https://quillette.com/2020/06/27/the-mob-that-came-after-me-is-turning-on-itself-when-will-this-end-who-does-this-help/
Me:
Haven’t read any of the thread.
Article is excellent.
I reject virtually in toto the idea of cultural appropriation as anything bad, and I’d distinguish between it and cultural misappropriation, which can take many forms, some criminal, but has 0 to do with the good faith artistic imagining and creation of any others whatsoever.
The ultimate logical absurdity of cultural appropriation is that we can only write about ourselves. Only then is 0 “appropriated.” And even that is problematic since we’re formed out of so much cultural context informed by such a variety of cultural sources. Even more so for those who hold to tabula rasa.
One side point, though:
“We are grappling with problems that are life-and-death serious: a global pandemic and its devastating economic aftermath, systemic overuse of police force against Black and Indigenous citizens…”
I disagree that there is “systemic overuse of police force against Black…citizens.”
“Systemic” is thrown around so much it becomes more received narrative than fact, more rhetoric than fact. Wouldn’t it be better to say with respect to police force used against Blacks in Canada that the disproportion speaks to a problem, a problematic dimension of policing rather than something that is systemic, which itself relates to the whole of something rather than the part?
Consider the number of police civilian interactions in Canada in a year. Might they number 35,000,000, 1/10th of the rough annual number in the US? Cut down that number by any reasonable amount you like. Of all of those, how many are problematic? Of all those that are problematic, how many involve Blacks? Of all those that involve Blacks, how many are so univalent that race is only or predominant factor involved?
Answer these questions and I don’t see how anyone fails to distinguish between a problematic discrete part of the system and it as a whole.
I make no such claim as regards the relation between the police and Indigenous Canadians. That’s much more complicated.
Sunday, June 28, 2020
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
A Few Preliminary Lay Thoughts On Some Of Heidegger
https://aeon.co/essays/heidegger-v-carnap-how-logic-took-issue-with-metaphysics?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3c1f81616b-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_06_22_12_45&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-3c1f81616b-68850749
Don, thanks for sending this. I read it just now. I’d heard the name Carnap before but never knew who he was. As for Heidegger, I knew who he was and had some vague notions of what he said.
For no reason I can readily identify, I decided to try my hand at some self study of him. I’m watching a nine hour and change online series of lectures about Being and Time, which are a video of a class on it Hubert Dreyfus gave at UC Berkeley. I do a bit at a time—my then being in time. In tandem with that I’m reading a long essay by an Iain Thompson in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Heidegger’s theory of art. I try to integrate the ideas from both sources to each other. Dresser’s essay seems a very, very generalized nice summary of some of Heidegger’s larger project of use for laymen such as me.
I read a note by a student of Dreyfus in which he said, paraphrase,” after you get through the language gobbledygook of Heidegger, the ideas are quite banal. That description, so far as I’ve gotten, resonates with me except at times when what Heidegger says just seems altogether weird.
On the banal side, he talks, for one example, about how we go through our days mostly actively but so non-deliberately in what we’re doing as to vitiate the dualism of subject and object but that then when things go wrong and we have to solve them and in that we’re subjects again in relation to objects.
So he doesn’t deny the dualism in our experience of the world but says it’s not primary or basic with us. I think it’s no great revelation that the familiar—driving through a city we know well—is done without deliberation.
What of it, I ask.
And even when we do it without without deliberation, automatically so to say, who ever really drives in a state such that the self, or we as thinking beings, as subject disappears. All kinds of contingencies happen in traffic constantly that take us out of our non-deliberativeness. We go through our days relentlessly shifting back and forth between acting kind of automatically and then thinkingly in the sense of ourselves as subjects encountering and then negotiating the world external to us.
And why is the immersive experience more basic than, primary to, the dualistic experience of subject and object as we go through the world?
And in the immersive experience does the dualistic self really disappear so as to shatter the dualism of self and outer world, or is describing this latter way more poetry or metaphor than literally so? I don’t think we shatter anything, and describing it as though we do is just a way of saying how we really “got into it,” whatever it is.
I can’t think of too many times when I was utterly without self consciousness even when I was, so to say, “in the flow.”
And finally for the banality, doesn’t it all derive from Heidegger’s overarching characterization of what he calls our epoch, or our being in this historical/historicist time,
“... the historical ascendance of science, technology, aesthetics, and culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, that historical decline of the divine which Heidegger (echoing Schiller) calls the “ungodding...“
which is just his arbitrary summing up, which he then escalates to our essential desire to commodify, master and control everything as the predominant essence of our epoch.
Describe our epoch sharply differently and does his philosophy, what he argues for and wants to prize, his ideal notion of being, start to falter?
It seems to inform his idea of art, which is to say that great art appreciated as magnificently created beauty is a lesser and invidious understanding of it. For at its truest great art illuminates the depths, limits and flaws of our “historicity” and points to, prefigures, the transformation of our human nature, our being, accompanying the next time for beings, the new aborning epoch.
I don’t understand art this way, though certainly in great art we see the deep conflicts roiling its time and the ways of being peculiar to its time but those conflicts and ways of being are continuous with and embedded in our universal, eternal conflicts and permanent drives and dispositions as human beings.
He also argues that if we only see art as aesthetics we don’t get over the subject object hump and stranded on that hump we treat great art as objects to be commodified, mastered and controlled and in doing that we ultimately turn ourselves into objects to be commodified, mastered and controlled rather than being “empty heads” immersed in great art, which unendingly discloses itself to our openness to it.
He does a “phenomenological analysis” of this poem, which Thompson recounts in his essay. Read it for yourself and see.
The Roman Fountain
Up springs the spout and, falling, fills
To brim the marble basin’s round,
Which, under veiling, over spills
Into a second basin's ground;
The second one, too rich now, runs
Into the third its falling waves,
And each one takes and gives at once
And streams and stays.
I find Heidegger’s analysis incredibly strained, remote from and unconvincingly imposing itself on it.
I find, on what I’ve read and heard so far, that these thoughts on art while having some accuracy in describing how some people approach and apprehend art, range from the poetic or metaphoric in capturing that accuracy to the arbitrary and absurd. They at bottom stumble and fall if we reject his characterization of our epoch. And they stumble and fall more if we reject the idea of the radical transformation of our nature from epoch to epoch with no allowance for the poetic wisdom of “thus it ever was,” “plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose,” “there’s nothing new under the sun.” For these verities exist in all art in dialectical relation to the specifics, situations and circumstances of its time. And poets are the unacknowledged legislators of our time about as much as I am.
I’d say we never surmount in experiencing art the dualism of self and object and that to speak of transcending it in our empty headed openness to art is mere poetry or metaphor to describe what we feel to be the intensity of our rapt engagement, which btw is with art as an object of created magnificence and not to a historicist marker.
So, then, finally, to dismiss our aesthetic appreciation of art as an obstacle to appreciating its historicist revelation and prefiguring is to miss what the essence of art is for us.
Don, thanks for sending this. I read it just now. I’d heard the name Carnap before but never knew who he was. As for Heidegger, I knew who he was and had some vague notions of what he said.
For no reason I can readily identify, I decided to try my hand at some self study of him. I’m watching a nine hour and change online series of lectures about Being and Time, which are a video of a class on it Hubert Dreyfus gave at UC Berkeley. I do a bit at a time—my then being in time. In tandem with that I’m reading a long essay by an Iain Thompson in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Heidegger’s theory of art. I try to integrate the ideas from both sources to each other. Dresser’s essay seems a very, very generalized nice summary of some of Heidegger’s larger project of use for laymen such as me.
I read a note by a student of Dreyfus in which he said, paraphrase,” after you get through the language gobbledygook of Heidegger, the ideas are quite banal. That description, so far as I’ve gotten, resonates with me except at times when what Heidegger says just seems altogether weird.
On the banal side, he talks, for one example, about how we go through our days mostly actively but so non-deliberately in what we’re doing as to vitiate the dualism of subject and object but that then when things go wrong and we have to solve them and in that we’re subjects again in relation to objects.
So he doesn’t deny the dualism in our experience of the world but says it’s not primary or basic with us. I think it’s no great revelation that the familiar—driving through a city we know well—is done without deliberation.
What of it, I ask.
And even when we do it without without deliberation, automatically so to say, who ever really drives in a state such that the self, or we as thinking beings, as subject disappears. All kinds of contingencies happen in traffic constantly that take us out of our non-deliberativeness. We go through our days relentlessly shifting back and forth between acting kind of automatically and then thinkingly in the sense of ourselves as subjects encountering and then negotiating the world external to us.
And why is the immersive experience more basic than, primary to, the dualistic experience of subject and object as we go through the world?
And in the immersive experience does the dualistic self really disappear so as to shatter the dualism of self and outer world, or is describing this latter way more poetry or metaphor than literally so? I don’t think we shatter anything, and describing it as though we do is just a way of saying how we really “got into it,” whatever it is.
I can’t think of too many times when I was utterly without self consciousness even when I was, so to say, “in the flow.”
And finally for the banality, doesn’t it all derive from Heidegger’s overarching characterization of what he calls our epoch, or our being in this historical/historicist time,
“... the historical ascendance of science, technology, aesthetics, and culture, on the one hand, and, on the other, that historical decline of the divine which Heidegger (echoing Schiller) calls the “ungodding...“
which is just his arbitrary summing up, which he then escalates to our essential desire to commodify, master and control everything as the predominant essence of our epoch.
Describe our epoch sharply differently and does his philosophy, what he argues for and wants to prize, his ideal notion of being, start to falter?
It seems to inform his idea of art, which is to say that great art appreciated as magnificently created beauty is a lesser and invidious understanding of it. For at its truest great art illuminates the depths, limits and flaws of our “historicity” and points to, prefigures, the transformation of our human nature, our being, accompanying the next time for beings, the new aborning epoch.
I don’t understand art this way, though certainly in great art we see the deep conflicts roiling its time and the ways of being peculiar to its time but those conflicts and ways of being are continuous with and embedded in our universal, eternal conflicts and permanent drives and dispositions as human beings.
He also argues that if we only see art as aesthetics we don’t get over the subject object hump and stranded on that hump we treat great art as objects to be commodified, mastered and controlled and in doing that we ultimately turn ourselves into objects to be commodified, mastered and controlled rather than being “empty heads” immersed in great art, which unendingly discloses itself to our openness to it.
He does a “phenomenological analysis” of this poem, which Thompson recounts in his essay. Read it for yourself and see.
The Roman Fountain
Up springs the spout and, falling, fills
To brim the marble basin’s round,
Which, under veiling, over spills
Into a second basin's ground;
The second one, too rich now, runs
Into the third its falling waves,
And each one takes and gives at once
And streams and stays.
I find Heidegger’s analysis incredibly strained, remote from and unconvincingly imposing itself on it.
I find, on what I’ve read and heard so far, that these thoughts on art while having some accuracy in describing how some people approach and apprehend art, range from the poetic or metaphoric in capturing that accuracy to the arbitrary and absurd. They at bottom stumble and fall if we reject his characterization of our epoch. And they stumble and fall more if we reject the idea of the radical transformation of our nature from epoch to epoch with no allowance for the poetic wisdom of “thus it ever was,” “plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose,” “there’s nothing new under the sun.” For these verities exist in all art in dialectical relation to the specifics, situations and circumstances of its time. And poets are the unacknowledged legislators of our time about as much as I am.
I’d say we never surmount in experiencing art the dualism of self and object and that to speak of transcending it in our empty headed openness to art is mere poetry or metaphor to describe what we feel to be the intensity of our rapt engagement, which btw is with art as an object of created magnificence and not to a historicist marker.
So, then, finally, to dismiss our aesthetic appreciation of art as an obstacle to appreciating its historicist revelation and prefiguring is to miss what the essence of art is for us.
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
Pre-Preliminary Note On Bostock
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
Glance at, skim, glide over, take a peek at, dip your mind’s toe into, read intently if you wish, read about, look at the head note of and so on and on of the (quite possibly) landmark SCOTUS 6-3 majority opinion in Bostock holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act phrase “because of sex“ as an unlawful ground of workplace discrimination applies to instances of sexual orientation and gender, as decided under the aegis of textualism (wiki)—“interpretation of the law primarily based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as: intention of the law when passed, legislative history, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law”—and originalism (wiki)—”all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding of the authors or the people at the time it was ratified“.
Significantly the decision was written by conservative Justice Gorsuch.
Some conservative legal and non legal commentators are going nuts and some are saying this decision marks the end of the usefulness of these two doctrines if they lead to such results.
I’ve read some of Gorsuch’s opinion and none yet of the dissents. I agree with what I’ve so far read. I think the whining about the death of the usefulness of originalism and textualism is especially revealing special pleading horseshit. These doctrines were never to be mere instrumental means of getting ideologically preferred results.
One thing I take from what I understand of the opinion is better understanding the artificiality of 100% hiving off textualism from purposivism (Wiki)— “courts interpret an enactment (a statute, part of a statute, or a clause of a constitution) within the context of the law's purpose”—claimed to be opposites. Once adjudication gets to semantics seen in light of, in context of, the overall legal enactment, purpose necessarily gets implicated.
Glance at, skim, glide over, take a peek at, dip your mind’s toe into, read intently if you wish, read about, look at the head note of and so on and on of the (quite possibly) landmark SCOTUS 6-3 majority opinion in Bostock holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act phrase “because of sex“ as an unlawful ground of workplace discrimination applies to instances of sexual orientation and gender, as decided under the aegis of textualism (wiki)—“interpretation of the law primarily based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as: intention of the law when passed, legislative history, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law”—and originalism (wiki)—”all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding of the authors or the people at the time it was ratified“.
Significantly the decision was written by conservative Justice Gorsuch.
Some conservative legal and non legal commentators are going nuts and some are saying this decision marks the end of the usefulness of these two doctrines if they lead to such results.
I’ve read some of Gorsuch’s opinion and none yet of the dissents. I agree with what I’ve so far read. I think the whining about the death of the usefulness of originalism and textualism is especially revealing special pleading horseshit. These doctrines were never to be mere instrumental means of getting ideologically preferred results.
One thing I take from what I understand of the opinion is better understanding the artificiality of 100% hiving off textualism from purposivism (Wiki)— “courts interpret an enactment (a statute, part of a statute, or a clause of a constitution) within the context of the law's purpose”—claimed to be opposites. Once adjudication gets to semantics seen in light of, in context of, the overall legal enactment, purpose necessarily gets implicated.
Thursday, June 11, 2020
So Said Edmund Burke
So Said Edmund Burke
Whenever the reign of terror reigns
the violence comes down without refrain.
Organic continuity, said Edmund Burke,
moving slowly but surely is what does work
As past, present, future each other claim.
Whenever the reign of terror reigns
the violence comes down without refrain.
Organic continuity, said Edmund Burke,
moving slowly but surely is what does work
As past, present, future each other claim.
Saturday, June 6, 2020
On Glenn Loury’s Letter Responding To Brown University’s Letter On George Floyd’s Death
Glenn Loury’s letter:
Last week, in the aftermath of the national fury that has erupted, and continues, over the apparent killing by a Minneapolis police officer of a black man, George Floyd, while he was being taken into custody, a letter appeared in my inbox from Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, where I teach. The letter, sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty, was cosigned by many of Brown’s senior administrators and deans.
“We write to you today as leaders of this university,” the letter begins, “to express first deep sadness, but also anger, regarding the racist incidents that continue to cut short the lives of black people every day.”
It continues:
“The sadness comes from knowing that this is not a mere moment for our country. This is historical, lasting and persistent. Structures of power, deep-rooted histories of oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate, directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour. Black people continue to live in fear for themselves, their children and their communities, at times in fear of the very systems and structures that are supposed to be in place to ensure safety and justice.“
I found the letter deeply disturbing, and was moved to compose the following response, which I shared with a colleague. I’m happy now to share it as well:
Dear ____:
I was disturbed by the letter from Brown’s senior administration. It was obviously the product of a committee—Professors XX and YY, or someone of similar sensibility, wrote a manifesto, to which the president and senior administrative leadership have dutifully affixed their names.
I wondered why such a proclamation was necessary. Either it affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties. It trafficked in the social-justice warriors’ pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums. It invoked “race” gratuitously and unreflectively at every turn. It often presumed what remains to be established. It often elided pertinent differences between the many instances cited. It read in part like a loyalty oath. It declares in every paragraph: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident.”
And just what truths are these? The main one: that racial domination and “white supremacy” define our national existence even now, a century and a half after the end of slavery.
I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling. Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?
They write sentences such as this: “We have been here before, and in fact have never left.” Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story? They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity? Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis? We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly? Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing?
I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges. The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History.
What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.”
Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s.
My bottom line: I’m offended by the letter. It frightens, saddens, and angers me.
Sincerely,
Glenn
Says G:
I agree Brown’s is a badly written letter. All committee written lettrs are bad as each member of the ommttee tries to add a word or line that he or she thinks will make the issue clearer or more pertinent. But, its the wy of social issue expression -- other than singing solidarity forever. What would you have the profs and the leadership of the school do. Send a memo to each teacher asking him or her to write their own personal appreciation of the proble, sign, it and send to the President of the University to be presented to the press as the voice of the school. You could walk to the moon before that could be arranged or done. The net net -- you hvave a badlly written letter, hyperbolic in nature, but still presenting the various social and racia issuesl that are roiling the USA today. Petitions and letters of this nature have been the Vox of the masses since writing began. Other than disagreeing with the extent of the problem what did Dr. Loury want other than greater participation in the drafting?
Me:
The old joke is a camel is a horse designed by committee.
Assuming the school *had* to say anything, big assumption, there could have been a way of saying something that didn’t so transparently want to placate students and faculty by joining them in bowing before the day’s conventional and unsubstantiated wisdom, thereby insulting independent minded intellectuals like Lowry.
The letter is like the email I got from Uber today with its statement decrying systemic racism. What I took from that email is that someone at Uber decided that such decrying is good for the ol’ bottom line. I characterize the content of the letter differently than you. It doesn’t just avert to the issues plaguing the US. Those Issues are complex and at least two sided. In the letter, Brown takes a particular position on them that is problematic for among the reasons Loury notes and is questionable for the same reasons. The letter makes Brown an imbiber of the “narrative.”
A better letter could have raised those issues but in a way that fit with what in big part a university is supposed to do, expressing a commitment to disinterestedly but deeply and rigorously exploring those issues with a view to their better understanding and, so, join a vital national conversation about them. Something like that.
I suppose for those who with Godly omniscience know the truth of these matters, Brown’s letter will go some way toward satisfying them. But for the mere mortals among Brown’s faculty and students who are sufficiently open minded and modestly Socratic in knowing what they don’t know—take Loury for example—but not willing to accept Brown’s ready platitudes and its intoning of ready conventional wisdom, the letter is an affront.
Last week, in the aftermath of the national fury that has erupted, and continues, over the apparent killing by a Minneapolis police officer of a black man, George Floyd, while he was being taken into custody, a letter appeared in my inbox from Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, where I teach. The letter, sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty, was cosigned by many of Brown’s senior administrators and deans.
“We write to you today as leaders of this university,” the letter begins, “to express first deep sadness, but also anger, regarding the racist incidents that continue to cut short the lives of black people every day.”
It continues:
“The sadness comes from knowing that this is not a mere moment for our country. This is historical, lasting and persistent. Structures of power, deep-rooted histories of oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate, directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour. Black people continue to live in fear for themselves, their children and their communities, at times in fear of the very systems and structures that are supposed to be in place to ensure safety and justice.“
I found the letter deeply disturbing, and was moved to compose the following response, which I shared with a colleague. I’m happy now to share it as well:
Dear ____:
I was disturbed by the letter from Brown’s senior administration. It was obviously the product of a committee—Professors XX and YY, or someone of similar sensibility, wrote a manifesto, to which the president and senior administrative leadership have dutifully affixed their names.
I wondered why such a proclamation was necessary. Either it affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties. It trafficked in the social-justice warriors’ pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums. It invoked “race” gratuitously and unreflectively at every turn. It often presumed what remains to be established. It often elided pertinent differences between the many instances cited. It read in part like a loyalty oath. It declares in every paragraph: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident.”
And just what truths are these? The main one: that racial domination and “white supremacy” define our national existence even now, a century and a half after the end of slavery.
I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling. Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?
They write sentences such as this: “We have been here before, and in fact have never left.” Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story? They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity? Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis? We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly? Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing?
I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges. The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History.
What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.”
Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s.
My bottom line: I’m offended by the letter. It frightens, saddens, and angers me.
Sincerely,
Glenn
Says G:
I agree Brown’s is a badly written letter. All committee written lettrs are bad as each member of the ommttee tries to add a word or line that he or she thinks will make the issue clearer or more pertinent. But, its the wy of social issue expression -- other than singing solidarity forever. What would you have the profs and the leadership of the school do. Send a memo to each teacher asking him or her to write their own personal appreciation of the proble, sign, it and send to the President of the University to be presented to the press as the voice of the school. You could walk to the moon before that could be arranged or done. The net net -- you hvave a badlly written letter, hyperbolic in nature, but still presenting the various social and racia issuesl that are roiling the USA today. Petitions and letters of this nature have been the Vox of the masses since writing began. Other than disagreeing with the extent of the problem what did Dr. Loury want other than greater participation in the drafting?
Me:
The old joke is a camel is a horse designed by committee.
Assuming the school *had* to say anything, big assumption, there could have been a way of saying something that didn’t so transparently want to placate students and faculty by joining them in bowing before the day’s conventional and unsubstantiated wisdom, thereby insulting independent minded intellectuals like Lowry.
The letter is like the email I got from Uber today with its statement decrying systemic racism. What I took from that email is that someone at Uber decided that such decrying is good for the ol’ bottom line. I characterize the content of the letter differently than you. It doesn’t just avert to the issues plaguing the US. Those Issues are complex and at least two sided. In the letter, Brown takes a particular position on them that is problematic for among the reasons Loury notes and is questionable for the same reasons. The letter makes Brown an imbiber of the “narrative.”
A better letter could have raised those issues but in a way that fit with what in big part a university is supposed to do, expressing a commitment to disinterestedly but deeply and rigorously exploring those issues with a view to their better understanding and, so, join a vital national conversation about them. Something like that.
I suppose for those who with Godly omniscience know the truth of these matters, Brown’s letter will go some way toward satisfying them. But for the mere mortals among Brown’s faculty and students who are sufficiently open minded and modestly Socratic in knowing what they don’t know—take Loury for example—but not willing to accept Brown’s ready platitudes and its intoning of ready conventional wisdom, the letter is an affront.
Thursday, June 4, 2020
Poem: A Letter
A Letter
Anonymous
Have you ever gotten a letter
from who you love
but they’re not where
your arms can reach them?
The letter fills in,
is words on a page
you read over and over and over.
They lose all meaning,
become ciphers;
and you know that reading
and rereading and rereading
is delusion.
The letter, the letters,
the words, are not flesh,
as a picture is not flesh.
The letters, the picture, not flesh
are a torture,
a God you pray to
who never answers,
never does you any good.
June 4, 2020
Comment, mine: The delusion isn’t that only one person will do: it’s the sad realization that a letter is any kind of substitute for the real thing, actual presence—not necessarily sexual but of course could include it. It’s not even second best because compared to living adjacency, it’s in a way first worst, an acute reminder of what’s not there, a cruel tease. An enactment of that sad tease reminding us of what’s not there is kissing the letter or picture or crushing them to one’s heart, maybe salting them with tears. Plus, the realization of absence acutely heightens the feeling and meaning of love. It doesn’t in any way weaken it.
R:
"Not flesh" sounded sexual to me. And a bit cold. Why would the words lose meaning? The response is so far from my own that I cannot but hear it as disgruntled at not getting what is for the writer the only way he can love and feel loved---through physical contact. And I seem to recall people reading letters over and over as if each reading was a communion. and the song,
I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
and make-believe it came from you, etc
That's not me either but I'm sympathetic to it.
Me:
When someone misses a person, the person isn’t there. Flesh seems a warm and immediate way to designate what’s missed. Sure, it connotes sex, and how is sex not part of what’s missed with one’s beloved? But flesh effectively goes to the totality of physical presence or what I call physical adjacency.
That includes sex but isn’t reducible to sex; nor is sex a necessary or sufficient condition for flesh as physical presence. You might be thought to tilt away from the point or loading your point by your words “physical contact,” which imply sexual exchange. But my point is that flesh in the context of this poem signifies, points to, the totality of physical presence.
In the poem, the letters are read. They fill in, as the words of the poem say. But then they are read over and over because one wants more than to be filled in. One wants the person; and letters are then reread in the impossible quest for more and reread and so on till one knows there can be no more. There finally is only absence, nothing that can fill in the absence of presence but presence itself. And that’s the rub. Of course then the re-re-reader is, using your word, “disgruntled.”
In the song, the guy doesn’t have the girl. So he’s going to write himself a letter to try to pretend that he does have her and that she’s writing lovingly to him just as she used to. It’s actually pathetic, even as the song’s just a popular ditty. But in the poem the guy has the girl but she’s away from him. He wants what he can have but for her being away, hence the rejection of letters as any kind of stand in. If the guy in the song got back the girl, then he’d rather have her than her letters.
Anonymous
Have you ever gotten a letter
from who you love
but they’re not where
your arms can reach them?
The letter fills in,
is words on a page
you read over and over and over.
They lose all meaning,
become ciphers;
and you know that reading
and rereading and rereading
is delusion.
The letter, the letters,
the words, are not flesh,
as a picture is not flesh.
The letters, the picture, not flesh
are a torture,
a God you pray to
who never answers,
never does you any good.
June 4, 2020
Comment, mine: The delusion isn’t that only one person will do: it’s the sad realization that a letter is any kind of substitute for the real thing, actual presence—not necessarily sexual but of course could include it. It’s not even second best because compared to living adjacency, it’s in a way first worst, an acute reminder of what’s not there, a cruel tease. An enactment of that sad tease reminding us of what’s not there is kissing the letter or picture or crushing them to one’s heart, maybe salting them with tears. Plus, the realization of absence acutely heightens the feeling and meaning of love. It doesn’t in any way weaken it.
R:
"Not flesh" sounded sexual to me. And a bit cold. Why would the words lose meaning? The response is so far from my own that I cannot but hear it as disgruntled at not getting what is for the writer the only way he can love and feel loved---through physical contact. And I seem to recall people reading letters over and over as if each reading was a communion. and the song,
I'm gonna sit right down and write myself a letter
and make-believe it came from you, etc
That's not me either but I'm sympathetic to it.
Me:
When someone misses a person, the person isn’t there. Flesh seems a warm and immediate way to designate what’s missed. Sure, it connotes sex, and how is sex not part of what’s missed with one’s beloved? But flesh effectively goes to the totality of physical presence or what I call physical adjacency.
That includes sex but isn’t reducible to sex; nor is sex a necessary or sufficient condition for flesh as physical presence. You might be thought to tilt away from the point or loading your point by your words “physical contact,” which imply sexual exchange. But my point is that flesh in the context of this poem signifies, points to, the totality of physical presence.
In the poem, the letters are read. They fill in, as the words of the poem say. But then they are read over and over because one wants more than to be filled in. One wants the person; and letters are then reread in the impossible quest for more and reread and so on till one knows there can be no more. There finally is only absence, nothing that can fill in the absence of presence but presence itself. And that’s the rub. Of course then the re-re-reader is, using your word, “disgruntled.”
In the song, the guy doesn’t have the girl. So he’s going to write himself a letter to try to pretend that he does have her and that she’s writing lovingly to him just as she used to. It’s actually pathetic, even as the song’s just a popular ditty. But in the poem the guy has the girl but she’s away from him. He wants what he can have but for her being away, hence the rejection of letters as any kind of stand in. If the guy in the song got back the girl, then he’d rather have her than her letters.
Wednesday, June 3, 2020
No There There: Flynn Outrage!
From Jonathan Turley today:
.... What was not discussed was any quid pro quo or anything untoward or unlawful. Flynn stated what was already known to be Trump policy in seeking a new path with Russia. Flynn did not offer to remove sanctions but, rather, encouraged the Russians to respond in a reciprocal, commensurate manner if they felt they had to respond.
The calls, and Flynn’s identity, were leaked by as many as nine officials as the Obama administration left office — a serious federal crime, given their classified status. The most chilling aspect of the transcripts, however, is the lack of anything chilling in the calls themselves. Flynn is direct with Kislyak in trying to tone down the rhetoric and avoid retaliatory moves. He told Kislyak, “l am a very practical guy, and it’s about solutions. It’s about very practical solutions that we’re — that we need to come up with here.” Flynn said he understood the Russians might wish to retaliate for the Obama sanctions but encouraged them not to escalate the conflict just as the Trump administration took office.
Kislyak later spoke with Flynn again and confirmed that Moscow agreed to tone down the conflict in the practical approach laid out by Flynn. The media has focused on Flynn’s later denial of discussing sanctions; the transcripts confirm he did indeed discuss sanctions. However, the Justice Department has not sought to dismiss criminal charges against him because he told the truth but because his statements did not meet a key element of materiality for the crime and were the result of troubling actions by high-ranking officials....
So if I have this right, Flynn discussed sanctions with Kislyak only in the way of trying to tamp down tensions between Russia and the US as the new administration was getting its sea legs. No actionable quid pro quo.
And Flynn in the perjury trap, ambush interview lied/misspoke—alright let’s say lied—about his benign and lawful discussion of sanctions with Kislyak by denying he spoke with Kislyak about sanctions.
And this is what the Ds spun into an alarming, deeply troubling concern pointing to collusion; and this is what Mueller went after Flynn for in order to lever him into turning against Trump!
The actual conversation was benign; and it seems wasn’t material to any criminal investigation and by definition wasn’t material because the truth behind the lie was already known by the FBI who wanted to close down the investigation (but McCabe, Strozk, Page, Comey, others?, kept it going for a tactical way into Trump.)
...For a lie to be a crime under federal law, it must be material to the investigation – meaning that the lies pertain to the issues being legitimately investigated. The role of the FBI is to investigate past crimes, not to create new ones. Because the FBI investigators already knew the answer to the question they asked him—whether he had spoken to the Russian Ambassador—their purpose was not to elicit new information relevant to their investigation, but rather to spring a perjury trap on him. When they asked Flynn the question, they had a recording of his conversation with the Russian, of which he was presumably unaware. So his answer was not material to the investigation because they already had the information about which they were inquiring...Dershowitz
I don’t know how anyone with no ax to grind in these matters isn’t outraged by the powers that were’s abuse of all norms in the treatment of Flynn.
Monday, June 1, 2020
An Interpretation Of Wallace Stevens’ Poem Re-Statement Of Romance
Re-Statement Of Romance
Wallace Stevens
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.
Me:
American legal heavyweights throughout the 20th century reviewed and summarized the law in different areas, Restatement of Contracts, Restatement of Torts, and so on. The idea was to bring the law up to date and in accessible language reformulate the state of it at the time, clarify what the law was.
Stevens, a practising lawyer, calls his poem a Re-Statement, the dash a variation on the lack of one in the formal titles of the legal Restatements.
As I understand, his poems’ titles were of the utmost importance to him. The legal Restatements were meant to be clear and seamless, the law in the area restated as a coherent whole. Not so fast this for this Re-Statement: Romance, the mind’s idealization of all things in their harmonious unity, is being re-stated but with seamlessness, clarity and an almost divine unity gone, no longer the single unifying principle which is the divine as immanent. All of this I believe is implicit in the dash separating Re and Statement.
“Chants of night” suggest more than songs or poems of night. “Chants”suggest something almost mesmeric, something intoned by people who give up individuality to a group chanting or who who give it up individually in reflexively repeating the chant. For Romance, the chant might involve a ritual way an individual gets past himself and perhaps finally transmits himself into the unity of all things. For re-stated Romance, “chants” more suggest mindlessness and the illusion of the loss of self as in Romance before its Re-Statement.
Night has no cognition. It knows nothing. It just is. “It is what it is.“ And the poet is who he is. But what he is among other things is cognition and perception that mark differences between himself and night. Here are subject and object. In perceiving—his cognition at work, unlike unknowing night—this new Romantic reality, the poet gains his own best self understanding.
The enjambment between “myself And you” technically reinforces the idea of the separation between the poet and “you,” the other. But within that separation there seems to exist a kind of spare, severe, limited, dry, prosaic connection between the two, which is between two people, and which is qualitatively different from any relation, such as it may be, between either of them and insensate, inanimate night. “Only” and “interchange” raise my litany of adjectives for the human connection.
“Only” and “interchange,” the latter here such a formal unromantic verb, is offset by the preposition “in” in the next line. “In” signifies some ostensible penetration, depth, getting inside the physically separate other, in what each has to give to the other. This seeming exchange while going inside is not illimited: only what each has to give limits what can be given. The monosyllabic diction in “what each has to give” reinforces the sense of unadorned limit coinciding with the interchange of some innerness:
“Each in the other what each has to give.”
The sentence ending with “give” also grammatically conveys limit. But against limit, is the seeming paradox of apart but within each other, “Only we two are one.” So here is some Re-Statement of Romance. It seems a spare and singular unity, limited but still within each other, and emphatically negativing any notion of any oneness with night:
“Only we two are one, not you and night,
Not night and I, but you and I alone,”
The repetition of focused singularity in “Only,” “we two,” one,” “alone” makes both the separation and the unity, “we two,” stark and intense. In this Stevens may be thought to intimate Donne’s lovers creating their own world alone together on their bed but without the wit, unrestrained joy and playfulness evident in Donne’s highly clever and imaginative—“metaphysical”—metaphors and images. Here, rather a plain spoken, restrained, even melancholic, intensity predominates. After all, they are,
“So much alone, so deeply by themselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes.”
It is the depth of this stark, sobering realization of aloneness in the re-stated world of romance that feeds the great emphases, “So much alone,” So far beyond.” It is, one might say, a metaphysical realization of how one is in the world, perhaps ameliorated somewhat only by some getting together within hard limits by two people who find themselves alone with each other. “Casual solitudes” stop short of this realization, don’t have the depth of it. So, quite literally, these “casual solitudes” are relaxed and unconcerned.
Understanding that night can be no metaphor, symbol, image, objective correlative, or unifying or encompassing ground for the poet and the other—more re-stated romance—it is only “background for our selves.” That is now the supreme truth of its relation to each of them, however each of them with their own individual cognition and perception apprehends it:
“Supremely true each to its separate self.”
The moon and stars at night may cast a pale light on them but each can do no better than perhaps what the night can palely illumine, which is to say, cast some pale light on the other. Which is a final somber acknowledgment of the limit of what each separate self to the other can provide.
The final somber acknowledgement is the reason for all my “seems” and “perhaps.”
That is so because I argue finally that the stark realization of aloneness in the third verse, so far beyond the causal solitudes, comes to prevail over the previous sense of limited oneness, the two getting a little inside the other in their “interchange.” I argue that the final conclusion of the Re-Statement of Romance is but mere pale light, as wan as the night’s, that one self “can upon the other throw.” That’s the best, finally, that two people can do.
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