On Copy-Editors

They are wonderful. And I presume to correct the English of my students?!?

On the Fair Tax

'Twould be regressive--and at a far higher rate than promised--it promises the impossible, the end of political twisting of the tax code--and it plays on a somewhat fevered dislike of the IRS. And yet ... how many billions of dollars do Americans spend each year on tax preparation? How many billions of hours? And what are the psychic costs of worrying about the IRS?--worrying that you'll do something wrong in this godawful complicated form, and bring a Kafkaesque nightmare of paperwork down on your head? What are the psychic costs of worrying that the IRS will check you randomly, for no reason at all? Considerable, I think--enough, that I think the "rational" dismissal of the Fair Tax is missing an emotional truth--that many Americans might think themselves the better for paying more taxes while getting rid of the income tax bureaucracy. And their feelings should not be dismissed.

Put another way: if E. P. Thompson can say that what mattered is that the English working class felt immiserated in 1830, can't we say that what matters now is that Americans feel better without an income tax?

I don't ultimately want a Fair Tax. But I don't think the frame of mind that animates its supporters should be dismissed.

No Interviews

Quite certain by now--I'm not heading to the AHA in DC.

I have often run scenarios through my head where I play the Conservative Martyr who can't get an academic job because of his politics. And who knows, perhaps people have twigged on to my identity and are blackballing me unbeknownst. (I do keep offering to teach military history courses--that could be a problem.) But somehow I doubt it. Which means I have no excuses -- this is just the same frustrating fate any other academic has to go through, and maybe they just aren't that into me.

Feh. Now I wait to see if any postdocs pan out, plus spring jobs, etc.

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class

An interim report--it is 800 pages long!--from 300 pages in. This is a book I should have read years ago, and am finally getting to. So: yes, it is a splendid book. I can recognize how a great many other, later books are basically expanding points Thompson makes in a paragraph or a page. It is Marxist polemic, emphasizing the harsher effects of the Industrial Revolution, of upper-class rule in England in 1780-1830--perhaps stealing a few bases with a loose definition of "exploitation"--but it is intelligent polemic, quite aware of the counter-arguments, and careful in its claims. His basic claim, that some of England's poor suffered quite dreadfully in the Industrial Revolution, and that they perceived their lives as a catastrophe, I have no objection with--the way I would put it is that I have a tragic pro-capitalist-industrialization stance--that it was the way to go, but that one shouldn't minimize the attendant sufferings--and I think Thompson's data is consonant with that interpretation.

It is very interesting to see how Thompson is bending the field--changing the focus from the economic-history focus on the objective conditions of the English working class to the cultural-history focus on the consciousness of the English working class. So to speak, you can see the old arguments being abandoned--my sense is that the arguments about how much the English working class earned, consumed, etc., have continued, but very much in a minor register, and without interesting people outside a narrow, specialist focus--and new ones starting. Everywhere, Thompson says "more research needs to be done"--and, yes, quite a lot has been done since 1961, and you can see how he inspired an entire field. That's quite nifty.

It's also interesting to read his footnotes and realize the sheer mass of solid research from the 1920s to the 1950s. History, I think, is in many ways a remarkably shallow discipline--there's a great tendency, save for your own immediate specialization (and sometimes even then) to ignore all but the most recent research--perhaps to read the odd classic (such as Thompson, for example!), but let all the competent, mid-ranking books (which we ourselves generally write!) slip out of memory--to assume their results, but forget the writing. So reading Thompson provides a window to a previous generation of historians, reminds me that our professional amnesia isn't always a good idea.

(Mind you, a fair number of his references are to his Marxist peers--Christopher Hill and Eric Hobsbawm. Interesting to see how they provide a sort of phalanx of research and polemic, reinforcing each other as they collectively cover all the centuries from 1600 onward.)

In terms of actual history, I am most struck so far on how the great success of the agricultural revolution, allowing for an expanding English population, also provides so great a labor surplus that much of the population is only semi-employed--a situation of which the employers are able to take advantage, and contributes strongly (my analysis, not Thompson's) to the falling wages of the poor. I had thought of early-industrial English workers more in terms of full-time labor--rethinking their history in terms of the dynamics of occasional employment is quite important.

So, that would be a recommend! Not that Thompson needs a thumbs-up from l'il ol' me this late in the game, but he's got one anyway.

LEGACY! - The Game

I was wondering how to turn my interest in genealogy into a game ... and, with a tip of the hat to Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, which Alpheus recommended to me more than a decade ago, here is my idea for a card game:

Each player is a great-grandson of Josiah Blackbirder (1628-1702), the great Bristol merchant. Blackbirder left various wills and codicils, which designate his vast fortune to one or the other of his various descendants. Each player is given a card which states, secretly, his line of descent. ("You are the second son of the first daughter of Josiah's first son by his second wife.") You play various cards: 1) birth and marriage certificates, to establish your descent from Josiah; 2) different versions of parts of the will and codicil, directing the fortune via the female line, to different sons, to bastard sons, etc.; 3) Forgery cards, rendering invalid previous emendations to the will and/or various birth and marriage certificates; 4) Marriage cards, played either on yourself or on other people--you marry the chambermaid, the strumpet, the duchess, any one of whom might turn out to be a cousin of yours, possibly with a better claim to the Blackbirder inheritance; 5) lawsuit cards, preventing another player from claiming the inheritance (but which diminish the inheritance, possibly to zero if the game lasts long enough; 6) Miscellaneous cards, such as Fire in the Parish Church (Records Destroyed), Heir Transported to the Americas, Forcible Marriage, Exercise of Wardship (Player Loses Turn), Birthmark (Birth Certificate Unnecessary), Unreliable Governess (Infants Exchanged), etc.

Off for a Week

Off for a week. Merry Christmas all!

You're a Fascist!

So, all us good responsible folks know the drill: don't call people fascists just because you don't like them! Don't call people communists just because you don't like them! These are mass-murderous, tyrannous movements--it insults our fellow citizens to call them such names, it insults the victims of communism and fascism, and it is Imprecise and Untrue. So don't do it.

This is what I believe. What follows is wicked speculation.

Is it actually useful for liberal, democratic society to hurl around these insulting, inaccurate epithets? Even if lefties and righties aren't really commies and nazis, does all this bile serve to keep their nastier tendencies--whatever they really are or should be called--under control?--by means of making the mass of citizens veer away from political extremes, under the productive misapprehension that these extremes really are communazi. Is liberal democracy best served, not by dispassionate discourse that restrainedly cherishes the loyal opposition of our fellow citizens, but rather by mud-slinging calumny of every faction against their enemy?

Just' askin.

Personal Memoirs: Ulysses Grant

That lucid style everyone raves about? The bit which tells you everything in clear English prose? It's actually quite dull. Once he gets to the Civil War, the personal anecdotes largely fade out, and it becomes a potted history of his military campaigns--and since he depended on documents, it's not entirely unjogged recollection either. Dullness also proceeds from the fact that there's no drama--Grant is always competent, the Union forces are always superior, so who could expect anything but victory? Also, he says what happens on the battlefield with no analysis, no whys, nothing but a plain, uninflected narrative. It has its virtues as a style, but, Lordy, yawn!

Some interesting things: he describes generalship not so much as a matter of brilliance, but rather as a matter of not making mistakes. His enemies made mistakes, hence lost; Grant makes no (or few) mistakes, hence wins. This is not how it's usually put it, and I think it's a helpful way to regard military history. (Political history too, I suppose.) Grant also engages in that perennial sport of second-guessing--which is a little odd, given that he won, but he spends much time saying how if he had been in charge sooner, he could have ended the war sooner! This apparently against the context that a great many Southern writers were already engaged in the "we could have won if" school history; Grant is batting down these critiques as obliquely as possible. No, you couldn't have won; no, your soldiers weren't that good; you guys are lucky you lasted as long as you did! Only human, I suppose. He's also quite explicit that some of his tactics--around Vicksburg--were inspired by politics--that he lunged ahead to Vicksburg with a weather-eye to the elections in the north, and the preservation of political support for the Republican Party, and hence for continued prosecution of the war. Clausewitzian insight?

I think he's most interesting up to the conclusion of the siege of Vicksburg; after that, he commands armies so large, that all detail fades out. Worth reading as a historical document, but I don't think I'd assign it to undergraduate students.

Swarthmorofascism

Jonah Goldberg is getting some grief for saying

The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Apparently Swat doesn't provide an education degree. Yet one of my formative experiences at Swat was, when a freshman, debating some topic with a senior, who said at the end something like "You haven't taken enough classes. Once you're properly educated, you'll come around to the right way of thinking." And, yes, that is the liberal fascism to which Goldberg (I presume) refers--the unthinking conflation of education with a particular opinion.

Faith and Judgment

The perennial question of the place of faith in a secular republic rears its head again--a question of the relationship of Athens and Jerusalem, indeed. And if you speak highly of faith--or any single faith--does this somehow render agnostics, atheists, dissenters from the named faith, second-class citizens of some sort? "Of course not!" and "Of course!" seem to be popular answers. What to say?--what to say, ideally, that is vaguely original at this late date?

A great deal has to do with judgment of one sort or another. Democracy takes as a first principle the universal possession of a capacity, and a right, to judge--to make political choices, ultimately. The evolution of modern democratic thought required as an essential stage the (dissenting Protestant, Miltonian) thought that God gave all men this capacity and right--and this religious conception remains, a ghost in the machine, in our secular republic. (If not necessarily in others.) In a formally secular republic, where faith is not assumed, one variant of this ghost is the belief that only faith provides the proper judgment for political choices--that, although democracy requires that believer and unbeliever alike have the vote, the believer (his judgment informed by faith) should by strong preference vote for another believer, his judgment likewise informed (and guaranteed, as much as human judgment can be guaranteed) by faith. Those secularists of a particularly antireligious bent use a mirroring thought-process: where faith is taken as a failure in judgment, the secularist will exercise his judgment to vote only for other secularists, whose judgment has not failed.

These judgments are, in their essence, very harsh. You are, after all, saying that somebody else's judgment, by dint of their faith, lack of faith, sort of faith, is deeply flawed--inferior, indeed. And where the capacity of judgment is the root of one's right to act as a free citizen, to doubt someone else's judgment is--to say they are or should be a second-class citizen?

I don't think it quite amounts to that. So long as you recognize somebody else's right to vote, to make policy that will govern you, your harsh judgment of someone else's judgment remains secondary. The recognition of the equal vote is the primary judgment--the fundamental acceptance of the sufficiency of judgment of the godless atheist, the faith-addled fool, the heretic, the pagan. The secondary judgment must be quite rankling to those found lacking in judgment--but if rankling, insulting, to call a section of your fellow-citizens dangerous fools is not, ultimately, the same thing as calling them second-class citizens.

Now, getting back to the rankling--it must of course rankle to have a judgment of something as private as faith, or its lack, used to judge your capacity as a citizen. I have a feeling, however, that it rankles secularists more than it rankles the faithful. A secularist, after all, takes his judgment as something uniquely his--whereas the faithful man takes his judgment as a gift from God. (And when he takes original sin to have permanently marred human capacities, will not in any case have an excessively optimistic estimate of any human capacity for judgment.) The secularist is therefore more likely to take pride in his judgment than is the faithful man, for he regards it as something of his own making, and in consequence is also more likely to be affronted when his judgment is doubted--more likely to feel like a second-class citizen--like a second-class human being.

I would suspect that the faithful man does not usually understand quite how seriously the secularist takes even a secondary critique of his judgment. Likewise, the secularist does not understand that the critique of his judgment is not intended to bite so deeply. A common critical vocabulary hides very different psychologies.

Getting Rid of the RINOs

I wouldn't mind if both the RINOs, Romney and Giuliani, imploded. And they seem to be imploding! Then we could have a debate among (not to be too judgmental or anything) the real conservatives as to who should be president.

Lordy, I still like McCain. His immigration stance drives me up a wall, but for everything else, he's the pick of the crop.

What Drugs is Mitchell Taking?

On Fox News Sunday, George Mitchell apparently said that the baseball players identified as having used steroids in his recent report shouldn't actually be punished. Instead of concentrating on retribution, we should "look to the future" and work on finding new ways to eliminate performance enhancing drugs in pro baseball.

Dear God, isn't this getting old? I realize Mitchell hasn't actually been a Democratic politician stricto sensu for a while now. But this is the Democrats' attitude toward everything from illegal immigration to violations of campaign finance rules: don't enforce existing sanctions against transgressors; instead, devise some new system of rules that will eliminate or reduce transgressions -- presumably without the need for retributive punishments.

Of course, so such magical reforms exist. Ultimately, the effectiveness of all rules depends upon the credibility of the penalties that are supposed to come with breaking them. There ought to be a name for this particular brand of illogic. At the moment, I'm thinking, "Mitchell's Fallacy."

Stuff

I've been clearing out the possessions of my uncle and aunt. A very sad process--endless amount of their lives going away, I don't know what it refers to, now all gone. (Mind you, getting rid of old bills is less heart-pulling!) As a historian, I mourn the passing of thick social history and biography. As a nephew with no storage-space--what else can you do? I've tried to perserve a core of material, but still ... Quick moral: everyone, dispose of your own possessions when you start getting old. If it has to go, do it yourself. I made my good-byes as I got rid of all the old letters, but it's not enough.

Meanwhile, the Academic Wiki that Sam directed me too informs me that more than half the positions I applied to already have sent out requests for interviews; I still haven't heard from anyone. Ugh.

Technological progress

David Frum has an interesting post on the habit of assuming constant technological progress, and notes that neither H. G. Wells nor John Maynard Keynes had it, and says that

It would be an interesting project to try to date the moment at which the idea that technological change was not going to stop really took hold in the western consciousness. 1950 maybe?

He’s right; that would be interesting. As everyone says, you have nightmares of modern science going out of control back to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, but that’s somewhat different from having a general expectation of technological change. But although I’m willing to grant that such an expectation is widespread, I’m not sure I think it’s warranted. I do think that technological advancement is ultimately a second-order effect—you first have to have a system of economic and political liberty that won’t veto the development of new technology, because previous interests would be damaged, because someone might be unemployed, because the money’s been leached away for welfare, etc., etc.—and I do think this system of liberty is still far too fragile to have faith in its continuance. No, developing the gun is not inevitable, if the government is run by a consortium of bow-makers, bow-workers, and rabble depending on bow-taxes to supplement their incomes. Basically, I think Europe and China, absent the competition from the United States, would happily descend into a sclerotic, high-tax stupor, prop up the existing conglomerates as cartels, and let invention peter to a halt. Indeed, should the Democrats gain control of US fiscal policy for any sustained length of time, we could tip over the edge into torpor as well—our bureaucratic state is already highly developed, and we’re already unpleasantly close to the edge. (Why else do so many foreigners so eagerly desire the Democratic Party to control the US? They want the world to return to its normal, confortable stasis, and to end this annoying technological progress, liberty, and creative destruction.) As in foreign policy, only a narrow, intermittent majority of Americans stand between the world and dystopia. And we should have faith in constant technological progress? Oh, no. Acedia is a powerful lady, and she may conquer yet: To borrow a description of one of Acedia’s sisters,

In vain, in vain, — the all-composing Hour

Resistless falls: The Muse obeys the Pow'r.

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold

Of Night Primæval, and of Chaos old!

Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay,

And all its varying Rain-bows die away.

Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,

The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.

As one by one, at dread Medea's strain,
The sick'ning stars fade off th'ethereal plain;

As Argus' eyes by Hermes' wand opprest,

Clos'd one by one to everlasting rest;

Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.

See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,

Mountains of Casuistry heap'd o'er her head!

Philosophy, that lean'd on Heav'n before,

Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!

See Mystery to Mathematics fly!

In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

And unawares Morality expires.

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor'd;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

Open Letter: Universities

Dear Universities to Whom I Sent off Applications for Jobs,

Now would be a good time to tell me I’ve gotten a first-hand round interview at the AHA. Hereafter, you will be billed for ulcers, depression, etc.

Sincerely yours,
Withywindle

Taxi Stories

My taxi driver yesterday told me a fair amount of his life story. He is now 62. He was born in a small town in Syria near the Iraqi border, a seven-hour drive from Damascus. He was a handball player for many years—competed on the international level—and then became a sports superintendent of some sort, living in Damascus. He came to the United States, to make more money, seventeen years ago, but left his family behind. His three children all became, or are studying to become doctors—a surgeon, a pharmacologist, and a gynecologist. The children all went to medical school in Ukraine—in his small town, a lot of young people go to Ukraine to study, because the fees are cheap—although you do have to spend an extra year learning the language. His children were always asking for money. The eldest son, a surgeon, married a Ukrainian woman, and brought her back to Syria. His son died in a traffic accident on 31 December 2005—his car spun out of control for some reason—and he was buried the next day, 1 January 2006. My taxi driver hadn’t seen his son for three years before he died—now hasn’t seen him for five years. His son had one daughter, and his wife was one and one half months pregnant. Now there are two daughters. The Ukrainian wife went back to Ukraine with the elder daughter; the taxi driver’s wife is raising the younger granddaughter; the Ukrainian wife said she’ll come back to visit, but he doesn’t think she ever will.

God bless you, I said, as I got out of the cab—what else can you say? I wanted to hug him—so sad a story.

Is it a Sign of a Dark Age....

...when the Pope seems more rational and objective than the scientists?

Mulish Disputatiousness

Why am I so suspicious of the Neil Postman book mentioned by Miss Self Important, The Disappearance of Childhood?—why do I so mulishly argue against a thesis retailed to me second-hand? The thesis, for those who have not followed this blog/seminar discussion, apparently argues in part for the importance of the printing press as formative of concepts of innocence/childhood, and the great power of televisual culture to erase the distinction between childhood and adulthood and thus create immature adults. Why, I am a pseudo-Habermasian!—and therefore ought to believe the printing press is a Wonderful, Magical Beast, a veritable Shmoo, which can provide everything a scholar can imagine. What’s my problem?

It’s a question, I suppose, of the power of culture vs. the power of free will. On the one hand, I am a very great believer in the power of culture. I think an awful lot of our beliefs are culturally formed—that our faith in our essential individual selves is wildly overblown, and that we would be very different creatures in different cultures. (Some of this came out in my discussion of homosexuality.) On the other hand, I don’t like theories that ascribe everything to culture, to forces outside ourselves. This, I think, is the theory behind Rousseau, behind Marx, behind Freud—at any rate, behind their second-rate followers—that anything you say is really a product of your social class, of your unconscious, that once you know something about a person’s attributes, you can ignore what they actually say. This sort of thing drives me up the wall—I mean, when I’m not indulging in it myself!—not merely for the despotic implications of such theories, but, even worse, for the insufferable rudeness of this style of intellectual debate. “Oh, well, of course you’d say that—you’re a Wizzian. It’s a Wizzian sort of thing to say.”

Now, when I say I believe in the power of culture to form our selves, I’m obviously straying close to this sort of obnoxiousness. I like to think I save myself from it by saying 1) that culture is not all-powerful to form us; and 2) that we in turn form our cultures. It’s a reflexive process—whatever we are individually contributes to the larger culture. Does Anglo-Saxon lack the vocabulary of Greek philosophy? Sure, but Englishmen nativized a good deal of that vocabulary into English, and now we can discuss a fair bit of Greek philosophy. We weren’t perpetual prisoners of language. Tolstoy strengthens the Russian tradition of pacifism—he isn’t trapped by his culture. Withywindle, in his particularity, is shaped by academic, American culture, but he also helps shape it. My consciousness is culturally shaped, but I am not a prisoner, not suffering from “false consciousness.” And I extend a like courtesy to all other human beings—I can note their cultural patterning, but I take them in the last analysis as free men and women.

So I haven’t read the Postman book. My hackles rise because the thesis of the power of literate and televisual culture to form human nature seems to me to waver on the edge of what I consider to be obnoxious, a denial of any human freedom. Now, details are everything. Maybe Postman is subtle yet nuanced, and keeps his thesis from a reductive simplification. And, of course, any book with a broad thesis has to be sweeping and simplifying—it’s stupid to condemn a book for successfully achieving a feature of the genre. But this is where my mulishness comes from, simply at hearing the book described—a fear that it is another one of those books that gleefully sketches the shackles on the human mind, and discounts the possibility of human freedom.

Imagination

David Brooks, speaking of the modern Communist Chinese Party, says, Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army. I therefore think of these lyrics and this music.. Or possibly the reverse.

Artistic Epics

My dad, great Anduin, gave a presentation the other day on Alfons Mucha’s cycle of historical paintings, The Slav Epic. My dad’s talk was on how Mucha, famous for posters of Sarah Bernhardt and the like while working in Paris, descended into relative obscurity, even among the Czechs, when he came home to work on High, Serious art—partly because by the time he finished his historical paintings, after World War One, they were already two generations behind the artistic times. (My dad compared the effect to Arthur Sullivan switching from operetta to Ivanhoe, the latter unknown while the operetta is on a fair way to immortality. Also to John Singer Sargent switching from portraits to edifying murals, as in the Boston Public Library.) My dad’s point was largely to make a case that one ought to take a look at Mucha’s historical paintings seriously, both historically and aesthetically. (By the by, I saw the original paintings with my parents when we visited the Czech Republic in 1999.)

What the talk made me think about was genre—is there a trouble conceiving of epic in visual terms? Are we more or less likely to conceive of epic visually than we used to? I gather from my dad that there are cycles of epic historic paintings that glorify various dynasties, but I don’t think any of them have world fame. Then there’s the question of genre prestige—as I recollect, history paintings had highest prestige in the (French) academy up to about 1850 or so, even probably up to Mucha’s formative year, and part of the great narrative drama of the Barbizon and Impressionist painters is their challenge to the genre prestige of history. I think it would be interesting to tell that story of prestige decline from the point of view of the history painting—to make it the protagonist of the story—and include Mucha as part of that narrative.

Then there is the question of national epic—the impulse to include an entire people in an epic, not just a few select noble warriors. This I think of as a 19th-20th century phenomenon, and it would be interesting to compare Mucha with various contemporaries. What comes to mind: Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida, the Spanish painter, has a 360-degree panoramic painting of the different regions and peoples of Spain up at the Hispanic Institute of America, in upper Manhattan; that strikes me as epic in ambition. The various landscape schools of American art strike me as trying to make a sort of landscape-epic of America--Albert Bierstadt seems like a good example to me. Diego Rivera does murals in Mexico. In prose, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is, among other things, an English epic in a more modern, national mode. (Hobbits as well as great warriors, you see.) In poetry, Pablo Neruda writes the Canto General and Walt Whitman his effusions on America. I suppose in opera, Wagner’s Niebelungenlied expresses an epic impulse, but is it national-popular?

All this by way of saying that modern-national-epic is a phenonomen I hadn’t really thought of in those terms before, that I think it would repay study, and that Mucha ought to be a major figure in any such study.

But I am doubtless reinventing another wheel.

What Giuliani Should Say

I am so tough that I will personally interrogate every single terrorist we capture. I will blind them with the glare from my forehead. However, Judy will not be the First Lady. I will be on my fourth wife by Inauguration Day. His name is Bernard Kerik, but I am a Federalist, and I do not expect the states outside of Massachusetts to recognize our union. Nor will I entrust him with the accounts for White House decoration. However, he has my undying loyalty. May God continue to bless America, and especially the Yankees or the Red Sox.

What Romney Should Have Said

Hi, I'm a Mormon. I have many wives--some of them used to be yours before they traded up. I will choose my Cabinet from the Mormon Elders, so don't worry--I'll be giving orders to them. The relocation of the Federal Government to Salt Lake City will save money due to the lower cost of living in Utah. Your required mission service abroad for my heretical sect can be waived, so long as you make a small tithe to an appropriate non-profit institution; please make out your checks to Brigham Young University. And in closing, all your dead ancestors will be officially converted to Mormonism if I win the election, so smile!, it'll be a big family reunion at the Pearly Gates.

Some will argue that his version gains more votes. But I submit that my version is more memorable.

Long European Vacations

This article on Danes fleeing high-tax Denmark mentions by-the-by

"When you are at 63 percent tax, you don't look forward to the evaluation with the boss to get a raise," Sorensen said. "You look for more vacation or a training course in the tropics - something that you get the full benefit of."

So does that mean that long European vacations aren't just a Great Perk, but a benefit sought by workers because they can't be taxed? That's an interesting way of looking at them. It also helps explain why Americans work so much longer than Europeans--with lower tax rates, we'd rather get paid, and to heck with the vacations.

The Belgium is Falling! The Belgium is Falling!

Belgium is without a government for half a year, the country falls apart ... except it doesn't. It carries on quite nicely without a government, so far as I can tell. Pleasant moral: a people can carry on without a government well enough. Unpleasant moral: the bureaucratic state can carry on by itself well enough. Particular Belgian moral: enough powers had already been devolved to the regions that the incapacitation of central government mattered less. As we said in History seminars back in college, Each of these Morals has Some Truth, and the Answer is Complicated.

Prolonged Childhood

Reading Adam Smith, I take especial note of how the operation of the market is supposed to be character-forming--to create the sort of prudent person who will, seeking his own self-interest, operate in the public interest. Reading Nobody Sasses a Girl in Glasses and What Would Phoebe Do (both on the blogroll), I note a prolonged conversation touching, among other things, on the proper age to start sexual relations and the proper age to start marriage. It seems to me that this is part of a larger conversation about childhood and adulthood--when, and in what societal frameworks, is it proper to engage in various adult activities? I put these two together to rediscover a truism: shouldn't we be thinking about the development of a prudent character in the same way that we think about the development of a sexual character?

Now, the childhood link: I take the point of our prolonged modern childhood to be a prolonged innocence about all adult matters--about sex, about violence, about money. The plus side of such innocence is--well, the innocence itself. There's no going back once you gain experience of the world, however defined, and there is something sweet in preserving that innocence. Against that, the argument of preparation for the world: the sooner you know about sex, money, and violence, the better you will be prepared for the brutalities of the world. For all of these, I note, society is ambivalent: sex, money, and violence have their place, but the place is not supposed to be one with children in it.

But if we add money to the conversation of character, is either sex or violence so important? That is, it seems to me that modern life (middle-class American) has prolonged the entrance of children into the money economy from the age of seven or so (!!!) to twenty-two, or thirty if you're in grad school--delayed the acquisition of that prudential knowledge of wage, labor, and self-interest that Smith held to be essential for the public good--and that this delay is of far more consequence than the varying ages or amounts of sex education, initiations into violence, etc. Should not a social conservative--a Smithian one, anyway?--care at least as much about making sure his teenager has a summer job than about said teenager's dating life?--although with a rather strong sense that instilling a work ethic now is the best surety that said teenager will acquire the character of prudence in the dating life later.

This conversation allows for other parallels in analysis. That is, both in sex and in fiscal prudence, there are parallel fears attached to upper and lower classes. The fear for the gilded youth is not so much for their survival as for their decay--that sexual and financial excess will rot their souls and, worse, cast them out of the meritocracy. The fear for the lower classes is that, set a bad example by the upper classes, sexual and financial excess will penurize them for life. The process is taken to be the same; the effects on the poor, devastatingly disproportionate.

I say this aware that there is a fair amount of concern about a lack of financial character in America--articles about well-off teenagers who no longer work, articles about an underclass that never works. A great deal of it is phrased in terms of character. But I think we have half-forgotten the specifically Smithian link between finance and character, the idea of financial prudence as a social virtue--and that it might sharpen the national conversation to mention the point again.

The Manliness of Modern Women

Medea says in the Euripides play "I prefer to stand in battle three times rather than give birth once!" While I defer to Victor Davis Hanson for the exact estimation of the risks of fatality in ancient Greece, that seems about right: go into battle three times and you will receive a serious, possibly fatal wound, involving a certain amount of excruciating agony. This sort of calculation, it seems to me, underlay a great deal of traditional society: both sexes underwent great risks, whether in pregnancy or in battle; both placed a moral claim for their position in society by their willingness to undergo such fatal risks. (Women's claims tended to be somewhat undervalued by men, but that's a story for a different post.) In the terms of Harvey Mansfield in Manliness, both sexes' manly virtues--endurance of pain, willingness to risk death--were central to their moral standards.

But what of modern times? The risk of death or permanent injury has gone down enormously (1 in 5 women dying per birth to somewhere under 1 in 100 would be my seat-of-the-pants guess) in childbirth--but the risk of men dying or getting wounded in battle has gone down even more. The modern American male has close to zero chance of getting near a battlefield. (The number of men on the front lines has to be somewhere under 1% of the male American population, and not more than a few percentage points of the age cohort, and most won't get killed or injured.) The modern American women--well, let us put it at the level of enduring pain. The modern American women can expect to undergo two excruciating gut wounds in the course of her life--and that, even with the expectation of recovery, is two more than the modern American man can expect. Furthermore, with the rise of birth control, these gut wounds are very often voluntary choices, hence savoring even more of manly virtue. The choice to have a second child, having had a first, may be praised even more highly.

Now, this ratio of danger has been even higher at points in the past--the white American male born in 1865 had very little chance of entering battle, while his female counterpart bore risks in pregnancy much higher than her descendant nowadays. Nevetheless, there has been a very radical shift from Greek times in the distribution of chances to display manliness. The rise of women in society and politics, I think, must reflect a realization of this fact in some way or another--that women, not men, have been the more manly sex of late. The shift in values away from manliness also reflects this--not, as Mansfield thinks it, a feminist plot against men, but rather a masculine plot against women--to shift the standards towards something men can compete on with some chance of winning.

All this by way of not entirely serious speculation, but not entirely unserious either.

Extensive and Intensive Reading

One of the things I find interesting in research is the shift from intensive to extensive reading--the shift, associated above all with the printing press, from reading very few texts quite intensely to reading a great many texts more shallowly, and assembling information from their multiplicity. (See Elizabeth Eisenstein and Ann Blair, among others.) This shift has also affected education practices--broadly speaking, text-based education began with the practice of modes of intensive reading, and has shifted toward the practice of modes of extensive reading, but intensive reading remains at the core, I think, of academic study in the humanities. So I consider all this, and I ponder my own practice as a teacher.

It seems to me that what we want above all is to get our students reading at all, and into the practice of reading. For this, I think, we have first to interest them in extensive reading--which is the default for reading nowadays. When I assign a textbook, or a coursebook on a basic level (or even an intermediate one), what I want to do is get the students interested in reading something else. The textbook, the basic books of the course, are my reading recommendations in some sense--but not just the books I think good, but the books that will get you reading other books, and thus provide you the knowledge which will in turn provide you with a certain basic extensive knowledge of a historical period or subject. (This is one of many reasons why choosing syllabi is so delicate an art--you're trying to choose books and texts that will stimulate an interest in reading as well as simply impart knowledge, and you have to take account of the students' limited and varying reading habits.) Simultaneously, of course, the books I assign, when repeated, give me a lesson in intensive reading--by now, I have a rather in depth knowledge of John Keegan's Face of Battle, and I suspect that in twenty years I will know it backward and forward! And just learning enough to teach means that I read far more intensively than I usually did as a student at any level.

You also want to teach students to read intensively. At the levels I've taught, the essay assignments, the primary source texts, and the discussions are supposed to be ways to get the students into intensive reading. I think this is a more difficult skill to teach--which is both to say that the students I've had don't fall naturally into intensive reading, and that I am not yet a good teacher of how to read intensively. I think you would do this more in an upper-level seminar, which I haven't yet taught. I think you would do this more at an elite college, also not yet within my teaching experience. I think that a good college education--much less a graduate one!--needs to include training both for extensive and intensive reading, probably in that order of acquisition.

I take English and (Political) Philosophy to concentrate more on intensive reading than does History, so these comments are to some extent discipline-bound. But I also understand the New Criticism and Straussianism, in their different ways, to be calls for even more intensive reading within these disciplines, with the corollary thought that they too indulge in a certain amount of extensivity. The whole Cultural Studies schtick--studying the cultural context of a text rather than the details of the text itself--to be a prizing of extensivity over intensivity. Anyway, the self-conscious traditionalism of New Criticism and Straussianism is, I think, genuine to the extent that intensive reading is more at the heart of Western reading practices. (I'm sure genuine for other reasons too; reading mode isn't the only standard of genuine traditionalism!)

And, of course, the idea of a Core Curriculum is meant to promote intensive reading--the intensive study of selected texts, available for common discussion, aligns naturally with the mode of intensive reading. Now, the astute among my readers will note that the Core inverts the order of learning I've propounded--which is to introduce students to extensive reading first, then to intensive reading. To which I reply that Chicago, Columbia, etc. assume students who already have a good background of extensive reading, and don't need to be wooed into reading period; the students I have taught so far are at a much lower level of preparation. I think, practically, the extensive-intensive sequence still needs to be followed--it's just that the students at the better colleges have done the first half of the sequence in high school.

Blood Wedding

I just saw, for the first time in seventeen years (good lord!), Carlos Saura's Blood Wedding. This is a movie of a flamenco adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's play. It is just as good as I remember--brutal, beautiful, tragic--although I had forgotten just how much of the movie shows you the dancers arriving, the warm up, before you get to the dress rehearsal of the performance itself--the prefatory material is perhaps 15-20 minutes of the total. A film about making art, as much as showing the art itself. Looking on the internet, I now find that Saura did two more flamenco movies--Carmen and Amor Brujo. I'll have to take a look at them.

Interesting note: the DVD made for the Americas region comes from Brazil.

History is So Broadening

As I've remarked or implied a few times before on this blog, this has been an unusually bad teaching semester for me. Classes that have gone very well for me before, classes in subjects I like very much, seem to be going exceptionally badly.

It's probably been a useful learning experience -- for me. I now feel like I know better how to deal with large numbers of truly difficult students, something I guess I've never really had to confront before. But there are times when the sheer resistance to learning of some of the kids in my classes simply leaves me floored. I don't think I'm exaggerating or overdramatizing when I say that never have I seen so many people so stubbornly close their minds to ideas and techniques that ought at least to be granted a hearing. Many of these ideas and techniques are commonplaces among the learned professions.

Nothing quite shocked me though, so much as yesterday's history class, when it became apparent that some of my most vocal students -- the ones who think they're the smartest in the class -- really believe that they possess an absolute standard of judgment by which to measure all societies, all eras, and all cultures.

I wish I could be specific about the context and the course of the discussion, but I want my anonymity. The key moment, in any case, came when I suggested that someone else, someday, centuries hence, might be able look back on our own time and place and think our ways deluded and ridiculous.

This got some laughter. Nervous laughter. I could be mistaken, but as I looked into their faces it seemed that this was, to many of them, not a cliche but a wholly new idea. A strange and disturbing idea. I was amazed, and I was even more amazed when, at this point, some of them became eager to pronounce the past unknowable and to cry King's X against any attempt to hold one era's values and practices up to scrutiny in terms of the values of another. This was a change of course, for these were precisely the same people who moments before had been eager to specifically and invidiously characterize what was going on in the minds and hearts of whole vanished civilizations.

The upshot seemed to be that some of the students -- and again, the most vocal and the most self-confident -- were willing to take any position rather than admit the possibility of historicizing their own values and allow the study of history any role as a corrective to their "parochialism in time." Which, for me, is exactly one of history's most important roles.

Many years ago, Sinclair Lewis wrote a comic short story called "Travel is So Broadening." The title is ironic: it quickly becomes plain that the couple in the story have used travel only as a way to reinforce their own prejudices and decide that people living in faraway lands are quaint and silly. Apparently history can be "broadening" in the same way. I can only say that I'm happy to think that the mindset I encountered yesterday is still a minority one, even among undergraduates.