry than fascism, or as he says dictatorship. In fact, if Trump is a charlatan, then he is in that assimilable to all politicians, since dissembling on Arendt’s own views is at the heart of politics: 

... In their invocations of Arendt as a theorist for a new age of “post-truth,” her new fans missed that she argued that truth and politics have never mixed. On the contrary: politics is a realm of appearance, not one of correspondence with fact. For Arendt, we have always been post-truth...

So maybe Trump wears his charlatanry more visibly on his sleeve, but if he is as politician assimilable to the “post-truth” of all politics, then from where arises in his case the Arendtian need for all the soul searching and searing self criticism resulting in “embarrassment at being human.” 

So, rounding “first,” there is nothing in Trump’s case that warrants the self abasement that Moyn via Arendt insists we have. And worse, it’s not just Trump that ought to be a reason for this searing self abasement, it’s also what America has been—certainly in the last 60 years, but, too, I must infer, from the time of its founding:

... She acknowledged that fascist lies were unique, but their novelty—and that of later American ones, like the defence of the Vietnam War that the Pentagon Papers revealed to be so deceptive—allowed no “moralising,” since “the background of past history” is “itself not exactly a story of immaculate virtue.” That same belief guided her refusal to moralise once Nazism fell...

Vietnam goes to about the last 60 years. My necessary inference comes from the incomprehensibility of imagining that Moyn thinks that before 1960 America was any more virtuous. Reinforcing this inference is Moyn’s rejection, again via Arendt, of any clean break between Trump’s invidiousness and that of the American past. He writes:

... Arendt did not believe in what the Germans began calling a Stunde Null, a “zero hour,” a caesura before a new era untainted by the old. Far from it: the idea of a clean break with guilt was just another mode of convincing ourselves that we are exempt from universal responsibility...

For me, characterizing what America is and inferentially always has been is absurdly one sided, seeing only darkness and indictable immorality. If he doesn’t see it that way, then why in the first place invoke Arendt to indict Americans as such louses that they must blanch in shame at their impoverished humanity? 

Second, briefly and finally, Arendt’s ground for our continuing necessary self abasement as but mere alive human beings, namely, ... Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame... is as far fetched as it is inhuman. She and Moyn insist on our utter saintliness, and our self laceration in its absence, until all evil is extirpated from the earth. 

Good luck with that. 

Long List On Twitter About What Trump’s Done

 https://bit.ly/3omn8cD

Are Rights Harmonious Or Conflictual

 A long note to a friend as part of a longer exchange:

Thanks for your fine, thoughtful and fulsome response Phil. 

I absolutely agree that stressing good faith dialogue, respecting the opinions and analyses of others, being empathetic about them, tolerating diverse opinions and so on are all to the good and necessary. There is 100% no difference between us here.

But then we divide. And the issue is substantive. Are all rights compatible so as to be ultimately harmonious in the sense, as you quote Young, of being “indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent” or are they as I tried briefly to suggest inherently at logger heads—generically, liberty vs equality? 

But before I go further, I wouldn’t want that issue to be sidetracked by any arguments from temperament, mine, yours, anyone else’s. There’s a philosophical question that needs to be addressed on the intellectual merits. Whether I’m disputatious, likely, and whether you get Olympic gold for equanimity, unlikely, have to be beside the point. As well, neither of our preferences for whether exchanges should be robust, even sharp elbowed or peaceful and beatific bear on the question.  

Young and you may think that with effort and imagination we can reconcile rights, whatever their source. And you along with him seem to assume the conquerable disparity is simply between natural rights and positive rights. That has you both overlooking that rights are always pitted against each other in concrete situations regardless of their source or category.

I don’t know the law of Ireland but both the American Bill of Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify along with other natural rights, freedoms of expression, assembly and religious belief and the right to petition for grievance. 

Others include what as a term of art are called the rights of  “natural justice,” the right to know the accusation against you, the right to confront your accuser, to cross examine, to plead in your own defence, to an impartial decider. 

Others include principles which flow from the idea of the rule of law, that the law is to treat those similarly situated equally, and that no one is above the law. 

It takes no imagination to see how these rights rub up against each other incessantly and interminably, and aren’t so much harmonized in case after case as solved by (sometimes even arbitrarily) deciding what right/value/principle ought to be preferred over another in a given set of circumstances. 

An example: the state wants to tax me more so as generally to redistribute wealth. That ooh infringes my liberty, my right to the fruits of, say, my labour. Otoh, it conduces to greater equality. What are the limiting principles here, if any? How does this opposition get harmonized? Does it ever? Or is the answer, as I think it is, that in this instance we will tax more and in another instance we will tax less, at the inescapable goring of someone’s ox.

Another example: pro choice versus pro life. If you can harmonize body autonomy and the right to life, I’ll move to Ireland and worship at your feet as a disciple of a modern day Socrates. 

As you know as well as I, the examples are endless. Whenever do either policy decisions or judicial determinations or even settlements short of adjudication not involve the clash of the serious assertions of right?

What would Young say about these examples? Do they countermand his thesis of rights as “indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent” 

I’m not sure I see what you mean by “abstract victories” and even if I’m able to construe that meaning, I’m not seeing how it bears upon our central issue. Nor do I see what single issue obsessiveness has to do with it, whether coming from left or right. 

Now, to be clear, I do agree that Young is reacting against the totalitarian assertion of the unassailably superior correctness of certain values, ie, his notion of a fixed hierarchy of rights, and of course we’re both with him on that. But, again, we depart after our standing on common ground on the intellectual goods I’ve just referred to in my second  paragraph of this note. 

For you and him it seems to follow from our common rejection of the rights screeching monopolists that the alternative is an ultimate harmoniousness of rights. But it’s exactly that that I say is misconceived. My alternative is to recognize what will be an inevitable, in fact inhering, conflict in rights but with the noted intellectual goods being brought to bear in sorting out the conflicts for the most hopefully reasonable resolution of which right predominates in any given set of circumstances. 

A few final, maybe repetitive, comments: the remaining few short paragraphs of your note seem to say in essence that in the harmonizing of rights, let’s stop all the militancy and that a “status quo of fundamental freedoms should be developed, rather, through processes of analytical research, narrative, education and reflection, that include dialogue.”

Respectfully, while what you say is highly desirable, I want to suggest it misses the precise target. It rather shows a conflation of highly desirable civil exchange and the philosophical question of whether all rights can be harmonized as though the former is the answer to the latter. This reasoning is circular: it’s premise is all rights can be harmonized; it then says if we only strip out the rancorous, obsessive assertion of superior rights, if we can engage in high minded exchange, we can arrive at what we’ve premised, the harmony of all rights. But whether all rights can be harmonized is the very issue between me and Young and you and that harmonization is assumed rather than argued for or demonstrated. 

When The Idea Of Dialogue Becomes Pablum

 The essay:

 https://quillette.com/2020/10/09/how-we-lost-our-way-on-human-rights/

Me:

I just wrote the following to a friend who sent me today a link to Young’s essay.

——-

I tried my best, Phil, to read this essay attentively, to discern the outline of an interesting, perhaps provocative, argument.

I’d started it once before you emailed me its link. But that time, I trailed off, sort of nodded off, resolved to come back to it again with full concentration. Your email, as noted, reminded me of my promise to myself. So I’ve just read it now, trying to be fully alive to what I could make of its argument.

The best I can do is say it’s a bland form of motherhood. Who but the intellectual miscreants Young identifies as social justice warriors would deny the importance of allowing for intellectual diversity, respect, at least presumptive respect, for views different from our own, of at least trying to lend a presumptively sympathetic ear to what the other person has to say, which is, in the cant of the day, “seeing where the other person is coming from.” But a kind of pious meaninglessness lies at the bottom his version of these obvious goods of intellectual exchange. 

Here’s an example:

“Much of the museum’s methodology hinges on the concept of dialogue. In his 1996 book, On Dialogue, David Bohm noted that the purpose of dialogue is not to argue with, critique, or undermine another’s perspective, but instead to suspend one’s own opinion and actively engage in listening as a way to understand the perspectives of others. Dialogue pursued in this manner leads not to debate but to shared meaning, which aligns well with the museum’s mandate to contribute to collective memory, and to promote respect for others. An institutional commitment to dialogue requires less in the way of advocating particular interests and rights claims, and more in the way of collecting and sharing lived experiences that are part of our common heritage related to human rights. This, in turn, may facilitate efforts to balance different rights claims.“

Take these notions to what at least I see as their absurd logical conclusions. No disagreement, no debate, let alone, vigorous, spirited, energetic debate, maybe laced with a sharp elbow or two, with a reasoned rejection of bad, illogical, silly, simply asserted ideas? This reads to me like the bromide of toleration of which I was disabused when I studied a little bit of political philosophy. Even John Stuart Mill’s “let the market place of ideas lead to what are the better arguments,” my words of course not his, is inimical to the idea of dialogue in what I’ve just quoted.

Another related point, the long standing distinction between positive and negative liberty, freedom to and freedom from, as framed by Isaiah Berlin is persistently intriguing. There is an obvious tension between them that sounds in the perennial tension between liberty, freedom from, and equality, freedom to. It’s commonly observed that one comes at some cost to the other.

Scruton, Young rightly notes, champions freedom from, negative liberty, and is wary of freedom to, the difference lying in the former as a set of natural, which is to say, pre-state rights and the latter as positive rights insofar as they are state provided. Scruton may be wrong in his inclinations and Young describes his own commitment to both ideas of freedom, from and to. He encapsulates his commitment to freedom to. Otherwise, he says,

“…we get a never-ending zero-sum competition to assert or reassert a hierarchy of rights, an approach hardly in harmony with the principle that all rights are meant to be indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent.“

Trouble is, with this we’re back both to bland motherhood and a fundamental illogicality. The bland notion of all rights as harmonious runs afoul of the fundamental tension Berlin sees inhering in every policy decision a free society wishes to make, the tension between liberty and equality, freedom from and freedom to, negative and positive liberty. What Young describes here is a piety which real hands can’t hold; it’s pious water that is ungraspable.

The illogicality is that Young’s binary opposition between rights as harmonious as against a fixed hierarchy of rights excludes the innate tension in the very idea of rights formulated as negative and positive.

Young cites Michael Ignatieff for an informing principle of his (Young’s) commitment to positive rights, freedom to:

“ I drew from Michael Ignatieff’s 2007 book, The Rights Revolution, in which the Canadian scholar wrote that “to believe in rights is to believe in defending difference”—and so defending human rights required governments to protect “the ceaseless elaboration of disguises, affirmations, identities, and claims, at once individually and collectively.”

I can, I think, understand what Ignatieff means, that we must respect and tolerate others in all the varied and varying ways we all manifest our ideas of ourselves whether individually or as a group, which is fine as far as it goes. 

But Young omits, and omits any accounting for, Ignatieff having been a student and a virtual acolyte of Berlin and alive and open to the very tensions Young seems completely to elide. Ignatieff has a lively sense of the need to choose between competing claims and that often these choices are between the lesser of two evils, or as one fellow put it, the evil of two lessers. Which is to say, policy involves hard choices, ox goring, nearly every time.

One would think the ideas informing an institution dedicated to exhibiting and illuminating human rights would want somewhere to take into account the inexorable need to take these hard choices. But no, instead we get the pablum of “ all rights are meant to be indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent.“

Finally, in lieu of averting to, let alone grappling a little with, the inhering tensions in the very idea of human rights, Young’s “argument” devolves to the truisms of diversity, respect and sympathy for differences, for other points of view. But even in this he stops short of any notion of disagreement and debate. No, what he seems to want is to begin and end with the motherhood of dialogue.

Two Bits Of Mafia Miscellany

 Meyer Lansky And Lucky Luciano Disagree 

“But Charles,” Meyer said, “2+2 must equal 4.”

“Wrong!” said Lucky, “They can also equal less or more.”

He pointed his gun at the next table.

“Do 2+2 make 5, if you’re able?” 

The man said “Yes.” And Meyer said, ”I’ll buy and I’ll pour.”

—————-

Crazy Joe Gallo In And Out Of Stir

In stir, Joe read books all the time.

He read poetry, both free and rhymed. 

Released Joe hobnobbed in the Village 

But got caught for plunder and pillage.  

Joe pleaded Sartre, but still caught a dime.

A Small Exchange On Critical Race Theory And The Idea Of Anti Racism

 S 

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Bret Stephens. He's a rare conservative columnist for the NYT. He was featured recently with Robert Wright on Bloggingheads here if you're interested. 

Anyway, he's taken the very unusual step of criticizing a piece written by a fellow NYT writer - the 1619 project. This may be a little too much inside baseball for you, but the paper has strict guidelines against this practice, so it's a fairly big deal internally. 

You'll likely be sympathetic to his argument, but give it a read just the same. I thought it was quite compelling as well. I've downloaded and attached it, so you won't have to contend with the paywall. 

By the way, I read the essay on the myth of the stolen country. I really liked it, so thanks for passing it along.

Me:

I’m pretty familiar with Stephens. I’ve read him on and off but not much lately. I don’t pay attention to Bloggingheads anymore but thanks for the link to him on it. I’ll check it out.

I’ve only today heard about his piece criticizing 1619. I’ve just read it. It’s good but I would have been happier if it was more hard hitting. I didn’t know about NYT restrictions against criticizing colleagues’ work. I can see a rationale for that but it doesn’t make overwhelming sense to me. Those restrictions seem something of a joke considering what happened to Bari Weiss, years in the making and culminating in her leaving, and what happened because of the publication of Tom Cotton’s op ed calling for National Guard action against the rioters. 

Stephens has a mild journalistic sensibility except when he’s inveighing against Trump. I can see that mildness plus institutional/internal-political constraints causing him to tamp down his criticism of 1619 and go out of his way to stress the good it’s done, as he sees it. Yet to be fair to him, he does make the points against 1619 and Hannah-Jones that need to be made.

In a recent WSJ columns Jason Riley asks, where all the liberal voices given Critical Race Theory and the theory of Anti Racism, both despicable theories.

S:

I don't know. You think these are "despicable theories"? I'm watching a Glenn Loury/Heather MacDonald conversation about this same sort of stuff, and they just go too far for my taste. I'm not conversant in critical race theory or anti-racism theory (what would that be, exactly?), but the idea that it's all a hustle can't be quite right. MacDonald is talking about the end of Western civilization if these ideas take hold, and gives no validity whatsoever to the claims of injustice. I've shown you data and so have others that indicate there are problems to do with race, here. Until that evidence is meaningfully contended with, I think it's just a silly shouting match. 

Me:

That there are problems to do with race is quite beside the point. Who denies it? 

But CRT holds whites are ineradicably socialized in the biases, values, mores, folkways, attitudes, norms etc. etc. of the hegemonic power they have wielded since the beginning of American time. 

In fact, on some CRT iterations, we can’t transcend our inherited racism. 

The measure is disparate outcome rather than equal opportunity. So that any black white gap—of which gaps there are many, with “white” seemingly including any group that ascends, whites, Jews, Asian and with blacks low man on the totem pole, except for crime and like dysfunction, where they sit on top—is attributable only to racism operating subtextually underneath supposed de jure equality. 

Otherwise, goes CRT, the only gap explanation is black genetic inferiority. Which is unthinkable.

And as that is so, it’s insufficient to “be against racism” as a matter of attitude. That can’t begin to encroach on your own inherited racism, your socialization into it, your breathing it in as you breathe in the hegemonic air. 

No, you must be an activist against it, marshalling your efforts to combat it, starting with the baby step of recognizing and disclosing your own near-to-irredeemable racism. That in a nutshell is the theory of anti racism.

As I say, both despicable theories.

Capisce?

S

You've written a lot here, and I'm not sure how far we'll get untying all these threads. Suffice it to say, you accept none of the criticisms of the right, and all the criticisms of the left. CRT and its proponents are despicable and a scourge. That's fine.

You've asked me to point to an example of "de jure" racism as well as what work "we" have to do. 

If I understand "de jure" racism, it concerns an actual law on the books. Is that the only standard you'd accept for racism on a systemic level? This is part of the point I was getting at earlier. I linked you to a ton of examples of how racism can persist in our legal system, in spite of colourblind laws. You've either chosen to ignore it or you've dismissed all these studies. Below are just a few. Doesn't this suggest something important about the state of the law and race in America to you? 

A survey of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year found that when black men and white men commit the same crime, black men on average receive a sentence almost 20 percent longer. The research controlled for variables such as age and prior criminal history.

A 2016 review of nearly 474,000 criminal cases in Hampton Roads, Va., found that whites were more likely to get plea deals that resulted in no jail time for drug offenses. While facing charges of drug distribution, 48 percent of whites received plea bargains with no jail time, vs. 22 percent of blacks. Among those with prior criminal records who pleaded guilty to robbery, 36 percent of whites got no jail time, vs. 8 percent of blacks.

In Delaware, according to a 2012 study, “black defendants who kill white victims are seven times as likely to receive the death penalty as are black defendants who kill black victims. … Moreover, black defendants who kill white victims are more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as are white defendants who kill white victims.”

Most recently, American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast did painstaking research on the 26-year career of Mississippi District Attorney Doug Evans and found that over the course of his career, Evans’s office struck 50 percent of prospective black jurors, vs. just 11 percent of whites.

According to figures from the National Registry of Exonerations (NER) black people are about five times more likely to go to prison for drug possession than white people. According to exoneration data, black people are also 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes.

As for what work "we" have to do, I don't have any easy prescriptions about this. The first step, it seems to me, is recognizing we have a problem, and that it hasn't been solved by government program liberals or bootstrap conservatives. In the case of policing, I think there's common ground for the right and the left in getting social workers or mental health workers more involved. Advocating for that would be a good thing, I think. Having people in the criminal justice system grapple with some of the disparities mentioned above, and how they might go about gradual reforms that might ameliorate some of this would also be good. But it's undoubtedly thorny. 

Me:

I’ll respond point by point but my abiding sense is that you haven’t grappled sufficiently with the heart of both these theories and that you’re conflating the good of wanting to try to ameliorate racial problems with the theories themselves. One can want that amelioration, recognizing that there are such problems, and still reject CRT and Anti Racism, which is a term of art, as despicable, which they are. 

Tell me what the criticisms of the right are; pinpoint them and tell me where they fall short. For example, if, say, the right, which btw isn’t a monolith, says racism is only the gross and obvious kind, and uses that as an argument against the despicable theories, then that’s a blinkered criticism to which I don’t subscribe. And so on that basis, you’d be wrong to say my views are parallel to those of the right. Btw, that specific criticism is flawed for at least two reasons: it’s empirically wrong; and even if it were empirically right, it doesn’t get at the essence of what’s despicable, the innards of the theories that make circular arguments, constitute whiteness as near to ineradicably racist by definition—in some versions it’s ineradicable, not near to, it conflates inequality of outcome with inequality of opportunity, has a power based view of society characterized at its core by the dynamics of oppression, with culture as its hegemonic superstructure and others such unlovely, I’d say despicable, notions. 

So you tell me to which of these foundational ideas do you subscribe?

In fact, in your last email you tried to strike a middle ground between the theories and their critics. This betrays a fundamental misreading of the theories. It’s zero sum, in my view. You’re either with them or against them. Partial views of the theories, some kernels of insight, are insufficient. If you rest on those alone, you land outside their perimeters. 

Btw, I did not say the proponents are despicable. Some are and some aren’t. Please don’t put words in my mouth. 

I can’t deal with your studies/examples. I don’t know the studies. I don’t know what the responses to them are. I don’t know what the surrounding statistical context is. Do the studies show improvement or worsening disparities? Coleman Hughes notes that in incarceration rates for blacks, for example, are dropping. 

But analytically there is a way of understanding disparities and unequal treatment short of concluding systemic racism exists. I’ll give you an example but need to make an initial point. When I challenged you to name an example of de jure racism, at least two things are notable.

First, it seems, you can’t, which goes a long way to show how much things have improved from slavery to de jure racism to comprehensive institutional and legal equality. That’s important because under the despicable theories nothing has changed. It’s functionally still slave times, with masters, oppressors, hegemonic whites, and slaves, the oppressed, people of colour. 

Second, where do I say that de jure racism exhausts the meaning of systemic racism. I didn’t and don’t.

But as to your studies, here’s an example, Scott introduced a long list of studies in the criminal justice system showing differential treatment including that white  cops proportionally kill more unarmed white men then black men, that black men up to a certain level of violence get harsher treatment at the hands of the cops than white men. And the assertion under the theories and by many others is that police are systemically racist.  But consider: there are about 350,000,000 yearly cop civilian interactions in the US. How many are problematic? Of those that are problematic, how many are racially so? How many of the bad cases involve innocent victims? How many involve dealing with criminals, and which raise ambiguous fact situations. 

As the numbers dwindle by this kind of slicing and dicing, then as against the whole we move further and further away from anything that can fairly be called systemic. We’re forced to recognize the distinctions between problemic and systemic and therefore reform and revolutionary type overhaul, that leads to its reductio ad absurdism of “defund/abolish the police.”

“Systemic” is way overused because it’s ready to hand and delusionally distills complex, problematic issues into a simple encompassing formulation explaining everything. In his debate with Trump Biden said most cops are good but there’s systemic racism in policing. That circle simply won’t square. 

Think of the rhetoric of rape culture to describe what was going on campuses and in society at large. The theory of rape culture is that society taken as whole promotes rape, that’s that what campus culture was and what North American culture was. The term has faded and rape was so overused as to lose meaning such that an unwanted touching was assimilated to rape under the aegis of sexual assault. I think there are analytic parallels between the notion of rape culture and systemic racism. And it’s not just words. Different remedies flow from the characterization.

Your ideas about what “we” have to do are revealing in a few ways. First, you don’t answer what you personally have to do, what efforts you have to make, how you need to recognize your inner socialized racist. I don’t think you have to do any of those things. But the theory of Anti Racism says that we who don’t individually do any of those things are racist, simply masking it rhetorically by our swell liberal ideas. It’s zero sum. I think that notion is horse shit. And I think further it’s despicable. 

Secondly, the same point really, no one reasonable will gainsay ideas for reform, whether what you briefly point to, or others. But for CRT, that’s just nibbling at the edges of things. No, I’m sorry, you need sensitivity training to help you confront your inner white racism and either transcend it on some versions of CRT or at least better manage it on others. In fact attending sensitivity sessions and declaiming racist, racist, racist, is easier than the hard work of rolling up sleeves and trying to implement incremental reform. 

Which all leads me to conclude where I started this long note, that you really haven’t come to terms with the innards of these theories and your comments reveal it.