Revisiting Rene Girard: _I See Satan Fall Like Lightning_

 A while back I tried reading Rene Girard's Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and gave up. Now I'm attempting his later, shorter book titled I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. It promises to be an exploration of the victim concept in Western culture, and at some point will tackle political correctness. The basic premise is that Christianity flipped the script on the age-old ritual of scapegoating and communal violence, putting the emphasis not on the community purified by the removal of the enemy, nor even on the heroism of the divine sacrifice, but on the wrongness of crucifying Him. I'm about a third of the way in, and he's still mostly talking about "mimetic rivalry."

I was not sold on the mimetic basis of rivalry when I first read Girard. But this book makes a key point: Humans envy each other no matter how wealthy their society is. If our envy were based on desires that didn't derive from social cues, anyone with more food than a baseline caveman would be happy. But we desire new things and more things because we see what those around us have and how much they enjoy it.

One other key point: In chapter 4 he talks about a pagan society killing a beggar to end a plague. Contemporary historians considered the claim credible. Now, obviously killing a guy already in the town will not stop an epidemic. If he were the initial carrier and killed by arrows from a distance before entering the city, OK, that might save the town. But he was in town. No way killing him could stop a microbe.

What Girard says is that plagues led to social disorder, and so social disorder was sometimes interpreted as a plague. One might note an analogy with the social contagion of mass hysteria even in the modern world. So if historians note lots of people suffering mass hysteria, and perhaps even getting physical maladies from the disruption of life, the breakdown of services and supplies, etc., well, anything that restores order could indeed end the epidemic.

Girard writes on page 52:

Until the Renaissance, whenever "real" epidemics occurred they disrupted social relations.

Alas, he wrote this book in 1999, and died in 2015. He never experienced 2020.

Some have joked that Russia's invasion of Ukraine ended COVID. Now, on one level that's absurd: COVID was and is still spreading, albeit not with the same severity after a few years of both vaccine-acquired and naturally-acquired immunity. And early 2022 corresponded with the tail of the first Omicron wave that gave COVID to damn near everyone who had not already gotten it. On another level, Ukraine certainly diverted a lot of attention from COVID. A certain kind of Westerner had a new foe to oppose and a new victim* to support. I think I know what Girard would say to that.

*I characterize Ukraine this way not to critique them as weak but to simply recognize that they were the targets of unprovoked aggression. Their response has been heroic.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

 I have been reading a lot but haven't had the blogging bug. Until today, because I read two very different things that clicked together.

I'll start with the Serious Reading: I'm reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a very philosophical novel that I won't attempt to summarize in full. I'm about a third of the way in, in chapter three of Part 3 ("Words Misunderstood") He's describing the experiences of Sabina, a Czech woman who has moved to Switzerland after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Sabina is talking to some other Czech emigres, and one of them starts inquiring into her anti-communist bonafides. Did she engage in sufficiently dissenting activities back in Czechoslovakia? Did she do enough to oppose the Soviet-backed regime?

Sabina's realization is that this guy is the mirror image of the communist functionaries who would scrutinize people's dossiers before they could get jobs or travel visas or official approval for other activities of life. It also reminds me of a point that Vaclav Havel made in his essay "The Power of the Powerless": These modern authoritarian regimes care deeply about appearances. It's not enough to just threaten to kill anyone who tries to thwart the dictator's material interests, they also need to keep up the veneer of ideological uniformity.

Related to the veneer of ideological uniformity, today I learned that in the official Dungeons and Dragons rules they will no longer refer to Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, etc. as "races." They are now "species." It seems that the essentializing of group differences in Dungeons and Dragons comes too close to racism in our real world.

There are two levels on which we could look at this. If we approach it purely on the level of the specific term, well, I don't know what the "right" term is to describe a world of fantasy and magic, with trolls and wizards and lizard-men and gnomes and all sorts of other weird stuff. Surely trolls and humans and lizard-men differ from each other more than, say, humans from different continents differ from each other. On that level, "race" seems an inapt term, and trying to equate the difference between an orc and an elf to the difference between two groups of real humans seems illogical. On the other hand, the existence of half-elves, half-orcs, half-giants (in some stories), etc. suggests that these creatures can mate with humans, and maybe do differ less than most species.

Not to mention that they mix and mingle in many of these fantasy societies, which may be the far more salient reason to say that they are more akin to different human races than to, say, dogs and cats. From a story perspective, Elves and Dwarves and Lizard Men (or Lizard Thems, to be gender-neutral?) are groups that often have their own separate kingdoms but frequently trade and sometimes even mix in bustling trading ports. Their interactions are fantastical, exaggerated stand-ins for conflict and cooperation between human groups, as magical creatures in fairy tales have long been. "Race" captures their story function quite accurately, if sometimes uncomfortably. (And who said fiction is or ought to be uniformly comforting?)

But that's not the real point here. It's not about dogs and cats versus human groups in modern society. It's about moral hygiene. It's about trying to ensure that this fantasy game doesn't corrupt the youth with ideas that run counter to the morality that adults are trying to install. And we've seen this game before, with the 1980's freak-outs about D&D being satanic. Now a new group of prim, proper grown-ups with strict moral codes is trying to parse games of fantasy and imagination for anything that might corrupt the youth, and lo and behold they've found it. How long before Tipper Gore starts bitching about music again?

All of this has happened before and will happen again.

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.

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.

Next book: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

My next book blogging will be about Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by Rene Girard. I came across a reference to this book, while reading something about political correctness. I can no longer find the essay that I read, but the title of this book stuck with me. The reference said that this book discusses the roots of religion, and since the social concerns at the root of political correctness also sit at the root of much that maddens me in modern education, it's worth studying.

The book seems to be very focused on the theme of mimicry as the root of social strife. It's dangerous to try to fit all of human society into one single social theme, but my impression of 20th century French intellectuals is that they engaged in these over-simplifications for playful reasons. They felt that if you want to understand an idea you must take it as far as it can go and then some, and try to fit absolutely everything into it. Even if the fit is awkward, you must keep trying. They never say explicitly that the awkwardness of the fit might be telling in its own way, but instead expected you to figure that out for yourself.  So I'm reading him forgivingly. Also, his ideas about mimicry, and how it can lead to rivalry and contests, while repeated on every page, also seem to be more of an invitation to bigger questions, rather than something that he seriously intends you to fit everything into.

Mostly it has me thinking about religion in general. Abrahamic faiths seem to be particularly versatile religions, in that they provide at least 4 things:

1. A cosmology: God made the world, and that explains it.
2. Morality: You must do good when possible, and atone and repent by the rules of the faith when you fall short, and God will reward you.
3. Ritual: The year is organized by a religious calendar, with rituals for different facets of life at different times of the year. This focuses our time and endeavors, provides cohesion and outlets for our communities, and provides, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a season for all things.
4. Community: The community of believers is distinct from other tribes.

When I contrast with older polytheistic faiths, one omission that I see is morality. One reason is that in ancient mythology it isn't clear which god you should look to for morality. The universe has no undisputed moral leader, but rather a strife between deities with conflicting agendas. And many of those deities are deeply flawed (the Greek gods being particularly flawed, but not unique in having flaws). Are we to look to these murderous adulterers for morality? At least the Old Testament God, when He smites the wicked, has an uncontested claim to moral arbiter status.

Instead, polytheists appeal to different deities for different purposes.  Want victory in war? Sacrifice to the god of war. Want a bountiful harvest? Sacrifice to a harvest deity, or maybe a weather deity. And so forth. Also, while ancient polytheists were deeply concerned with tribal identity, alien tribes have deities whom some societies considered real rivals to their deities, rather than figments of alien imagination.

(Hinduism has morality, but there's also an idea that the multitude of gods reflect some deeper, higher order behind the world, something that might not be a single God like the God of Abraham, but at least brings unity.)

Political correctness offers morality and community, and increasingly ritual (e.g. land acknowledgments), but not (yet) a cosmology. I suspect that as they edge toward "noble savage" tropes we'll see a re-emergence of religious cosmology, particularly as the astronomy community struggles to reconcile their need for mountaintop observatories with traditional religious beliefs about sacred mountains, but we're not yet at the point of a PC cosmology. Maybe we'll eventually get myths about certain groups having not just more sustainable lifestyles but supernatural connections to the land, but we're not quite there (as far as I know).

Or maybe not. Ancient religions didn't check all of the boxes that Abrahamic faiths check, and much of the world gets by without all of those boxes being checked in their belief systems. Still, since PC seems to be quite Christian in its roots, being so focused on guilt and redemption, I am open to the possibility that eventually a full-scale recreation of Christianity will emerge.

We are so screwed.

The author of this essay "The Promise of Intellectual Joy" was accused of "white supremacist rhetoric" and subsequently fired.  For an essay that cites Hofstadter extensively and proclaims that every child can and should feel the thrill of intellectual challenge.

We are so screwed.

More on America's elites and The Restlessness

This article on political correctness and activism at Yale argues that the problem is not about speech, but about a loss of confidence by America's elites.  The writer (Natasha Dashan) starts by noting that the effectiveness of student protests were a symptom of loss of confidence:

But the appearance of bottom-up protest politics is always a bit of a false narrative.  It would be one thing if the students were polled and a majority said they wanted the name changed, or some other process was used. At least the university could say that it was making decisions based on some objective democratic process, and wasn’t just being pushed around. But this is not what happened. No polls were taken. There was no authoritative process. The school said no for a few months, then caved. If the school were actually confident in its position to resist, it could have easily pushed back on the protests.

I admit that on some level I don't understand why America's elites have lost confidence.  Yes, America has lots of problems, I disagree with its elites on lots of things, and I think they've made a lot of mistake.  But isn't that true of every era?  There's a whole lot that America does right, and a whole lot that it could still set right with sustained effort.  And plenty of other places and times have seen elites who did worse.

Maybe the problem is that America's elites know that they aren't really in charge.  I mean, yes, they control so many institutions, but they no longer control the government.  That may seem laughable on one level, with the Supreme Court being packed with Yale grads and plenty of Ivy Leaguers, rich people, etc. in Congress.  Not to mention the Ivy Leaguers packing the top of executive agencies and Congressional staff positions, i.e. the people who REALLY run the government and always have in every country ever.

On another level, consider the most intractable problem in American government:  The deficit.  You simply cannot have tax rates that are acceptable to Americans AND have the massive military that we have (and all the commitments that come with it) AND do something substantial about healthcare.  You can do any two of those, but not all three.  This isn't a matter of political ideology but rather arithmetic.  Nonetheless, it is impossible to raise taxes, impossible to cut the military, and impossible to do anything about healthcare that might threaten the bottom lines of entrenched interests.  There are too many different players with too much at stake.  And they can get the masses to vote with them.

OK, maybe all of those defense contractor executives and healthcare executives and upper-income taxpayers are elites, but (1) there are so many of them that the word "elite" gets stretched to something broader than "Top Ivy Grads", (2) they aren't the forward-thinking elites who know that some things can't go on forever (i.e. the sorts of people who are smart enough to rise to the top at Yale), and (3) these things wouldn't be politically impossible if the elites couldn't win elections while adhering to these stances, and lose elections by substantially straying from them. The people who benefit from these unsustainable contradictions have a critical mass of, well, the masses on their side. Something has slipped loose and is no longer under the control of smart old guys from New England.  It's not democracy, but it's also not an elite that's coherent enough to act together and accept short-term pain with the assurance that they know the other guys and can keep them from cheating.

Dashan seems to know this.  She says (emphasis added):

Western elites are not comfortable with their place in society and the responsibilities that come with it, and realize that there are deep structural problems with the old systems of coordination. But lacking the capacity for an orderly restructuring, or even a diagnosis of problems and needs, we dive deeper into a chaotic ideological mode of coordination that sweeps away the old structures. 

When you live with this mindset, what you end up with is not an establishment where a woke upper class rallies and advocates for the rights of minorities, the poor, and underprivileged groups. What you have is a blind and self-righteous upper class that becomes structurally unable to take coordinated responsibility. You get stuck in an ideological mode of coordination, where no one can speak the truth to correct collective mistakes and overreaches without losing position. 

This ideology is promulgated and advertised by universities, but it doesn’t start or stop at universities. All the fundraisers. All the corporate events. The Oscars. Let’s take down the Man. They say this in front of their PowerPoints. They clink champagne glasses. Let’s take down the Man! But there is no real spirit of revolution in these words. It is all in the language they understand—polite and clean, because it isn’t really real. It is a performative spectacle about their own morale and guilt.

I've written before about comfortable, well-dressed people sitting in conference rooms and nodding enthusiastically while people about them discuss TRANSFORMATION AND DISRUPTION!!!  It's not just about the federal budget.  In education the problem is the unsustainability of expanding access while preserving some modicum of excellence.  But denying access is simply not an option.  So everyone tries to look for too-good-to-be-true solutions, or at least tries to look like they're looking for them, so that they can look like they are the side of righteousness.  Because there's no politically feasible way to get off this train.  So they're all eating this shit up like it's pita chips and humus from Trader Joe's.

And then a reality TV star with a Twitter account and more loyalty to Moscow than Main Street wins the Presidency and half the country freaks out while the other half jumps on the bandwagon.  Because our elites don't know what to do.  Yeah, he's a rich guy (sort of) and a businessman, but just about all of the business elite would have preferred a more competent rich guy to sign their tax cuts and appoint people who will deregulate.  And the old-school elites, who could think long-term, would have preferred somebody with a bit more discipline.

The elites lack confidence because nobody is in charge, or at least nobody can coordinate the people who are collectively in charge.  God help us, we're sort of a democracy.

Legutko, Chapter 3

I'm almost done with this chapter.  Much of it is a critique of political correctness, cultural liberalism, etc.  I have bits of sympathy for some of it, but I reject his stances on rights of women, gays, minority groups, etc.  I might not like some of the speech norms around these topics, but that doesn't mean that I want to turn the clock back on rights.

Separate from my disagreement with his social agenda is the fact that his arguments are weak.  He's trying to link the spread of these causes, and elite acceptance of these causes, to the spread of liberal democracy.  If we take "liberal democracy" as simply a name rather than description, and use that name for some sort of consensus viewpoint, then by definition he is right. Elites agree with their own consensus.  However, if we look for the roots of these ideas, if we ask (1) why protection of minority rights has improved, (2) why it has sometimes been taken to the excesses of modern political correctness, and (3) why elites are so fervent about this, liberalism gets you only so far as an answer, and democracy gets you barely anywhere at all.  Yes, in democracies crucial political blocs have sympathized with minority rights, and they did so because they embrace liberal ideas.  However, democracy can be reactionary at least as often as it is progressive (indeed, majority tyranny is one of the most discussed dangers of democracy).  In most modern Western countries, majoritarianism would NOT lead to excesses of political correctness, nor even reasonably cautious protection of minority rights.  Elite intervention matters here, and it is by definition anti-democratic when protecting minorities more than majorities might favor.  He hasn't really addressed this.

He's on firmer ground when he says that an elite embrace of liberalism is at work, favoring liberation of individuals (and small groups of individuals) from tradition, popular prejudice, etc.  I think that's part of it.  However, why do elites favor liberation of small groups and enforcement of new norms on the majority at a level far exceeding "live and let live"?  Liberalism is part of it, but I get hints that he also sees a strategy of "divide and rule."  There are many ways to describe "divide and rule", but "liberal" isn't one of them.  Elites might believe that dividing and ruling is necessary to liberate minorities, but that belief is still a belief in the limits of liberalism, not unlimited liberalism.  He hasn't really dealt with that.  He has called them out for hypocrisy, but it's only hypocrisy if they believe what he thinks what they believe.  If they believe something else, they might be acting entirely in accord with their beliefs.  He doesn't explore this.

He makes an interesting comparison between campus freak-outs over offensive speech and the way that Communist societies responded to a dissident reading a poem in public.  The entire apparatus of the state would mobilize in a panic if somebody spoke out of turn in a Communist society.  There are indeed some fascinating parallels between the Communists freaking out and campus authorities freaking out.  However, there is one absolutely crucial difference:  The Communist authorities believed that if they left the speech unchecked a mob would form in support of the speaker.  Campus authorities believe that if they leave offensive speech unchecked a mob will form and demand that the campus authorities be fired for not punishing the speaker.  Yes, both sets of authorities fear the mob, but the relationship between the mob and the speaker, and the perceived public sympathies, are very different.

Legutko doesn't grapple with this.  He's pushing too far on the analogy without acknowledging its limitations, and blaming democracy without making his case.  There's a case to be made about democratic culture more than democracy itself, but he hasn't really explored those tensions enough.  He just wants to rail against feminism, gay rights, etc.

Next book: The Demon in Democracy

The next book that I'll blog about will be The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko.  I am reading it because a public lecture by Legutko was called off by Middlebury College in the face of protests (though he did eventually manage to give a guest lecture in a class).  The students stated that they were offended by, among other things, his homophobic views.  I don't know much about him, but if he is indeed a homophobe then I am also deeply offended by him.  Nonetheless, I'm also offended by people who try to shut down speech, so I will read one of his books as a counter-protest.  I have no idea if this book is any good, or if it addresses his views on gay rights, but a friend of a friend said something nice about the book, so let's see what it's about.  Maybe I'll love it, maybe I'll hate it, maybe I simply won't find much either way, but if somebody tries to get the speech canceled that's an easy way to get me to read the book.

A strange moral reversal

Gillette, the razor company, has received considerable attention for an ad campaign that talks about how men have to be better in their conduct and their approach to others' conduct.  Many are applauding it while others are recoiling from the criticism of men.  There's no point in me trying to say whether the ad does or doesn't paint with a broad brush, whether the message is or isn't ultimately positive about men (while there's surely criticism, there's also a clear implication that men can be better), because it's very much a Rohrschach test.  You see what you see, not what I argue that you should see.

What fascinates me is that the critics of the ad, many of them nominal conservatives, include in their ranks people who say that the ad is condemning the inherently aggressive nature of men, while those praising it, many of them nominal liberals, speak of the need to teach men discipline and self-control.  In an earlier phase of the culture war, it would have been considered hippie-ish to say that people need to celebrate their own inner nature and do what feels right for them.  It would have been considered conservative to say that discipline and structure and conformity to rules and ethical norms are what matter.  Now, granted, the hippies would have said that people should follow their natural instincts for love, not war.  Likewise, conservatives would have wanted to discipline men to channel their aggressive natures into healthy competition and the use of force for the enforcement of laws and protection of national security.  This just means that while history rarely repeats it often echoes.

Still, the echoes are strong, and inverted.  And they bring to mind a recent chance conversation with someone who turned out to be an elderly professor, and also an outspoken conservative.  The topic of the #MeToo movement came up, causing him to speak quite adamantly about how modern political correctness is denying men the chance to act on their instincts.  I was dumbfounded that a conservative would call for a social order in which men follow their instincts, rather than one in which they are disciplined to submit to the order of society, and channel the best parts of their instincts into worthy pursuits that are governed by rules, while taming and suppressing the worst parts of their instincts. Conversely, liberals have become quite rule-oriented.

I'm not necessarily a fan of every rules-oriented move by liberals, especially on the topic of political correctness in speech and entertainment, but surely some self-restraint in matters of sexual behavior is a necessary prerequisite for civilized society.  Surely we can enjoy some jokes while also keeping our hands to ourselves.

Of course, there are still some hippie types on the left, and some restrained types on the right.  But I think that this era of a genital-grabbing TV star as head of state has caused some on the right to walk away from the virtue of restraint.  I'm not wholly in favor of ever-increasing restraint in all aspects of life, but academic fields are called "disciplines" for a reason, and I am a proud academic.

Bell on religion

On page 155, Bell cites Emile Durkheim, who apparently viewed religion as dividing the world not into men and gods but sacred and profane.  Seen in that light, the religiosity of a society is measured not by supernatural belief but by extremes of moral convictions.  I think our modern politically correct era is a very religious one.  However, it's a religion that cannot identify itself as one, so we lack the language and customs to respect it, critique it, constrain it, and channel it.

Is "The Good Person of Szechwan" racist?

In November it was reported that Knox College, a private institution in Illinois, was canceling a production of "The Good Person of Szechwan", a play by Bertolt Brecht, on the grounds that the play (which is set in China) is offensive to Chinese people.  I decided that I should read this play, so I did.  Before I weigh in on the criticism, let me acknowledge three points:

1) The play was originally written in German, and I am reading it in English.  (Specifically, I am reading a 1962 translation by John Willett.)  I cannot assume that whatever I find/don't find in this English translation would also be present/absent in the original, or in other translations.

2) There are severe limits to what you can conclude about a play from just the text.  Everything about the staging, whether the actors' mannerisms and accents and gestures and other dramatic decisions, or the set, costumes, props, lights, make-up, etc., can help convey a message. These elements of the staging can accentuate or de-emphasize something that is present on the page.  Moreover, a play could be inoffensive on the page but be offensively staged, or even be problematic on the page but be staged in a way that wrestles with the problem rather than embracing and endorsing what is problematic.  Thus, there may be good reasons to oppose a staging of a play that is inoffensive on the page, and good reasons to stage a play that is problematic on the page.

3) When I read this play, I'm seeing it through the lenses of whatever stereotypes I hold about China and Chinese people.  Those may be different from the stereotypes that Brecht and the audiences of his time brought to the play.  They may also be different from the stereotypes that other audiences in the US would bring to the play (though I have to suspect that I have a reasonable understanding of the stereotypes that people at a college in the Midwest would bring, seeing as how I'm a college professor from the Midwest). A play could be perfectly innocuous in most settings, but happen to conjure up offensive stereotypes in some other setting. That, however, raises the interesting question of whether a play should be judged on the understandings of past audiences, as opposed to the words on the page, the intent of the playwright, the intent of the present director and other artists involved in the staging, the actual work presented by performers in the present, the interpretations of a modern audience to said performance, or the interpretations of people who declined to join the audience to avoid pain.  (Or all of the above.)

Finally, in the interests of disclosure, I haven't come across much description of Brecht's views on race and Asia, but I also haven't searched very thoroughly.  Brecht was an exile from Nazi Germany, and he wrote the play in 1938-1941, while in Sweden and the US.  He cleared the minimum moral threshold of not being a Nazi, for whatever that's worth.  So, while I can't assume Brecht to be free of racist contamination, I also can't use the Nazis and their views to make any inferences about Brecht.

With all that out of the way, let's analyze the play itself:

The play reads very much as a fable, one that could have been set in almost any society.  Of course, fables often work best when set very far away, to strip away the mundane and focus on the dramatic interplay of a few key elements.  China was clearly chosen as the setting because it is a distant land, not because Brecht wanted to explore China on its own terms.  Thus, the relevant question here is not whether China is portrayed accurately, but whether it is portrayed through the lens of offensive stereotypes. 

Honestly, the generic nature of the setting, the fact that it is a fable about general human dilemmas rather than a meditation on Chinese culture, weighs against any reading in terms of offensive stereotypes.  It could have been set in any distant city instead of Sichuan, and as long as the time was in the modern world the various mentions of modern amenities (e.g. airports) would not strike the audience as strange.  It is very clearly a fable of human nature.  Indeed, one could set it in another country without even changing many of the characters' names.  A few characters have Chinese names*, but the rest have names like "The Unemployed Man" or "Mother-in-Law."

I'm actually surprised that the students were offended by the racial aspects of the play rather than the gendered aspects.  Shen Teh, the prostitute and main character, often struggles to defend herself against people trying to take advantage of her kind nature and help themselves to her money, so she often puts on a mask to pose as her invented cousin Shui Ta. Shui Ta is able to stand up to people and even prosper in business. The fact that her simple disguise is so convincing clearly shows that the play is a fable, a contemplation of how people react to other people in different stations, rather than a dramatic portrayal of plausible events and actions, which reinforces my point about how this play is not attempting to dissect Chinese culture from a Eurocentric perspective.  However, in showing how she only gets respect when posing as a man (and sometimes takes actions as a man that she regrets when reverting to feminine presentation), this play definitely takes up the topic of gender.  I will leave it to people better-versed in feminist theory to take up the question of whether Brecht treats gender with proper sensitivity, but gender is surely more salient to this fable than anything specific to China and Chinese people.

One criticism of the play, according to the article linked above, is that the main character is a prostitute, and thus the play is portraying Asian women negatively.  Honestly, though, just about everyone in the play is terrible and greedy and takes advantage of poor Shen Teh. It's hard to read the play as portraying Asian women, en masse, as being of loose** sexual morals.  Indeed, Shen Teh actually quits prostitution when she has the financial means to do so.  She's one of the few characters to try to adhere to a standard of morality that involves helping everyone no matter how outrageous their demands and how little they do to help themselves.  Were it not for the fact that Brecht was anti-capitalist (even going so far as to voluntarily live in East Germany after the war) I would read it as an allegory about the unworkability of socialism.  Instead, given that the Gods appear as a trio, I assume it's a critique of Christianity's proffered foundation for a compassionate society.  The play acknowledges the challenges of being good (according to a particular moral compass) while living in this world; if one wanted to reconcile this play with socialist sympathies I suppose the answer would be (1) even (especially?) good things can be hard to achieve in this world and (2) socialism would require a system with enforcement mechanisms rather than reliance on individual adherence to Christian ethics.

Anyway, having only read the play once, and mostly with an eye searching for racial/ethnic factors rather than matters of gender or socialism, I am loathe to delve much farther into those topics.  What I will say is that it's really hard for me to read this as anything but a fable set "far, far away" rather than some sort of attempt at portraying Chinese society as such.  I suppose that one could take offense at that indifference to setting, but then it still strikes me more as a literary device with strengths and weaknesses to be weighed, not as anything over which a reasonable person might experience pain.  Yes, the staging could still make or break this play, but isn't that in the nature of all plays?  As it stands, what's on the page is hardly worth taking offense over (at least in regards to matters of race and ethnicity).

The kids at Knox College should lighten up.

*I cannot judge whether the names are commonplace, inoffensive Chinese names, but I know a lot of Chinese people and these names don't seem terribly unusual.

**To the extent that one chooses to view this as a bad thing.  Sex work is a complicated topic, and those who have thought deeply about gender issues have come to a variety of complex conclusions on the matter.  I offer no negative judgment on Shen Teh for having worked as a prostitute, but I see why it is a delicate matter, and why some might prefer that the play not focus on a prostitute as the representative of Asian women.  However, Shen Teh does not spend most of the story as a prostitute, and there's nothing to suggest that she is offered specifically as a representative of Asian women as opposed to simply women in general.  Or, more accurately, women trying to adhere to a particular type of moral code that is very much the subject of the play's exploration.

On political correctness

No time for detailed comment, but I like this article from the National Post about political correctness and Twitter mobs.  The opening is priceless:

A journalist friend of mine recently attended his four-year-old daughter’s year-end dance recital here in Toronto. “Every dance was in some way about Canada,” he told me. “My daughter’s dance was Canada Geese. Another was Aurora Borealis. One dance was Our Aboriginal Peoples. And I’m like, ‘Oh, God, no.’” 

“It’s one of the youngest classes — very basic. No real theme, just introductory dance moves. The costumes are evocative of animal skins. The hair buns have little feathers. The theme was ‘Honouring the first people of North America.’ And I was freaked out. It was objectively innocent, benign, cute and even touching — and it was absolutely well-intended. But I’ve spent so much time in Stupid Twitter-Land that I expected the parents to stand up and start booing and hissing and calling for the studio owner’s head.” 

“No one did that, of course,” my friend added. “Normal people don’t do those things.”

My only criticism is that as the essay goes on he spends too much time talking about the precarious positions of the obscure Twitter users who police the norms of political correctness and not enough time dissecting why the respectable managerial classes care about those scoldings in the first place.  I get the interest in why someone administers those scoldings, but surely one reason why they keep doing it is that it works.  And the question is why does it work?  Why do editors of major publications and managers at high levels care so much about being scolded over such trivial things?

There's at least some acknowledgment that political correctness is a thing because people in the right positions care about these scoldings over things that ordinary people neither know about nor care about.  That's progress.  But I'd like to really unpack why the Right-Thinking educated and managerial classes care so much about avoiding these scoldings.

Hayek, Chapter 9

Having talked about the difficulty in getting people to see emergent order in chapter 8, in chapter 9 he talks about the belief in the superiority of planning over emergent order.  This is definitely a thing, especially among the educated classes.  I find it funny that technocratic liberals also tend to like "natural" food.  It's generally believed that if there is emergent order in an institution then there must be missed opportunities, because resources are not being directed.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how modern this is.  Central authorities have always banged their heads against emergent orders, determined to rule rather than go with the flow.  I doubt that they put it in the same technocratic language as their modern counterparts, but the ability to let go and steer on the margins has never been a strong suit of rulers.

Sadly, this chapter is somewhat jumbled (he took the opposition to planning a bit too literally), and not always well-argued.  Steps and connections are left out.  I did manage to parse out, eventually, what he meant when he talked about people trying to plan the progress of the human mind:  I don't think he was talking about engineering the human mind like geneticists in Orphan Black, but rather plans for scientific discoveries, technological progress, and the progression of ideas in other scholarly endeavors.  The problem is that you can't plan where you will go when you engage with the unknown.  Things almost always turn out to be harder than you planned, and sometimes serendipity happens.  Hayek's point was that if we knew what we could/would discover next then we would have already made the discovery, so there's a logical impossibility.  I just wish he had organized his thoughts more clearly.

After arguing that, Hayek quickly leaps to arguing against the idea that truth is not determined by deduction from observations, but from hidden causes which have determined the thinker's conclusions, and thus truth or falsehood can depend on the social position (race, class, etc.) of the person making the argument. It seems that he's arguing against ideas of implicit bias, but I don't really see how he got there from his previous point, unless he's making a very subtle argument against the idea that all of our knowledge is already in our minds (hence the possibility of planning) but some of it is fake (hence the possibility of bias or distortion).  It's a big leap of the argument.

Also, while I have no doubt that modern political correctness has plenty of antecedents (remember, one of the main themes of this blog is that all of this has happened before and will happen again), I'm mildly surprised that 1952 had substantial numbers of people arguing that implicit bias is a huge thing, or that the privileged cannot know certain things.  I suppose it's possible that the Marxists might have made the second point (I don't know, I'm just speculating) but that's the sort of argument that could easily be wielded by peasants against planners.  (Unless he's arguing against the idea that only the top of the ladder has the proper perspective.)

Near the end of this chapter, Hayek does offer one point that I like very, very much:  It is dangerous when people abandon religion but see no reason to submit to anything that they do not rationally understand. If people respect neither God nor arbitrary moral codes (and ultimately all "ought" statements are rooted in assertions rather than logic, a point that I spent this afternoon making to a colleague) then they could engage in great hubris.  If this comes at the same point in historical evolution as the rise of great technological capabilities (e.g. nuclear weapons) and a belief in the superiority of planning over emergent order then the unguided might create upheavals that lead to disaster.

I think we have the nuclear genie more-or-less controlled (arguably less, right now, with North Korea rattling the saber) but in higher ed I think we have undermined too many principles, leaving only short-term thought about individual selfishness.  Hayek might be greatly sympathetic to the good that can emerge from selfishness in market economies (and I am, as well) but institutions need rules (even for-profit companies require a certain amount of coordinated sacrifice for greater benefit down the road--it's the whole concept of investment in a project that involves more than one person!), and non-profit educational institutions supposedly offer a chance be supported while indulging one's passions via creative pursuits, in exchange for work that benefits students.  However, when the concept of duty collapses, when the quasi-monastic sacrifice inherent in academic work is regarded as an oppressive norm feasible only for men of a certain class and era, when pervasive and unfair bias is seen as driving every decision, then what is left but short-term selfishness?

Hayek, as a man of ideas, is less of a capitalist than he'd ever admit.  He wanted people to submit to duty and purpose without a clear answer to "Why do I have to listen and what is in it for me?"

Political correctness flatters the elite

I am too tired to comment on this, but I very much enjoyed this National Review article (did I really just type that?) about class, political correctness, and college.

Two quick links

One of my themes here is that liberal establishment ideas are rooted in unexamined assumptions and privileges.  So, two relevant links:

1) From Quillette, an article arguing that the difference between Eastern and Western Europe on the issue of Muslims refugees is that Eastern Europeans have been the conquered rather than the conquerors. I personally support taking in refugees, but I think the mindset of those who disagree is worth understanding rather than dismissing.  However, I think the biggest error in this piece is exaggerating Western European openness to refugees.

2) Timothy Burke uses the example of Donald Trump to dispute Jonathan Haidt's claim that liberals don't have a sense of sacred vs. profane.  Burke argues that liberals simply hold sacred very different things than what conservatives hold sacred.  Here I strongly agree with Burke.  Liberalism has plenty of religious aspects.

Awesome quote from The American Conservative

Not much time, but I must share this quote from an article in The American Conservative:

Administrators aren’t particularly loyal to the core higher-ed mission of discovering and disseminating knowledge. Many are failed academics whose only talents are regurgitating on cue vacuous corporate jargon—“innovating in strategic processes,” “developing new thought leadership platforms,” and so on—and attending conferences with each other. And in student grievance, they have found an endlessly renewable energy supply.
....
This is an unlikely alliance between corporate middle-management and self-styled student radicals, adolescent zealotry getting pimped by bureaucrats. And it’s playing out all over higher ed. Over the last two years, usually in response to some rash of undergrad intolerance, colleges and universities have hired about 75 new “diversity” administrators.

Indeed. The fact that identity politics is so compatible with administrative interests should be setting off warning lights in the minds of liberals, but elite liberals have no concept of how co-opted they already are.

We broke our postmodern cage and ran

We're revisiting the 90's right now, partly because Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell just died and partly because some people attempted to replicate the Sokal hoax, publishing a nonsense article full of dense gender studies jargon.  For those too young to remember the glories of the 90's, Sokal published an article full of incomprehensible postmodernist jargon, making some sort of pretentious claim about physics being just, like, your opinion, man.  Or something.  It wasn't really supposed to make sense.  Anyway, these authors published an article arguing that the whole concept of a penis is just an invented concept, or something.  Then they published an article revealing that their first article was never meant seriously, and the fact that it nonetheless got published proves that the field of gender studies is bunk.  Or something.

Now, whether these authors have really taught us anything about alleged problems in the field of gender studies is very much a contested claim, not the least because the article was turned down by an undistinguished journal before being accepted by an even less distinguished journal.  But I'm not interested in dissecting alleged problems in the field of gender studies.  Rather, I want to note a different point, about the contrasts between the fashionable postmodernism of the 90's and the fashionable identity politics of today.

On the surface there are similarities.  The identity studies and identity activist types of today and the postmodern literary theorists and Science Wars types of the 90's both agreed that you can dismiss an idea if it is Western, patriarchal, colonialist, yadda yadda.  Both are ultimately signaling games for people with a certain type of education.  And both are largely rubbish from an intellectual perspective.

Still, there are two key differences:

1) The PoMo guys didn't seem to believe in truth.  OK, they probably believed that Western, male, yadda yadda ideas were even less true than others, but ultimately they seemed to think that everything is just, like, subjective, man.  So, yes, they would reject Western, patriarchal, yadda yadda ideas, but they'd also reject any other idea if you got too enamored of it.

The modern identity politics types, OTOH, seem to believe that they have access to truth.  They don't just want to tell everyone that stuff is complicated and depends on your point of view.  They want to claim that truth comes from the margins and so while my white, Western, male, yadda yadda opinion might be wrong, theirs is right.  There are problems with claiming moral authority on the grounds that truth can only come from the margins, as I've noted before, but they certainly make that claim.

2) The PoMo guys had hard reads.  Foucault is not for the faint of heart. Marx (not PoMo but nonetheless appreciated by a certain type of humanities scholar) can only be read with a lot of caffeine and cigarettes. OTOH, I am pretty sure that you could do just fine with the modern politically correct types if you read a few privilege think-pieces and just nodded along with whatever they said.  They have truth, and as long as you acknowledge that it's good.  There's no intellectual game to be played, no idea to be skewered, just a "yes-and" discussion.  Remember your victim hierarchy, defer to others* the loudest when in doubt, and it will be fine.  You don't need thick books or nuanced arguments, just rhetorical cudgels.

So, as much as I like the 1990's, and as much as I would like to return to them, we aren't there.  We're in a different era.  The PoMos read thick books, and as much as they annoyed me back then I would gladly take them over the current wave of identity politics.

Mind you, the 90's did have political correctness, but that was a different beast, an angrier one than the PoMo types.  And I never had to encounter much of the PC because it had already self-discredited by the time I entered a pretty Republican-heavy college.  It didn't disappear but it dial back a notch.  PoMo was a lesser evil, in retrospect, because it was always just a game, a game that ended the second that we got a Republican in the White House and (more importantly) the EPA.  Science is only a social construct until somebody tries to ignore it.  Then every liberal turns into a raging technocrat.  But while "That's just, like, your opinion, man" gets tossed aside when practical considerations dictate so, identity politics shows little sign of abating.  Alas.

Anyway, the post title comes from a song that was written by Chris Cornell (who died this week) and was covered by Johnny Cash in 1996 (the year of the Sokal hoax).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nehoakn-LbE

*My apologies for Othering people :)

Politically incorrect

America doesn't have a problem with political correctness.  America's tribes have a problem with political correctness.

You can say anything you want in America.  You can't say anything that you want and still remain respectable in the eyes of various cultural groupings.

In America you can say that institutionalized racism and police brutality are so ingrained in our law enforcement services that it's impossible for the community to maintain confidence in the police.  If you say that in my academic circles you'll be regarded as speaking a common-sense truth that too many people deny.  If you say that in front of some of my non-academic Facebook friends they'll see you as Part Of The Problem.

In America you can dispute the claim that 1 in 4 female college students will be raped, and suggest that it's an exaggeration proffered to score political points.  You can't say that and retain credibility in certain academic circles.  You can say that and gain credibility in certain conservative circles.

In America you can say that abortion kills children.  You can say that and retain credibility in many religious communities.  You can't say that and remain respectable in a lot of liberal circles.

In America you can say that signing up for military service is morally questionable when America's wars for the past generation (or longer) have been so morally questionable and so remote from the stated purpose of defending freedom.  You can't say that and be electable, or be respectable in the eyes of a lot of my Facebook friends.  You can say that and be credible in certain left-wing circles (not to be confused with centrist liberalism).

In America you can say that America's gun obsession is irrational and primitive.  You can say that and be credible in many cultural and political contexts.  You cannot say that and be seen as credible in many other situations.

Finally, in America you can say that there is no God and religion is a lie.  You can say that and be credible in many cultural groupings.  You cannot say that and be elected to statewide office, let alone US Congress or the Presidency.  And depending on which (if any) Abrahamic faith you do or don't single out, you might get people to change their reaction from sympathetic to wary or vice versa.

Now, I happen to agree (at least to some extent) with some of the things that I wrote above.  I dissent from some of them.  Others I view as dramatic over-simplifications to the point where agreement and disagreement are equally meaningless. There's no need for me to demarcate for the reader which ones I agree or disagree with. But all of these are examples of protected speech that simultaneously get a lot of heads nodding while getting other people to reach for the torches and pitchforks.  Switch some of the statements and some people will switch sides.  Consequently, whether or not political correctness is a problem, whether or not orthodoxy is enforced, and whether or not a topic is radioactive, is a highly contextual matter.  Complaints about political correctness are almost as dubious as dismissals of those complaints.

I was thinking of this in the context of the Timothy Burke essay that I blogged a couple months ago.  If claims to truth are strengthened by being on the margin, then academics have a two-fold reason to contest complaints about political correctness and deny that it exist.  There's the obvious one: We academics have a genuine interest in ideas and debate, so we certainly don't want to admit it to ourselves if there are times when we stifle the exchange of ideas.  People can simultaneously hold a value in their hearts but also fall short of the ideal embodied in that value, but who wants to admit it?

Then there's the less obvious one:  If the marginality of the speaker is relevant to the truth value of their statements then enforcement of orthodoxy is self-defeating, and if somebody were to prove to us that we are enforcing an orthodoxy they would have taken a step to refuting the truth value of our claims.  We thus have to push back and deny that this is what we're doing, because otherwise we lose intellectual credibility both on our own terms (we've just loss our claim to the high ground of the margins!) and the terms of more rational people.

People are strange.

One more thing from the Deresiewicz essay

I forgot to quote this part:

I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend whom she had known since the beginning of college and who, she’d just discovered, went to church every Sunday. My student hadn’t even been aware that her friend was religious. When she asked her why she had concealed this essential fact about herself, her friend replied, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”
...
When my student wrote about her churchgoing friend, she said that she couldn’t understand why anyone would feel uncomfortable being out as a religious person at a place as diverse as Scripps.

There's a belief that tolerance is about bringing together people whose identities are different, not people whose beliefs (or lack thereof) and practices are different.  There's an idea that diversity of the first sort--a diversity achieved through presence, not practice--not only confers moral legitimacy but also automatically exudes a sense of comfort.

I remember encountering bits of this in college in the 90's.  It was different from intellectual relativism, postmodernism, etc.  Those ideas involved hard reading and mental challenges that went deeper than smiling and saying "Thank you for sharing that."  It was not as developed as what's going on now, but the stirrings were there.  Contra Deresiewicz, it didn't come from Foucault or the humanities faculty, it came from Student Affairs.  It is the process of academia replacing academics with administration.  Academic work should exhaust the mind when it's done right, not make everyone feel happy-shiny and smug.