Disorientation

"The dominant opinion proclaims that no shared set of ideas, no common body of knowledge, and no baseline set of values or virtues marking an educated human being exist. To be sure, the overwhelming majority of all American colleges adopt a general distribution requirement. Usually this means that students must take a course or two of their choosing in the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, with perhaps a dollop of fine arts thrown in for good measure. And all students must choose a major. Although departments of mathematics, engineering, and the natural sciences maintain a sense of sequence and rigor, students in the social sciences and humanities typically are required to take a smattering of courses in their major, which usually involves a choice of introductory classes and a potpourri of more specialized classes, topped off perhaps with a thesis on a topic of the student’s choice. But this veneer of structure provides students only the most superficial guidance. Or rather, it sends students a loud and clear message: The experts themselves have no knowledge worth passing along concerning the core knowledge and defining qualities of an educated person. Take two political science majors at almost any elite college or university: It is quite possible for them to graduate without ever having read the same book or studied the same materials. One student may meet his general distribution requirements by taking classes in geophysics and physiological psychology, the sociology of the urban poor and introduction to economics, and the American novel and Japanese history while concentrating on international relations inside political science and writing a thesis on the dilemmas of transnational governance. Another political science major may fulfill the university distribution requirements by studying biology and astronomy, the sociology of the American West and abnormal psychology, the feminist novel and history of American film while concentrating in comparative politics and writing a the- sis on the challenge of integrating autonomous peoples in Canada and Australia. Both students will have learned much of interest but little in common. Yet the little in common they learn may be of lasting significance. For both will absorb the implicit teaching of the university curriculum, which is that there is nothing in particular that an educated person need know."

-Peter Berkowitz, "Liberal Education, Then and Now"

The Faith

"Critical Theory, Adorno once claimed, was like 'bottles thrown in the sea' for future readers whose identities could not be known. It is an interestingly ambiguous simile. Messages in bottles are usually cries for help, in this case from a mournful, marooned group of revolutionaries who had seen their hopes for political emancipation crumble to dust. Yet the message of Critical Theory was a response to that plight too. It also demonstrated, as if to someone scanning a desert island for traces of smoke, that against the odds there were some survivors. 'We only have a chance at all of withstanding the experience of recent decades,' Adorno wrote, 'if we do not forget for a moment the paradox that despite everything, we are still alive.'"

-Terry Eagleton, "Determinacy Kills," LRB 6/19/08

True. Then it's no surprise things have turned out the way they have.

That New Yorker Cover

"What's the point of electing a progressive president if you lose your soul in the process?"

I'm surprised and confused by the reaction to that New Yorker cover on Obama. I thought it was hilarious. His knowing look at the viewer as he gives his militant wife a terrorist fist-pound, having finally conquered the Oval Office on behalf of Osama bin Ladin. The flag burning in the fireplace.

But people on the left really seem to be pissed off by it. I don't really know what to make of that. Am I a sucker again? Have I fallen for another of these fake controversies periodically manufactured by the media to absorb wasted airspace in a slow news cycle? And who gives a shit what a bunch of commenters on alternet.org think? Why do I dilute my mind with this nonsense? Because, like the rest of these people, I want to be rescued from my desk job.

Anyway, I blame the scientists. They recently released a study purporting to show that repeating a claim to show its falsehood actually reinforced the audience's belief that the claim was true. That is, to try to negate a claim is to strengthen it. And if you want to weaken it, your only option is to propagate some other claim instead.

So I'm guessing all of these people, none of whom believe in rational discourse, applied that finding to the New Yorker cover. I can believe that the finding is accurate. It correctly describes the circus-like environment in which our "political discourse" takes place. I see this as another inevitable step along the path shaped by mass-media democracy. Humor was bound to die. Well, to hell with it all.

"Beyond these considerations, there's something ridiculous about the whole debate. The New Yorker is the most prestigious magazine of its type in the country, with a circulation of over a million and a disproportionate influence, but it's not a network or CNN or Fox. If the New Yorker starts trickling down to supermarket racks in Des Moines, Iowa, as the critics seem to fear, the GOP is toast. The only demographic it's going to swing is between 110th Street and Canal. What next -- riots in the left-wing blogosphere because the New York Review of Books runs a cartoon depicting McCain as Superman?"

Grantchester Meadows

...Crickets. It's the muffled sound of crickets. Or is it the buzzing of my cable box, mixed with the humming of air conditioners?

My computer is off. It has started crashing spontaneously, so I just use my laptop now. And my room is quieter than it has ever been. This is the first time I have needed to and can afford to keep my computer off, since I have the laptop. Silence is better. It's even better than I thought.

At my desk, I've got on my floor-length pharmacy lamp and a smaller gooseneck lamp, both stainless steel. I've got open Habermas's Between Facts and Norms. I'm actually reading it. I should read this book before I go to law school, before I even apply to law school, so I have a better sense of what I could be dealing with.

But before then I have to write an email. The email has been delayed by a year and 2 months. It's to a professor, explaining what I'm doing and why. I don't really know this, and even if I do then I don't quite know how to explain it, so I'll have to make things up. But I don't like making things up. No; I'm telling the truth. I'm creating the truth: I'm writing a myth that I will believe in, because I need to. This is me shaping myself to my destiny.

I'd rather let it all out - describe the full extent of my doubts, have her lead me out of them. I don't want to pretend to certainty; I want to reveal all the cracks in the story. This is why I cannot write stories.

All this doubt, backtracking and second-guessing is not the stuff of glorious, triumphant achievement. That's what embarrasses me the most.

Although I suppose this could be the trip to Hades.

[An hour and a half later]

It's done. I feel - dirty. Impure.

"Icy wind of night be gone, this is not your domain..."

I feel like I've betrayed the ideals. Well, it's all in her hands now.

Life is a mess, really. If only I could go back to that idyllic lifestyle, think it over, all over again.

"In the lazy water meadow
I lay me down.
All around me golden sun flakes covering the ground.
Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon
Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room."

What I really need is nothing. No job, nothing. I need just to sit for a few weeks with my books, figure things out. But I won't get that. Well, I'll try to orchestrate something like it.

Back to the more humble ideals. It would be nice to have a forest, a book, a lover.

Unfulfilled Promises of Militarism

I think this one speaks for itself.

Unfulfilled Promises of Scientism

Of course, I'm not sure that "scientism" promised us anything, but this is my blog, so I get to say things that don't even make sense.

Brooks and I have the same prejudice on this issue, so we're both likely to prematurely declare the war over.

I think in narratives. I desire in narratives. When I'm asked what I want out of life, all I can think of is that I want it to be a good story (and I'd rather have a comedy than a tragedy). I also want that life to involve telling stories.

So I want narrative to be vindicated; I want to see respect for it restored.

Two jobs I never want: president and op-ed columnist.

Traveling Among Them

"It [is not] to be supposed that the man of conventional wisdom is an object of pity. Apart from his socially useful role, he has come to good terms with life. He can think of himself with justice as socially elect, for society in fact accords him the applause which his ideas are so arranged to evoke. Secure in this applause, he is well armed against the annoyance of dissent. His bargain is to exchange a strong and even lofty position in the present for a weak one in the future. In the present, he is question with respect, if not at great length, by Congressional committees; he walks near the head of the academic processions; he appears on symposia; he is a respected figure at the Council on Foreign Relations; he is hailed at testimonial banquets. He risks being devastated by hostile events. But by then he may be dead. Only posterity is unkind to the man of conventional wisdom, and all posterity does is bury him in a blanket of neglect."

-John Kennet Galbraith, The Affluent Society

A Question

"You know it's amazing, the difference between now and when I had just graduated. There are certain kinds of thinking I used to be very serious about, that I just don't engage in anymore. Like reasoning about values. I mean, how can it matter to think about something if nobody else does?

"If there was a God, I can see how it would matter.

"If there was some objective structure to reality that could be grasped by reasoning, then I can see how it would matter.

"If there was some advantage to me to know that structure, I can see how it would matter.

"But none of those things turned out to be true."

I said these words to a friend in a recent conversation. On reflection they seem to capture the truth pretty well.

The value of individualism at that deep level of beliefs is a condition of the existence of one of those things: religion, metaphysics or some pragmatic secular benefit. It's nearly impossible to me to see how, on their own, purely pragmatic secular motives could lead to a situation where independent-mindedness has any value. Where it exists, it is just an accident of personality, or of the religio-metaphysical history of our culture which hasn't yet been completely stamped out.

On a slightly different note:

"After a century that, more than any other, has taught us the horror of existing unreason, the last remains of an essentialist trust in reason have been destroyed. Yet modernity, now aware of its contingencies, depends all the more on a procedural reason, that is, on a reason that puts itself on trial. The critique of reason is its own work: this double meaning, first displayed by Immanuel Kant, is due to the radically anti-Platonc insight that there is neither a higher nor a deeper reality to which we could appeal - we who find ourselves already situated in our linguistically structured forms of life."

-Habermas, Between Facts and Norms

Unequal America

"Research indicates that high inequality reverberates through societies on multiple levels, correlating with, if not causing, more crime, less happiness, poorer mental and physical health, less racial harmony, and less civic and political participation."

-Unequal America

Not surprising - it's not hard to imagine that a country with high levels of crime, unhappiness, racial strife, and civic apathy is less likely to extend a comfy social net under all of its citizens. To suggest that better social welfare programs would somehow remedy things, as this article does, is probably to mistake the direction of causation.

Take That

"Ironically, it could be that children of working-class immigrants to the U.S.—one of five children in 2006—are really in the most privileged position. With parents who speak little English and lack the know-how to manipulate the system on their behalf, they have no one to run interference for them, no one to clean up a mess in their wake. They are forced to learn to bring in their homework and handle life on their own.

"On an airline flight, I was seated next to a woman who is a vice president of a major investment group. She comes in regular contact with young people. She confided that she hires only children of first-generation immigrants. They are resourceful, hardworking, good at problem solving. The "fancy kids," she says, are not persevering, not willing to work hard, not clever at problem solving, not resourceful. The kids she hires whose parents didn't speak English well had to learn to figure out things for themselves; they couldn't rely on their parents. Their "disadvantage" wound up making them stronger."

-Pitfalls of Perfectionism

So, from the articles I read, it seems that investment banks mainly hire Wittgenstein-toting first-generation immigrants.