Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu

I just read Virtue Hoarders by Catherine Liu. It's an admirably compact read, taking only as many pages as it actually needs in order to make its case: The Professional-Managerial Class is full of neuroticism, insecurity, and hypocrisy. She focuses on three examples: Attitudes towards child-rearing (everything ever done by neurotic parents looking to get their kids into Ivies), books (a less convincing chapter), and sex (not gonna touch that). Her bigger point is that the PMC has largely tried to identify itself as being more virtuous than the lower economic classes so that they can justify having more. They want to justify it to everyone: Themselves (all that insecurity), the more affluent people for whom they work (again, they feel insecure), and those with less (to try to get the poor to strive rather than revolt).

Liu is far-left on economics, more lefty than I'll ever be, but you don't need to be lefty to (1) agree with her cultural critiques of the PMC and (2) think that actual material living conditions should be a bigger concern than whether somebody spoke about a social issue in precisely the right language. One could support reforms from any number of angles, left, right, or otherwise, and think that those reforms should concentrate on tangible economic issues instead of culture.

My most important takeaway from her book is from the intro: The contrast between the progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th and the PMC of today. Educated professionals were prominent in that progressive movement as they are among today's self-styled progressives. However, the progressives of the earlier era were often in sympathy with the working classes, while today's PMC finds the working class appalling.

I'm not convinced her history is strong there. I'm hardly an expert on this, but labor movements were generally aligned with the Democrats, at least by the time of FDR, while many (not all) progressives were identified with the Republicans. Yes, FDR came after the days of the capital-P Progressives, and I'm no expert on that history, but it seems clear that the story was probably a bit more complicated than hinted at in Liu's intro. (I'm quite certain that historians will always agree with the statement "[Insert movement here] was more complicated than a short summary.")

Still, to the extent that she might be capturing some truth, it's worth noting (as Liu does) that the educated professionals of the PMC are largely salaried people working for bigger organizations. They don't own the means of their production (her wording, she's very proudly leftist) the way that many small-town professionals did a century ago. Hofstadter noted that the progressive movement of a century ago had plenty of professionals and businessmen (not normally a leftist bunch) who felt threatened by corporations. They had enough ownership of their jobs to feel threatened AND enough ownership to have some ability to push back. Today the educated professionals mostly work for someone else, not themselves.

I'm also reminded of Claudia Goldin's observations about how working for corporations closed gaps between male and female pharmacists. On one level this is unambiguously good: Of course we want to see men and women enjoy the same opportunities. And it is obviously something that the PMC would and should celebrate, both because of the wider gender implications and because it is in their self-interest. However, Liu would note that the victory doesn't necessarily trickle down to women working in other jobs (e.g. the low-paid cashiers in those pharmacies). A segment of the PMC gained equity in the sense of fairness by giving up their equity in the sense of ownership. Maybe it's a very good thing from many angles. Maybe it's better for patients, especially certain kinds of patients. If I traveled a lot I'd probably want to be able to go to any CVS in the country and get my prescription refill.

On the other hand, I know from family experience that certain specialty services seem to be easier to get at independent pharmacies.

But whatever the bigger-picture pros and cons of corporate vs independent pharmacies, the main point is that the PMC prioritizes certain social goals and has partly achieved some of those goals...at least for themselves...by accepting the economic power of larger entities. And so we can't really stand up to larger entities. I'm just a guy with an inconsequential blog. If I actually caused real trouble for a big entity I'd lose my job and health insurance. We all know this.

I think this is Liu's best point, separate from her critiques of various books and sexual politics.

"Souls of Black Folk", Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 1 is a summary of the book. At the top of the second page he mentions the question that white people pose: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Like Baldwin discussed, black people are never just discussed as people in the US. They're a problem. Even the most sympathetic seeming see only problems. Problems to solve, solutions to fund, outcomes to assess and study. I can see the influence on Baldwin. I also see some echoes of this chapter in Fanon, when du Bois discusses the feelings of inferiority in a people whom du Bois saw as still very "underdeveloped."

Much of the second chapter concerns the roots of the under-development in the Freedmen's Bureau, which tried to protect African Americans during Reconstruction, but ultimately failed on so many levels. There's the aspect of the task that could never be done in a manner beyond reproach--taking millions of people and trying to help them join a new society while that society is being (hopefully) transformed in the aftermath of bloody war--and then there's the part that is fully deserving of reproach: The decision to end it.

I won't recount all the many failures, I'll just note one anecdote: Tthe New England school mistresses who headed south to introduce the idea of universal elementary education, and along the way introduced it to white and black alike. The whites of the south were kept in as feudal a state as the slaves were, because it was a feudal society.

Next read: The Souls of Black Folk by du Bois

I finished McWhorter's Woke Racism. A lot of it is stuff I've heard before and agreed with before, and thus it didn't jump out as blog-worthy. I'm now reading The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. du Bois, which I read a while ago but didn't write about and hence didn't retain. Let's see what he has to say.

Current read: Woke Racism by John McWhorter

I'm currently reading Woke Racism by John McWhorter. It's a critique of "wokeness", the latest name for political correctness. I won't blog the whole book because much of it is unsurprising to me. Gratifying to read, well-stated, but not new or surprising.

But I have to talk about pages 104-105. McWhorter is discussing college admissions and argues that there's nothing wrong with attending a less selective school. One intriguing thing he delves into is the difference between a general education course at Columbia (where he teaches) and some less selective school. At Columbia every student is assigned to read all 300 pages of Plato's Republic. At a less selective school students might read ~50 pages of carefully curated excerpts. McWhorter notes that most people (aside from diligent philosophy majors) will not recall much of the Republic beyond the Allegory of the Cave, so what's the harm in just reading that excerpt and really delving into it? They'll still be prepared for thoughtful examination of the world around them.

There's much that one could say in defense of reading the entire book. (Disclosure: I read the whole thing nearly 20 years ago, but I don't remember much except the part about the cave.) And obviously philosophy majors should read the whole thing, as well as more theory-oriented political science majors. Even those who aren't philosophy majors might benefit from reading the whole thing and discussing other parts besides the cave. There are always good reasons to read all sorts of things. And surely students at other schools could read the whole book, if the reading assignment were spread out over a couple weeks and the discussion were more gradual.

But we shouldn't get too hung up on the particulars of this one text. McWhorter's main point is that at Columbia the courses will go into more depth than an analogous course elsewhere, because the students are prepared for it.

But one might turn it around: Why does Columbia make everyone read the whole thing? Why do they aim their program at the level of kids who were privileged to get the sort of k-12 education that would prepare them for a very intense general education program? Why shouldn't Columbia admit students with great potential but less preparation and Meet Them Where They Are At, to use a common phrase in education? Do you really want to deny a kid with great potential the chance to study at a great place just because they weren't prepared for a certain pace of assignments? Why not take them and groom them and lift them up?

The short answer is that you can't do that AND simultaneously challenge the other kids at the level that they're ready for. At least not in the same class. And as soon as you have different tracks like that we're back to all of the same dilemmas. It's not so different from trying to teach physics to a group in which some students are struggling with high school algebra and others have mastered differential equations.

But some people would push back and say that the kids who can handle long reading assignments or hard math problems or whatever don't need our attention. And I guess the question then is whose attention? Obviously the Columbia-ready kids won't be coming to me, so there's no need to deliberate over whether they need, deserve, or get my attention. But the more fundamental dilemma is about how to handle different levels of preparation, and I know and work with people who would say that in every case we should prioritize the least-prepared. From a religious perspective, well, Jesus said that we need to serve the least of His people. 

The question, though, is whether the least prepared are actually well-served by being pushed along paths that aren't working for them and can't really be made to work for them via any means plausibly available to me. There's also the Parable of the Talents to consider. Should the well-prepared twiddle their thumbs or develop their talents?

This is very much a Rohrschach test.

Thoughts on Goldin's _Career and Family_

There's a lot of history and data that wasn't exactly familiar but wasn't necessarily surprising either, so it didn't really jump out at me as something that changes my view of things. But the discussion of pharmacy careers was interesting. In short, Goldin spent much of the book making the important but commonplace point that family responsibilities pose a major challenge in women's careers. Even when women are well-represented and make the same pay as men in the same positions and working the same hours, women often make less than men on aggregate because many women are in different roles and/or work fewer hours. Also, because of the nature of certain jobs, there are increasing rather than decreasing returns on hours, as certain time-intensive roles cover more complex tasks for which the supply/demand equation produces greater pay.

Pharmacists used to mostly own their small businesses, and small business owners face greater time demands and financial risks, but also make more money as a result. (Or at least they make more money when the financial risks work out.) Even when they didn't own their own business, because they were working in smaller operations they often had to put in more hours to cover evenings and emergencies and whatnot. But with the corporate takeover of pharmacies, work is less differentiated. It's more shift work, fewer risky roles, and so women and men have the same jobs open to them, and pay gaps have shrunk. Yes, there are still higher-paying evening shifts and whatnot that men disproportionately take, but those are predictable (mostly). People are more interchangeable and can fill in for each other rather than being on call because they're unique and needed. With work less differentiated and more predictable, pay gaps have shrunk.

She sees this as progress, and in many ways it is. There's no denying the benefits of working for a large organization, nor the consumer benefits of being able to interact with a big chain that can transfer your prescription to another outlet if you're traveling. There's no denying the benefits to everyone when certain tasks become routinized. At the same time, well, even leaving aside the cliche things that could be said about "giant soulless corporations", there's an inevitable upward transfer of power from people who understand the task at ground-level to a corporate bureaucrat who often doesn't. Yes, ideally the person at corporate HQ setting policy for the person in the local office is someone who used to be in a local office and knows the on-the-ground reality. In practice, well, I work for a university with a metric shit-ton of administrators. I'm just saying.

Equality at ground level is a great thing, but the question we should be asking is if we can achieve it without transferring all control upward. Of course, keeping control at ground level means keeping risk and responsibility at ground level, which produces hectic hours that challenge family life. I get why she's applauding one facet of this, but I think she's given short shrift to other facets.

On the other hand, seeing the very tangible way in which standardization can lead to equality between the sexes does illuminate why corporations have (at least in certain respects) embraced social liberalism.

Next read: Work and Family by Claudia Goldin

 The next book I'll blog is Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by economist Claudia Goldin. She's most famous outside the economics profession for her work on orchestra blind audition, and I'm curious to hear her take on one of the biggest workforce shifts of the past century: Women working outside the home. The only other workforce shift that arguably rivals it is the rise of mass education.

Two quick notes

 First, a Texas legislator is trying to purge schools of books that address racial issues in ways that might make students "uncomfortable." He's coming at it from a right-wing perspective, but it is very much cancel culture, building on the exact same foundation of "We must drive from the public square anything that might hurt feelings."

Second, a Liberties article by Mark Lilla makes the point that Americans romanticize youth to a greater and longer extent than any other culture, and so we strive mightily to not disabuse people of the delusions that we (rightly) inculcate in youth. I think this helps explain some of the STEM Pipeline mania. Children need to believe that they can do anything if they try. Adults need to cut their losses and focus on what they can realistically do. We refuse to admit that some kids should try something else.

Baldwin: "Many Thousands Gone"

"Many Thousands Gone" is about Richard Wright's novel Native Son. Baldwin sees it as a protest novel, which it certainly is, and he hates protest novels. He might indict it for other sins, but I'm pretty sure he just hates protest novels. I'm OK with art having a message as long as the message doesn't get in the way of the art, but everyone will have a different threshold for whether the art has gotten in the way. Baldwin's threshold is pretty sensitive, as is his right. (And given the modern moralizing emphasis on messages when critiquing art, I sympathize with his threshold.)

He also indicts Native Son for having a main character who is largely blank, devoid of much of his own development, and serving largely as a metaphorical or allegorical figure on a journey that will illustrate a critique. That's a stylistic choice which Baldwin hates but I'm more forgiving of. Or, at least, I think I am--I last read Native Son in 1994. Maybe I wouldn't like it if I re-read it. But Baldwin undermines his own indictment by conceding that the main character, Bigger Thomas, represents a primal anger that many black people feel on some level, even if they don't manifest it outwardly. There are traces of Fanon's claim that being black in a white-dominated society produces some deep emotional challenges. Whether it's as common of a feeling as he claims (who'd know without a survey?) the very fact that he sees it as a common theme suggests that there's something to explore, and so I see the artistic justification.

But let's go beyond Baldwin's critique of the novel to some of the wider social commentary in this essay.

Page 26: 

[The black man in America] is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his confining status among us were somehow analogous to disease--cancer, perhaps, or tuberculosis--which must be checked, even though it cannot be cured. In this arena the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life; if he breaks our sociological and sentimental image of him we are panic-stricken and we feel ourselves betrayed.

First, I like how Baldwin steps back and dares to speak as a generic, detached American observer, pan-racial rather than as one of the black men under that microscope. He doesn't allow himself to be a victim, a pathology, or a Noble Activist. He's just a pan-American observer. It's an admirable conceit. He won't allow white people the sole right to speak as the detached observer on behalf of American Social Analysis.

Second, in American education today, 66 years after the publication of this book, we still cannot bring ourselves to look at black people as simply complicated individuals. The success or failure of a black student is something that requires celebration as social progress or hand-wringing as social failure. John Q. Blackman can't just get a good grade in math and a bad grade in history because he likes math and found his history class boring and hated the early-morning time slot. No, John Q. Blackman succeeded in STEM because we're working so hard on the STEM Pipeline, and he did badly in history because that teacher doesn't know how to Connect With The Black Experience. John Q. Blackman never just gets to be himself, a point that Fanon made.

And it is Bigger Thomas's detachment from any sort of individual personality or cultural richness that bothers Baldwin. Bigger is this alienated observer. Even when real people are alienated, they're more than just alienation. That's Baldwin's critique. I think there's room for effective use of one-dimensional characters, and we'll have to agree to disagree on whether this use was effective, and agree to disagree on whether detaching Bigger from any rich self and experience was making the point or ruining it, but that certainly is the point.

On pages 31-32, Baldwin discusses the discourse around Native Son:

The feeling which prevailed at the time of its publication was that such a novel, bitter, uncompromising, shocking, gave proof, by its very existence, of what strides might be taken in a free democracy; and its indisputable success, proof that Americans were now able to look full in the face without flinching the dreadful facts. Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection, and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle. Such a book, we felt with pride, could never have been written before--which was true. Nor could it be written today. It bears already the aspect of a landmark; for Bigger and his brothers have undergone yet another metamorphosis; they have been accepted in baseball leagues and by colleges hitherto exclusive; and they have made a most favorable appearance on the national screen.

It sounds like 2020 and everyone patting themselves on the back for enjoying a good scolding by Ibram Kendi. All of this has happened before and will happen again.

The last sentence is complicated: The events that he describes, the steps of inclusion and acceptance, were real. They were tangible. They mattered. They didn't fix everything but they fixed something, they improved actual lives. I think Baldwin's point is that whether those steps are big or small, however real they are, the euphoria would make it harder for a dour protest novel to be accepted at that moment. Mood is cyclical, and after each time of shame there is progress that's a mix of mere symbol, useful symbol, and tangible improvement, and in that new mood the novel that started it could not be written at that time.

Later in the essay Baldwin notes that the greatest forgiveness of Bigger's crimes came from white liberal characters in the book, not black characters. I think this undermines Baldwin's contention that the book is "just" a protest novel. It strikes me as deeply insightful. Bigger might be, as Baldwin says on page 35, "an incarnation of a myth" but the reality in the people around Bigger is also part of the novel. Maybe it's about them?

On page 38, Baldwin says that the anger in Bigger is a specter in American life, hovering in the hearts of black and white people alike. There's an element of that anger in every black person who has felt injustice and every white person who has felt the associated guilt, but it is just a part of black life, not the whole portion. On page 43 he writes:

If, as I believe, no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in the skull, then what most significantly fails to be illuminated here is the paradoxical adjustment which is perpetually made, the Negro being compelled to accept the fact that this dark and dangerous and unloved stranger is part of himself forever. Only this recognition sets him in any wise free and it is this, this necessary ability to contain and even, in the most honorable sense of the word, to exploit the [Bigger Thomas] which lends to Negro life its high element of the ironic and which causes the most well-meaning of their American critics to make such exhilarating errors when attempting to understand them. To present Bigger as a warning is simply to reinforce the American guilt and fear concerning him, it is most forcefully to limit him to that previously mentioned social arena in which he has no human validity, it is simply to condemn him to death.

Indeed, on page 40 Baldwin says that black life is so much more than that, and hence he dislikes building a novel around this mythological character.

In other words, he thinks the novel simplifies too much, but isn't all fiction a useful elaboration on a simplified portion of human existence?

Anyway, I will stop here. I tried to read the next essay, concerning a remake of the opera Carmen with black characters, but I couldn't get into it. Let's try the next essay after that, "The Harlem Ghetto."

Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes and "Everybody's Protest Novel"

 The book starts with several pages of autobiographical notes. I'll just quote these great words from pages 8-9:

I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don't like people who like me because I'm a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one's own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright.

The first essay proper is "Everybody's Protest Novel", a critique of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Baldwin argues that it's a bad novel, being too sentimental. My recollection of it is that it was a very earnest novel, to use a term from a few pages earlier. Uncle Tom's meek obedience was offered not as some example to which Harriet Beecher Stowe thought that black people should aspire, but as an indictment of slave owners: Even the most servile of servants was abused when he did nothing that could ever plausibly anger his owners. If even this most meek and abased of servants could be mistreated then it was the ultimate indictment of slavery from a certain 19th century Christian perspective.

The problem with the novel, as Baldwin says here and others have said elsewhere, is that it's a pamphlet rather than a novel. It's a piece of moral instruction, which is good and necessary but not a work of art. Works of art can indeed be instructive, but the good ones are more than just that.

Here's something that would give a heart attack to today's critics of art and entertainment, who see everything through a lens of identity and marginalization:

...the avowed aim of the American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the oppressed. They are forgiven, on the strength of these good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, whatever excessive demands they make of credibility. It is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as to approach decadence to suggest that these books are both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told to put first things first, the good of society coming before niceties of style or characterization. Even if this were incontestable--for what exactly is the "good" of society?--it argues an insuperable confusion, since literature and sociology are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were.

I need to trot this essay out the next time somebody critiques a novel or movie or TV show or whatever primarily through a lens of representation.

Some thoughts on society vs the individual, and the paradox of attempts at social reform:

We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed to us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void--ourselves--it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us--"from the evil that is in the world."

It must be remembered that the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society; they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, they both alike depend on the same reality. Within this cage it is romantic, more, meaningless, to speak of a "new" society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shivering dependence on the props of reality which he shares with the Herrenvolk make a truly "new" society impossible to conceive. What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places.

We see this in calls to "center" marginalized voices, invert hierarchies, and always believe certain claims. If we can't even things out exactly then we'll reverse things.

He goes on to say, though, that more than reversal the oppressed long for a status that reflects the pathologies of being oppressed, as Fanon discussed:

But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community. Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on his knees before that God in Whom he must now believe; who had made him, but not in His image. This tableau, this impossibility, is the heritage of the Negro in America: Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white.

I have no idea what to do about this, and I'm not sure that Baldwin did , at least not in his capacity as a wordsmith with a duty to be better than merely earnest.

Next read: Notes of a Native Son by Baldwin

The next read that I'll try to blog is Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays by James Baldwin. I read it a while ago but didn't take notes, and note-taking greatly enhances recollection. So this time I'll blog about it.

Fanon chapters 4 and 5

 Fanon was a psychiatrist so his book is basically a psychoanalysis of people living under racism and colonialism. Much of it focuses on critiques of literary characters as illustrative examples. To examine it in-depth is to dissect a style of literary criticism that I've occasionally encountered and never really gotten comfortable dissecting. Also, to analyze it would be to take the ideas and accounts at something other than face value. In the year 2021 I see nothing good that can come from sitting in judgment of this book, and honestly I don't have any issues with it to the extent that I understand it.

So I'll just share one observation: In chapter 4 the part I liked best was where he said that learning more African history was essential to get over some of the neurosis and inferiority complex associated with his situation. To learn that African societies had rivaled any other societies in sophistication prior to colonialism did a lot to alleviate his problems. It made him see himself through some framework other than that of a black man in a white man's world. I suspect this will lead to the individualistic analysis apparently promised in the intro.

Black Skin, White Masks, Chapters 2 and 3

 These chapters mostly talk about interracial romantic relationships from the perspective of a black person, how status and skin color interact, etc. I think if I tried to summarize that fraught topic I'd just get myself in trouble. Also, a lot of chapter 3 is an analysis of some characters from a literary work who help illustrate his points.

I'll just note that Fanton gets to a very important issue on pages 50-51 when discussing a black character who had spent so much time in mainland France that he was, in many ways, a thoroughly French person. A white character encourages the black character to accept that fact and stop agonizing over being different from white people. That is a laudable sentiment as far as it goes, but the white character further implies that the black character is not "really" black. One needn't see color as everything to see that comment as troubling, because it implies a binary choice. Either the black character is "really" white or "really" black, rather than being a person with many experiences and relationships and affiliations.

I think this is building towards the individualist take promised in the intro.

Black Skin, White Masks, Chapter 1

 I don't have a lot of time to summarize Chapter 1, so I'll just note a few things.

First, Fanon spends a lot of time discussing how the use of a creole speech marks the black people of the Caribbean as distinct from the Frenchmen of mainland France, and is a cause of much anxiety. Caribbean people who have lived in France make a point of distancing themselves from their roots by speaking "proper" French, and have much anxiety over this. Much of this discussion reminds me of things linguist John McWhorter has said, about how we have to get past the idea that dialects, creoles, etc. are "wrong." They are perfectly fine systems of language with rich vocabularies and internally consistent rules of grammar and usage. It is fine and proper for children to learn and use "standard" dialects for the purpose of interacting outside their community, something that people in many societies throughout the world and throughout history have done and still do as a matter of course. But the purpose of learning a "standard" language should be to communicate easily with more people, not to distance oneself from a shameful identity.

Second, Fanon notes that plenty of people in French colonies can understand standard French just fine and it is demeaning to act like they can't. Just as they suffer humiliation from having their dialect degraded, they likewise suffer humiliation from well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning) people who talk down to them. This he rightly calls out as racism.

On to chapter 2.

Black Skin, White Masks: Intro

 I read the intro. I don't have a lot of time, but I do want to summarize it. Basically, he argues that it is unhealthy to be a person defined by a race, either via pride or shame regarding that race, and it is similarly unhealthy to be a person seeking to masquerade culturally as another race. It is healthy to be simply a person who eschews racial identification.

So he says that black men and white men are unhealthy, but men are fine. Since this was a book written in French in the 1950's, there may be nuances missing in the translation, things that don't carry over well to how we speak about race in 2021. And the gendered language is even more complicated, given the differences between the 1950's and 2020's, and also the differences between French and English. Take it for what it's worth.

Do not take him as someone deliberately obtuse about race and color. He makes it clear that the book will discuss how living as a subject of colonialism screws people up. He sees racism as real and a problem, and will address it unapologetically.

Let's see how the book unfolds.

Next read: Black Skin, White masks by Frantz Fanon

 My next read will be Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist from the French Caribbean who spent time in revolutionary Algeria and wrote extensively on race and identity in an explicitly colonialist system. I came upon a recommendation of his works a few months ago but can no longer remember who recommended it or why. Nonetheless, I added it to a reading list and now here I am. Let's see what he has to say.

American Idyll, Chapter 2

 Chapter 2 is about the notion of an "average" American. I won't attempt to summarize it because it's a very dense chapter, full of summaries of other writers' summaries of the history and how they responded to it. I'll just note two big takeaways:

1) The "average" American is an artificial construct. While I'll go to the mat arguing that standardized tests are useful for carefully-defined purposes, they aren't everything, and they certainly don't tell you everything that you need to know about people. People with scores in the center of a distribution are a hugely varied bunch by every measure other than scores, and I reject any technocratic effort to shepherd all of them into a small number of paths. For that matter, I reject any effort to shepherd people anywhere else in the distribution into a small number of paths. A score may rule out a few things from a huge range of options, or add a few more things to a huge range of options, but there's a huge range of options in any case.

Much of what she is reacting to is efforts to over-use scores.

2) Test scores can be used for elitist purposes, but she notes that humanities education was actually critiqued as being unsuitable for the non-elite, and hence some commentators looked down upon humanities rather than looking down on the non-elite. If you celebrate the middle then you'll look with suspicion upon subjects for the elite. If you celebrate the elite you'll look with disdain on those not prepared for elite subjects.

I wish that the debate about "academic" versus "vocational" education wasn't an either/or. People should study "traditional academic subjects" both because they provide useful insights for life AND because stretching the mind is worthwhile in its own right. We can study Shakespeare for insights into power, relationships, etc., but let's face it: There are plenty of other ways to learn about those matters. First and foremost we study Shakespeare because the plays are delightful. We study disordered materials in physics in part because they are useful, but for many applications all you really need to know is a few parameters that engineers already know how to measure.  We also study disorder because it is fascinating.

People should stretch their minds. People should also learn how to do useful things. The real world requires both. Some might focus on one more than the other at a particular stage of life, but why does it have to be either/or?

American Idyll, Chapter 1: Meritocracy

 Chapter 1 is written as a summary of history and thinkers. She covers a lot of things I've heard before, including standardized tests and Hofstadter's critiques of anti-intellectualism. I could summarize everything she's said, but that would be a lot of space (she packs a lot in) and frankly I don't take issue with much. The meta issue is that she is critiquing meritocracy as a technocratic hierarchy. I have more than enough issues with that, so I don't disagree. But meritocracy is an idea with two very different usages, subject to two different critiques. Besides an overall societal hierarchy based on technocracy, "meritocracy" also refers to hiring workers or selecting students based on qualifications for the particular position in question. Merit for the job is narrower than merit to run society. Being qualified to study a particular subject at a particular level is different from being qualified to enter the leadership class.

Liu critiques standardized tests alongside efforts to make education more "relevant" that Hofstadter critiqued. I'm not sure that the two things really belong together for critique. Sure, testing can be combined with tracking to give some people a less "academic" and more vocational education, while others get more traditional liberal arts or whatever. Whatever the advantages or disadvantages of such tracking, when you DON'T track you wind up having to dumb things down. (Ask me how I know.) Testing and tracking is the best hope for offering rigorous education at all. Otherwise we have to go to the lowest common denominator.

I'm not sure that I'm seeing how Liu will tie these things into anti-elitism. Testing is elitism.

Now, Liu does note that if we make teachers accountable for test scores then we can wind up stripping the richness from education and make it into desperate attempts to boost scores. That ultimately weakens intellectualism and is a form of anti-elitism. But testing is also one of the few tools we have to actually preserve some truly academic education. Educators who know their students are ready can demand more than educators who fear that their students aren't ready. (Ask me how I know.)

Now, Liu does make the point that one of the early goals of testing was to smash a hereditary elite by opening it to smart kids of every background, e.g. Columbia opening up to children of immigrants instead of traditional WASPs. That's a type of anti-elitism, but also a new type of elitism.

American Idyll: Intro

 Liu's book is a heavy read. She assumes a reader well-versed in intellectual history, political philosophy, etc. The intro was a hard read, rapidly summarizing many different ideas over the years. She gives a lot of attention to Richard Hofstadter in her intro, and her synopsis of him matches up with my recollection.

A few choice quotes:

If in the 1890's the People's Party demanded economic justice for producers, the populists of the 1980's demanded freedom from cultural condescension. (page 4)

I freely admit to having some of that sneering condescension in me. I know that I shouldn't, but it's hard to let go of it. As much as educated liberals can drive me crazy, their opponents refuse vaccines while pushing back against elites by rallying behind a rich asshole from NYC (Trump) and previously a rich asshole from Connecticut (Bush The Lesser). How do I not look down on that? At least when I support an elite I'm a knowing elitist, you know?

But I just did what she's talking about: I shifted from economics to culture war. That's her point. Everyone shifted from economics to culture war. Maybe it's in part because calories are now cheap, so the economics of farming is no longer so politically central? We've hardly solved all our material problems, but we solved a key one: Getting enough calories. (Yes, I'm quite aware that calories aren't the be-all and end-all of nutrition, but getting sufficient energy is certainly important. If anything we have the opposite problem now...)

Also on page 4:

For the most extreme academic populist, any criticism of popular culture and popular taste was associated with elitism, universalism, normative masculinity, consensus politics, liberalism, and Marxism.

I don't know the humanities as she does, but certainly I've seen more celebration of middle-brow culture. That's not all bad--Shakespeare did plenty of stuff for the low-brow and middle-brow parts of the audience. But, yes, there is insecurity about denoting something "high" culture. We're all supposed to be egalitarians now.

On page 6 she critiques right-wing populism for embracing superficial trappings of common life--pork rinds, NASCAR, etc.--while pushing policies that dismantle or privatize the post-New Deal state. We can debate how much has actually been dismantled, but she's certainly summarizing a well-known critique. She spends a lot of time on Thomas Frank, who has made these points better than I have time to summarize. (I've only read him in excerpts, not full books.)

Her outline of the rest of the book is as follow:

Chapter 1 will critique meritocracy and standardized tests. I'm not favorable to such critiques, but given her sympathies we might be able to find some common ground. Chapter 2 will continue the critique of standardized tests and take on the concept of the "average student." I think I have some common ground with this notion: As much as I think tests tell us something with some relevance for some endeavors, they aren't everything, and the big middle ground of humanity needs varied paths. In chapter 3 she looks at advice, self-help, counseling, etc. She freely admits to covering some of the same ground as Hofstadter in "Self-Help and Spiritual Technology." In Chapter 4 she looks at myths about student radicals in the 60's and how that played into critiques of elites and experts. Finally, in Chapter 5 she looks at Cultural Studies and the Professional Managerial Class. Apparently there will be a discussion of Alan Sokal and the Science Wars of the 90's.

Should be an interesting read.

Back to Book Blogging: American Idyll by Catherine Liu

I have been reading a bunch of non-fiction, but not blogging has hurt my retention. The next book will be American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique by UCI Professor Catherine Liu. I recently read an essay of hers (alas, I can no longer find it) and that put her on my radar. The title should make it clear why I decided to read this book from among her works. Haven't started it yet, but this post commits me to blogging about it.

Elite paradoxes

 I just don't have the blogging bug these days, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I very much appreciate this article about elite education by Jonny Thakkar at Swarthmore. Some choice quotes:

...Swarthmore educates around 1,600 students per year at a cost of something like $110,000 per student. (I find it hard to believe it could be so expensive, but the figures are what they are and apparently the explanation is just that the facilities and support services are first class, the faculty are well paid, and the student-faculty ratio is extremely low.) By comparison, the annual per-student spending of Southern Connecticut State University is about $13,000. Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

This makes faculty radicalism at elite colleges largely phantasmagoric. Professors campaigning for something like divestment from fossil fuels typically take themselves to be fighting the man in the form of an inscrutable board of managers — or should that be board of donors? — whom they picture as bourgeois reactionaries. But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty members are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window dressing.

Everyone in academia agrees that our paramount task is to dismantle power structures. To that end, we will select administrators committed to dismantling power structures, and promote the career advancement of those committed to ending inequality.

In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory, I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think. One of the dogmas of contemporary academe is that history gets made from below and that any attempt to argue otherwise robs ordinary people of their agency. But it is true by definition, or near enough, that elites have more power than nonelites. It follows that what elites think and do should be of concern to everybody, and hence that a society should care a great deal about the political education its elites receive.

Much like the Keynes quote about "practical men" being slaves of dead economists and philosophers.

Of course, the committed anti-elitists will never leave their elite schools.  Thakkar offers some good reasons why:

In a funny way, though, I actually agree that conservatism is better represented on campus than is often assumed. Those who argued that the Chamberlain Project was antithetical to the college’s history of peace activism, for example, were clearly offering a conservative reason in the form of an appeal to tradition. And lately I’ve been wondering whether the decision to teach at an elite college doesn’t necessarily commit you to respecting a conservative consideration of a different kind, one emphasized by thinkers as disparate as Michael Oakeshott and G. A. Cohen, namely the thought that we have reason to cherish the value that already exists in the world even if the things that bear that value would not exist in a better world.

...

One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware. Each needs to recognize that they are the recipient of a golden ticket, not so they can engage in pointless rituals of self-denunciation but so they can reckon with the question of which responsibilities follow from the privilege that has been unfairly bestowed upon them. What is needed, as conservatives such as Helen Andrews and Ross Douthat have rightly argued, is something like the old ethos of noblesse oblige, according to which a golden ticket comes with the unavoidable obligation to make what Christopher Lasch called “a direct and personal contribution to the public good.” The difficulty is knowing how to teach with this in mind, given that career decisions are generally considered private.

However, he makes one assertion which is common but I have lately heard is contested:

But America will not be just any time soon; even its public-education system devotes vastly greater resources to well-off children than to those from poorer backgrounds.

I have no doubt that spending disparities exist, but I have heard knowledge people contest the magnitude of the alleged disparities. I suspect, however, that affluent districts actually operate with less overhead and more spending on in-the-classroom things, like science equipment and smaller classes and sports facilities and whatnot, i.e. stuff that kids actually see and experience directly. Poorer districts probably have more bureaucracies overseeing the efforts to allegedly help poor kids. Because poor kids allegedly need case managers and assessments and whatnot, instead of, you know, science equipment and small classes and sports facilities and all that.

Piece on Diversity Statements at Heterodox Academy

The Heterodox Academy blog just posted a commentary piece by me, critiquing the use of Diversity Statements in academic hiring. I'm pleased that I was able to work in a Ghostbusters quote.

I want to read some cancelled books. The scolds? They scare me more than crooks!

The estate of Dr. Seuss has decided to cease publication of 6 books because they carry images that offend modern sensibilities, and perhaps for good reason. It's an easy decision to criticize, but also an easy one to defend. After all, the book was not censored by a government, and there are no penalties to anyone who already owns a copy. Besides, some books really aren't appropriate for kids. And books go out of print all the time if nobody buys enough copies to justify continued printing.

All of these things are true, and yet. And yet.

And yet there's a difference between choosing some other book and condemning a particular book as dangerous. In a culture that values books, people laud the ones that they choose to read rather than condemning the ones they choose not to read. Every time that I go into a library or bookstore and walk out with a book, I have decided that all of the other books in there are, in one way or another, not as suitable for my current needs. But I do not tell people that there's something wrong with the other books. Every time I decide which book to assign for a class, I have implicitly decided that other books are, in some way, not as good, but I do not spend (much) class time critiquing the other books.

Some of Seuss's books probably are not the best choices for young children. They probably should not be emphasized over other Seuss books, or children's books by other authors. There's nothing illiberal about drawing up a list that happens to include some wonderful children's books but doesn't include And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. And if this means too few buyers to justify further printing costs, well, then some of Seuss's books will go out of print, like so many books before.

And yet. 

Libraries with finite shelf space, publishers with finite budgets, and schools with finite time for reading instruction should all be in the business of exploring and celebrating that which is valuable in the books on their rosters. That is different from announcing and critiquing the harm of other books. The world has more than enough puritans and preachers telling us why books are harmful. Why would a book lover join their ranks when quiet omission is an option?

More importantly, I do not believe that there is such a thing as a truly dangerous book. There are certainly books that one could misread (e.g. all of them), books that small children are not yet ready to examine (e.g. most of them), and books that might challenge our values (e.g. the best ones), but there is no such a thing as an inherently poisonous page. A book that blends a joyous children's tale with the less savory norms of an earlier era is a cultural artifact well worthy of examination. It might not belong in the typical kindergarten syllabus, but I would hope it continues to attract enough attention to stay on the market. If not, I hope we could wave goodbye to it with sorrow rather than smugness. Maybe the best parts of it will move a future author to write an inspired work.

It would be easy to tar my stance as reactionary, defending dead white males whose works offend a more diverse society. However, I still remember the 80's and 90's. I remember when the people trying to get art and literature pulled from the market were conservatives. It used to be the fundamentalist preachers who wanted to banish art from the public eye if they thought it might corrupt the youth. Indeed, in many places it still is the religious conservatives who occupy that role, and not just in foreign countries. America has no shortage of conservative religious types who would gladly censor art if given the chance. Every argument that I make now about the complexity of art and literature, the value of examining morally complex characters and ambiguous themes, applied at least as well to the conservative censors of previous decades. Dee Snyder's arguments are timeless.

I want a society that finds joy in books. I want a society where the books that discomfit us are examined for lessons when possible and treated with benign neglect otherwise. I want a society where we respond to apparently offensive literature with a simple "That's nice, but here's another book that might be more useful in this lesson plan" rather than "No! That book is dangerous! It will pollute minds!"

New Medium post

 I decided that my thoughts on less-academic matters should go to Medium.com, so here's a post on my frustration with COVID pessimists and vaccine discourse.

An article on ass-essment

 I don't have time for an in-depth review of this article on assessment, but I do enjoy it. I never thought I'd read an article that approvingly quotes both Dewey and Hofstadter. 

I want to quote two things. First:

As Michael Bennett and Jacqueline Brady point out in their 2014 article “A Radical Critique of the Learning Outcomes Assessment Movement,” learning outcomes is only a different term for lesson plans or course content. 

Yep. It's about asking us to restate something we already know (we'd better show up to class with an idea of what we're doing) with a word that they control, because they can always accuse us of not understanding their buzzword well enough.

Second, there are many great points about the pointlessness of "learning goals" but I will quote this one:

Trevor Hussey and Patrick Smith, in their 2008 article “Learning Outcomes,” distinguish between and among learning goals written for a lesson, for a course, and for a program, and the authors point out that the more remote the learning goals are from the classroom itself, the more irrelevant learning outcomes become. Robert Shireman, in his 2016 op-ed “SLO Madness,” amusingly labels student learning outcomes as “gibberish,” capturing Dewey’s point that for a learning goal to be an intellectual one it has to arise from the intelligence and experience of the teacher; otherwise it is meaningless. Similarly, one cannot function as a true scholar or an intellectual while being told what to do. Moreover, the sheer number of classes that need to be certified necessitates that learning goals be written in categories that may or may not be relevant to the material taught. For example, in the general education category at San José State University (SJSU), where I teach, a single learning goal can apply to ten to twenty different disciplines.

This machine-like nature stands in stark contrast to the ass-essment movement's commitment to "innovation." If I'm constantly doing new things then the goals will inevitably be shifting, at least in part. Yes, at the end of the day I still want them to learn optics or mechanics or whatever, but if I try new assignments then the details change, and the details of the assignment matter! The details of the project matter! Two classes can cover the same basic idea in such different ways that all you can really say is "Well, both classes talked about lenses."

Posting elsewhere

 I'm occasionally putting some of my more polished writing at Medium.com. Here's an essay on why I don't like using education jargon.

Stillborn God: Rest of chapter 5

 He spends some time discussing various liberal theologians, particularly in 19th century Germany. They were so sure that they'd come up with rational ways to reconcile modern society and religion and steer Europe away from the passions of the religious wars.

And then World War 1 happened. Oops. Even if WW2 had never happened, the first World War is more than enough to show that Christian Europe had not really sorted out its problems.

Near the end (page 248) Lilla gets at something that had been hinted at since the start of the book: Once you have a modern system of ideas that doesn't really require God, why have God?

Once the liberal theologians had succeeded, as they did, in portraying biblical faith as the highest expression of moral consciousness and the precondition of modern life, they were unable to explain why modern men and women should still consider themselves to be Christians and Jews rather than simply modern men and women.

Indeed. Religion was measured against its ability to help people express and live by modern values, not by its access to truth that would otherwise be unavailable.

I'm coming more and more to believe that everyone needs religion. Or, at least, they need religion when locked inside and fearing death, which has been the condition of our world since March 2020. From the confessional rites of penitent white liberals during the summer of 2020 to the idiots screaming about freedom while rampaging inside the US Capitol (and nearly rampaging inside the Michigan state capitol last year) everyone is invoking the sacred. Yes, many of the right-wingers are Christians, but I think the Christian faith of the hard right is over-estimated. Whether talking about the more libertarian-leaning elements of the right, or the definitely-not-religious Steve Bannon faction, not everyone on the right is high on Christianity. But that doesn't mean they aren't religious. I mean, they brought a shaman in furs to the Senate chamber with them.

Stillborn God, Chp. 4 and start of Chp. 5

 Chp. 4 spends a lot of time on Hegel. I don't feel like I can summarize his entire summary, I'll just quote one point (regarding Hegelian thought, not necessarily Lilla's own preferences) from near the end of the chapter (pages 206-207):

Now we know what it is to live in freedom: It is to live in modern bourgeois societies where we exercise control over the machinery of political life, hardly noticing its gentle hum. These societies will be complex, comprised [sic] of organically connected social spheres, in which we play different roles: citizen, producer, consumer, newspaper reader, club member, parent, friend. Those who are educated and cultured will have no trouble reconciling themselves to such a system, since they will understand its rationality and appreciate its freedom. Those less gifted may still need religion and patriotic symbols to win their loyalty and sacrifice, but these, too, can be provide within the ambit of the bourgeois state.

One could argue that Trumpism and the sacking of the Capitol show what happens when the less cultured (at least by the measures favored by people like Hegel, and me, apparently) feel like the system is run by people who don't actually share their beliefs in religion and patriotic symbols. That's hardly a complete diagnosis of what led to the current troubles, but it's a factor, and a way of pointing to a bigger cultural divide that fuels a lot of things. Lilla has summarized so many political philosophers as conceding a need for some sort of religion to control the worst in people and/or channel the best. If religion is not heartfelt worship then it is a noble lie, and noble lies only work when delivered convincingly. If they aren't even delivered then there's no solidarity. 

Not everyone on the right (even the hard right) is as religious as people think, but if they reject revealed religion they still adhere to a "civic religion" that reveres a particular vision of the Founders and the Constitution. It isn't theology in the sense that most of the political philosophers discussed by Lilla probably thought of it, but it is religion. It is a narrative that tries to explain the origins of the setting in which people live, and offer morality tales. It's mostly BS, if for no other reason than that the Founders disagreed with each other on so many things, so one can't ascribe a consistent belief system to them.

And it's disrespected. I just called it BS. I'm part of the disrespect. And they know it. They also know that the federal government rejects this originalist religion, as it does far more than the Constitutional Convention ever contemplated. We have a priestly caste of Supreme Court Justices who interpret the original texts and proclaim that the federal government's actions are consistent with their reading of the Constitution, but it is, on some level BS. I don't offer that as a revolutionary statement or a call to an uprising. It's just a fact that basically every modern society on earth has a government that does far more than our Constitutional Convention contemplated. It's how the modern world works. Which is arguably fine, but to have a priestly caste say that the sacred text authorizes this requires mental gymnastics.

On the other side of the culture war, inclusivity is the new religion. I've said plenty about that and don't need to rehash it.

So back to Lilla. He says that the religious wars of post-Reformation Europe led to a desire to separate church from state, or at least remove church authority from any possible meddling in the state, and leave at best an "opiate of the masses" that could be used to suppress the worst and/or bring out the best in people, in accordance with some plan. He's focusing on the debate between those two sides, but I'm left wondering how you get people to buy into either form of religion if they can tell that the elite classes supervising the delivery of this religion, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave, very obviously don't believe it.

Anyway, he is focusing a lot on Germany part-way through chapter 5, noting that many Germans believed Protestantism should be an integral part of a modern state, while England and the US believed that religion would benefit from religious freedom. (I gather that by that time the UK had largely stopped persecuting Christians who eschewed the Church of England.) He even notes that many Jews in Germany thought that their values were sufficiently similar to those of Protestantism that they could be assimilated into this new Germany. (Lilla adds that we know how that worked out, in a moment of dry understatement.)

One other thing I notice at this point is that he focuses so much on Catholic-Protestant tensions and doesn't mention the Eastern Orthodox churches. I gather it's because he's talking about debates in Christian Europe, and most Eastern Orthodox Christians either lived under Ottoman rule or Russian rule.  Russia was/is, of course, Christian, but it's also on the geopolitical edge of Europe and poorer than most European Christian countries. And Christians under Ottoman rule couldn't really have religious politics.

One other thing about chapter 4: On page 189 he notes that Hegel found Greek religion interesting because their gods were so human. While it meant it would be hard for Greek gods to have final moral authority, he saw it as a window into Greek cultural appreciation of humanity as humanity. Christianity, at least in many forms, tells us to look to the next life, not to lust for this world, while the Greeks could appreciate human life as embodied life in this world that even the gods had gusto for. Lilla notes later that, for all of Catholicism's otherworldly pretensions, it became a very worldly power. The reaction was a Reformation that focused on individual faith rather than adherence to an institution, and somehow wound up producing a Protestant work ethic that led to great worldly prosperity while focusing minds on salvation.

Stillborn God, Chapters 1 and 2

 My previous post was about the short introduction to The Stillborn God. I've since read the first two chapters.

Chapter 1, "The Crisis" is largely about Christian political theology and its origins. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the history, but the insights provide some food for thought. He gets at the core issue pretty early, noting two things I've remarked on before. Page 22:

God's intentions themselves need no justification, since he is the last court of appeal. If we could justify him, we would not need him; we would only need the arguments validating his actions.

I'm not sure I completely agree with that, but I get the argument. I think there would be ways to say something about the importance of the final authority while hiding his rationales behind a veil of mystery. But maybe that argument just reduces to what I've said before about the need for a final authority so you don't have agonize over your postulates.

On pages 22-23, he makes an interesting comment about Greek political philosophy:

In ancient Greece, some imagined a first cause or "unmoved mover" without personality who embodied divine law, which philosophers could contemplate to understand the cosmic order and man's place within it. Other Greeks entertained thoughts about a panoply of deities with conflicting personalities but whose natures were still intelligible to human reason. Such gods were never thought by the Greeks to exercise revealed political authority because they created man and the cosmos--and perhaps that is why political philosophy was first able to develop in ancient Greece.

I've made the point before that pagan pantheons provide no moral authority because there is no power monopoly and no consistent behavior between the deities. There is instead strife, and most of the point of morality in society is to avoid or resolve strife.

He goes on to talk about the challenges facing Christianity, which has a 3-fold deity with very different roles in the world, and a history that started as a minority faith and then accidentally acquired an Empire. Christ was a hippie figure but his followers were running the Roman Empire. He over-simplifies when he occasionally contrasts with Judaism and Islam, but he isn't really writing about them. He's making the point that Christianity had a dilemma in constructing a political theology, but at least had a divinity with a monopoly on moral authority that could, in principle, provide the final axiom. I'm not sure that Christianity is as unique as he claims in having dilemmas around political theology, but he never pushes hard on the claim of uniqueness, so I guess I can let it slide. I'm sure that there are differences between Christianity's problems and other religions' problems. 

Chapter 2 dissects the history and struggles around that. I like the point on page 59 about how Christian cosmology is a rather strange thing:

The Christian conception of the cosmos was always a patchwork affair. It had been cobbled together in the Middle Ages from biblical sources, the speculations in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, the systematic scientific treatises of Aristotle (filtered through Muslim commentators), and the ancient astronomical works of Ptolemy. Why it was fashioned at all is something of a puzzle. The Hebrew Bible does not engage in systematic speculation about the structure of the cosmos; it assumes that nature was created good but has nothing fundamental to teach us about how to live. The Torah is complete. The Christian New Testament takes a similar approach to nature: it is there, it is good, but it is not grace.

In The Meaning of Creation, Conrad Hyers argued that Genesis sought to demystify the world, treating it not as the playground of disparate pagan deities but a place that one God made with one purpose, and it is good. And the explanation of God's creation involves a work week ending in rest, just as a righteous adherent of the faith would work all week and devote the 7th day to worship and rest. Trying to tie this to some sort of natural science was never the goal, and if the Church had grasped that point the Galileo Affair might not have been an issue.

Much of the chapter concerns Hobbes. I am taking a big risk by offering summary of a summary of Lilla's Hobbes and his work Leviathan, but how else will I recall anything if I don't write about what I read? Hobbes argued that human existence is at perpetual risk of a state of war, and for fear of death and loss they hand power to a sovereign who can guarantee peace. This is the basic argument that an effective government basically has a monopoly on the use of force within its territory. Worse, people who look into the depths of their own souls will see dark desires, project their desires onto others, and see a need for violence because whoever moves first has the advantage. In Lilla's read, Hobbes reduces the problem of evil to game theory: Conflict is a natural state and you have to be aggressive. Forget demons and original sin and all of that, there's a much simpler explanation of the darkness of human existence.

Lilla also argues that while the task of a king is to keep peace in his territory, churchmen cheat by speaking directly to the people and offering messages that don't necessarily fit into the sovereign's plan.

Lilla summarizes Hobbes' proposal as being not to abolish the fears that drive humans, but rather:

...focus it on one figure alone, the sovereign. If an absolute sovereign could ensure that his subjects feared no other sovereigns before him, human or divine, then peace might be possible.

At the root of all power is fear and force, and the hope is that absolute power will bring absolute peace. Well, um, yeah, we know how well that works. But then again, no state has ever been truly effective, especially back then, so I guess I see the temptation.

But to Lilla, the most important thing in Hobbes is not his case for an absolute sovereign but that he turns political questions into questions about human nature and how people see the world. Everything is driven by human fears and how they project their own flaws onto others, so perception is ultimately everything.

Interestingly, Lilla claims that while Hobbes was OK with a state religion to help ensure compliance, he was not too concerned with whether people honestly believed, only with whether they demonstrated obedience. He reads Hobbes as being interested in vanquishing the interplay of church and state because it led to churchmen bypassing kings, and in this way Lilla sees some continuity between Hobbes and much more liberal thinkers that came after. If they were interested in taking away the power of churchmen and finding a better way to enforce harmony then Lilla sees them as being in some sort of continuity with Hobbes.

What I find interesting in all of this is how the problem of perception is tied in with the problem of power. It ultimately comes down to who the armed men will listen to. What they perceive and fear determines what they respond to and how they respond. In this regard there's some overlap with Plato, whose book The Republic is concerned with governance but goes deep into the allegory of the cave: How can we know if what we see is reality or something put there to fool us? We only know what we perceive, and that will affect our conduct, including the conduct of those entrusted with power. Just 9 days ago we saw how this plays out: A mob stormed the Capitol because they perceive an election as rigged, and armed men defended it because, whatever they might personally think about the particulars of whatever allegations, they were loyal to the system that certified Biden. Mind you, I have every reason to believe that Biden's win was legitimate, but the facts of legitimacy are less important than the perceived facts. How do I honestly know that it was legit? How do they honestly know it wasn't? We have our preferences that determine whom we trust, and a critical mass of people in the right places put their trust in the system and hence fought back against the mob, while a disturbing number of people put their trust elsewhere and stormed the building.

The roots of power are dark and fundamental stuff, and what I'm hoping to learn is what Lilla sees as the fallout from removing God from that equation. He says that a lot of political philosophy in Europe arose from religious wars, bloody battles between people who all believed in the God of Abraham, the Bible, and Jesus, but were loyal to different clergy. Before reading this I assumed that the problem of mixing religion and state was solely about the passions for control that come from religion, and the excesses that those passions can lead to. Most kings wind up being practical, hoping that they can get some tax revenue, keep the place running, and keep themselves running it. How a peasant prays is rarely their biggest headache. But neighbors and local clergy can be terrible. The take I'm getting here is that it's not just about them, it's about the fact that they are a separate center of power. That's interesting to me, because my liberalism leads me to believe that a society needs many centers of power. I've said much about how bad it is for economies and "the good jobs" to be monocultures. I still think that's true, but there are obviously more angles here. Take away religion and you take away its problems, but you don't take away the needs it fulfilled, and yet you do take away a center of power, with all of its advantages and drawbacks.

Food for thought.

Next Read: The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla

The next book that I'll blog is The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. Lilla is examining what he calls political theology, i.e. politics rooted in religion. He doesn't necessarily mean strict theocracy like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the Puritan settlements of New England. He just means a society where people look to religion for guidance on social structure. From page 7:

Human beings everywhere think about the basic structure of reality and the right way to live, and many are led from those questions to speculate about the divine or to believe in revelations. Psychologically speaking, it is a very short step from holding such beliefs to being convinced that they are legitimate sources of political authority.

Indeed, as much as I value religious freedom and the religious neutrality of the public square, how can we expect people to not be influenced by their religion? I believe whole-heartedly that we can and should find secular rationales for public policy, but if that public policy touches on matters of morality, how could we expect a person to NOT be influenced by their religion? You can come up with secular rationales for all sorts of things that various religious denominations might approve of, and members of those denominations should appeal to those rationales so that they can coexist in the public square with people who aren't in their religion, but let's not kid ourselves about the role of their beliefs. I say that not to dismiss their secular arguments as pretextual, but rather to make a point about coexistence. I am a state employee, but I teach in part because of things instilled in me in Catholic school. That's not a priori a church/state violation.

He also makes an important point about the role of stories in human understanding and child psychology:

We are still like children when it comes to thinking about modern political life, whose experimental nature we prefer not to contemplate. Instead, we tell ourselves stories about how our big world came to be and why it is destined to persist. These are legends about the course of history, full of grand terms to describe the process supposedly at work--modernization, secularization, democratization, the "disenchantment of the world," "history as the story of liberty," and countless others. These are the fairy tales of our time. Whether they are recounted in epic mode by those satisfied with the present, or in tragic mode by those nostalgic for Eden, they serve the same function in our intellectual culture that tales of witches and wizards do in our children's imaginations: they make the world legible, they reassure us of its irrevocability, and they relive us of responsibility for maintaining it.

He goes on to say that his book is no fairy tale, because he will discuss the fragility of the modern world. He was writing in 2008, with 9/11 on his mind, but it applies today. Indeed, just 8 days ago barbarians entered the Capitol and chased away the representatives of the people. Their rationales were more complex than a single slogan about modernity and its critics or whatever, but many were in that vein.

In the introduction he argues that we secular westerners are the unusual ones, not necessarily because we don't live in a theocracy but because we don't live in a society where appeals to divine authority are common and accepted. I think about this a lot, and not just because I am religious. If you push hard enough on a chain of "Why?" questions you eventually reach your fundamental axioms, the bare assumptions that you can't derive from other assumptions. And then you say "But why those axioms?" and people kind of stall. You can appeal to personal desires and preferences, but besides the fact that those desires are almost by definition selfish, this world has many people desiring many different things. Why should you desire what you desire instead of something else? A king could provide an answer to that, but the leaders of a democratic society cannot (unless you subscribe to a very vulgar and illiberal majoritarianism). You could appeal to consequentialist arguments, and say that without these principles guiding a society you get chaos, but we have seen more than one type of society enjoy extended eras of peace (or at least internal peace). 

You soon reach a "Well, that's my opinion" stage, and the obvious modern/postmodern response is "But that's just your opinion, man!" We have no real base if you dig deep enough. One motive for religion is not merely fear of death but fear that all we have is each other and our equally idiosyncratic and arbitrary preferences. Wouldn't it be nice to have some authority to sort it out? Not just because humans are weak and sheep and all that, but because we've built up some pretty impressive things despite our ostensible weaknesses, and it's terrifying to think that they sit on sand. Surely we must have a rock under them! Surely there must be some foundation for prosperous, liberal, tolerant civilization. 

Perhaps part of why social justice and diversity talk gets so religious is because they want to just take the tolerance and diversity that we should preserve and put that itself on God's pedestal. It's a nice idea, except it eventually results in guilty liberals confessing sin in pointless training sessions while somebody tries to remove Shakespeare from the curriculum, and none of this stops barbarians from storming the Capitol. We thus get to the true root of power, which is force, and then we have to ask about the factors that make (hopefully most of) the men with guns loyal. Those factors rarely involve training sessions on implicit bias. If there is a God in our politics, it's whatever keeps the armed men at the base of the system from turning disloyal.

Anyway, let's see what he has to say about the loss of religion and its consequences.

Latest read: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe

 The latest read is Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe. Arguably it is pointless to read a critique of liberal guilt after watching MAGA lunatics take over the Capitol. On the other hand, 2020 saw an incredible outpouring of liberal guilt and self-flagellation, and the end result of that liberal guilt and self-flagellation is that the mob was not stopped. Mind you, I'm not placing all of the blame on any particular liberal official or faction, or denying the role of the Trump administration (far from it). Trump and his cult are indeed the bad guys here, and beating ourselves up did exactly nothing to stop them. Say everything that needs saying about the ignorance and bigotry of MAGA and I will agree with the big picture and most details. (I will always reserve the right to dissent from specifics, but I might also assign that dissent a low priority, depending on the detail.) 

But given all of that, what did liberal guilt do to stop them? Did liberal guilt get reinforcements in place sooner? Did liberal guilt erect more barricades or get more police out there? Did liberal guilt speed any evacuations? Did liberal guilt talk any Trumpanzees out of the insane notion that Democrats rigged the election for Biden but forgot to rig enough Senate seats to give themselves a majority prior to the Georgia elections? Did liberal guilt persuade anyone that the ghost of Hugo Chavez isn't dropping off faked ballots in Maine?

Liberal guilt is worth exploring precisely because it is the irrelevant distraction that liberals turn to. And, honestly, what is simultaneously heartening and disheartening about this book is just how little things have changed. All of this has happened before and will happen again. To wit, page 26 quotes a particularly woke passage from a Vogue article. I don't know exactly when it was published, but presumably in or shortly before 1970 (the year that Wolfe's Radical Chic essay was published). There are two salient points here:

1. Vogue was woke even back then. I bring this up because the anti-PC corners of the internet have, in the past few years, taken note of the extreme wokeness of Teen Vogue. They find it strange, and quote excerpts of articles with definitely woke viewpoints. Being a person who has never read fashion magazines, I likewise find it strange. Then again, since I've never read fashion magazines, how would I know what is normal for them? There's the old joke about only reading Playboy for the articles, acknowledging (and protesting!) that Playboy has articles about things other than naked women. I guess it makes sense that a fashion mag would have political articles about things besides the gender politics of skirt lengths or whatever.
2. The Vogue article capitalized Black but put white in lower-case. 2020 saw a lot of this, and a lot of carping about how it was a new and unreasonable stylistic choice. The reasonableness is very much a matter of opinion, but the newness is factually wrong, as I now know.

At this point I don't have a lot else to say about the book. But I'm glad to see that all of this has happened before and will happen again.