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"They keep saying that without tenure, the faculty
would be afraid to express an opinion. I’ve been kissing up to tenured
faculty for so long, I can’t remember having an opinion!"
A Few Words from the Editor
As in little things, so in big things. When I
volunteered to manage my seven-year-old’s Little League team (under some
duress: it was implied that without my help, the team would disband), I
had not the remotest idea that I was in for an object lesson in human
nature. First of all was the draft—a business as sordid as any
pork-politicking or fall-guy selection that ever went on behind closed
congressional doors. The managers who have seen all the children play ball
from the cradle immediately snap up the most talented and experienced,
while any newcomer (yours truly, in this instance) is appointed, quite
without his knowledge or consent, to be the season’s punching bag. Yet a
deficit of experience is not always insurmountable at the age of seven,
and I briefly had confidence that our "bums" (a malign spirit
whispered "Dodgers" in my ear when I was asked to choose a name)
could be drilled into shape. That was before I realized that a good half
of the parents considered their mission accomplished once they had
photographed their child in his new uniform. Practice? "Why, of
course he’ll be there… as long as we don’t have a party or bowling
league or choir rehearsal—and, you know, he spends every other weekend
with my ex."
If baseball is the national pastime, then Little League—with
all of its unethical boundary-drawing, skin-deep family-friendliness,
evasion of firm commitment, allergy to drill, and transferred lust to win—must
be a national allegory. And a human allegory, too; for, to be fair, much
of this was going on when I was seven, a tally of years ago better left to
the imagination. (Hint: we used wooden bats.) Believe me, however, when I
say that the conduct of parents is different now. Some sign up
their little tyke for two or three sports at once, just to make sure that
he doesn’t get cheated. They seem to devote not an instant to reflecting
that his inability to practice with each team regularly is a betrayal to
other children who may wish to improve. They buy him state-of-the-art gear
for every role, so that on rare occasions when he actually shows up for a
game, he is accoutered like a superstar—until, that is, his pricey toys
are hopelessly mislaid over house, van, and field. They find a scapegoat
for each of the child’s setbacks during the game: the umpire made a
lousy call, the ball took a bad hop, the manager hasn’t supplied
adequate direction, the opposing player is on steroids. Yet all is quickly
forgiven and forgotten when the fat lady sings. After all, Tommy had fun.
He failed to perform at the most elementary level, but he liked wearing
his uniform and he got to play tag with Billy in the dugout.
In a decade or so, Tommy will attend college. His
parents will fork out the money, not just for tuition and lodging, but
probably for a car and a "cool" wardrobe. Undeterred by a full
course load, he will sign up for glee club, use his student card for
season football tickets, join the Alpha Omega fraternity, film a campy
sci-fi flick with his buddies, and discover an interest in rock-climbing.
His professors will rack their highly trained brains to make his course
work fun, and those who finally assign him a C will receive a very
long stare from the Dean. On his way to becoming a virtuoso-dilettante,
willing to dabble in anything for five minutes and informed enough about
nothing to author more than five lines, he will drop a great deal of money
from his porous pockets. At the end of it all, he will be eminently
qualified to adorn the upper floors of an office building where potential
investors are made to feel that they are "among their own".
So play ball! With this issue of Praesidium, we
again invite you to ponder the lost depth of a culture which tunes
in to watch people eat loathsome invertebrates, act insufferably rude to
other people, and hurl chairs across a stage upon hearing the results of a
paternity test. My own essay about foreign language instruction is perhaps
a bit pedantic; I am especially grateful, therefore, to Gianna DiRoberti
for livening things up with a most stimulating—even polemical—piece
about the "bohemian bourgeois", and to Allan Shields for
resurrecting landscapes of a hundred years ago. What an irony, by the way,
that the age of high literacy was also the golden age of walking!
The "book worms" of the old school were often master ambulists:
Wordsworth thought nothing of hiking twenty miles to post a letter. Now,
with all our "free time" from the "boredom" of
clerical labor, our bodies are growing as flabby as our brains.
No recent issue of this journal, furthermore, has been
more generously endowed with creative work. Mr. Moseby’s short story
strikes me as something more on the order of a prose poem, and rewards the
effort which it takes to work through properly; but, if you disagree,
surely the ensuing exchange between the two of us will be more to your
taste! In any case, the second story, "Straight Shaft" (which
reached me just before deadline), is as "realist" and linear as
it is delightfully acid. I’ve read nothing else that comes close to
satirizing a departmental meeting with the ruthless candor which Mr.
Davies displays here.
Then we have our poet-contributors, whose reliable Muse
is a needed reminder to me personally that contemplation and mystery have
not entirely abandoned us. When I saw that Professor Carlson had sent me a
little piece about coaches, of all things, I couldn’t resist!
~J.H.
*******************************************
The Intimate Message of Foreign Language:
One Small Curricular Step Toward Restoring Reason
by
John R. Harris
Πολυμαθία
νόον ου
διδάσκει.
Knowing many things does not
produce an educated mind.
Heracleitus
The subject of primary and secondary public education
was recently a very hot issue in these parts—though not, I fear, at the
proper level. The enormous tax increase sought by our school district was
earmarked (as well as I could ever make out—details were not
forthcoming) for major building projects; and, like good middle Americans,
my fellow citizens fell to arguing mostly about whether our children
"deserve" to have tedium held at bay daily in surroundings
somewhere between the Mall of America and Disneyworld. The general opinion
was that no amount of convenience and luxury (at the expense of
property-owners, of course) was too good for "our nation’s future
leaders". Pundits who keep saying that American character rejected
big government and the welfare state after Jimmy Carter should get out of
DC once in a while. Madison lies a-moldering in his grave. So for the
Protestant work ethic; and as for the Western valorization of endurance,
self-discipline, and inner strength… Sparta, thy ghost has been laid,
and thy very foundations carted off to make golden arches.
If we could have concentrated this debate upon what
actually happens in the classroom, we would, I believe, have taken a major
collective step toward arresting the vast ruination of our young minds and
the sickening degradation of our culture. We would at least have been
shooting on the same range, if not at the same target. Another missed
opportunity... and who knows when the next may come? In preparation for
that distant day (may it be much nearer in your own community), I share
the contents of a letter which I addressed to our local rag. It was never
published in that venue, by the way, and I can’t really argue with the
editor. Considering that the biggest bone of contention was an
eight-million-dollar swimming complex, I can hardly maintain that the
thoughts expressed below were in the fore of my neighbors’ minds.
"Dear Editor," I wrote:
"Though much has been said lately about the
importance of schools to our children’s future, little attention has
been paid to the content of their classes. I wish to state briefly my
concerns about the ‘silver bullet’ of contemporary education:
computers.
"Computerized searches are anti-hierarchical
whenever values cannot be quantified (as in morality). They strew
limitless information over the table without ranking any of it for beauty,
truth, or goodness: a smorgasbord of fare to flatter every whim.
"Computerized studies are anti-deliberative. They
keep the eye (and ear, increasingly) always occupied, and at a click they
bring up a flashy new screen. To sit in still silence and think a question
through is not a skill anyone ever learned from Microsoft.
"Computerized communications are anti-social and
prone to misuse. No amount of ‘interaction’ substitutes for the
presence of other human beings, and the dependency of such interaction on
protocols is an open invitation to cheats and crooks. No program is
hack-proof. Every time you log on to the Net, you are trusting in methods
of verification whose exploiting is a nice livelihood for criminals who
cannot be caught.
"Computerized expression is counter-creative. All
the talk about creative freedom is based on the correct perception that
computers destroy hierarchies of ethics and taste—but that doesn’t
mean there’s no ‘first’ and ‘last’. Marketing is all about the
morally repugnant and creatively degraded competition to seduce
bystanders. The Net’s big winners are the best seducers. Even off-line
expression—say, a mouse-controlled ‘paintbrush’—gives a pitiful
approximation of the shades and textures found in real paint; and the
project almost always begins with a pre-packaged image (like a
photograph).
"Finally (and most importantly), computerized life
is anti-spiritual. By that I mean that computers deprive reality of its
depth precisely by destroying hierarchy, deliberation, social bonds, and
creativity. A trip to the art museum becomes ‘virtual’, a climb up
Everest is packaged on a CD or Website, and a moral question like abortion
produces an opinion survey and some ‘bulletin boards’. I call this
drowning at the shallow end of the pool.
"Add to all this that many of our society’s
leaders have staked their reputations or fortunes on luring us into this
‘web’, and you have a crisis far greater than Islamic fundamentalism.
(By the way, Al Qaeda has massively exploited the West’s
digitalization.) So you’re concerned about education? Go see if our
schools are using computers to supplement literate, humane learning or,
rather, to fill large parts of every child’s day with fireworks
displays."
The letter ended here. I should most certainly have
stressed the parenthetic point in the final paragraph had I wished to
sound a utilitarian note over a moral one (viz. "Computers may not
leave us worse people, but they may well leave us all dead"). If
identification documents were not checked by computer, flights not booked
and cleared and virtually flown by computer, power plants and water
treatment plants not operated by computer, financial business from sales
of stock to bank loans to credit card purchases not transacted by
computer, and intimate friendships and confidences not cultivated by
computer, opportunities for catastrophic sabotage and undetectable
infiltration would not so abound in our society. (Yes, I know, we’re all
being pushed to accept a "foolproof" electronic identity card of
some kind. Incredible. Then the fake Mr. Jones will no longer need to
shave his thumbprint with a razor: he will only need to hack into the FBI’s
database.) Already as I sit writing, a purely natural disaster—a
mid-winter ice storm, say—is capable of visiting calamity upon vast
areas thanks to our electrified way of life. Our wood-burning ancestors
didn’t stay as toasty as we do, but neither would they have frozen or
starved because a blizzard brought down a bunch of tree limbs. In the near
future, our very doors and windows will open by computer command (as our
garage ports already do by hand-held remote-control stick). We shall have
invested so heavily in this single technology that its compromise for any
reason will leave us fully at the mercy of raw nature and malevolent
aggressor.
Even though the rest of this paper is not dedicated to
stressing the practical dangers of wired living, we should never forget
that its proliferation has thoroughly tarnished the motives of our age’s
leaders. With or without cause, Democrats have always accused Republicans
of pandering to big business throughout my lifetime. The computer
revolution, however, has soiled everyone’s fingers, at least
potentially. Its profiteers and piggy-back riders include dot-com
fly-by-nights as well as oil magnates, radical propagandists as well as
Madison Avenue publishers, incendiary crackpots as well as straight-laced
establishmentarians. When the local school board or a national
representative, therefore, recommends that we teach our kids from screens,
their or his or her political affiliation or age or race or gender or
socio-economic profile cannot be relied upon to supply any kind of filter
which might help us to snare traces of self-interest. All are tainted. The
stock trader owns shares of Microsoft, the small businesswoman has a
lucrative Website, the councilman’s son-in-law sells computer systems,
the college freshman grew up on video games. You have a far better chance
of finding a critic of the automobile, whose toxic emissions are disputed
only as to degree and whose lethal abuses have left human gaps around us
at the rate of a major war.
Neil Postman’s recent work, Technopoly, is as
splendidly insightful as his now almost legendary denunciation of TV
culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman recognizes that we
cannot backpedal to a pre-electronic age of Jeffersonian letter-writing
and Addisonian pamphleteering. Computers are here to stay, and in some
ways we all welcome them. The labors of Praesidium would be
impossible for so few people so poorly funded if the word processor and
the Internet didn’t lend a thousand mechanized hands. The trick is to
keep these hands from unlocking their cage: to restrain this Briareus from
picking our pockets, stealing our lunch, redecorating our living rooms,
playing with our babies—taking over every aspect of our lives, in short.
Postman ends up advising that we acknowledge "technopoly" to be,
not just a specific range of household and marketplace conveniences, but
an entire philosophy, complete with its own epistemology (what we know
about reality) and its own ethics (what we should do about what we know).
Since this digital philosophy is miserably impoverished, we should
actively combat its toxic effects by teaching other ways of assessing
reality and its obligations upon us. Along with a historical overview of
technology and of the arts, Postman counsels a course in comparative
religion. No particular religion would be allowed to dominate the student’s
attention; rather, the course would cultivate the religious sensitivity to
truths not fully visible, not remotely quantifiable, and not amenable to
popular vote despite their hold upon our basic humanity.
This is a daring proposal, and, of course, has little
chance of finding its way into either public or private education. Public
schools will reject what they see as incipient narrow-mindedness, despite
Postman’s emphatic insistence that sacred texts from the Bhagavad-Gita
to the Koran to the Communist Manifesto (you read that
right) should be included.2 Private institutions, in turn, will
reject what they see as a dangerously demoralizing broad-mindedness
(Islamic schools more vehemently than Christian, by the way, and Marxist
academics more vehemently than anyone). In the real world, at the very
least, one would hope to observe a smattering of the great ethical
philosophers introduced someday into the last years of high school. They
have long been banished from most college campuses, as we all know, but
not because adolescent minds cannot grapple with them at some level beyond
the merely superficial. (On the contrary: Plato, Aristotle, and the other
"dead white guys" would make only too much sense to inquiring
young minds, which must be "protected" from them for subsequent
programming with addle-pated ideology.) A few brave, thoughtful, and
competent administrators could redeem our young minds from the nauseating
nullity of their cultural surroundings by offering them such intellectual
bread of life. Here the problem seems to be less political than practical.
Neither bravery nor thoughtfulness nor even basic competence is in
abundant supply at the top of our educational hierarchy.
There is one well-established discipline, however,
which is by nature humane, social, analytical, dependent upon hierarchy,
insistent upon clear and distinct truths, indebted to tradition, dedicated
to correct self-expression, and—in short—pregnant with all the values
our children sadly lack and our avant-garde theorists vigorously
persecute. It is the discipline of learning a foreign language. Consider
the virtues of submitting to such a regimen. You have to talk to other
people, or at least attend their recorded communications very closely and
respond in point-by-point fashion. It isn’t enough to have your own
"thing" which you’re going to do in your own way: indeed, it
runs entirely contrary to the exercise. You are not even allowed to say
things like "thing" without, at a minimum, becoming aware that
you are using a highly ineffective idiom. Hence the analysis, the
hierarchy, and the clear truths which follow from such an intense degree
of human interaction. When your mind is narrowly focused on what others
are saying, you scrutinize each piece of the puzzle—not just individual
words, but the inflections and prefixes and suffixes of those words—to
arrive at the most accurate perception possible. In this analytic
exercise, your mind is concurrently leaping back from the minutiae to view
the emerging landscape. Which of two homonyms confers a clearer sense upon
the emerging sentence? Which of two orthographically identical verb forms
better suits its action and time frame? This synthetic counter-motion to
the analysis of small parts is a hierarchy-building operation. It creates
priorities of greater and lesser likelihood. (And let’s be honest: when
not translating in a professional setting, we often shoot in the dark. Our
quick measurements of likelihood in these circumstances may go so far as
to include what we know of the author’s character and tastes.)
Obviously, any solid affirmation we can clutch in such clouds of witness
is a great help. The French tirer can mean "to shoot" as
well as "to pull", and it almost certainly does if we find fusil—"a
rifle"—in the same sentence. Words mean things when we anguish
through these quests after another human being’s intent. They may not
mean anything at all when we later sit at the feet of some critical-theory
guru; but in French class, tirer means "pull" or
"shoot" or one of a few other things—not "sail" or
"simmer" or "make love".
I remember a passage in Tobin Siebers’ excellent Morals
and Stories which reflects upon the analytic-synthetic tug-of-war
involved in the discovery of meaning. I plainly recall, in fact, that when
Siebers summarizes the research of linguists Schank and Abelson on the
importance of verbal clusters and social environment in conferring sense,
I thought immediately of translation from another language. "Both
literary and ethical notions of character," Siebers concludes,
"rely on a dense social context that is responsible for their
applications and that is influenced in turn by those applications."3
The chapter in which this remark appears is titled, "The Case Against
Linguistic Ethics". Siebers takes aim in these pages at such
contemporary torture of words (usually called "play") as one
sees in deconstruction and reader-response criticism. I find him right on
target. As a matter of fact, in dealing with defunct languages, we
sometimes have nothing but inference from context to suggest a word’s
meaning to us; and in reading such formulaic texts as the Homeric epics,
we may well choose to make little of a specific word’s known meaning if
it creates dissonance in its setting. ("Swift-footed Achilles"
would be an irritating phrase to encounter while the hero sits in his tent
if we truly dissected each bit and piece to the skeleton.) The intensity
of analysis practiced by literary critics upon single words often seems to
have gone haywire, leaving its complementary synthetic "checks and
balances" far behind the way an overheated machine might lock in a
certain gear. The crowning irony is that many theories which the simplest
translation exercise would prove ridiculous have been concocted in Europe,
where every educated person is a polyglot. But then, perhaps that’s why
they had to emigrate to the New World to attract a following: nobody back
home took them seriously! Certainly mainstream French scholars, whose
letters have long been guarded with Cerberus-like ferocity by the
Académie Française, would not take kindly to the notion of
"playing" with words until they yield ideological bias. A French
colleague once assured me that she viewed Derrida very much as a bad boy
reacting against the academic successes of Lévi-Strauss and
structuralism.
Would that we were capable over here of telling a
genius from a prankster! But we are not, at least in linguistic theory,
and our clumsiness with foreign language must be part of the reason.
Because the discipline of learning another language, while firmly
established in our schools, is now just a shadow of what it might be or
what it once was in the United States, we are easy prey for charlatans
selling the propaganda that every expression conceals propaganda. As a
society, we already denigrate those other virtues which I listed as
implicit in acquiring a second language: high regard for tradition and
dedication to expressing oneself clearly. We Americans have always trusted
that newer is better and complained that time-honored formality is
suffocating. We call ourselves rugged individualists —which creates a
contradiction, of course, with our contempt for precise self-expression.
Perhaps we view the painful labor involved in crossing all our t’s
as oppressive to our free-wheeling spirit. If so, then our individualism
isn’t very rugged, or else our ruggedness is doomed to become crudity
incapable of individual finesse. We latch onto the phrase, or even the
entire sentiment, currently in general circulation, and then we
self-indulgently try to cover our tracks by saying that we value the
common man’s honesty over the scholar’s stuffy jargon. (On the morning
of my writing these words, I was forced to sit through a video tape
chronicling the ascendancy of a certain religious denomination. I found
myself wincing at each of the narrator’s pregnant pauses in anticipation
of a "warm fuzzy" shibboleth: "God shows his will through…
people. His ultimate purpose is… love." Flann O’Brian,
blessed be his memory, would have found ample matter here for his series,
"The Catechism of the Cliché".)
The truth is that accurate self-expression depends
mightily upon conventions. People must be able to index your formulations
to a set of generally received and acknowledged meanings before they can
determine in what sense and degree you are challenging the received or the
acknowledged. When we abandon such accuracy, we enter the unwholesome
realm of the inarticulate mob, part of which is ruled secretly by sophists
who speak only to pluck the desired nerve, the rest of which belongs to
the frightful chaos of pre-rational whimsy, passion, and stupor. The new
sophists who reached our college literature programs from France and
Germany were deluded, no doubt, only in thinking that the adulation they
harvested was a proper verdict upon their merits. (Sophists are always so
deceived: a liar may be bright enough not to believe himself, but he is
never honest enough to refuse himself the praise of his believers.)
English and History departments fell like dominoes before the trend. Young
people, many of them exceptionally intelligent, swallowed whole the toxic
notion that every notion wants you to swallow something toxic. How could
that have happened—why had they no confidence in the ability of rational
discussion to ferret out illogic and falsehood? Because their own culture
had already betrayed them in a way they never suspected: because, that is,
they had not been educated to analyze and synthesize and re-analyze, to
work toward coherence however they could (including by appeal to common
sense), to establish priorities of resemblance to the real, and to have
recourse to convention in all these endeavors. They could not express
themselves, and so they were willing to believe that their unexpressed
frustration grew from the manipulative expressions of others which had
somehow cut them off, somehow stilled their tongues. They had never
learned how to think.
The cause of this intellectual debacle is manifold. The
appearance of the television and the disappearance of neighborhoods where
people walked about and spoke to one another probably had far more to do
with it than the recession of foreign language study from the curriculum
at all levels. Yes, we still have such study. Time was, however, when
young adolescents studied Latin and Greek and French or
German in many schools, and had access at least to Latin courses in
virtually every school, public or private. High school graduates of three
generations ago were often better thinkers than Ph.D. candidates are
today: they plainly wrote better English, at any rate. Ask your
grandparents (or, better yet, a great-grandparent if you can find one)
where they learned to handle sentences so well and they are likely to
answer, "Latin class." Subject-verb agreement and subordination,
especially, are linguistic concepts with which English-speakers bent over
the Latin grindstone become very familiar. Now that such apprenticeship
has virtually vanished, we need only click on CNN to hear senior
newscasters and successful lawyers-turned-politician mauling the King’s
English in their profound ignorance of these very concepts. Even worse,
their reasoning reveals deficiencies corresponding to their grammar. They
have no sense of proportion: they quickly lose the main point, or else
have never identified it among a debris of loosely relevant detail.
I repeat that the causes of such intellectual
degeneration are many. If learning a second language, however, could
merely slow the bleeding of what increasingly looks like a mortal wound,
why not apply the poultice? Instead, colleges are actually abandoning the
foreign language requirement among their core courses with alarming
insouciance. Some campuses have the audacity (or the stupidity) to
volunteer "computer literacy" as a replacement. Gertrude
Himmelfarb, ruefully reflecting upon this trend, explains, "The
presumption is that any method has its own justification, has to be
tolerated on its own terms and judged by its own rules".4
Just so. The administrative brain trust is so far from understanding the
interconnectedness of disciplines (and, in this case, the very special
connections of foreign-language learning) that it advances computer
studies because of their difference from everything else! These
architects do not answer the question, "How does Field A relate to
Fields B, C, and D?" Rather, they defiantly fling out the rhetorical
question, "Why not Field Q—what genuine relation has anything to
anything else, after all?"
And indeed, computer-speak encourages none of that
intellectual stimulation which I catalogued in the learning of another
language. The occasion is not social; those who stress that we are
receiving instantaneous messages from people all over the world have
blinded themselves to the machine’s ineradicable drawback: its
obstructive mediation. "Worldwide earth-linking internet"? We’re
actually crouched in reverence before a screen whose flickers claim to
come from Russia or Kenya, but might just as well hail from the next room
or be a "glitch". As for analysis, computers may greatly assist
statistical studies by providing instant graphics or projecting trends
quickly into the future, but they cannot question the quality of the data.
Hence we have the vexatiously "unanalytical analysis" of opinion
surveys or of next year’s weather. Too many people are falling on their
knees before the electronic oracle’s print-out, and too few are aware
that "facts" need to be evaluated very closely before they are
fed into mathematical formulas. For the computer knows no true or false:
its definitively yes-no, on-off digital nature takes you left or right
without ruling upon the soundness of your choice. If we pursue this
absence of truth a little farther, we find that it becomes an absence of
hierarchy. A stint on the computer is a lateral navigation among various
options: any command will open a door. The level of satisfaction your
journey raises in you after a long series of opened doors, however, is an
entirely subjective response to a medium indifferent to vertical thinking.
Tradition, of course, is the computer industry’s primal adversary.
Though computer programmers must observe certain protocols, the level at
which the typical college student is expected to become
"literate" on the machine hides the binary coding and the HTML.
The celestial term "user-friendly" might indeed be defined as
relying minimally on any fixed body of knowledge. What "self"
this sad student has left to express, having been liberated from analysis
and the past to lurch around in a menu, is quite beyond my ability to
imagine.
I have just recapitulated the letter to the editor with
which I opened this essay. What an irony! The digitalization which is
carrying us away from the Western tradition of humane letters and literate
analysis is prying its way into the curriculum behind the wedge of foreign
language! Foreign it surely is, but language it will never be. One hears
occasionally that mathematics is also a language, and not without justice.
The "laws" which govern numerical relationships are the most
impressive example in our human world of universal truth not dependent
upon empirical phenomena and yet as "objective" as anything we
know. What these laws gain in truth value, however, they lose in finesse.
They require no negotiation, no qualitative sensitivity, no soul-searching
struggle toward consensus. In that regard, they are only half human.
"Computer fluency" takes the worst of both worlds. It borrows
from mathematics a disdain of tradition and a worship of rigid numerical
"fact", marries these to rhetoric’s lame pretense of
sociability (which is truly a following-leading immersion in mass whimsy),
and gives birth to a barbarous pseudo-objectivity of pseudo-feeling.5
This is precisely the sort of influence which we most need foreign
language programs to combat.
I cannot "prove" that curricula with
stringent foreign language requirements make better thinkers—not in the
sense intended by the stuffed shirts who always require proof. They seek a
statistical vindication for everything they do; and, not surprisingly,
they are leery of the humanities and all other fields not readily
susceptible to quantification. I can only promise them that the world
would have fewer of their kind if it had more foreign language
instructors. I know this because it is a thoughtful observation
based upon long experience. I have spent most of my life in and
around schools in some capacity. At the moment, I am tracking my young son’s
progress through grade school with great interest. I find that the
settings which produce eloquent, imaginatively agile, profoundly
discerning graduates are those which offer more foreign language.
Naturally, if an institution does not measure success in eloquence,
imaginative agility, or profound discernment, but only in ability to
attract the attention of the region’s accounting firms and machine
shops, the advantage I cite will seem negligible. The never-known is never
missed: no swine ever wept for a pearl.
Yet one experience in my own considerable stock of
anecdotal evidence has nagged at me steadily as I have prepared these
comments. It directs us back to college—in fact, graduate school—rather
than keeping us focused upon our local school district, and to that extent
it constitutes a digression. Yet I pursue it here, not only in the spirit
of honesty, but also because I believe that, however irrelevant graduate
study may be to grade school in other ways, in this one there are
meaningful correlations.
I received my doctorate in Comparative Literature. The
"comparatist" on most campuses which have such a program is
required to be fairly competent in at least three languages. If my theory
about the intellectual rigor of studying other tongues is valid, then
surely here, if anywhere in the humanities, we should find scholars being
produced who have no patience with theoretical mush and irrational
victimology. We find nothing of the sort, however. On the contrary,
Comparative Literature was the landing craft which outlandish critical
theories of conspiracy, privilege, and propaganda used to make their
beachhead on many campuses around the country. This would seem a most
embarrassing circumstance for my argument.
The more I ponder it, the more the Comparative
Literature phenomenon strikes me as the exception that proves the rule. It
is complex, and requires careful dissection. First of all, every such
program of which I have any knowledge accepts English as one of the
languages qualifying one to participate. This means that our
"polyglot" graduate student may in all probability turn out to
be a) a British or American national strong in one other tongue and
passable in a third, or b) a foreign national who happens to speak good
English as well as a third language usually related to his or her mother
tongue (e.g., Spanish and Portuguese, German and Danish). Now, since the
gurus of theory were almost all northern Europeans early on, our graduate
student, if British or American, may well have learned another language
precisely to plunge into the delights of the sacred tantrum tantra;
or, if European, may have come to America precisely to discuss the
banished prophet unharassed—and perhaps to sit at the Great One’s
feet. Even students who were not fully converted to a faith in verbal
conspiracies upon entering grad school would be instantly and permanently
immersed in anti-propaganda propaganda. Their reading lists would contain
practically nothing else: just trendy theoretical works and a few
non-canonical (i.e., miserably written) primary texts showing the
"play" of exploitation and oppression in "narrative".
To put it bluntly, the connection of Comparative Literature with foreign
language was often no more subtle than getting to read folderol in its
original form.
I have frequently tried to imagine how a faculty of
comparatists would go about evaluating such a candidate’s competence to
proceed to the dissertation. What would a competency exam look like when
given over texts which overtly—even militantly—declare that all
efforts to establish hierarchies of competence are an oppressor’s power
play? To say the least, a dedicated footsoldier of the movement would be
under great pressure to grade charitably. So what if this student doesn’t
know that tirer means "to shoot" when coupled with fusil?
Why should any decent person expect another decent person to be versed in
the wicked male idiom of detonation and murder? Better to fail the ones
who get the sentence right: their heads may be sitting straight, but their
hearts are horribly skewed!
I exaggerate, of course (or so I fervently hope). I may
add in all candor, however, that the best thinkers in the program I
entered were invariably those who did not fit the categories I have
just described. They were not self-styled victims of oppression in search
of a soapbox who happened to be bilingual. Many of them did not choose
English as one of their three languages of specialization. Others
specialized in the ancient or medieval phase of a certain language and
culture rather than insisting that all should be contemporary (and, as
anyone knows who has ever tried it, studying medieval French or German is
like learning a language almost entirely distinct from modern French or
German). I will not say that I found these people politically out of step
with the theorists. Most of them lived on the borders of nihilism, at
least superficially: after all, this was graduate school! Yet with a
little persistence, one could always bring them to a depth of conversation
about literature where the theoretical jargon simply blew away like chaff,
leaving behind long-deliberated opinions and a genuine humility before the
evidence’s vast diversity. They were not above secretly sniggering at
the pompous critical jargon which their less weighty peers clung to as a
shipwreck hugs his driftwood.
Then there were the Hispanists, the Spanish majors who
spoke fluid English and tacked on a bit of Portuguese. I must say
immediately that I intend no disparagement of Spanish literature, either
of the Old or New World, in what follows. I came to Spanish rather late
myself and am completely self-taught (with a lot of help from Latin and
Italian). Nevertheless, I have already discovered a great many jewels
which I highly prize, from Antonio Azorín to Rómulo Gallegos. I will
admit that Spanish literature confronts the classical temperament with
certain challenges not met in other romance languages. Spain was so well
insulated from the rest of Europe that she preserved her serious
ruminations in a Latin Catholicism longer than other nations (including
Ireland), allowing mostly popular legend and picaresque narrative to leak
into the vernacular.6 Yet there are quite enough Spanish
classics to keep the most voracious reader busy, even if they do not root
as deeply in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance as do the canons of
France and Italy.
That said, I may proceed to certain geographical and
cultural realities which bestow upon Spanish a unique position as a
foreign language in North America. These realities will carry us right
back to our original discussion of foreign-language learning in our grade
schools and high schools, so they are worth stressing. Spanish is actually
the mother tongue of many North Americans—and I do not mean simply
Mexicans. It is the only language other than English which
Americans find on most of their government’s publications (much to the
chagrin of many). It is the language, therefore, of a culture in highly
visible rivalry with traditional Anglo-Saxon customs; and since
Anglo-Saxon culture is so deeply infused into our institutions, Spanish is
a language of the underprivileged. Bilingual Hispanics who entered
Comparative Literature programs thus already bore a much more substantial
baggage of victimization when they walked through the ivory gate than did
classmates who merely felt out-of-joint with life and were looking for
somebody to blame. Furthermore, the massive corpus of Spanish literature
generated by Central and South America over the past century is replete
with Marxist sentiments dramatizing the struggle of oppressed against
oppressor. How could it be otherwise? This part of the world has seen more
years of real oppression by an alien culture than anywhere else. (I am not
excluding Africa: the European exploitation of the African interior began
relatively late and lasted relatively briefly. Besides, Europeans never
settled in Africa and merged racially with Africans to any degree
approaching what we find in the Americas.)
In short, with the Hispanists you often got real
victims with a genuine literature of victim-chronicles. There’s nothing
anti-intellectual about recognizing this, either (though there is
something quite unintellectual, I believe, about founding an entire
Manichaean philosophy of good guys/bad guys upon it). One may hone one’s
reasoning skills just as sharply by reading and analyzing Karl Marx as by
paying homage to Dante or Shakespeare; and if you add Gabriel Garcia-Márquez
to the equipment, you can bring a sparkle to your blade. My reservation
about Spanish as the major power in today’s foreign language
departments, I emphasize, has nothing to do with the progressivist
tendencies of modern Spanish literature. It has to do with speaking.
The special reality of Spanish to us in North America is a spoken
reality, not a read or written one. Many of our hispanophone
neighbors are no more literate in Spanish than in English: printing
government documents in both languages doesn’t help them much unless
they find a friend who can read. Nor is this true simply of the poorer
classes which tend to slip into the United States in desperate search of
work; even the comparatively affluent Argentinians and Chileans are
finding that their populace, though widely educated, chooses not to read.
Spanish-American culture is vaguely but significantly
opposed to literacy. I have already grazed the reasons why this should be
so. The original Spanish who subjugated the New World did not themselves
have a vernacular literature as liberal, expressive, and meditative as the
rest of Europe. What literature in Spanish existed, furthermore, was no
more passed along to native converts and collaborators than was the Summa
Theologica. Transplanted Spaniards themselves were too busy with the
work of administering colonies to cultivate literary taste. Hence today’s
Hispano-Aztecan Mexican or Hispano-Mayan Guatemalan or Hispano-Carib-African
Dominican has no centuries-old tradition of literature upon which to draw,
even if we may assume that he knows how to read, nor are the endemic
customs which survived Spanish colonization remotely relevant to life in
the TV-and-Computer Age. These people have few roots reaching back either
to oppressor or oppressed. They have been dumped into the
twenty-first century almost as if they had been transported through
several previous centuries in a dark knapsack.
Now, at last, we confront a major issue. Spanish
departments are clearly going to endure at our universities, and Spanish
classes will clearly continue at our local grade schools. The ideology of
victims-and-villains which reigns in the academy will secure the place of
Spanish in the former venue, and the blunt reality that immigrants from
the south are permanently settled among us will secure its place in the
latter. The last stand of foreign language promises to be a good one. In
fact, it may just turn the tide of the battle.
Unless, that is, you insist upon the healthy survival
of literature as a condition of victory. Spanish may not be able to
deliver this prize. Since the ivory tower has been so heavily politicized,
I fear that even graduate programs in Spanish may become steadily mired in
contemporary fiction which is little more than the transcript of those
soap operas so extremely popular south of the border (even more than
here). Such works are centrifugal in every way: they orbit no nucleus of
common values or traditions, their style chases after the ever-changing
slickness of the movies, and the patois in which they are written
is itself almost indecipherable in other quarters of the Hispanic world.
Certainly our schoolteachers seldom inspire a love of literature.
Administrators and parents alike lean upon them to produce adolescents who
can chatter away like some fudbol sportscaster—this so that
Johnny and Susie may have the inside track when it comes to getting a job
among a bilingual public. Our primary and secondary schools have the ethic
of instant utility forced down their throat in this age of
"accountability" (I cannot resist the quotes, as a defender of
the humanities); and our "higher" educators (no explanation of
quotes needed, I trust) choose to live out their Juarista fantasies
rather than to help us all rediscover what unites us as human beings.
Allow me to explain why this emphasis upon speaking,
and upon a popular literature more attuned to electronic performances than
artistic composition, undermines the thought-provoking qualities of
foreign language study. The speech of ordinary people in ordinary
situations (called "demotic" from the Greek demos) is far
less rigid than the formal language of "serious literature", if
one may still use that phrase of any creative writing in the world. In
Spanish culture, at any rate—especially Spanish-American—it has little
meaning. Writing is judged on how closely it approaches informal speech,
just as plot is judged on how closely it replicates the microscopic
melodramas of unheroic multitudes. There are many casualties of such
popularization. For instance, the tense which is designated conditional in
Italian and French, constructed from the present infinitive, and employed
under specific circumstances has collapsed into the imperfect subjunctive
in Spanish.7 I have found repeatedly that even college-level
instructors cannot define for me the circumstances in which one form
should be chosen over the other: they only remark that the
infinitive-based subjunctive (once the conditional tense) predominates in
the New World, while the other structure (the imperfect subjunctive in
Italian and French) is Old World, old-fashioned, and practically obsolete.8
Demotic usage simply lost sight of the distinction, and its indifference
soon became law (i.e., abolished the existing law) since Spanish has no
watchdog like the Académie Française to guard its standards.
This "tyranny of the street" is even more
apparent if one examines vocabulary. The common people frequently don’t
understand big or rare words. As a result, they either discard them or
press them into service as synonyms for words with only approximately the
same meaning. A few issues ago, we wrote in Praesidium of how the
Spanish verb cavilar rather brutally comes to mean
"think", leaving a gap around the subtle act of caviling which
can only be filled by supplying descriptive phrases ad libitum.
Demotic language lacks rigor and precision. Any student of Greek who has
read Plato and then attempted the New Testament knows the frustrations of
rule-bending and oversimplifying for the earnest translator. If you are an
educated American who has lived at least forty years, of course, you must
be painfully aware of this leveling phenomenon already from observing how
quickly a sloppy coinage, once popularized, finds its way into the
dictionary. The man who wins the lottery is "fortuitous", we
hear it said, and an idiot does not "bungle" but
"bumbles" like a bee.
To be sure, diminished rigor is still better than no
rigor at all. Yet the laxity of demotic language has more serious
consequences. A language can get along nicely without a conditional tense,
and the meanings of words are never rock-solid; but the most morally
salutary quality of language study—its invitation to think things
through—may actually be opposed by the ethic of casual conversation.
When people talk casually, they spend far less energy on thinking than on
keeping the verbal ball in lively motion. They grab at idioms instead of
pondering the mot juste. The teaching of conversational technique—which,
I repeat, dominates foreign language pedagogy today—depends heavily upon
burning into the student’s memory a bunch of tired phrases, trite
sentiments, and dead metaphors. It is a preparation in how not to
think, in how to jabber seamlessly and volubly. You know what people sound
like on a given day at a given street corner:
"Hey, Bob. How’s it going, man?"
"Okay, I guess. No complaints. How’s
Jane?"
"She’s back up again, she’ll survive."
"So she’s cool with your new job?"
"Hey, man—totally. She wants that new pad,
know what I mean?"
How could anyone not know what these vocalized
hand signals mean? That is, how could anyone think that they mean much of
anything? It is into such challenging situations as these that we prepare
our students to plunge on a faraway street corner.9
The objection may be raised that idioms are
traditional, and hence uphold that respect for the past and for hierarchy
which I recommended earlier. Not so. The idiom is precisely the lingo of
the idiotês—the regular Joe, the average bloke. In today’s
parlance, idioms last (I would guess) about five or ten years: less all
the time. Our electronic technology causes them to be churned out at
breakneck speed—and we all know better than to ascribe any regard for
tradition to that source! In fact, The perceptive reader may
already have reflected that to draw closer to street talk in today’s
circumstances is to draw closer to TV, the movies, and the Internet. If I
am correct that the skills involved in acquiring a foreign language are in
some important way opposed to those involved in "computer
literacy", then dedicating a foreign language program to bus-stop
blabber is sleeping with the enemy. With the flux of "in"
phrases, naturally, comes a parallel flux of topics and ideas. Rock stars
pass into and out of popularity, movies explode on the scene and then
vanish, and even the most critical events now have a shelf life of mere
months. (How many people were interested in President Clinton’s
impeachment even for a few weeks? How many people on the streets of New
York mention the World Trade Towers today if they do not happen to pass by
the yet littered chasm?)
In a truly, functionally oral society, language is
anchored firmly, not by the idiom, but by the proverb. It has been
plausibly maintained that oral-traditional peoples do not search their
souls as do their literate counterparts. "By separating the knower
from the known…" writes Father Ong, "writing makes possible
increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never
before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself
but also to the interior self against whom the objective world is
set."10 A counter-argument might be made, however (and I
very much doubt that Ong would disagree with its terms), that the
pre-literate person is not wholly deprived of self-expression—he simply
"seeks" himself in the broader community rather than in his
intimate thoughts and feelings. Proverbs are indeed a measure of such
self-expression. A speaker puts before his audience a timeless proverbial
truth, implying that it is relevant to a specific situation being
considered. The audience’s members then ruminate over the suggestion,
fitting specific details into the universal panorama. One of them may
respond with another proverb, which may either confirm the first or hint
at an adjustment. These people are most certainly in some sense
"speaking their mind". Their exchange is punctuated by
respectful and meditative silences. (One sees the like, for instance, in
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.) They are not riding the crest
of trend to sustain themselves in incessant prattle. Though Ong, Havelock,
and others have been quite right to distinguish their activity from its
literary equivalent by depth of analysis and force of individual
assertion, they are in their way infinitely more analytical—and,
yes, even more individualistic—than the tourist armed with a host of
"guidebook phrases" learned in French or Spanish 202.
Lest I seem to be bullying Spanish, I must add the
final point about demotic language’s degradation that, in every
particular venue around the world, it is growing more and more anglicized—and
especially more americanized. Eventually, I suppose we will end up with
one bland American cheese of slang. The assault, as one would expect,
comes primarily in the form of technological terms. Words for
"telephone", "microwave", "minivan"… a
glance across my desk assures me that the French for "toner cartridge
(according to Xerox’s box) is cartouche de toner. Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry refused to learn English when he took refuge in this
country during the Nazi occupation, worried lest the gradual American
conquest of his culture proceed through his own writing! What would he
think of télévision and the rest? Reading with great pleasure the
Venezuelan novel Doña Bárbara the other day, I ran across the
word Güinchester for a Winchester rifle. As an enthusiastic
student of other languages who does not, however, make any effort to
sustain the conversational fluency of the soap operas and gossip
magazines, I can only imagine how many such barbarisms have been
machine-drilled into reverend tongues around the world. And with this
techno-speak come more conventional Anglo-American idioms. Irish has a
colorful and intriguing phrase for "give an account" or
"describe": cur síos (literally, "put down").
Move the image in the opposite direction and you get cur suas, as
in "put up [with], endure"—an image very familiar to us, as
well it should be.11 It is ours. You won’t find it in any
Gaelic text of more than a few decades old.
When things are viewed from this perspective, one has
to conclude that all foreign languages—but perhaps especially Spanish,
with its relatively thin layer of literary tradition in the New World and
its immense weight of popular pressure—would very much benefit from
being taught more from plays, poems, stories, and novels and less from the
language lab. Those exponents of ethnic preservation in the Hispanic
community should realize that delivering Spanish instruction to a
slaughterhouse of electronic chatterboxes will sooner or later strip the
language of most of its character. What people like the Irish and the
Welsh hope to achieve in Europe by foisting their ancestral tongue with
similar jingoism upon uncouth teenyboppers is beyond me to say. National
unity, perhaps… but what they will in fact achieve is the ultimate
colonization of their heritage, not just by the English, but by all the
tasteless ephemera of postmodernism’s posthumanism.
Here, then, is my most urgent recommendation for
availing ourselves of foreign language instruction’s happy survival
among compu-kid games and PC history books, among business departments and
nursing programs. Teach the literature. Relegate speaking to a secondary
status: don’t avoid it, but don’t stress it. First and foremost, teach
the rules of grammar and cultivate a richness of diction. Do so as quickly
as possible, in preparation for the marvelous day when children (or young
adults) can pick up a short story by Dario or Maupassant or Deledda and
read it in its original form. The blessings of literacy include a richness
of internal life and an acute analytical ability; those of orality include
a richness of communal life and a wonderfully synthetic sense of
transcending purpose. The electronic habit of living, I am fully
convinced, cultivates the psyche from neither of these directions, nor
does it have anything substantial to offer in their place. It is the first
step upon the path to becoming a robot. Computers can already talk to us
with about the level
of sophistication that we find in the typical language
lab: "Would you like to write a letter… may I make some
suggestions?" (Of course, the suggestions themselves will be dictated
by a suffocating uniformity.) If, instead, we surround the nurturing of
verbal skills with thoughtful, humane, intricately crafted literature, our
language programs, rather than "programming" kids to ask
directions in German or Russian, will bestow upon them the best gifts of
oral and literate culture at the same time. Rather than preparing them to
think like robots, we shall be preparing them to think and live without
robots.
My own experience has been that language labs are of
doubtful efficacy even in the narrow endeavor of learning how to speak
among natives. If one could pass within a few days from the lab’s
headphones to the streets of Paris or Madrid or Cairo, the strategy might
make sense. In fact, if I were a coordinator of events, I would never use
a speech-and-listening intensive program except in just such a context:
that is, when I could arrange for students to hear and speak the relevant
language several hours a day immediately before they take a
school-sponsored trip to another part of the world. But this is seldom the
procedure. Instead, the student routinely devotes a couple of hours a week
throughout the semester to listening in on taped conversations, repeating
certain passages as directed, and taking aural comprehension tests. These
tedious hours would be better spent reading, writing, and learning
grammar. Whatever facility may be acquired in making conversation vanishes
over summer break, if not the Christmas holidays. One must hear and speak
a language almost daily if one has no other means of preserving a mastery
of it. Of course, one must read it scarcely less often to maintain the
same level of mastery, and most students will no more take a French novel
home over vacation than they will track down a French speaker to address;
but the point is that they could do the former with relative ease—and
throughout their lives—whereas the latter would eventually prove
impossible (always barring marriage with a French national). Read a
language every other day, and you will be able to bring your speaking
skills up to speed with little pain whenever the need may arise. Basic
grammatical principles will be firmly fixed in your mind, and your
vocabulary will grow by the month. Immerse yourself in speaking, however,
and all your painful learning will fly away within weeks of your leaving
lab and classmates behind. Even if you should find a conversing-partner
within your life’s stabilized boundaries, what are the chances that
brief chats about job and family will keep in repair (let alone improve)
your knowledge of the language’s complexities?
There is a species of teacher, I know well, who will
not appreciate my suggestions. In fact, I am bound to say that one of the
reasons speaking and listening are so strongly endorsed by teachers of
foreign language is the ease of lesson-planning and paper-grading involved
in that strategy. Administrators, in their characteristic ignorance, are
impressed by such chirping extroverts, who often speak their special
tongue with the beauty of a cardinal calling for a mate at springtime. But
if these same teachers don’t read anything except the textbook dialogues
assigned to their students, they have little to their credit beyond their
warbling mellifluidity—and they can scarcely impart that to their
classes!
Until we face up to the liabilities of such methods, we
shall be getting far less out of our language programs than we ought to. I
can well recall the first college-level interview I ever endured after
earning my doctorate—for a joint Latin-French position, with emphasis on
the former. Now, even with secondary emphasis, the French duties concerned
were arguably beyond my competence, given that developing conversational
abilities in the students was a stated objective and that my delivery in
French was halting. (My English isn’t much closer to the torrential: I
have a nasty habit in all languages of pausing to think over what I’m
about to say.) I could have accepted my rejection, therefore, if it had
been couched in those terms; but what I heard instead has left me
disturbed for two decades. I sounded "too much like a book",
read the verdict—not halting, but too formal in style and too florid in
diction. What strange reasons for denying one access to impressionable
young minds! If I had possessed a cab driver’s command of French, on the
other hand, I suppose I would have been ideal.
Where will this orientation take us, if not (I repeat)
down a cloaca maxima where everybody speaks in the same hybrid
slang of the same television-and-poll filtered ideas? Why not speak
like a book to one’s students? What’s so frightening about a live
person with a better-than-average vocabulary and an uncommon respect for
subjunctives? Indeed, isn’t it precisely those languages most ravaged by
popular short-cuts and misconceptions (I repeat) which should most
heartily welcome a few "bookish" referees?
I shall close with two scarcely more recent memories. I
found myself in Dublin during the summer of 1986 to attend a three-week
course in Celtic Studies. At the first week’s end, all of us students
(there were only about forty of us) were invited to some sort of
nightclub/eatery where only Gaelic was spoken. I almost didn’t make it
past the door. A rather assertive young scoundrel kept yammering something
at me which I finally understood to be a question about how many were on
my ticket. As if touched by an electric cow prod, I piped in sudden
recognition, "Mí fhéin" ("Myself"), the only
Gaelic I managed all night. (One of the instructors kindly translated my
dinner order for me.) The whole outing, beyond being a bit humiliating,
struck me as thoroughly ridiculous. Why would people do this sort of thing—just
to give England and her language a political thumb in the eye? If these
Dubliners had political differences with England, would such differences
not profit from being addressed directly; or if they merely wanted to
cultivate their ancestral tongue, could they not do so with less
ostentation and more method? What was the exact nature of the good being
served when one uttered, "Tasty grub," or, "I like that
song," in Irish? What good is served, for that matter, by the new
rash of Gaelic short stories about teenagers running away from home or
priests arranging trysts with hookers? In our miserably ignoble world, is
our squalor somehow sanitized when expressed in the Irish? Wouldn’t we
do better to use language in our recovery of right reason than to
translate our lunacy into every language on earth?
Then I remember a scene involving Proinsias MacCana,
author of many fine books, scholar of international repute, and gentleman
of the old school. He had just finished his daily lecture on the medieval Fled
Bricrend, a new edition of which he was preparing at the time. I had
made the trip across a quarter of the planet largely to hear him on the
subject of Irish myth and legend. He had attended the soirée at the
nightclub, of course: in a way, he was our host. I can’t vouch for the
quality of his modern Irish, but I should be very surprised if it were
deficient to any other’s except in abundance of slang and
"colorful" mispronunciation. This particular scene, however,
occurred right outside the classroom which we were all in the process of
vacating. As I followed the others out, I noticed that he had stopped to
converse with another student—in fluid French. Having just parsed a
great many difficult Middle Irish verbs in impeccable English, he could
respond when plucked by the arm in yet a third language without breaking
stride. To be sure, what I inadvertently overheard of his response sounded
a bit bookish: no ça va bien or je m’en fiche. But then,
I feel fairly confident that he must have been talking about books, not
taxis or soccer or draft beer.
The full experience of another language does not
confine you within that language: it carries over, rather, into how you
speak your mother tongue and treat a stranger and grapple with a moral
dilemma. Likewise, another language is experienced most fully when not
severed in artificial "concentration" from issues of universal
value. Our creature concerns will take care of themselves; if I had been
ejected from the nightclub, I would have dined just as well from the
corner supermarket. Education isn’t about how to stay alive, but about
what one lives for.
1 Technopoly: The Surrender of
Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993). Amusing Ourselves
was published in 1986.
2 Ibid., 198.
3 Tobin Siebers, Morals and Stories (New York
and Oxford: Columbia UP, 1992), 34.
4 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old:
Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP,
1987), 34.
5 I use the word "rhetoric" quite
deliberately. It is worth noting that, as the star of foreign language has
declined on college campuses, that of rhetoric has shot to the zenith. Freshman
English is indeed titled "Rhetoric and Composition" in many course
catalogues, and the students in such classes are often issued a
"rhetoric" to accompany their more conventional grammar handbook. The
shift in focus is understandable, perhaps inevitable. With the exile of
objective truth, tradition, and hierarchy from the ivory tower, relativism has
carried the day by default—and rhetoric is relativism applied to verbal
expression, the science of manipulating an audience purely by style. This
situation, too is pregnant with irony. The revolutionaries who subverted the
stodgy Western faith in universal ideals now teach out of a bag of tricks
purloined from hucksters, shysters, and demagogues: the bourgeoisie’s
inveterate enemy is instructing our children in how to sell used cars. Gianna
DiRoberti’s review of David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper
Class and How They Got There (Simon and Schuster: New York 2000) appears
later in this issue; and whatever one makes of that book, it clearly announces
that our progressive ideologues have become highly successful salesmen.
6 For instance, note that the vast majority of learned
ecclesiastics cited (albeit ironically) in Letters 5-10 of Pascal’s Provinciales
are Spanish. The foundation of the Society of Jesus had concentrated Spanish
intellectuals upon the culture of Church Latin more than ever.
7 As a matter of fact, the conditional form began life
in Latin as an imperfect subjunctive: what the romance languages view as an
imperfect subjunctive was pluperfect in Latin, a tense not preserved anywhere in
that mood among European tongues today. Both subjunctives—in fact, all four
Latin subjunctive tenses—could be involved in Cicero’s conditional
sentences. By the Renaissance, apparently, one was favored in those
circumstances just for its statistical frequency there. All such struggles have
been entirely forgotten in modern Spanish, which has no logical rules for
distinguishing between occasions to use hablara and hablase. We
cannot say, therefore, that Spanish has remained uniquely true to Latin. We can
only conclude that evolution ironically came full circle—with extinction
waiting where the loop was closed, however, rather than revitalization.
8 If I may, from my paltry bit of experience, propose
an example in confirmation: Rómulo Gallegos wrote Doña Bárbara in
1929. Having just finished the novel (I refer to it elsewhere in this essay), I
can vouch for the frequent, even regular occurrence of the "Old World"
imperfect subjunctive featuring an s. I am currently reading Antonio
Skármata’s Ardiente Paciencia, published in 1986. The "New
World" subjunctive using r has entirely taken over. The only
occurrence of the European form I have noticed comes when a dour widow stiffly
directs to Pablo Neruda a request that he dissuade his young protégé from
assailing her daughter’s virginity. Skármata is clearly unsympathetic with
this character: in her mouth, the old-fashioned subjunctive partakes of wills,
obituaries, and letters of intent to sue. Both novelists, by the way, are highly
educated South Americans (Venezuelan and Chilean). The difference lies in fifty
short years of electronic entertain-ment and the suppression of "élitist"
usage.
9 To the extent that Jacques Derrida’s rave against
"logocentricism" in Of Grammatology has any coherence at all,
it is patently contradicted by the observations I have just advanced. Far from
being at their most "essential" in the spoken word, people are far
less themselves when forced to respond quickly in a slick wash of slang and
clichés. There is no conspiracy afoot against the written word, and never was.
That writing involves more reflection than speaking is transparent, and that
more reflection favors richer, more honest self-expression is surely no less so.
10 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 105. Ong
refers to Eric Havelock’s Preface to Plato in the matter deleted from
this citation.
11 Cf. these uses of cur suas at about the turn
of the century in Fr. Peter O’Leary’s Gaelic-language autobiography, Mo
Scéal Féin (1915): "… until that strike came that was put up
[i.e., mounted] against the great afflictions"; also, "every man
understood how to put up [i.e., interpret] the cry." Clearly, there
is nothing very English here.
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*******************************************
It’s Been Said Before
"I’ve just been speaking to you rather lengthily
about painting, to the point that I may seem to see in its adventure the
central subject of this letter.
"I repeat to you that the recent history of
painting is full of significance in my view. The analysis to which it
lends itself is valid in many other cases. The term ‘conspiracy’,
which I have perhaps abused, is not inappropriate here. We are clearly in
the presence of an intersection of deleterious tendencies. What it
possesses of the non-deliberate does not attenuate the resulting bad
effects.
"Other sectors of the art world would lend
themselves to very similar considerations. Sculpture, for instance, has
been struck by the same ill: an overgrown corkscrew is entitled Andromeda’s
Dream and flatters itself that it perpetuates a kind of art which has
descended straight from Phidias to Rodin. The causes of this degeneration
are the same as for painting: the artist’s desire to shock at all costs;
the intimidated public’s resignation; the pretentious verbiage of a
critical establishment anxious, above all, to appear ‘on the right page’
by verifying such issues of counterfeit currency—an enterprise with
which it has associated itself for too long to be able to pull away now.
"One arrives, thus, at a very grave state of
affairs.
"Such a situation cannot continue indefinitely.
The spring-releases of shock are eventually worn out. In practicing the
rule, ‘always push things farther’, one sooner or later reaches,
however much one may resist it, a border beyond which is utter void. After
having offered to the admiration of the masses a rectangle of white canvas
with a stain in the middle and an overgrown corkscrew, you can take very
few more steps in the same direction.
"Furthermore, this paradoxical situation
concerning art is contemporaneous with a rapid, even prodigious
development of industrial technique whose origins lie in science. At the
same time as a painter ‘on the right page’ is wondering if he should
put one red and three blue splotches in the middle of his blank canvas, an
engineer is drafting a plan for a new calculating machine; another is
working to perfect the controls, already maddeningly complex, of an
airplane; a third is researching a way to install telephone automation
between two large cities while inconveniencing customers as little as
possible. Each of these labors is of the utmost intricacy. They are
rendered practicable only by accumulations of knowledge and experience: a
capital of technique which would make the uninitiated tremble.
"I’m very much afraid that, sooner or later, the
technician of electronics or of aeronautic design may perceive a contrast
that has grown scandalous. He could well end up saying to himself, ‘When,
a century and a half ago, society urged one of my predecessors, practicing
what they called then a "mechanical art", to bow before a
masterpiece of David or Ingres or Delacroix, he might have been personally
indifferent, but he found it entirely natural to pay homage to the complex
of acquired science and invention with which he was presented….’
"Now that’s all over. This same man will say one
fine day, ‘The technique which I apply has not ceased to grow more
complex and profound. No more can you ask me to respect and admire
something which I consider the game of a spoiled child.’"
Jules Romains, 1966
Lettre Ouverte Contre une Vaste Conspiration
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*******************************************
Bimbos in Limbo:
Will the Real Bobo Please Stand Up?
by
Gianna DiRoberti
Ms.
DiRoberti has often contributed to Praesidium from her bunker of
erudite reflection among the cultural ruins of outer Dallas. Her Ph.D. in
Comparative Literature, she insists, has inspired her to make her children
musical.
David Brooks certainly seems to be a very pleasant
fellow, in addition to being bright and well informed. His assertiveness
is chastened by just a hint of shyness, and his glasses and coy smile
bestow upon him the faintly nerdy good looks which are likely to attract
intelligent people. Many of us feel as though we know him well after his
Friday-nightly appearances on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour. (He holds
up the conservative polarity against Mark Shields, a position previously
occupied by David Gergen and Paul Gigot, who have gone on to better things
while Shields remains a fixture. Eloquent conservatives are hard to come
by and quickly enlisted in higher causes.) A book written by this gentle,
thoughtful man, therefore, on the subject of the Bohemian Bourgeois—or
Bobos, as they have been christened—seems to hold the promise of a good
read. It must surely be well researched, tastefully executed, seasoned
with humor, and above all weighted with a cultural conservative’s
classical insights into the flighty nature of this frivolous group.
Bobos in Paradise delivers on all of those
expectations—except the last.* Three out of four isn’t bad.
Heaven knows, you will look far and wide nowadays before finding a book
which is researched or tasteful or humorous, let alone all
three. So I could recommend Brooks’s book for its successes; and as a
reviewer, I do. But as a commentator in my own right (one who hasn’t one
scintilla of Brooks’s brilliance, yet who is perhaps for that reason not
blinded by her own halo), I choose to devote most of this essay to the one
great failure I find in Bobos: its lack of gravity, of "rootedness"
in timeless truths. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so unpleasantly
surprised. The hyperbolic blurbs on the back cover are a tip-off.
Christopher Buckley, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom Wolfe… not exactly wellsprings
of gravitas. Darlings of the East Coast intellectual élite, these
worthies are either too young to have witnessed our culture’s
four-decade dance around the drain (Buckley) or too heavy with wine and
laurels to walk straight down the foul line. And if you approach the book
in a "party" mood, you will indeed enjoy its merry meander. But
that, as I say, is not my purpose.
My discomfort began with the first chapter, "The
Rise of the Educated Class", though it was little more than a
subconscious nagging at that point. Brooks’s style is immediately
seductive, and I thought that perhaps my fidgeting was a perverse
reaction. Maybe I had picked up the book with such a hunger to see the
Bobo phenomenon dissected that almost fifty pages on the history on the
New York social scene made me impatient. But no, my response was not mere
impatience—or my impatience was not merely with a meticulous manner
bordering on digression. What should have been a digression, I realized on
the chapter’s last page, was being advanced as a pedigree in all
seriousness. "The WASP Establishment," concludes Brooks,
"fell pretty easily in the 1960s. It surrendered almost without a
shot. But the meritocratic Bobo class is rich with the spirit of
self-criticism. It is flexible and amorphous enough to co-opt that which
it does not already command" (53). Flexible and self-critical, the
overbearing ideologues who have destroyed the academy—the
thousand-buck-an-hour social activists who have turned "lawyer"
into a swear word? Brooks is already sidling toward this extravagantly
generous conclusion in the early pages about the Ivy League set growing
brighter as tradition and privilege lost their hold upon college
admissions offices. There is much more later in the same vein.
But take the beginning proposition that Bobos, first
and foremost, are intellectually sharper than their predecessors at the
top of the socio-economic ladder. This just isn’t so. While snobbery has
surely kept good minds out of Ivy League colleges in the past, its
demise there was no simple yielding of the scepter to
scholastic credentials. In the sixties and ensuing decades, high SATs were
only one way of getting into Harvard or Yale, and they soon became the
less reliable way. Besides the leveling effect of various quota systems,
respected colleges were also suffering from a moral collapse in the
professoriate. Even the first-rate minds which managed admittance to the
halls of ivy through an ever denser clutter of racial screening were
sitting through ever duller classes. Teachers asked to be called Bob and
Susan, they consulted you about what you wanted to read, and they
contracted with you for your grade. Certainly in the humanities, this
period must rate as the Ivy League’s dark age. The students who sullenly
crossed the stage for their diploma during these years entered life with
far more claptrap in their heads than they could have imagined as high
school seniors; and of basic historical facts (if surveys are at all
reliable), they possessed fewer than ordinary high school freshmen of a
generation or two earlier. Perhaps their quantitative skills were
impressive—perhaps the engineering and architecture majors were wonders.
Yet I have never observed this group to be very much given to any of the
affectations which Brooks describes in his subsequent chapters. The only
college-educated people in Vermont who don’t drink Latte and
consistently vote Republican are probably engineers.
Is Brooks entirely wrong, then, about the brilliance of
these young Turks? The answer, I think, did not strike me without much
reflection and long after I had completed the book, since Brooks himself
does nothing to elicit it and much to obscure it. For instance, Chapter
Two, "Consumption", proceeds directly to how Bobos stock their
houses and dress their persons with articles as costly and artificial in
actuality as they are weather-beaten and natural in appearance. Reversing
Marx’s famous observation, writes Brooks, "the Bobos take
everything that is profane and make it sacred" (102). This is perhaps
the most enjoyable chapter for those who delight in seeing hypocrisy
unmasked. Brooks has a clear genius for filtering ridiculous
inconsistencies from the lives of these young, wealthy, and
oh-so-sensitive proselytes of the New Age. "When we need lettuce, we
will choose only from among those flimsy cognoscenti lettuces that taste
so bad on sandwiches. The beauty of such a strategy is that it allows us
to be egalitarian and pretentious at the same time" (97). To me, at
least, Brooks’s discussion reveals that Bobos are the bourgeoisie-hating
children of the haute bourgeoisie. They buy peasant and dress down
to thumb their noses at their snooty forebears; but they do so in the
ostentatious, even exhibitionist manner so typical of their forebears, and
the whole show ends up costing a small fortune.
These are my words, however. In fact, you will notice
in the last citation that Brooks includes himself, if somewhat ironically,
among the very class he is cajoling. The inclusions become more frequent
and less ironic as the book progresses. They are partly responsible for
what comes across as an odd sympathy with the Bobo charade, as if this
contemporary version of pompous pretense had its heart in a better place
than earlier versions. We were told before that Bobos are brighter than
their predecessors; now we see that they are kinder and gentler. Could it
be that Brooks’s book is indeed organized around an effort to win us
over to the Bobo lifestyle? Certainly Chapter Three, "Business
Life", would have been more appropriate right after Chapter One if
Brooks intended to finish building a case for superior Bobo intelligence.
For, sure enough, it turns out that Bobos are neither engineers nor (for
the most part) literary scholars. They are business and communications
majors—and maybe art majors, but only if their course work focused on
computer-assisted design. They are the types he observes in Burlington,
Vermont, home of ice cream legends Ben and Jerry. Hippies lecture on the
stock market in cafés. Distinguished liberal politicians run
bed-and-breakfast houses in retirement. Younger idealists make a handsome
living selling organic vegetables or Shaker furniture. Folk art festivals
are in constant session.
And what strikes me about all this only now—what
never occurred to me as I muddled through Brooks’s labyrinth of irony
and admiration—is that all this activity is marketing, and all of these
people are marketers. Why patronize a B&B rather than a motel? Why buy
organic vegetables over mass-produced varieties? Why a Shaker rocking
chair instead of something on clearance at Big Al’s? We all need sleep,
sustenance, and shelter, yes; but you can get a good sleep in a motel, no
evidence shows that organic foods are healthier (some of it suggests the
contrary), and a chair does its job if it doesn’t fall apart beneath
your weight. The Bobo alternatives in these matters are all more expensive—tremendously
more expensive. Yet they manage to generate a whopping profit. How? By
marketing. These are children of the "information age"
(translate, "age of incessant hyperbole"). They sell, not
objects, but visions. You think you are living closer to nature,
peace, virtue, truth, and God when you sleep in a restored cabin, eat what
the rabbits left, and feel your chair arm’s splinters clawing at your
sweater. You feel that way because you have bought the Bobo worldview, the
recycled (but not fortified) utopianism of the sixties. To be fair, some
of the Bobos have sold you the vision, and some have only sold you its
accessories after your "consciousness" has been
"opened". No wonder they cluster in these lucrative villages!
Where vultures circle, there you find a corpse.
I don’t know that this genius for marketing makes
Bobos any smarter than Beats or Hippies: it certainly doesn’t make them
any more honest, especially since they are most emphatic about having
rejected the philosophy of P.T. Barnum. Brooks begins to look more and
more like these computer nerds from whom he distances himself less and
less. By Chapter Four, "Intellectual Life", his smugness is at
its most indigestible. Here I found marketing mentioned for the first time—that’s
right: in a chapter devoted to writers and academics! Quite a smooth sell,
making your readers believe that the word-doctors are the culture’s new
salesmen while the number-crunchers in Adidas shoes are leaving their
money to Greenpeace. Not that Brooks criticizes the new professor or
journalist for scoring points on talk shows or amassing huge honoraria on
the lecture circuit. Referring to the fifties intelligentsia as if he
actually had some recollection of its quirks, he laments, "the
self-importance of those thinkers was often hard to take. In cutting
themselves off from political insiders, intellectuals cut themselves off
from the reality of what was going on…. Today all that is as dead as the
dinosaurs. Now intellectuals tend to minimize or deny the gap between
themselves and everyone else, not defend it. The central feature of the
information age is that it reconciles the tangible with the intangible. It
has taken products of the mind and turned them into products of the
marketplace" (147). So he finally gets it—but only in the sideshow
which we might call (and which the editor of Praesidium has called)
the education-entertainment industry. Even there, he doesn’t really get
it. A loquacious Stanley Fish is supposed to be a vast improvement upon a
pontifical Lionel Trilling. How? By making extravagant claims which cater
to the adolescent impatience of his students and the pugnacious bigotry of
his colleagues? Was Trilling’s insistence upon studying the literary
text first and last, then, and extremist strategy in comparison with this
new "reconciliation"? Or are bright young Bobos like Brooks just
a little too deeply imbued with Attention Deficit Disorder to sit still
for a discussion of disinterested literary aesthetics?
One of the things that keeps getting marketed in the
Bobo paradise, I notice (present tense, because this is another
inspiration which the book only delayed), is what has been called
insipidly for thirty years "self-image". The Bobo isn’t just
marketing snake oil as an all-natural cure for arthritis: he is packaging
himself to and for himself. He is no mere marketer—or if he is,
then he has revolutionized that lowly enterprise, redefining markets to be
humane, progressive, and user-friendly. He is a prophet or guru or shaman
who just happens to make a hefty income because his blessed activity is
widely sought after and gratefully compensated. He’s a savior who just
can’t fight off the generous gifts of the lepers he has healed.
There’s much of this mentality in both of the next
two chapters, "Pleasure" and "Spiritual Life". The
book’s order again tends to beguile rather than reveal, though Brooks
appears amiably skeptical of lofty Bobo motives from time to time. If you
went to another planet and did a study of Little Green Men, you might well
begin with their social structures and routine occupations, then work
inward to their mating habits and their worship of the Big Green Being.
Brooks continues to market such an illusion of objectivity as he
undertakes (perhaps in spite of himself) a major apologetic behind it.
Most of us have a pretty good notion of the Bobo’s sexual mores: after
all, they dominate the entertainment media. Sex is a favorite recreation
before marriage, but thereafter it is severely bridled to keep the family
together (and to avoid AIDS). Extramarital affairs must be rather few,
extremely discreet, and above all strictly hygienic. Far preferable is the
revitalizing of sex within marriage at moments of lull by means of
everything from natural aphrodisiacs to stamina-building calisthenics to
guru-guided classes and videos. There is quite enough grave obsession with
the quality of orgasm among this silly bunch ("Doctor, I’m worried
that I’m not achieving maximum pleasure!") that Brooks might have
dedicated the whole of Chapter Five to it. Instead, what he has to say
about sex is mostly addressed to sadomasochistic practices, as if these
were standard issue among Bobos. (I really doubt that, though I’ve done
no survey.) Why the lurch to the extreme? Because, I think, Brooks wants
to give the lie to dour traditional conservatives like William Bennett and
Robert Bork who see our culture in an advanced state of moral degeneracy.
"But if you look around upscale America, it’s not all chaos and
amoralism, even among the sexual avant-gardists…. What they are doing is
weird and may be disgusting, but it has its own set of disciplines. And
when you get to the educated-class mainstream, it’s hard to find signs
of rampant hedonism or outright decadence. Smoking is down. Drinking is
down. Divorce rates are down" (196-197). Not only do the sex-tech set
and the leather brigade drink lots of tomato juice and bike regularly;
they are also highly disciplined in their special hobbies. Brooks presents
them almost as Zen masters.
Bright, informed, altruistic, sensitive, dynamic, witty…
and now Spartan, even in their pleasure! What admirable people these are
(and what a super-salesman Brooks turns out to be in his own right). If
even the most extreme forms of hedonistic self-degradation are almost
ennobling as practiced by a Bobo, then we must have a remarkable specimen
of humanity before us. Of course, it’s all nonsense. Moral depravity is
almost never chaotic. The sailor who goes on a binge during three days of
leave may descend into chaos, but he is not depraved for this very reason.
The depraved person has turned civilized custom and natural reason
ritually inside-out, and often follows rigorous rules in metamorphosing
from a human into an animal. The ritual is what makes him lower than an
animal—what puts him at the low end of humanity. To attempt to elevate
such characters into the dawn of a new Moral Majority is not just slaying
the straw man of "disorder" on their behalf: it is using a
sophistical perversity to scuff up the boundary lines of basic decency.
Brooks never makes me more nervous than on these few pages.
There are other pleasures, too, of course—and they
are not only more sane, but must rank among the funniest close-ups in the
book. Brooks’s trek through the REI emporium in Seattle, where
Microsofties buy "boots, rugged khaki pants, and carabiners [to wear]
around their belts with cell phones hanging down" (211), is comic
pleasure of the purest sort. Yet it occurs to me (again after much
reflection) that he missed the point of the journey in exploiting its
satirical potential. It is the point which could have arched backward to
the sexual obsessions of his subjects and unified a great deal of stray
detail. He prefers to emphasize the "serious pleasure" which the
well-drilled S&M moonlighter and the well-read orgasm-connoisseur have
in common with the flawlessly equipped spelunker or rock-climber.
Discipline again: the foundation of moral probity. The point, however, is
not in the practice, but in the pose. These people are all
acting out the lead role in one robust drama or tender romance after
another. Their discipline is that of the impersonator who can imitate the
smallest mannerisms of his subject after a little intense study. They must
be the best, the brightest, the wealthiest, the most generous, the most
competitive, the most compassionate, the most exalted, the most humble,
the most heroic, the most sainted. And they haven’t quite time to fit it
all in on their digital calendar, so they just do the important bit: the
scene where they accept the award, denounce the establishment, rescue the
baby, gaze from Everest’s peak. Even in their sex lives, where the only
audience is their own neurons, they must be constantly milking out one
notch more of ecstasy from bodies taxed to the limit.
This isn’t "serious pleasure". Brooks does
well to fling an oxymoron at it, but ill to do no more. That’s all he
ever does throughout the book: toss out oxymorons, one after another, as
if the impressive pile of them at the end amounts to some kind of
explanation. The explanation is that Bobo surface is consistently being
belied by Bobo motivation. Bobos are shallow people who have to be first
and best and most, the pampered darlings of the most affluent society the
world has ever known. And Brooks’s book, which began vaguely as a
critical analysis, soon peters out in more flattery.
Consider the final chapter before the summation:
"Spiritual Life". Brooks again begins with a caricature which
disarms us. As he sits meditating in rustic Montana, where "the only
things merging into one are my fingers into a block of frozen flesh"
(219), he wins a few more laughs. But by now I am familiar with this
strategy. I know that its appearance of earthy realism, instead of being a
welcome antidote to pompous Bobo fantasy, will end up denigrating itself
somehow as it reviews the Bobo alternative, and then—in the greatest
mystery of all, a true Montana epiphany—become one with its subject. And
I, the bemused reader who thought herself an amused onlooker, will find a
bottle of high-sierra snake oil in my hand.
Brooks is still playing his "wry social
critic" part when he writes the following. "Bobos tend to feel a
little surge of moral satisfaction if they can drop their church or
synagogue into a dinner party conversation. It shows that they are not
just self-absorbed narcissists but members of a moral community"
(244). It shows nothing of the kind: but no keen analysis will ensue here,
for Brooks’s reconstruction is already taking shape. Never mind his
fancy footwork—the show gives the game away. These people really
are consumed little narcissists because they have to stage their
repertoire’s "altruistic routine" before the rest of the
dinner party. Their self-sacrifice has to be seen and admired by an
audience. This, by definition, is the conduct of a narcissist. Someone who
was truly disturbed about the possibility of growing unhealthily caught up
in his own petty world would erase his presence from all struggles in the
other direction. His charity would be secretive. The right hand would not
know what the left hand was doing. The kind of people Brooks has described
are not charitable in any meaningful sense, for they already have their
reward. They have a self-glorifying part to play at the dinner party.
The book’s dissonance reaches its crescendo,
appropriately, in its summary chapter, "Politics and Beyond".
What was the merest tickle of logical discrepancy or unfinished argument
in the beginning chapters is a torturing of the truth in these final pages
which occurs almost in every sentence. By now, Brooks is steadily
identifying himself as a Bobo: the first-persons far outnumber the
third-persons. Bobos are represented as a kind of golden mean between the
social libertarians of the sixties and the economic libertarians of the
eighties. They have learned that free love has to be accompanied with
condoms and counselors, deregulation with clear federal guidelines and the
right to sue. "They triangulate. They reconcile. They know they have
to appeal to diverse groups. They seek a Third Way beyond the old
categories of left and right" (256: the chapter’s second page,
hence the third person). Can President Clinton be far away? No, indeed: he
strides out of the next paragraph as the ideal Bobo leader, warning Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell. "If ever there was a slogan that captures the
Third Way efforts to find a peaceful middle ground, that was it"
(257).
The trouble is that such sloganeering philosophy, being
quintessentially shallow, runs into dishonesty just beneath its appealing
surface. This particular slogan, floated during the brouhaha about
homosexuals in the military, satisfied neither side. It was a lobotomy
applied by Band-Aid. So for Mr. Clinton’s other coups. They invariably
left both sides disgruntled, for their sleek surface was more suggestive
of slime than silver. Conservative legislators were conceded just enough
that they could return to their constituencies proving they had fought the
good fight; liberal legislators seldom found the clear victory on
principle which they craved, only a specific instance of shifting
reference points. To the extent that this squishy medium is the one in
which long-term representatives of either variety tend to thrive, it was
of course expressive of a consensus—but let’s not confuse the survival
of career politicians with the emergence of a new etiquette. Voters on
both sides were being fooled. Either Social Security will go bankrupt, or
it won’t: either American intervention in Bosnia helped the situation,
or it didn’t. Most average citizens still have utterly no idea what to
say on these questions or on a host of others prominent during the Clinton
years. The legacy of that period seems to be that the masses will continue
to be fooled. Bobos of both parties will continue to use their vast
financial resources, their throttle-hold upon the communications media,
and their acquired charm to sell the rest of the public their own
narcissistic paradise, their theme park where everything is as you want it
to be because you don’t lean on the props and you don’t look back.
"Whether you are liberal or conservative, Bobo politicians adopt your
rhetoric and your policy suggestions while somehow sucking all the
radicalism out of them. They sometimes tilt to the left and sometimes to
the right. They never rise up for a fight. They just go along their merry
way, blurring, reconciling, merging, and being happy" (260). Will Mr.
Brooks please explain to me the difference between this portrait and that
of the wholly unprincipled manipulator?
Or how about the lunatic? Narcissism is, after all, a
mental disorder. I recently allowed myself the pleasure of watching for
the twentieth time Humphrey Bogart’s rendition of Captain Queeg in The
Caine Mutiny (from Herman Wouk’s novel). Queeg is a paranoid; and
paranoia, it seems to me, is the flip-side of narcissism—a defensive
isolation of the self in a fantasy world rather than an aggressive
exportation of the self’s fantasies into the real world. Hence the two
are the same in some sense, while seeming opposites, and I offer Queeg’s
case in that light. He’s so consumed with bawling out a sailor for
having an untidy uniform that he forgets the course his ship is steering
and cuts a cable. He is so afraid of a bombardment during a landing
operation that he rushes ahead of the craft he is to escort, pretends to
have fulfilled the letter of his orders, and hightails it to safety. He
turns the whole crew into criminal suspects because a bowl of strawberries
goes missing. Finally, he buries his head in the letter of his orders
(again) rather than navigate a typhoon professionally, nearly causing the
ship to capsize and precipitating the mutiny of good officers. Through it
all, he could be said to "triangulate". His fantasies about
being the perfect captain running the perfect ship are on one side, sloppy
or menacing realities are on the other, and his practical course is one of
constant subterfuge—of creative or literal interpretation, as the
occasion warrants. The cutting of the cable never happened: the equipment
was faulty. The desertion of the landing party was a tough, unpopular
decision illustrating the loneliness of command. The strawberry caper was
supposed to be "fun", or maybe a disciplinary exercise. The
terrified stupor during the storm was devotion to orders.
An ordinary liar lies in specific circumstances for
specific reasons. When lying is not profitable, he may generally be relied
upon to tell the truth. A pathological liar has no grasp of specifics to
start with, since he lives in a fantasy land. His lies therefore appear
bewilderingly unmotivated to sane people and crop up at the most bizarre
moments in the most bizarre forms. Truly, both the paranoid and the
narcissist create this harrowing gamut of unpredictability around them.
"They sometimes tilt to the left and sometimes to the right. They
never rise up for a fight. They just go along their merry way, blurring,
reconciling, merging, and being happy." Is this supposed to endear
them to us? Should it not warn us, rather, that they are loose cannons?
Paradise. Brooks never really picks up on that word as
he concludes, and perhaps he need not have. After all, he has shown that
Bobos are dedicated to a constant dramatization of life wherein they
always play all the heroic parts. If that isn’t paradise, it’s only
because Adam and Eve were subordinate to God, whereas the Bobo writes and
directs all the scripts as well as stars in them. My little boy loves to
play these games, too. Sometimes we play police, sometimes cowboys,
sometimes housebuilders or firemen |