March 29, 2004

Readings and Rereadings #2

Holly Elizabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: The Practice of Power in Buganda

March 28, 2004

Category Error

Sasha Issenberg’s typically entertaining, elegant critique of David Brooks (I get to call it typical because I graded his confident, intelligent and meticulous writing quite often when he was a student here) is already getting some justified and mostly positive attention from webloggers.

One of the best features of Issenberg’s article is his coverage of Brooks’ reaction to the piece. Issenberg finds that most of Brooks’ characterizations of red and blue America, or anything else, are based on stereotypes rather than reportage, inference rather than data, cliches rather than research. Brooks protests that this is a pedantic objection, that Issenberg doesn’t get the joke, or is being too literal. (And tosses in to boot a condescending jab about whether this is how Issenberg wants to start his career.)

I think Brooks would have a point were he another kind of writer, or inclined to claim a different kind of authority for his work. If Bobos hadn’t been sold and framed as a work of popular sociology, but instead merely as witty, personal social observation in the style of Will Rogers or Roy Blount Jr—basically as a folklorist of the professional classes—then Brooks would be entirely justified in putting on his best Foghorn Leghorn voice and saying, “It’s a joke, son”.

But as Issenberg observes, that’s not the weight class Brooks tries to fight in. He wants to be the latest in a line of popular sociologists diagnosing the American condition. Issenberg perhaps overstresses the untarnished respectability of that lineage: there’s a few quacks, cranks and lightweights scattered in there. Is Brooks the latest such lightweight? I think Issenberg makes a good case that he is.

This is not to say that there isn’t some truth in what Brooks has to say, but the odd thing is that the truthfulness of his writing has to do less with how we now live than how we think about how we live (and more, how others live). It’s not that you can’t buy a $20 meal in Franklin County, but that the professional classes of Blue America think that you can’t. Red and Blue America works not just because it’s backed by some sociological data (not collected by Brooks) but because once named, we all recognized its stereotypes and their correspondence to mostly private, mostly interior kinds of social discourses in contemporary American life--a point Issenberg makes astutely in his article. When professional middle-class urbanites talk amongst themselves about gun control—which they mostly favor—they often lard up their conversations with references to gun racks on pickup trucks and other visions of the rural Other, and it works in the other direction too.

If Brooks can ask Issenberg if this is how he wants to start a career (seems a pretty good start to me) then I think Issenberg and others are justified in asking Brooks if this is how he wants to sustain one, by feeding us back our stereotypes and acting as if he has accomplished something simply because many of us nod in recognition. If Brooks would like to move beyond that to showing us something we already—and often incorrectly—think we know about ourselves and our fellow Americans, he’ll probably have to get serious about those trips to look for $20 dinners. Or he can hang up the sociologist’s hat and settle into the role of observer and witticist—but even there, we often most treasure and remember the observers who do something more than hold up a mirror to our confirmed prejudices.

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Middle-Earth Online: A Prediction

I was just joining in a group-whine in one discussion forum about the failure of massively-multiplayer persistent-world computer games, and we were commenting in particular on how freakishly bad the initial experience of gameplay is in most of them.

MMOGs, almost ALL of them, go out of their way, almost by design, to make the initial experience of a player as boring and horrible as possible.

Which doesn't fit the ur-narrative of the "level up" heroic fantasy, if you think about it. In the ur-narrative, the protagonist begins his or her heroic career usually in the middle of a contented or at least static life (Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker) but the hero's journey doesn't start with ten hours of killing household pests. It starts with a bang: with tension and high stakes, with ringwraiths and stormtroopers. If heroic fantasy was written to match a MMOG, nobody would ever get to Chapter Two.

So I thought about that a bit more. Since there is going to be a MMOG game based on Tolkien's Middle Earth, I wondered a bit what the novel Lord of the Rings would look like if it were based on a Middle-Earth themed MMOG. Here's what I came up with:

Continue reading "Middle-Earth Online: A Prediction"

March 23, 2004

You Don't Know What You've Got Till It's Gone

Invisible Adjunct is closing her blog and giving up her search for academic employment.

There are two things I'm sure of. The first thing is that this is pretty solid evidence that academia collectively misses the boat sometimes when it comes to hiring the best and the brightest, or uses profoundly self-wounding criteria to filter between the elect and the discarded. I think anyone who read Invisible Adjunct's site could see unambiguous evidence that this was a person who had a productive, committed and deeply insightful understanding of what academic life is and what it could be, the kind of understanding I take to be intrinsically connected to effective teaching. There was also ample evidence of a fine scholarly mind on display, combining passion for her subjects of expertise with precision of knowledge.

The second thing is the collective value of a good weblog. Invisible Adjunct's site is what made me excited about doing this for myself, and connected me to people who shared a moderate, proportionate, and reasonable critical perspective on academia--something that is hard to find anywhere, in the world of weblogs or anywhere else. I don't think there is anything else that even comes close to serving that function, and it is clear that it was possible not just because of the domain name or the topics, but because of the rich table of information and useful provocation that the host so regularly set and the tone of moderated principle she struck day after day.

March 23, 2004

Waiting for Menchu

Not for the first time, a reported campus hate crime has turned out to be a hoax, this time at Claremont. A part-time instructor reported that her car had been vandalized and hate slogans scrawled on it, sparking campus-wide efforts to confront racism at Claremont. It now appears likely that the instructor did it herself.

Ah-hah!, say many critics of academic life and campus identity politics. This just proves that hate crimes on campus are exaggerated and the culture of victimization has run rampant. Nothing to see here, move along, say those who remain deeply concerned about questions of racism and discrimination within higher education.

This exchange reminds me in many ways of the debate over the fabrications of Rigoberta Menchu. For many of the combatants, that affair became a battle first and only briefly about Menchu herself and Guatemala, and more potently about the ulterior motives of her defenders or her critics. For the critics, it was evidence of the conscious, premeditated and instrumental lies of the academic left; for the defenders, it was evidence of the lurking malevolence of a conspiratorial right and the need to maintain solidarity in the face of this threat.

There were more than a few people who also threaded the needle in between in some manner, most prominently David Stoll, who revealed Menchu’s prevarications. What struck me most powerfully was that Menchu’s real story, had it been written in her autobiography, would still have been interesting and valid and important and reasonable testimony to the struggles of Guatemalans under military rule. The question for me was, “Why did she, with assistance from interlocutors, refashion herself into the most abject and maximally oppressed subject that she could?” The answer to that question, the fault of that untruth, lies not so much in Menchu but in her intended audience.

Here I think the academic left, that portion of it most invested in identity politics (which is not the whole or necessarily even the majority of the academic left), takes it on the chin. Menchu is what some of them most wanted, a speaking subaltern.

You build a syllabus and go looking: is there any text, any material, that will let you say, “This is what illiterate peasant women in this place think. This is what ordinary migrant laborers in 1940s South Africa thought. This is what serfs in medieval Central Europe thought. This is what slaves in classical Greece thought”. You know those people existed and presume they had thoughts, feelings, sentiments. You want those thoughts written in teachable, usable, knowable form.

You want what people in my field call “the African voice”. If you don’t have it in the syllabus, in your talk, in your paper, in your book, somebody’s going to get up in the audience and say, “Where is the authentic African voice?” and mutter dire imprecations when you say, “I don’t have it. I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist”. You may quote or mention or study an African, or many, but if they’re middle-class, or “Westernized”, or literate, or working for the colonial state, somebody’s going to tell you that’s not enough. The light of old anthropological quests for the pure untouched native is going to shine through the tissue paper of more contemporary theory. You may move into more troubled waters if you say, as you ought, “I don’t need it and there isn’t any such thing. There’s just Africans and Europeans and anybody else: everything that anyone has ever written or had written down about them is grist for my mill. A thousand voices, no Voice”.

Some people wanted Rigoberta Menchu. They wanted La Maxima Autentica, the most subalterny subaltern ever. They bought her book, taught her book, willed her into being. She fit. I don’t blame Menchu for giving an audience its desire, and I don’t really blame the audience for that desire either. It’s not the highly conscious, totally instrumental, connivingly ideological scheme that some on the right made it out to be. It’s a needy hypothesis gone deep into the intellectual preconscious, a torment over knowledge unknowable. Somewhere there probably is a peasant woman who lived Menchu’s fictional life, more or less. We don’t have her book, her words, and probably if we did or could, they’d be more morally complex, more empirically ambivalent, more reflecting the lived contours of an actuality (suffering included) than the searingly unambiguous j’accuse that some visions of the world require.

This is all similar to when someone fabricates a hate crime on a campus, or exaggerates the modestly offensive stupidity of a drunken student into the raving malevolence of Bull Connor. There is an overdetermination here, an always-already knowledge, a neediness. Of course some people are going to fabricate such crimes, following the logic of a moral panic, a deep prior narrative, a chronicle of a deed foretold. Everyone “knows” such crimes exist—and of course (this is important) they do. But they are presumed to exist more than they exist, they are needed to exist more than they exist, because our received narratives of racial and sexual injustice tell us that institutional and cultural racism is the iceberg below the sea, an iceberg signaled by the visible tip of extraordinary hate crimes. Crime has an intentionality that is tangible, a concretization: from it we infer the concrete intentionality of what is hidden from view.

So campuses mobilize at every blackface, at every act of minor vandalism, at every hostile word or mysterious epithet. The sign is given!

But no one knows how to deal with subtle, pervasive forms of discrimination, and that’s partly because the discourses we have available to us about fighting discrimination hold that it is equally bad regardless of its form or nature, that the harm suffered by being misrepresented, slighted, overlooked, denigrated, condescended to is one part of a seamless and unitary phenomenon that includes being lynched and put in the back of the bus. And they are connected. They are part of a connected history, but they are not the same. History contains continuity and rupture both.

The gleeful critics of campus politics roll their eyes at this equivalence and take it as evidence of the triviality of the academic left. I agree with conservative critics that it’s a mistake to stress the continuities between the brutalities of Jim Crow and the subtleties of unconscious stereotype and subtle exclusion in present practice, but this is not to say that the latter is non-harmful, or just something to shrug off. One thing I learned by being a white man living in a black country is that it is an incredible psychic drain day after day to know that you are marked as a stranger, as socially different, by mere fact of your physiognomy. It exacts a real toll on you, and every subtle thing that people do to remind you of it, without any malice, digs the psychic claws deeper and deeper.

This innocent wounding, this cumulative stigma, is the core of the problem. Many look for, expect or anticipate hate crimes on campus as the visible signs of a pervasive malevolence, an illegitimate system of holding power, as an indication of a willfulness and agency that is the illegitimate and contestable cause of the sense of alienation and unease that some students, some faculty, some people have within white-majority campuses. Those crimes come less often than predicted, and when they come, they mostly don’t seem to be the acts of Simon Legree’s spiritual descendents, deliberate acts rich in the intentionality of power, but accidents and oversights, misspeech and crudity. Some see in these incidents the secret of racial conspiracy revealed, rather like Eddie Murphy’s brilliant sketch on Saturday Night Live where disguised as a white man, his character finds that white people give each other free money and privilege once racial minorities are out of sight. They overdeterminedly read a synecdoche, a single moment that contains a hidden whole. And when the right number and type of crimes do not come, some make them come, certain that even if the incident is false, the deeper truth is not.

Rigoberta Menchu’s real story is still interesting and powerful: a woman with some education, some status, some resources, some agency, in confrontation with a state and a social order, witness to terror and suffering. Its ambiguities are what could teach us, not its stridency. If we want to confront racial alienation on campuses, we will equally have to embrace its ambiguities, its subtleties, and recognize that it cannot be easily marched against, confronted, protested, forbidden by statute or code, expelled. It is in us, it is us, and the world has changed in the time we have all come into being and found ourselves where we do. It is not dogs and firehoses now, but small words and the pain of a thousand pinpricks. Until that is fully understood, there will be occasions where stressed, needy people tired of waiting for Godot try to summon into being the spirit whose ubiquity they have too busily prophesized.

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March 23, 2004

Via Pandagon, evidence that whatever was funny or smart about Dennis Miller has evaporated into dust and blown away. And I regret it, because I do think he was both funny and smart once upon a time. This judgement has nothing to do with ideology. I am perfectly prepared to credit and like some of the transformations in his own politics he's talked about in the media, presuming they're for real and not just somebody trying to make a career move; some of what he talks about resonates with me. But this is as shameful a meltdown as anything Dan Rather or anyone else has ever had on live media. Miller likes to talk as if he's got cojones: well, anybody with real balls would get up the night after pulling this kind of stuff and apologize unreservedly to his rapidly shrinking audience and to his guest.

Been playing the full verson of Unreal Tournament 2004 the last few nights for about an hour or so each night (more than that and I feel like my eyeballs are bleeding). It's really good, at least the Onslaught mini-game, which is clearly influenced by Halo. What's nice is that though I haven't played an FPS for two years or so, I'm actually not a complete noob at it--I'm doing pretty well. It seems to me that multiplayer games like this only have a short "golden age", though, before cheats and hacks become widespread and cheeseball tactics take hold. Onslaught is pretty well designed to prevent some of the cheesiest tactics, like tank rushes, but I can already see a few stunts that could spoil the fun if lots of people start to pull them.

Speaking of Unreal Tournament, the Penny Arcade guys have come up with one of the funniest and most spot-on summaries of the online world in general with this cartoon.

March 22, 2004

Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

When I hand back analytic essays, I try to leave room to do a collective post-mortem and talk about common problems or challenges that appeared in a number of essays. I think it helps a lot to know that the comment you got is a comment that other people got, and also to know how some people dealt more successfully with the same issue. All anonymous, of course, and following my Paula-like nature, nothing especially brutal in terms of the actual grades dispensed.

I usually base my comments on some scrawled meta-notes I keep as I work through each batch of essays. Sometimes there are unique problems that arise in relation to a particular essay question, which is sometimes a consequence of my having given enough rope for certain students to hang themselves in the phrasing of the question. Often there are problems I’ve seen before and commented upon.

Read the Rest of "Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay"

March 16, 2004

Readings and Rereadings #1

I've been meaning to use this blog to compel myself to tackle the backlog of 50 or so books of various kinds that are sitting on my "to be read" shelves. So here I go. What I plan to do in this part of the blog is put short or long reactions to some or all of a book--not to do formal "book reviews". Some of these may amount to no more thana paragraph. If I can stick to it, I hope to tackle 2-3 books a week this way most weeks.

So here goes with number one: Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival.

March 16, 2004

Anybody else like Tripping the Rift? on the Sci-Fi channel? It's sort of like "Quark" meets "South Park". Obscene, a bit stupid at times, tries too hard, but still funny.

I feel a fragging coming on: the demo for Unreal Tournament 2004 is kind of fun, especially the "Onslaught" game. Been a while since I've done this kind of thing: I may actually get the full edition.

This is a mirror of a really fascinating archive of photos from the region around Chernobyl.

March 15, 2004

Terrorist Tipping Points

Following up more prosaically on my thoughts about the “hard men”, the atrocity of March 11th makes me think again about what moves below the surface in the conflict with terrorism.

Somebody put those bombs on those trains in Spain, and yet that same somebody doesn’t wish to stand forward and be clearly identified, or tie these acts to some concrete goal or demand. So someone someplace has a model of causality in their head, that to do this thing without any clear public explanation will still somehow produce a result they deem desirable. But what? A general climate of fear? An unbalanced response by governments? A sick morale-booster for terrorists embattled elsewhere? A victory for the Spanish opposition? Or nothing more than a nihilistic desire to act somehow, with no real conceptual belief about what action will accomplish? Particularly if it turns out to be ETA that was responsible for March 11th (something that is appearing increasingly unlikely) that last is about the only plausible interpretation.

What March 11th really demonstrated, however, is that any time a small group of people decides to do something like this in the United States or Western Europe, they probably can. Given the degree to which Americans have portrayed al-Qaeda as boundlessly blood-thirsty and completely unprincipled, the question of the day is thus not “What will they do next?” but “Why haven’t they done more?” The answers, I think, are uncomfortable.

First, the strength of US reaction to 9/11, particularly in Afghanistan, when we were still focused on al-Qaeda and international terrorism rather than the Administration’s unhealthy obsession with Saddam Hussein, communicated something very valuable and important, that major terrorist attacks would have major consequences. Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants may have reckoned that 9/11 would result in the lobbing of a few more cruise missiles at deserted camps and innocuous factories in Sudan. Having seen that this was incorrect, having suffered severe damage to their movement's fortunes, they and others may hesitate to act again against civilians within the domestic borders of the United States for fear of even graver consequences. On the other hand, this is where March 11th is a sobering reminder—because it may demonstrate that a terrorist movement which has nothing left to lose has no more fear of consequences. The worst atrocities might come paradoxically when a terrorist organization is closest to being defeated.

Second, for all of my anger at aspects of the Bush Administration’s homeland security initiatives, I still have to concede that many of the precautions taken and the investigative work completed have made it more difficult for existing terrorist cells in the United States to act. It is easy to be cynical about all the orange alerts, not the least because the Administration has been so willing to use security concerns to bolster its own narrow partisan fortunes (not something a genuine War President ought to do) but even Administration critics have to concede the very real possibility that the alerts and accompanying measures have prevented one or more attacks.

But that still leaves us with one additional consideration, which is the possibility that existing terrorist cells capable of acting have chosen not to act. This is what is so difficult to calculate. Everyone is looking at the political results in Spain and asking, “Is that what the terrorists wanted? Will that reward them?” Precisely because we have to treat terrorists as people with their own agency, making their own moral and political choices, we have to consider the possibility that they might refrain from attacking for any number of reasons, even including, impossible as it seems, their own contradictory and hellishly incoherent form of moral scruples.

This is a critical issue. Even in the best case scenario, we have to assume that there are still people at large in the United States and Western Europe who could stage terrorist attacks. Anybody who devotes even a small amount of time to thinking of plausible targets knows that not only is there a huge surplus of such targets, there must always be so in democratic societies. The train attacks in Spain could easily have happened on Amtrak: in the past ten months, I’ve sat on Amtrak trains where people in my car have left a backpack on a seat and gone to the bathroom or club car, or so I’ve assumed. If they were leaving a bomb instead, how could any of us tell? Trains only scratch the surface: a hundred ghastly scenarios spring to mind. Without any effort, I can think of ten things that a handful of suicide bombers could do in the US or Western Europe that would have devastating psychological and possibly even economic consequences at the national and international level.

If there are terrorist cells in the US and Western Europe capable of acting, and they have not acted, we can perhaps console ourselves that Afghanistan taught them to fear the consequences. We can also imagine perhaps that they are intimidated by security precautions, unimaginative in their choice of targets, or incompetent in their logistics. Far more, this all begs the question: what do they want, how do they imagine they will get it, and how does that dictate their actions? For all that it is soothingly simple to imagine them to be mindless killers who would commit any atrocity, we nevertheless face the complicated fact that they likely could have already committed atrocities beyond those already inflicted. What internal calculus tips a small group of men over to the commission of horror? There is no invasion force that can keep that tripwire permanently still: there is nothing to invade. The worst dilemma, however, is that we do not know and perhaps cannot know what the terms of that calculus are, whether it moves to action because of rigidity and repression or in the absence of it, whether it seeks anything concrete in terms of results or reactions. If it only seeks pure destruction and the maximization of pain, then I don't really understand why there have not been more attacks already. There must be more to it than that.

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March 10, 2004

Triumph of the Will, or in the name of my father

Because one of the major themes of the book I’m writing now is the nature of human agency in historical processes, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether some individuals are able to act in the world through drawing on unpredictable determination or mysterious inner strength, through a ferocious desire to make things happen. Through will.

Will gives me a thrill. If there’s anything in President Bush’s defense of his post-9/11 strategy that resonates in me, it is the invocation of will, of a steely determination to stay the course.

I know I’m weak and frightened. I’ve always been. When I am traveling or working in southern Africa, I preemptively flinch at even the slightest hint of tension. In my first stay in Zimbabwe in 1990, when a policeman politely but quite earnestly commented that he would have to shoot me if I didn’t stop walking while the president’s motorcade went past and then meaningfully swiveled his gun towards me, I waited frozen and then returned to my apartment instead of proceeding onto the archives. I crawled inside like a rabbit frightened by predators, emerging only with the next day.

I don’t mean to overstate. I have willingly gotten into strange and sometimes threatening situations every time I have spent time in Africa. Not with fearless bravado, rather with a kind of sweet and stupid cheerfulness, a determination not to listen to the warning bells going off in the back of my head. I listen to my anthropologist friends who programmatically seek out opportunities to attend unnerving religious rituals and tense, near-riotous political situations and I wonder wistfully why I’m so scared and they’re so brave.

I know that if it came to it, I’d piss my pants in a minute. Big Brother wouldn’t need a cage full of rats on my face in Room 101 to get me to betray my deepest commitments.

I found that out when I traveled with my father in South Africa. When we were confronted with a rather trivial example of a shakedown by a corrupt official in a game park, I was ready to unload my rands on the man in a country minute, just because he had a knife and a walkie-talkie (and, I imagined, a bunch of tsotsi pals waiting down the trail to ambush us). But Dad just stared him down, and the guy caved.

Yet here I am willing, perpetually willing, to talk about what we ought to do in a world where people want to kill us, want to kill me. What good am I?

There’s more than one flavor of will in the world, though, and all of them can make things happen that would not otherwise happen.

There’s a pure will to violence and survival that’s a highly masculized combination of sadomasochism and swagger. We mostly see it our fictions, in Rocky films or in the umpteen thousandth time that Wolverine staggers through a comic book stoically bearing the pain of a hundred knife thrusts to his abdomen, but it really exists. “The trick is not minding that it hurts”. Mostly in the real world this amounts to nothing: lacking mutant powers or cinematic magic, the man of a thousand wounds usually staggers towards death, perhaps performing some small miracle of salvation or destruction on the way. Sometimes it is more, a person who shrugs off pain and fear to stagger through to some better day.

This kind of will is related to but not identical to the soldier’s will, the will to fight when necessary or ordered, the will to act remorselessly if need be, to defend what is yours and take what you must. My father had some of that. When a crazy man with a gun killed people at another branch of his law firm, Dad wished he’d been there, believing that he could have stayed calm under fire and stopped the man before anyone died. Dad used to tell me how the Marines taught him to kill or disable someone by striking their windpipe hard. I don’t think any of this was bravado, or something he was proud of. They were quiet facts, stated calmly, based on a belief that if it came to it, he could do what was needed without pause or regret. I believed him.

The soldier’s will is not the will of the hard man. The hard man is the man who haunts our nightmares. The hard man is the man who disproves the easy, lazy adage that violence never solves anything or causes anything meaningful to happen. The hard man can drive history like a whipmaster drives a horse, frothing, eyes-rolling, galloping heedlessly ahead. The hard man dreams not of the world he desires: his will is fire, and burns down thoughts of better days. The hard man only knows what he does not want and cannot accept, and his determination to strike out against the object of his fury is mighty. The hard man bombs pubs and buildings and planes; he cuts ears off defeated rivals, hands off innocent children, heads off journalists.

When we think of will, the hard man is the one we both fear and yet sometimes secretly desire. He laughs contemptuously at the doubts that afflict us, sure that he floats above us like an iron balloon, unyielding and untouched. We forget too easily why fascism authentically, legitimately attracted many before 1939: not just the purity of its conception of nation, not just its focus on essence, but also the hardness and clarity of its commitment to transformation, its baptismal yearnings.

The hard man's close cousin is the fierce dreamer, the obdurate idealist, the person who looks at today and can only see the ways in which it is not some ideal tomorrow. I may be too quick to accuse some of utopianism--that will require some reflection--but I do not think I am wrong to fear the utopian's will and regard with suspicion anything redolent of it.

None of these are the will to do the right thing even if all the world says otherwise. To do the right thing, but not quickly, not eagerly, not with braying certainty. The will to do the right thing comes from men and women bound by honor, directed by wisdom, burdened by a mournful understanding of their duty. Atticus Finch does not rush ahead, beating his chest and howling a war cry. Will Kane seeks allies and the support of his community, even when he wearily understands that he is all alone. There is no eagerness in him. The lonesome righteous can make horrible mistakes, auto-imprisoning himself in obligations, like Captain Vere in Billy Budd. He or she can end up staring with melancholy regret at his dirty hands. This is the kind of will I most admire, the kind of courage which stealthily rises to lift the whole world on its shoulders and reluctantly hurl it into a new orbit. Against the hard man, we raise the quiet man as his opposite.

Dad may have had the resolve of a soldier, but he also had this kind of determination as well. He would have stayed the course even if he was the last person left to hold the rudder. There was a rawness to his integrity: it was like sandpaper, flaying the sensitive nerve-endings of some around him. It was uncompromising both when it ought to have been and sometimes perhaps when it would have been better to bend rather than break. Nor was he tested as sorely as some have been: he never had to risk his own career, his livelihood, his future the way that some whistleblowers have. I think he would have, though, if it had ever come to it.

This is the will I long for now, and it’s not what we’re getting. Oh, they’d like to have us think so, but the lonesome righteous doesn’t scorn allies, doesn’t rush to the last stand at the OK Corral. He does his best to avoid the fatal breach in the social order. He doesn’t talk tough and swagger.

I’d trust in Atticus Finch, not Napoleon. I’d trust in Omar Bradley, not George Patton. I won’t trust the hard men or the men who playact at being hard men, those who theatrically declare they will be stopped by nothing. I won’t listen to the men who shake their heads sadly at our inability to travel all the way to atrocity, who tell us we must act by any means necessary. But neither will I trust those who lack the will to justice, the will to fight if they must, the will to defend, those who snidely declare in advance that they will blow with the least wind and worry more about their own personal purity than the larger obligations of our times. I may be weak and frightened, but I’m not having any of that. I’ll trust in the people who both love and defend; I’ll trust in the will of the fierce and quiet. I’ll listen for the distant echoes of my father’s footsteps.

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Battle of the Moms

Lots of recent online (and, I suspect, offline) discussion about Caitlin Flanagan’s article in the Atlantic Monthly that criticizes working women and praises stay-at-home mothers.

At least some of the bad juju circulating in those discussions (and Flanagan’s piece) concerns settling old scores within feminism. There are many who have never forgiven the feminists of the 1970s for the evident disdain they demonstrated towards middle-class women who remained in the home. With good reason: women who felt liberated from domesticity tended to falsely assume that all women should want the same. Just as a matter of politics, that mistake was costly, alienating many women who might have been sympathetic to a more loosely conceptualized feminism. The women’s movement has never really recovered from that blunder, losing the sympathy both of middle-class women who have chosen domesticity and working-class women for whom the workplace is not liberation but brutal necessity.

Taking a step back, it’s interesting that the conversation continues to pit two sets of women against each other, each vying for the title of “best mother”, each notably defensive about their own choices and lives while projecting the charge of defensiveness onto their opponents.

It’s a struggle that’s hard to imagine between men about fatherhood, for a lot of reasons. For one, there’s a wider plurality of archetypes of the good father out there: men can get kudos for being domestic and attentive or being strong and above the fray, for being breadwinners or slackers. It’s also clear that men don’t fight about fatherhood because they don’t feel defined by it: the battle over manhood is sited somewhere else. Women, on the other hand, can’t escape motherhood even when they’re not mothers: they are held accountable to it by society, and hold each other to it as well.

There are brush fires that burn in the struggle over parenting—say, for example, the question of whether or not to ferberize kids. (We tried it, and it didn’t really work for us, both in terms of the emotional impact it had on us and our daughter, and in terms of results.) Then there’s the wildfire of staying at home versus day care versus nannies. In either case, the small or the large, everyone involved would gain a lot of perspective by reading Ann Hulbert’s Raising America, a history of advice aimed at American parents by various experts. One thing I take away from Hulbert’s book is a confidence that kids are resilient, that the parental choices we treat as momentous have far less import that we might guess. Another thing I take away is a wisdom about how remarkably stable the long-term terms of contestation over parenting (permissive vs. strict, involved vs. distant) has been within the American middle-class, and how much those contests are about middle-class manners and self-presentation rather than a disinterested evaluation of the development of children.

One thing in Flanagan’s piece and the reaction to it where I feel a bit distant from almost everyone in the debate has to do with Flanagan’s charge that middle-class feminists are exploiting and thus betraying other women by using them as domestics and nannies. In a way, it’s a silly point, because it’s awfully hard to contain to domesticity. What’s the difference between a once-a-month cleaning service and all the other kinds of service jobs that the middle-class makes use of? If the charge of exploitation attaches generically to domestic work (not to specific low-wage conditions of employment), then it attaches to all service-industry labor and Flanagan’s critique is suddenly a lot less about child-raising and much more a back-door socialism.

But I feel differently about it also because I’ve spent a substantial amount of time living in southern Africa. During my first fieldwork in Zimbabwe, I was intensely phobic about domestic service, and felt as Flanagan does, that it was exploitation. I’d read Maids and Madams, I knew that domestic workers in southern Africa were exploited. So I was determined to wash all my own clothes and clean my own apartment (there were no laundromats in Harare, even in the good old days of the late 1980s and early 1990s).

The family who lived in the small home behind my apartment building had a different opinion about domestic service, since they provided it for everyone else in the building. From their perspective, I was a selfish prick. I could pay to have my clothes cleaned, but here I was occupying a unit in the building and refusing to employ them. They weren’t at all happy about it, and once I became aware of that, I really didn’t know what to do. I went on washing my underwear in the bathtub but grew more and more puzzled about my reluctance to do what virtually everyone around me regarded as the right thing, including local leftists I knew whose commitment to fighting racial segregation and colonialism had been deep and abiding for the entirety of their lives.

I began to realize that it really wasn’t about exploitation for me—that was just a superficial thing, a cheap ideology, a slogan, and not at all consistent with my casual willingness to take advantage of other people’s affordable labor in other spheres of my life. What it boiled down to was that I was intensely uncomfortable about having strangers inside my domestic space. Not racially phobic, but generically, universally so. I didn’t want any people seeing my dirty clothes, my books, my things, my way of life, if they weren’t very close friends or family. I still feel that way, actually. For a very long time, I blocked my wife from hiring a once-a-month comprehensive cleaning service for this same reason, even though we were finding it increasingly impossible to handle that kind of cleaning with a toddler around. I just didn’t want them seeing the normal material conditions of my life. (I still don’t allow them in my home office). I was eventually convinced--and view that service like any other comfort in my life provided by human labor, made possible because I earn more than the people whose labor I purchase. I do it because I can. If I don't like it, that's for different reasons entirely.

I wonder a little if the stay-at-home moms argument doesn’t come from some of the same attempts to assert privacy, to cocoon some of our lives away from the world, to close the circle of family and shield ourselves from the world. I have some of that same attitude myself—but I’d like to avoid draping myself in laurel leaves and anointing myself Ace Exploitation-Fighter for having what is ultimately less a principle and more a phobia.

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February 24, 2004

Purge the PIRGs

The discussion of Ralph Nader online has produced an interesting eddy in its wake, namely an equally passionate attack on Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs), which Nader played a role in founding.

I don’t actually map my feelings about PIRGs onto Nader, though their mutual connection doesn’t help me get warm and fuzzy about either of them. In many ways, I object more fundamentally to PIRGs. They’re a scam.

Like Jane Galt, I first reached that conclusion as a canvasser for a PIRG one summer in the early 1980s. I only lasted about three weeks before the toxic combination of viciously exploitative labor practices and a recognition of the organization’s total lack of concern for political commitment completely alienated me. If you pounded the pavement all evening but came in just shy of quota, you didn’t get paid at all for your work. The people running the canvassing operation had zero interest in the issues or the ideas: they were in manner or functioning little different than the boss of a sweatshop factory floor. Keep the money rolling in and send it along to the state organization: that was the sole priority. The spiel we were told to memorize was a frankly deceptive presentation of the organization and its activities. PIRGs have a long habit of parasitically attaching themselves to legislation and claiming credit for it—and only if they deem it something fuzzy and blandly liberal enough that it is likely to raise more money or garner good publicity. There’s no coherent agenda beyond that, and never has been.

My antipathy deepened when a PIRG came rolling into town at Wesleyan University, when I was an undergraduate, seeking an automatic fee attached to the tuition bill. The whole presentation was slimy both in content and style. First, they dangled an internship in front of student officers, and then they shifted abruptly to left-baiting and bullying when anyone (a class of people that most definitely included me at that point) asked why on earth a PIRG should get an automated chunk of money every year when no other student group had the privilege—a chunk of money which would be completely non-transparently spent, moreover. As a magnaminous gesture, they finally offered a system where you could come and get a refund of your PIRG money if you were willing to show up at a basement office during a one-day window once every academic year and ask for it. This is all standard for PIRGs then and now: they push for mandatory fees, and accept as a fall-back an opt-out.

It’s not just that PIRGs are sleazy in their fund-raising and opportunism. Reading Jane Galt’s essay, I wonder a bit at whether they haven’t played a subtle but important role over two decades in disillusioning young liberals and leftists and driving them rightward as a result.

Based on my own experience and the experience of people close to me, I’d say that liberal nonprofits in general are usually not what they seem on the outside, or at least, rarely apply their outward convictions to internal matters. They often have unfair, exploitative or even discriminatory labor practices. They’re often intensely hierarchical, non-democratic and non-transparent in their internal organization. But PIRGs are in a class of their own. At least with something like the ACLU or Amnesty International, whatever their internal cultures are like, they stand for something consistent politically and socially. PIRGs don’t even have that.

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February 23, 2004

The Old Man and the Flame

The inner flamer. It’s such a temptation to let it loose. I feel like Black Bolt of the Inhumans: if I but speak, half the city could be destroyed.

In my salad days, I could crack off a mighty flame. Ah! In the Usenet days of alt.society.generation-x, when the resident objectivist could drive me to the dark side of the Force with a single post. Or rec.arts.startrek.current, when all it took to set me off was the resident feminist “Voyager” fan praising Captain Janeway and telling all the critics that they were misogynists for hating the show. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.

These days, there’s only one moment where I feel completely and gloriously justified in letting Mr. Hyde off his leash, and that’s in conversations dealing with Ralph Nader and his defenders. Not at Nader himself, really, because it’s obvious what his problem is. It’s the people who still defend him and proudly announce they voted for him in 2000 and they’ll do it again who drive me out of my tree. They’re a miniscule number of people overall, and not really that influential—but I suppose they could be just influential enough, which is very bad. As I said over at Chun the Unavoidable’s, the incoherent mish-mash of justifications for voting Nader, as well as the complete shamelessness of those offering them, just brings out the worst in me.

I sometimes wonder why I can’t flame more often, or when exactly it was that I developed a helpless compulsion to fairness. Maybe there’s something to this notion that the older you get, if you get more and more comfortable and attached to responsibilities, the higher the cost of acting up, the more you become a kept creature of the system. Maybe I’ve just become The Man.

Maybe. I’d like to think it’s something more, that it is about taking the ethical responsibilities of my profession seriously—something that I feel the usual Punch-and-Judy responses of both right and left inside and outside of academia don’t do, no matter how strenuously they claim to. More pressingly, it’s about efficacy, about how you make your convictions meaningful and powerful in the world.

The flamer really has only a few roads to efficacy and influence. There's one in which he or she forces everyone to accept his or her view through command over institutional power (in which case the flame itself is no more than a calling card for other kinds of compulsion). There's another in which achieving results in the world doesn’t matter, in which only the unsullied narcissistic purity of expression is the issue. I agree that the latter view sometimes produces beautiful prose—a brilliantly written flame, curse or diatribe is a pleasure to read. So thank god for the occasional narcissist, but only if they also happen to be brilliantly bilious stylists.

I suppose sometimes the flamer might hope to change the behavior or views of others through shame, and that’s the one time I still think it’s worth it to let the beast out (as I do against Nader voters): when only outrage and defiance has a hope of breaking through a wall of denial and stupidity. That's my only defense in that case: Nader voters appear so unpersuadable by any other means--in fact to be proud of their near-total invulnerability to any persuasion--that there's nothing left besides flinging feces at them. There are others on the American political landscape similarly cursed with mule-headedness, but I don't flame them because either I don't understand or know them well enough to be sure of their unpersuadability (whereas I feel like I understand Nader voters very well) or because, frankly, they're powerful enough numerically or culturally that it's important to keep trying to push the boulder up the hill no matter how Sisyphean the task.

Finally, the flamer can be a blackmailer who demands he or she be given what he or she wants or or he or she will lay waste to any possibility of a reasonable exchange between equals. That’s the Ann Coulter approach to the public sphere: I am become Flamer, Destroyer of Worlds.

Being addicted to mediation and fairness, to exploration of complexity, is actually pretty exhausting. You get a lot of shit from everyone in all directions, and very little thanks for it. Some days I’d rather be an anarchic free spirit, rather go back to dancing in private glee after dropping the bomb on the weakest link, the most suspect argument, the most clueless fool, rather go back to being the hairy eyebrowed bombthrower hurling discord from the back of the room. This other guy who usually comes out to play here and elsewhere in my professional life, well, he’s not the guy I imagined I’d become. He’s dour and perpetually disappointed in the weaknesses of himself and even more of other people. In one virtual community I have participated in, a departing member who took the time to spew venom on his way out said that I was a person who wanted to be superior to other people and liked by them because of it. I remember that because there’s something to it. I suppose it’s actually confirmation of its accuracy that I don’t think it’s all that terrible a thing to be. I also admit that a commitment to reasonable persuasiveness and unvarnished if polite truth-telling can often be a quite satisfyingly contrarian, dissenting, provocative thing in its own right.

Still, flaming seems a more glorious, free thing to be and do. It would be liberating to stop bothering to instruct, cajole, plead, work with, mediate and persuade, to worry about nothing but one’s own blazing righteousness and care little for the consequences or the results. That’s rather like voting for Nader. Which reminds me of why I really stopped doing it, because I saw again and again that when even a few people flame, the whole discursive house burns down.

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On How to be a Tool

I just saw a call for a March 3rd rally against the Comcast-Disney merger led by PennPIRG, Media Tank, Prometheus Radio Project, the Communication Workers of America, and Jobs with Justice.

Joining this rally is about as good an example of being a tool as I can think of. Media monopolization is a real issue, but rushing to the barricades to defend Disney from Comcast is about the worst possible way I can think of to deal with the overall problem. Disney executives ought to come outside and give anyone at the rally $10.00 coupons to the Disney Store in thanks. The fact that PennPIRG is apparently the key organizer just reinforces my low opinion of the opportunistic and amateurish nature of PIRGs in general.

It’s actually hard to know who to sympathize with in the Comcast-Disney struggle. I’ve had a low opinion of Comcast’s services for a while. Their technical management of their high-speed Internet service after Excite@home went belly-up was horrible. The hysterially overwrought, manipulative drumbeat of attacks against satellite dishes on Comcast channels is a pretty good argument against media monopolization. Their current level of service in their “On Demand” offerings are beyond lame. It’s no wonder they want to acquire Disney to provision content, because the content that they generate themselves is usually one bare step above the kinds of public-access channels that have recently released mental patients who’ve gone off their meds hosting talk shows. If Comcast succeeds, expect a whole lot of problems of integration between the two operations: the learning curve will be by far the steepest on the Comcast side.

On the other hand, if Disney shareholders can’t see that Michael Eisner and his inner circle of sycophants is dragging the company down, they aren’t paying attention and deserve to lose value on their investment as a result. Any parent with young children can see it: the company has foolishly surrendered the long-term stability of the high ground in children’s media by relentlessly cannibalizing its own properties, spewing a tide of made-for-video junk that permanently degrades the value of their most lucrative properties. There are so many misfires coming out of Disney lately that it’s a wonder that there have been any successes like “Pirates of the Caribbean” at all. It used to be that you could see a real difference between the weak storytelling and cheaper animation of non-Disney kidvid, as in the work of Don Bluth. Now Disney has voluntarily sunk to the bottom in pursuit of a few quick bucks. Tack on to that Eisner’s evident inability to attract, recognize and maintain talent, almost certainly because of his own authoritarian management style, and you have a company that is heading for a serious crisis. If I owned a lot of stock in Disney, I’d sure want to give Eisner the boot, and if it took Comcast to do it, I might well cheer them on.

It probably isn’t going to be a story that ends happily ever after for anyone, least of all the consumers—but in a world where there’s a lot to protest (including media monopolization) being a puppet for Michael Eisner strikes me as a low priority.

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Quicksilver and Foucault

I am finally almost done with Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (just in time for the sequel!) Stephenson reminded me of why I find early modern Europe so interesting, but also of why the work of Michel Foucault was so appealing to me and to many other historians when we first encountered it.

It is easy to label postmodernism as a single agglomerated villain and attribute to it every bad thing in the past thirty years. It gets blamed (sometimes in one breath by the same person) for dragging intellectuals into total irrelevance and for accomplishing a devastatingly comprehensive subversion of Western civilization. In academic arguments, a generalized postmodernism often functions as an all-purpose boogeyman in declensionist narratives, the singular explanation for why the young turks aren’t as good as the old farts. (Though that may be shifting: the genuinely ardent postmodernists are themselves becoming the old farts, and will presumably shortly be blaming something else for falling standards.)

This general posture allows people to get away with some appalling know-nothingism at times. When reading E.O. Wilson’s Consilience, I was excited at first by his ambitions to achieve the “unification of knowledge”, to re-create the practice of the Enlightenment when science and philosophy, interpretation and empiricism, were joined together. Then I began to realize that Wilson meant “unification” roughly the same way that Hitler meant to unify the Sudetenland with Germany. Nowhere was this more evident in his treatment of Foucault. Wilson basically admits that he just read a bit of his work, haphazardly, and thought “Come on, get over it, things aren’t so bad”.

I say all this as someone who does often talk about an agglomerated postmodernism rather loosely, and who certainly views it quite critically. I reject almost all of the deeper ontological claims of most postmodernists and poststructuralists, and I find the epistemologies that many of them propose crippling, useless or pernicious. And yes, I think that a lot of them are bad writers, though let’s leave that perennial favorite alone for once. But I still recognize the ontological challenge that postmodernism, broadly defined, offers as a very serious, substantial and rigorous one. Nor do I just brush off the epistemological challenges that postmodernists have laid out: they’re real and they’re important. (Though yes, at some point, I think it’s perfectly fair to say, ‘Yeah, I get it, I get it’ and move on to other things. You’re not required to read and read and read.)

The thing I regret most about casual rejectionism of a loosely conceptualized postmodernism (or any body of theory) is that it seems to deny that it is possible to read a single work and extract some insight or inspiration from it that is not really what the author’s full theory or argument is meant to lead you to. It's rather like one of the professors who I encountered in graduate school who would circle words or terms he didn't like and ominously ask, "Do you want to be tarred with that brush?" It's a theory of citation as contagion.

Taken in totality, I think Foucault is doing his damnedest to avoid being pinned down to any particular vision of praxis or anything that might be summarized as a ‘theory’, in a way that can be terribly coy and frustrating. Inasmuch as he can be said to have an overall philosophy, I find it despairingly futilitarian and barren, and I accept very little of the overall vision. Taken instead as a body of inconsistent or contradictory suggestions, insights, and gestures, his work is fairly fertile for historians.

If nothing else, he opened up a whole range of new subjects for historical investigation from entirely new angles: institutions like prisons or medicine and their practices, forms of personhood and subjectivity, and sexuality. It’s interesting that the historical work which Foucault inspired often ended up documenting that he was wrong on the actual details and often even the overall arguments, but even then, you can clearly see how generative that his choices of subjects were.

What Foucault does most for me comes from his attempt to write genealogies instead of histories, his attempt to escape forcing the past as the necessary precursor to the present, to break the iron chain and let the past be itself. That’s what brings me back to Stephenson’s Quicksilver and early modern Europe in general.

The temptation is so powerful to understand early modern Europe as the root of what we are now, and everything within it as the embryonic present, all its organs already there, waiting to grow and be born. But what I find so dizzying and seductive about the period is also its intimate unfamiliarity, its comfortable strangeness. I don’t feel as epistemologically and morally burdened by alterity as I do when I’m dealing with precolonial African societies, where there’s so much groundwork seemingly required to gain the same sense of interior perspective, but on the other hand, I always feel that around every corner in early modern European societies the familiar makes itself strange right before my eyes. The genesis of the present but also the possibilities of other histories; the world we have inherited but also all its dopplegangers and ghosts.

That’s what I feel Foucault’s idea of genealogies helped me to explore and understand, and what I think Stephenson manages to deliver in Quicksilver. The thrill of natural philosophy unbinding the world, so much a part of the more whiggish history of science is there, but also its distance. The Royal Society are ur-geeks and proto-technophiles and yet, they’re also aliens. Jack Shaftoe is the libertarian dream, the free man cutting loose of the constricted world around him—but he’s also the passive, drifting inhabitant of a commercial and social landscape unlike anything we know today, to whom events happen, recapitulating the narrative structure of the picaresque. Reading Quicksilver is like wearing bifocals: you can switch in and out of being able to locate yourself within its episteme. I’m not entirely sure it’s a good modern novel, really, nor is it good history—but it is a good genealogy as well as genealogical simulation of the narrative roots of the novel form.

This isn’t a pleasure limited to representations of the early modern world: Jeff Vandermeer’s edited anthology of pseudo-Victorian/Edwardian medical prose, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases delivers some of the same satisfactions through simulation (rather like Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum does by simply showing you the medical artifacts and exhibitionary vision of the same era). But simulations or explorations of the Victorian usually feel much more like recursions of the present than trips to a fever-dream alternative universe. Quicksilver, like Foucault, travels farther and tries harder to give us a way of representing the early modern European world that doesn’t just make into a toddler version of our own times.

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And Now For Something Completely Different

Well, not quite--I see my colleague Prue Schran has joined the conversation about Swarthmore and speech. Actually, I quite agree with a lot of her observations--they're relevant to what I was writing about in "A Pox on Both Houses", as well as some older posts at Easily Distracted about the conservatives-in-academia question. But attitudes and formal speech policy are absolutely not the same thing, and if attitudes rather than policy are the issue, the lever that will move them really is subtle, sympathetic moral and intellectual suasion, or at least that's my feeling. Feeling restricted or ostracized by the pervasive attitudes or unspoken orthodoxies of colleagues is very different than being formally restrained by a quasi-legal code--though of course the existence of the former phenomenon is why it is hard to trust to any procedures outlined in formal policy.

There's also the more arcane issue of how to untangle policies on harassment and speech. I think FIRE is overly sanguine both about how easy it is to disaggregate them, either legally or conceptually. Also, O'Connor offers some extra tricky arguments on top of that about the alleged legal invulnerability of academic institutions to federal employment law (is that really true? Where's the Volokh Conspiracy when you need it?) and the legal freedom of colleges and universities to restrict speech if they want unless they otherwise claim that they're not restricting speech, in which case O'Connor sees them as open to legal claims of fraud. At that point my head spins a bit: if colleges have published speech codes or harassment policies which O'Connor and FIRE say clearly and unrestrainedly restrict freedom of speech, and O'Connor acknowledges that colleges and universities are legally free to do so, then by their reading, wouldn't a charge of fraud be legally untenable? Where's the fraud if you have a published speech code that restricts speech and you're legally free to do it? Unless, of course, the kind of thing I've been suggesting is true, that there is a reading of many college policies as also trying, authentically, to promise academic freedom, and that it is the authenticity of that intent which makes its contradiction by speech codes potentially fraudulent.

Maybe this is an indication that the only solid ground for challenging speech codes is a moral or ethical one--that we shouldn't have codes because they're wrong to have, because liberty is the bedrock value of academic life, and leave the legal issues aside. That's certainly one of FIRE and O'Connor's most salient consistent observations, that whatever their merits or problems on paper, faculty- or administration-authored speech codes are basically a case of amateurs meddling in the construction of bodies of pseudo-law, hoping to direct the power of a quasi-state entity (their institution) to regulate local behavior.

Anyway, on to more diverting things. A couple days ago, my toddler and I found a great new thing at Noggin's website, called ScribbleVision. Basically, you color in a bunch of things and then ScribbleVision animates your colorings in a series of scenes featuring the hand-puppet characters Oobi and Grampu. It's one of those things that will very rapidly have the adults taking the mouse away from the kids. I was especially proud of my scene of Sauron's Lidless Eye dawning over Oobi's house, with a demonic rooster crowing in the background. Let's say that my impression of Oobi and Grampu's animated actions and expressions changed somewhat against that backdrop.

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February 17, 2004

The Argument Clinic (Apologies to Monty Python)

There is a real difference between my reading and Erin O’Connor’s reading of Swarthmore’s policies on speech, one which may reflect some very deep differences in the ways we approach working with the interpretation of texts and much else as a whole.

There are also stylistic differences: I’m long-winded, obsessed with nuance and ambiguity, and uninterested in calling people to the barricades even when there is an evidently urgent need to get them there. O’Connor is trying to mobilize people, and to do so with as much immediacy and intensity as she can. On the whole, I think we agree about a lot of the problems facing academia, and in particular, about the dangers to speech rights in academia today. O’Connor’s way of framing these issues is certainly much more powerful in getting people to acknowledge and confront those dangers. But I still worry about collateral damage on the way. Sometimes, I think complexity really is important, not just as an aesthetic preference but as the heart and soul of an issue. Perhaps on speech rights, what is more important is the root principle of the matter, and assertions of complexity are an unhelpful distraction. I would rather build bridges and mediate between opposing sides, playing for small positional gains. O’Connor would rather burn bridges and achieve victory in our time. You make the call, dear reader. There are reasons to prefer either approach, and reasons to think that in either case, we are kids with hammers who think everything in the world looks like a nail.

O’Connor raises some real potential problems with Swarthmore’s policies, most of which we broadly share with all colleges, and indeed, all institutional entities with sexual harassment or anti-discrimination policies.

Here are three probing questions that I think are pretty cogent that I get out of O’Connor’s second post on this subject:

1) How do we resolve contradictions in policies where one part says one thing and another part says another thing? Doesn’t Swarthmore's sexual harassment cancel out or make actively irrelevant any statement anywhere else about protecting speech?
2) Isn't trusting in grievance procedures dangerous given that they tend to violate due process concerns? Is there any reason to think that Swarthmore's procedures are any more protective of due process than most colleges? Hasn’t that already been a slippery slope elsewhere? Isn't Burke concerned about that?
3) What about this little section on discriminatory harassment? Doesn't that cancel out the general harassment policy? Can we talk about how to read those two in relation to one another?

I have a straightforward answer to the first question, which is that as I read it and understand it, our policy on non-harassing speech takes precedence over everything else, that it is the largest and most expansive principle we assert on the issue of speech. Harassment (sexual, general, discriminatory) is only a situational, contextual exception from the general principle, and only becomes meaningful when it can be proven to exist according to a defined set of precise criteria. In this sense, harassment under Swarthmore’s policy functions rather like the defamation or incitement to violence functions in relation to the First Amendment. The First Amendment is the bedrock principle; defamation or incitement are special cases which restrict speech only in relation to a judicial finding, and only within narrowly constrained and defined bounds. They exert no prior restraint: you cannot in advance define particular acts of speech, particular words, particular phrases as defamation or incitement. It’s all about context. If you take Swarthmore’s policies on harassment to completely cancel out or obviate the existence of a comprehensive protection of speech in our policy, as O’Connor does, then you are basically setting yourself up as a free speech absolutist in general, and arguing that any circumstantial restriction on speech annihilates a foundational protection for speech, that the existence of libel laws definitionally and intrinsically cancels out the First Amendment. You can make that case, and some do. I think it’s incorrect. I’m not clear if this is O’Connor’s general position on speech rights.

I might also note that to take this position is to argue that Swarthmore (or any other college) can never actually articulate a policy that sanctions harassment which makes reference to speech acts. I’d actually be curious to see whether O’Connor thinks that it is notionally possible for a university to reserve the right to expel a student who personally harasses another student on a repeated basis but commits no direct violence against them. If one student followed another student around campus saying, “Faggot. Faggot. Faggot” continuously for a week, is there any legitimate grounds for saying, “Listen, that’s a problem” that goes beyond moral persuasion directed at the harasser? If so, is there any way to construct a policy that legitimizes administrative action without making reference to speech? We went out of our way, at any rate, to avoid defining that speech as a class of speech like “hate speech” which would be definable without reference to context. In fact, it doesn’t really matter what one community member says to another if there’s a finding of general harassment here: the content of the speech is irrelevant. If the content is irrelevant, I really think it’s not about a restriction on speech.

Except for the sexual harassment and discriminatory harassment policies, and here I can only reiterate that I believe—I hope—our general protection of speech is firmly understood to be the bedrock principle that has precedence over those policies.

On the second question, of whether the sexual harassment policy is a ticking time bomb or slippery slope, in particular because it is adjudicated through a grievance procedure which has no due process protections as they’re commonly understood, well, that’s a real point. It’s my big problem with most such policies on college campuses, and the major place where they are typically mischieviously misused. O’Connor is right to say that I essentially trust my colleagues and my institution and trust that nothing will go wrong, but it’s also right to suggest that this is a flawed approach. I agree here that we share in common with most academic institutions a serious problem that could well obliterate any of the best intentions of our policies. I would also underscore, as I did in my first post on this subject, that I regard “hostile environment” standards as intrinsically dangerous. (Though I suppose here too I wonder whether O'Connor thinks that there is anything that would consistitute sexual harassment besides quid-pro-quo, and how you could identify it in a policy without reference to speech acts.)

On the other hand, I think O’Connor simply shrugs off the question of legal exposure and liability—and easy as it would be for me to do so, I have enough empathy for those who have a legal responsibility to safeguard the resources and wealth of this institution to recognize that you can’t have a revolution in one country on these issues. Barring a serious statutory reform of harassment law in general, it is insane for any single institution to voluntarily expose itself to serious liability by failing to conform to existing legal standards, whatever the weakness of those standards.

On the third question, I have to confess that I’m busily inquiring about just where the policy statement on discriminatory harassment came from. I remember the debate on the general harassment policy and the question of “hate speech”, and how we came to the policy we have. I remember the same for the sexual harassment policy. But I’m honestly puzzled about this smaller statement, and where it came from, particularly because it seems more pressingly contradictory to the statement on general harassment and speech rights.

I’d sum up by saying, however, that I really think O’Connor simply doesn’t give Swarthmore enough credit for drafting a policy which is actually quite different from the campus norm, and which actually intended to repudiate the idea of a “speech code”, with its prior restraint on defined classes of speech acts. I don't see the policy as a "trojan horse" with sinister conspirators inside, much less see myself as one of the Greeks waiting to pillage. As I see our existing policy, students here could hold all the affirmative action bake sales they like without any fear of sanction or judicial action by the college against them (though not without fear of being criticized for doing so). O’Connor chooses to portray me as a person who conveniently "pretends" otherwise. No, I just think it’s more complicated than she lets on, and that there is as much reason for optimism as there is for criticism, that the devil—at least in this case—is in the details.

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Thanks for Playing

Well, at least this time, Erin O’Connor has it really wrong.

Swarthmore has no speech code. The community specifically rejected having a speech code when we considered the issue. We specifically insisted that speech which might be regarded by some as offensive is non-adjudicable, and underscored that the college administration can bring no sanction against individuals for what they say regardless of how offensive it might seem to others.

There is only one way that speech can be an adjudicable issue at Swarthmore, and that is if it is part of a repeated, persistent attempt by one individual to personally harass another individual. The standards for this are very precisely enunciated in our policy on general harassment. You cannot generically harass a social group or identity. There is no one-time instance of general harassment—a single statement cannot be taken by one individual to represent an act of general harassment by another individual directed at them: it must be persistent and repeated.

Our sexual harassment policy, from which O’Connor draws almost all of her quotes, was adopted at a different point from our general speech and harassment policy, and I agree has a few emphases which differ from the overall policy, in that it states that it is possible for a one-time action to represent a “hostile environment” against which someone might have a grievance. Three things are worth noting about this policy, however. First, the general speech policy supercedes it, as I understand things, e.g., the specific protections granted free speech are the most important policy dictates we have on this subject, and the sexual harassment policy does not contradict or contravene those protections. Second, the sexual harassment policy contains an important qualifier which O’Connor notably fails to cite: “The perception of conduct or expression as harassing does not necessarily constitute sexual harassment”, and goes on to state that every complaint must be carefully examined on its own merits. No statement or idea or expression is categorically identified, outside of the context of a specific complaint, as prohibited or punishable. A grievant is directed to ask a perceived harasser to stop, and if they do not do so, is given the option to pursue a grievance procedure—but there is no a priori finding that any given expression creates a hostile environment. Third, I would note that aspects of this policy take the form that they do in order to achieve compliance with existing federal law on sexual harassment: if there is an issue here, it is an issue whose locus is far beyond this campus.

This is not to say that I’m entirely comfortable with the content of this specific policy: I found it overly broad in several respects when the faculty voted on it, and I’m especially concerned about the ways a “hostile environment” standard can and has been misused on college campuses—but it is specifically the “hostile environment” standard which federal law has legitimated. To expressly repudiate it in college policy is an invitation to a devastating liability claim against the college at some future date, because it would place the college at odds with a clear body of legal precedent. (When institutions or employers lose such lawsuits, it is often precisely on the grounds that they were made aware of a hostile environment and did nothing to correct it. Were we to state outright that we reject that a hostile environment can actually exist, we’d be wide open to such a finding.)

Still, I have to stress again that the impression O’Connor gives about even this aspect of the sexual harassment policy is downright wrong even beyond her mischaracterization of it as an overall policy governing speech. A Swarthmore student or member of the faculty expressly cannot be punished merely for saying something that has the characteristics described in the sexual harassment policy—which O’Connor implies. There is nothing adjudicable unless there is a grievance from a specific grievant, and that grievance must meet the specific test of being harassment with specifically sexual intent. John Ashcroft couldn’t file a grievance against Arthur Schlesinger under Swarthmore policy unless he thought Schlesinger was making a quid-pro-quo demand for sexual favors from Ashcroft or if Schlesinger was making Swarthmore a hostile working environment in a sexually demeaning way. (Since neither of them work here, the hostile environment standard wouldn’t apply in any event.)

Let me quote from the Swarthmore College policy statement on uncivil or demeaning non-harassing speech, since O’Connor didn’t see fit to share this with her readers (although speechcodes.org does reprint this policy in full):

“As a member of Swarthmore College, one's moral responsibilities extend beyond formally sanctionable conduct. All of us, therefore, have a responsibility not to indulge in gratuitous offensive expression just because it may not be subject to official sanctions. Anonymous offensive expression is generally inexcusable, but the risk of harm in making adjudicable all forms of offensive expression would not only outweigh the benefits of official proscription, it would also seriously endanger academic freedom."

"Even when individuals (or groups) admit authorship, however, they act irresponsibly if they are unwilling to engage in a defense of their views, especially with those targeted. Perpetrators of alleged non-adjudicable but uncivil expression should engage the objects of their attacks through discussion and, possibly, mediation. If they do not, however, no disciplinary action will be taken, though College officials or anyone else may publicly decry the content and manner of such expression."

"It needs stressing again that the College will in no way formally discourage any argument, provided it does not include threats of violence, though what is said may be deplorable and very possibly more diatribe that argument. “

That’s not a speech code. It’s the antithesis of a speech code. It’s a specific protection extended to speech, and a specific forbidding of judicial and quasi-judicial forms of sanction against speech by the administration or the community.

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A Pox on Both Houses, or Conservatives in Academia (again)

It’s Punch and Judy Show time, with academic blogs trading knocks over the question of whether conservatives are discriminated against in academia. Let me once again go over some of the important complexities that seem to me to be absent from most of the discussion.

1. Different disciplines and units, at different scales of institutions, are fairly non-comparable when we’re talking about existing distributions of political or social views. The humanities are not the same as the business school or the law school.

2. No one is ever asked bluntly in the humanities what their political affiliation is at the time of hiring. The discussion of the “politics” of a candidate in history or anthropology has never, in my own experience, involved any speculation about political affiliation. If there is a conversation about “politics”, it is likely to be about much more arcane, disciplinary arguments, about what specialization or methodology a person uses. I’ve occasionally heard someone pronounce this or that methodology or form of scholarship “reactionary”, but that’s a highly mobile epithet and can be applied to almost anything, including ideas and forms of practice that are highly, intensely leftist on the general map of American political life. To ask whether someone was a “Democrat” or even a “leftist” or “liberal” (or “conservative”) in a discussion of hiring would be like confessing that you’re the village idiot—it would seem a hopelessly unsophisticated way of thinking.

3. That’s not to say that someone who was identifiably a conservative or libertarian wouldn’t be in for some rough sailing in some academic disciplines, both at hiring or afterward. I was and remain surprised at how reluctant many people participating in this discussion are to just say, “Yes, in some disciplines, an identifiable conservative may be treated very poorly”. Most importantly, in most of the humanities there’s a default assumption that everyone around the table more or less broadly can be classed as a liberal, and a certain stunned incredulity when someone departs from that assumption. It is very, very hard to have certain conversations or advocate particular views that are held more widely in the public sphere in some departments or disciplines. I find that as I take increasingly contrarian positions on some of these kinds of issues that it is harder and harder to find a context where I can profitably converse with them about colleagues.

4. On the other hand, collegiality is a powerful cultural force in many colleges and universities, and its stultifying or comforting effects (take your pick) often have nothing to do with politics in any sense. A conservative or libertarian who is a mensch about his or her views and research may well be admired, even beloved, by liberal or left colleagues, and fondly regarded as valuable because of their views. On the other hand, someone like Daniel Pipes who is running around picking broad-brush fights with everyone whom he perceives as a bad academic, usually based on a paper-thin reading of their syllabi or even just the titles of their research, is going to be loathed, but as much for his behavior as his political views. A liberal or leftist who plays Stalinist Truth Squad in the same way is going to be equally loathed and avoided. I’ve seen departments where everyone treats a particular person as a “politicized” pariah even though the political views of that person are exactly the same as the general distribution in the department, and it’s entirely about strident, personally confrontational, abrasive, self-aggrandizing behavior. Now it may be that conservatives, having been sneered at, are more inclined, almost out of necessity, to go on the offensive, and create a feedback loop in the process. But the mode of action is more important than the views.

5. Along the same lines, ostensible political views and intellectual temperment may not map well onto each other. Tempermentally, most academics are highly conservative in the (Edmund) Burkean sense: they tend to oppose any change to their own institutions and they tend to argue strongly in favor of the maintenance of core traditions and practices. Many of the critiques of academic life circulating in the blogosphere now have less to do with the party affiliation of academics and more to do with this tempermental leaning, and the behaviors or attitudes which are justifiably seen as troubling would be no different if the party affiliations or political views of academics were changed, barring major changes to the nature of the institution. Magically turn everyone in the humanities into Republicans tomorrow, and they’d still exhibit all the behaviors that everyone is complaining about. Indeed, some of the conservative critics of academia seem to me to be actively campaigning for just this option.

6. Why do conservatives care about the humanities at all? The answer might be that for both the cultural right and left, the humanities or more broadly, mass culture, are an important alibi for explaining their failure to outright win the culture wars of the past twenty years. Rather than asking, “What about our views is just not appealing and may never be appealing to the majority of Americans”, they would prefer to assume that those views would be appealing if not for some partisan interference in the natural course of events. For the cultural right, higher education in general and the academic humanities in particular are the boogeyman of choice, to which I can only suggest that they’re vastly, gigantically overstating the possible influence of those institutions. I think the same thing is thought about mass culture in the other direction. In both cases, there’s a systematic effort here to avoid thinking the unthinkable thought, that maybe, just maybe, the majority of people have thought about your view of things and they just don’t like it, for good and considered reasons.

7. If conservatives aren’t going into academia, they’re not going into it well before they could be discriminated against. That means that conservatives should not casually ignore the possibility that there are market-rational reasons that conservatives don’t go into many fields (especially since it seems to be a compliment to them ).

Now add some new points about the latest wave of discussion on this issue:

8. Quick reads of syllabi and specializations are very lousy ways to decide what someone’s partisan politics or even general political philosophy might be, for a lot of reasons.

9. Being intolerant towards your students is different than being intolerant in hiring decisions. A student reporting intolerant asides or behavior in the classroom by a teacher is not evidence of systemic discrimination in hiring or training practices. This is a different kind of problem, a pedagogical flaw that may include behavior that is not especially or notably political, but that is simply about the failure to run a classroom which generates multiple possible outcomes and nurtures critical thought. Pedagogies which narrowly reproduce ossified orthodoxies are a common problem in academic life, and will remain a problem regardless of the party affiliation of academics.

10. Your party registration is not much of a guide to the way you actually act on your political views in an institutional environment. I have known people who are intensely active in a political party but where you’d never guess what their affiliation is from their scholarship or pedagogy. I’ve known people who could care less about formal politics who talk nothing but ideology in the classroom. In general, everyone in this discussion is failing to leave room for the professionalism of academics, which is often the most powerful determinant of their behavior.

11. The entire class of people with postgraduate degrees skew significantly Democratic in registration: it’s worth asking how much academic departments differ from this general proportion. Granted, when you hit 100%, as with Duke's Department of History, you're obviously different from the general population of people with Ph.Ds, but I wonder how much so. (Extra bonus point: can anybody guess my political affiliation? Hint: Swarthmore's History Department is not 100% registered Democrat.)

12. Kieran Healy rightfully observes that conservatives talking about this issue are making an interesting exception to their general tendency among conservatives to assume that results in the market are probably based on some real distribution of qualifications rather than bias or discrimination. It might be fair to assert in response that academic hiring is a closed or non-market system, and this is precisely what is unfair about it. But if so, it requires that one demonstrate that there is a class of potential, qualified individuals who are being discriminated against at the time of hiring, or that these individuals are being discriminatorily weeded out at the time of initial acceptance for training. If not, then the argument that conservatives are being discriminated against in academic hiring practices is exactly comparable in its logics and evidence to the logic of most affirmative action programs and many other antidiscrimination initiatives, that there is a subtle systemic bias which is producing unequal results that prevents a “normal” sociological distribution of candidates in particular jobs. It behooves conservatives who want to claim this to either concretely explain why this argument only applies to conservatives in academia, or to repudiate the standard conservative argument against affirmative action and other public-policy programs designed to deal with subtle bias effects.

13. On the other hand, most of the people mocking or disagreeing with the claim that conservatives are treated poorly in academia seem to me to be equally at odds with many standard representations of bias effects that are widely accepted by liberals or leftists, namely, that bias is often subtle, discursive, and institutionally pervasive, and that “hostile environments” can exist where no single action or statement, or any concrete form of discrimination can be easily pointed to as a smoking gun. Most of those claiming a bias against conservatives in academia are pointing to exactly these kinds of hostile-environment incidents and moments, and seeing them as causing the same kinds of psychological and inhibitory harms that this type of discrimination is said to cause in other contexts. I accept that people edging away from you in an elevator is a type of bias-effect that is harmful—an often cited instance of the kinds of subtly pervasive discrimination that African-Americans may suffer from in mostly-white institutions. I’ve never experienced myself because I’m white, and had I not read of it in the personal, anecdotal accounts of many African-Americans, I truthfully would never have noticed it. Same here. I don’t understand why it is so hard to accept that self-identified conservative undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty report experiencing many similar forms of pervasive, subtle bias. What I'm seeing from many of those who dismiss these claims is a collective eye-rolling, a sort of "big deal, so your professor sneered at you, get over it". And yet few of those doing that eye-rolling would say the same to a student of color or a woman reporting similar experiences. The grounds on which many critics are doubting that such bias exists would have to, in all honesty, extend to all anecdotal, experiential or narrative claims of bias. The only way to salvage such claims would be if they could be profitably correlated with quantifiable evidence of discrimination—but in this case, we have some evidence to that effect. The only other way to salvage this point is to say, "It's wrong to be biased against people because of their race, gender or sexual orientation, but not because of their politics". A few seem willing to say just that: I can only say I think that's a big, fat mistake on a great many fronts.

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Short notes

1. Regarding my earlier woes with my home PC, to my amazement, PestPatrol's tech support gave me a fairly simple command line to run through one PestPatrol utility to fix the aftermath of cleansing SahAgent off our home PC, and it worked, restoring all Internet functionality without any further difficulties. That is just about the first time ever that a tech support person has been able to give me straightforward advice that had straightforwardly good results. I've been reading up more about Winsock2 Layered Service Provider spyware like SahAgent and if anything I'm more appalled than I was before. Is there any question in anyone's mind that this sort of thing should be illegal? I don't see any difference between it and a virus in terms of destructive intent.

2. I'm fairly embroiled in an interesting discussion of what makes for a good childhood over at Crooked Timber--very high quality conversation, particularly the comments from Russell Arben Fox. Short summary of my arguments: I don't like "prosocial" children's programming, which I've hammered at before in Saturday Morning Fever. Not even Veggie Tales. And I let my daughter play "Morrowind" and "Neverwinter Nights" with me on my PC, monster-slaying and all. (When the PC is working.) Anyone who fears for her future goodness, take heart: she won't let me steal anything with my thief character and consistently tells me that I shouldn't kill monsters. Unless they're mean ones.

3. Responding to Laura over at Apt. 11D: I do most of the cooking, clean the dishes about 25% of the time, do all the stereotypically manly jobs like assembling toys and furniture or lifting heavy objects, dress and diaper if I'm closest (and did most of the diapering and baby care from months 3-12) and many other sundry acts of parenting. I also read the bedtime story. I am sorry to admit that I aggressively evade doing the laundry as for some reason I pathologically hate doing it. I would say I definitely don't pull 50% of the domestic weight, so yeah, I kind of suck. But I also think I'm more one of those slacker boys Laura is talking about who has cut back at work to spend time with family rather than the Type A achievement-chaser, which maybe I once was to a greater degree. Which is, I'm beginning to sense, a more complicated choice in its professional consequences and ego-impact than it first appears. No wonder men (and Type-A superwomen) get all angsty and weird at middle-age.

4. Quite a trollish thread over at Kuro5hin on blogging. My short response to the troll who kicked it off would be that yes, of course most personal webpages of any kind are banal. That's hardly a new thing, nor a result of Moveable Type. I remember very well that one of the reasons Justin Hall's links.net, whose tenth anniversary makes me feel very old and decrepit, got such a readership at the outset--it wasn't just nekkid pictures and stories about sex and drugs that drew people, but also that almost every other "home page" out there was a bunch of links to other links and nothing more, while Justin was putting up new and interesting material almost every day. Content then and now is king, and can come from anywhere, whether a blog or Atlantic Monthly Online. Blogs that originate content are more interesting to me, and more what I aspire to for myself, than blogs that do nothing more than link to content elsewhere. But even in collective banality, there are interesting things to see and think about. Even at their worst, the Web in general and blogs in specific represent an interesting sociological aggregate, a way to track the massed preoccupations of various constituencies and the movements of various memes.

February 3, 2004

From Hell's Heart I Stab At Thee

Well, somehow my wife took an accidental wrong turn while web-surfing on my home PC, I think because she misspelled a common domain name for a children's media site. I came home to find something squatting malevolently in the computer called “SahAgent”, which seems related to Gator. Busily infesting our PC, it kept popping up advertising windows every few minutes into the desktop while keeping a log of all our web-surfing and downloading or unzipping more and more executables of various kinds that wanted access to the Internet. I rushed to get an application I’d used once before to search for spyware called PestPatrol (I know, you’re all screaming, ‘Use AdAware instead, dummy! Be really careful removing SahAgent, idiot!’ I am today a bit more knowledgeable than I was on Friday.) PestPatrol quickly recognized and then supposedly straightforwardly cleaned the system of tons of SahAgent-associated crap (also lots of things related to a driver called “WildTangent” that I think I may have foolishly allowed on the machine when visiting Shockwave’s site and playing games there.)

Unfortunately that was also the end of our home Internet functionality altogether: browser, email, everything has gone bye-bye. PestPatrol’s tech support has some ideas that I’ll try tonight, but I have the bad feeling I’m going to end up reinstalling Windows from scratch. Bye-bye two days of my life if so. I know, I know, all the techier-than-thou out there are rolling their eyes and saying, “Use Linux, asshole” or “That’s your fault for using Internet Explorer, fool”. Blaming the victim, guys.

I find myself so gobsmacked at the very nature of the experience (like so many others before me). If I happened to dial a wrong number on my telephone, and the mere act of doing so more or less destroyed my telephone, I suspect there would be real legal consequences for whomever was keeping the telephone-destroying answering machine out there. There are some strange differences in both law and practice in the case of computers and the Internet that to me seem inexplicable.

With SahAgent or Gator or what have you, somehow, somewhere, somebody real is making real money by hijacking other people’s computers and sending them advertisements whether they want them or not, downloading software involuntarily onto their machines and the like, and yet that person or persons is basically legally untouchable. Somebody somewhere is paying to squat on domains that are misspellings, just waiting for an accidental visitor so they can seize control of their computers. Whoever these people are, they’ve cost me time and money. They’re going to end up costing Microsoft money as well, because I’ve been weighing whether having a PC in order to play games and get access to a relatively wide range of software is worth the hassle, and this has pretty well decided it—it’s probably not worth it, and our next machine may be something else, while my gaming shifts to consoles. (PC games are dying, anyway.)

Grrr.

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