Running Government Like an Artist

[P.S. I've made some big additions in the middle of this post, which I hope clarify and improve it.]

I've begun reading Ursula K. Le Guin's new collection of nonfiction, Words Are My Matter (Small Beer Press, 2016).  Much of it I like, but some of it makes me want to throw it against the wall, which I can't do, because I'd wreck my tablet.*

A poet has been appointed ambassador.  A playwright is elected president.  Construction workers stand in line with office managers to buy a new novel.  Adults seek moral guidance and intellectual challenge in stories about warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills.  Literacy is considered a beginning, not an end.

... Well, maybe in some other country, but not this one.  In America the imagination is generally looked on as something that might be useful when the TV is out of order.  Poetry and plays have no relatiion to practical politics.  Novels are for students, housewives, and other people who don't work.  Fantasy is for children and primitive peoples.  Literacy is so you can read the operating instructions.  I think the imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses.  It beats the opposable thumb.  I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.

That's the opening of "The Operating Instructions," the first piece in the book, which was originally a "talk given at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts in 2002."  She continues the flood of cliches throughout the essay, though she does say some things I like as she proceeds ("Home isn't where they have to let you in.  It's not a place at all.  Home is imaginary").  She even quietly contradicts some of her original claims, but on the whole she sticks with them.

Come now.  Construction workers did stand in line with managers to buy each succeeding Harry Potter novel, ostensibly for their kids but as often as not for themselves.  Do we really want a poet in government?  And by that I mean a person who has pursued poetry as a career, a vocation, rather than as an amateur sideline.  Ezra Pound, say?  I don't see how a poet or other artist would be any better as an ambassador, let alone a senator or president, than (to pluck an example at random) a reality-TV star would be.  This reminds me of the people who respond to anyone who says one thing they like by clamoring for that person to run for President.  The last time I saw it, they were responding to a meme featuring the late George Carlin.  Just because someone has a good imagination, it in no way suggests that he or she is up to interacting with people as a government official must, to educating him or herself about the world and how people have tried and failed to run it, with millions of human lives hanging in the balance.  Given the petty internecine envy and jealousy that have always characterized artistic communities, I think it would be madness to put a poet, or a composer, or an abstract expressionist painter into the Oval Office simply because of his or her artistic prowess.  Some artists might be good at politics, but only insofar as they transcended being artists.

Sure, imagination is important.  But as Le Guin insists, it's not an end in itself.  Politics is a means to an end.  Every human endeavor involves the use of imagination to some extent, of course, but applying imagination to politics or business requires different capabilities and skills than writing poetry or sculpting marble or composing a sonata.  What creeps me out about Le Guin's marshalling these tired, sentimental cliches about the imagination is that they also imply an aggressive know-nothingism that is the mirror image of the Philistine who looks at a modern painting and sneers that his three-year-old kid could do as well: here it's the artist saying that he or she could run an embassy as well as someone who's had the kind of training and experience one needs to be an ambassador, simply by virtue of being imaginative.

To some extent Le Guin realizes this, for she goes on:

Small communities with strong traditions are often clear about the way they want to go, and good at teaching it.  But tradition may crystallize imagination to the point of fossilising it as dogmas and forbidding new ideas.  Larger communities, such as cities, open up room for people to imagine alternatives, learn from people of different traditions, and invent their own ways to live.

As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be ... It's a lot to ask of a child to find a way through all that alone.

Nobody can do anything very much, really, alone.

Just before Le Guin admitted the limitations of small communities, she'd declared that we need stories that teach us who we are, culminating in "We are the people who live at the center of the world.  A people that doesn't live at the center of the world, as defined and described by its poets and storytellers, is in a bad way."

Le Guin has a number of things wrong here.  One is that children don't need to be taught that they live at the center of the world: they begin with that conviction, and unlearn it as they grow.  Another is that while stories may indeed teach children their societies' beliefs about the world, many of those beliefs and "definitions" are false -- even harmful -- and must be unlearnt as they come into contact with the world outside their families, tribes, insular communities.  (An example of a false, harmful belief taught by stories is that toothless old women are witches who cook little children in ovens for their supper.  I know Le Guin knows that one, and knows it's harmful.)  Le Guin talks as though stories encode true lessons that can be extracted and taught.  (P.S. I just remembered that Marilynne Robinson has said some very similar things, and is equally wrong.) That, as she knows very well, isn't true, and shouldn't be true.  It's a fundamentalist, inerrantist approach to stories, which only works in the least interesting cases.  Luckily, children are pretty good at orienting themselves in larger worlds; the complexities and novelties that disorient adults are easy for children to assimilate and digest.  The world is always changing anyway, and it's children who adjust to it and sometimes must help their parents and grandparents to get by.  (Le Guin surely knows about immigrants and their children and grandchildren.)  Luckily, people in larger communities don't have to "really do anything very much, really, alone."  They have each other.  But it's not a neat, orderly process, and it never ends.

Because of this, I'm a bit disturbed by Le Guin's "As alternatives proliferate, however, those who take the responsibility of teaching find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching -- what we need, what life ought to be."  She seems to disapprove of proliferating alternatives.  And adults who "find little social and moral consensus on what they should be teaching" often hurt children (and other adults) by trying to make them live as if change hadn't happened and alternatives hadn't proliferated.  Do adults really always know "what they should be teaching," even about the social structures they left behind?  Unfortunately, no; even more unfortunately, they often believe they do, even when they don't.

It's possible to live at the center of the world and to recognize that other people, other tribes, other nations also live at the center of the world -- that there are many, infinitely many centers of the world.  Professor Joseph Epes Brown, who taught a comparative religion course that I took during my first year at IU in 1971, declared that it was possible and that indigenous peoples did so, because wherever you are standing is the center of the world.  I like that insight, but I'm skeptical; I think it's a romantic projection.  I think that when you start to encounter larger communities and must live side-by-side with people of different traditions as Le Guin describes it, then you inevitably find it more difficult to locate that "social and moral consensus on what you should be teaching" and learning.  I think people can live happily in such an environment, either without a center or with a conception of the center that is qualitatively different from the traditional conception she extols.  In order to do that, you need new stories, and imagination becomes -- at least in part -- a means to the end of establishing the center.  The trouble is that you can't set out to do so; I believe that artists and storytellers will do it unconsciously, if they let their imaginations work.  But what they produce then has to be scrutinized to make sure it doesn't just revert to fantasies of simpler times when everybody knew where the center was.  As Le Guin knows from her own struggles with gender in her fiction, the imagination can and must be educated, not left to its own mudpies. Over time, people will find new meanings and lessons in the old stories, often believing that the new meanings were there from the beginning. 

In a later essay on genre in Words Are My Matter, Le Guin refers a couple of times to Jorge Luis Borges' dictum that all prose literature is fiction: "Fiction, for Borges, thus includes history, journalism, biography, memoir, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Pierre Menard's Don Quixote, the works of Borges, Peter Rabbit, and the Bible."  I agree.  I would add that it includes the law as well, from the Constitution and Blackwell to court decisions.  It happens that the book I read before beginning Words Are My Matter was Ronald Suresh Roberts's remarkable Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd: Counterfeit Heroes and Unhappy Truths. published by NYU Press in 1994.  Originally written as his thesis for Harvard Law School, where Barack Obama was one of his classmates, Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd is an analysis and critique narrowly of black neoconservatives like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Randall Kennedy, but more broadly of the nature of the law and the judiciary.

I first read Clarence Thomas and the Tough Love Crowd soon after it was published in the 1990s, having stumbled on it in a used book store, and it made a powerful impression on me.  I was just as impressed when I reread it this week.  Among his criticisms of his subjects is that they claim, not always consistently, that they are above politics and the babbling of what Thomas called "the maddening crowd," even above "race," and are simply humble servants of The Law, of facts, of reality.  "A Supreme Court justice," as Suresh puts this doctrine, "is only a funnel through which law expresses itself" (page 84 of the e-book). (By the way, this resembles scientists' equally self-aggrandizing claims to be mere oracles of Nature through whom Truth flows.)  So, for example, Roberts writes:

Judges may be blocked by many considerations, but a thing called law is never one of them.  Much that we call law is merely an ordinary combination of strategic reasoning and value judgments.  This kind of reckoning is certainly a constraint; but it is not the peculiar constraint that the thing called law needs to be.  It is, rather, the same sort of thing that congressional windbags deal with every day.  This kind of reckoning lacks the special leverage law needs in order to wall its empire off from the rule of men.  It fails to give a judge the scapegoat she needs in order to escape ordinary moral criticism.  If legal rules don't bind judges, then legal disputes are like our other disputes.  If legal disputes are like our other disputes -- if judges are like the rest of us -- then we can advance ordinary moral criticism of the work they do (85). 

I'd noticed this before when considering President Obama's failures as an authority on the Constitution, alongside the offenses of his fellow Harvard Law alum Antonin Scalia.  Obama's liberal devotees trumpet his authority as a Constitutional scholar, while tacitly ignoring that Scalia can claim the same authority.  If the law really did constrain (or "bind," the term Roberts uses) lawyers and judges, then there'd be no controversy over what the Constitution says.  As Roberts shows, self-styled "strict constructionists" disagree vehemently among themselves as to what the Founders' original intent was.  Of course each protagonist insists that he merely explicates the plain sense of the sacred text, while his opponent imports biases and political agendas into his opinions.  But how is the layperson to decide who's telling the truth?  (In reality, both are lying.  Neither is an empty vessel filled with law, both import biases and agendas.)

It seems to me that Le Guin wants "imagination," as she conceives of it, to occupy the same place "law" does for Justice Thomas and Roberts's other subjects or "science" does for Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye: as a pure disembodied force that transcends commerce and politics.  But while imagination is important, just like law and science, it is a human production, "an ordinary combination of strategic reasoning and value judgments."  I'm inclined to see imagination also as a usefully destructive force, for which "imagination" might not be the best name anyway.  It's something like linguistic change, which not only undermines the stability of languages but interferes with people's ability to communicate. It's positive but also negative; we imagine new possibilities even when we might prefer not to, when we're trying to find a reliable center of the world.  The world shifts beneath our feet.  Language changes not because we creatively change it, but it drags us along, bulldozing through the grammars and lexicons we made to try to contain it. The center cannot hold, but contrary to what I think Yeats meant, the center has never held for long.  If nonfiction is fiction, then fiction is nonfiction.  The "warrior monkeys, one-eyed giants, and crazy knights who fight windmills" that Le Guin believes will liberate us from Mammon will soon become fossilized as dogma and forbid new ideas.

*Actually, I wouldn't do it to a print book either, any more than I'd tear out pages or scrawl on the pages with crayons.  Not only because my mother impressed me with the inviolability of books, but because I don't believe in poppet magic -- that you can hurt the book (which is essentially the text, not the marks on the page or the screen) by hurting the physical object.

Hey, Kids -- Leave That Noam Alone!

This article turned up on the Noam Chomsky page on Facebook today (multiple ironies there), featuring a charming episode of "Ain't It Awful."

"I get a ton of correspondence, mostly email," Chomsky said. "I’ll often get questions from high school students saying, ‘I have to write a paper Thursday on the French Revolution,’ or whatever it may be. I tell them, ‘Well here’s somebody you could look up. And the next question routinely comes back, ‘How can I find it on the internet.’ And sometimes these come from prep schools - places with good libraries, educated students[,] privileged students, I say, ‘Well walk across the street to the school library and look it up.'"

I love Chomsky, but he must surely know that this isn't a product of the Internet.   Long before the Internet, writers I know were complaining about students who wrote to them asking them to do their research for them.  Writing in about 1981, for example, the science-fiction writer and professor of English Joanna Russ recalled:

Years ago a very young (junior-high-school age) woman asked me to send her copies of all my work and the answers to three pages of questions about it for a paper her teacher had suggested; I wrote her, explaining that writers hadn't the time to fill such requests and referred her to her teacher, who ought to be teaching her how to do research.  Her older sister then wrote me, stating that she was going to expose me in Ms., that because of my bad behavior her sister, who had hoped to be a writer, had given up all such ambitions. *

So such demands have nothing to do with the Internet, computers, or social media.  And to be fair, Chomsky admits:

But, as laughable as it is, who in America hasn't felt that way before?

“I’m not offering this as a critique of the internet, but there’s a lot of factors involved," Chomsky explained.

So why bring it up in the context of a discussion of social media and the Internet?  Alternet certainly packaged Chomsky's remarks as a "critique of the Internet" -- disseminated on the Internet, no less.

I think this kind of behavior has more to do with adolescence, and probably with the very privilege Chomsky refers to.  Of course privileged kids expect someone else to do their work for them!  What else are other people for?  But it also has something to do with a capability that language and human consciousness give us: to construct fantasies about people we've never met, so that we believe we know them and they know us.  It's also a product of writing and literacy.  If your encounter with stories and ideas takes place in face-to-face interactions, it's true that you are being addressed (though not individually) by the storyteller or the preacher.  People often feel that a written text speaks to them personally and individually, and may write to the author expressing that belief.  (Or they want a celebrity in sports or show business to grant them a wish.)  That's as much an illusion as thinking that a distant professor will do your homework for you.

* In Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (Firebrand Books, 1985), p. 53.

To Lose One Art Might Be Considered Misfortune

I should know better than to read jeremiads about the decline of reading, or the decline of The Book, but for some reason I picked up LA Times critic David L. Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time (Seattle: Sasquatch Press, 2010). Looking again at the Rain Taxi review of the book featured at Powells Books' site, I can't remember why I thought it would be worth looking at. Maybe because it's short? Though it's only about 151 small-format pages, it seemed longer when I read it.

There are a lot of annoying things about The Lost Art of Reading, but chief among them is that Ulin tends to admit the weaknesses in his arguments (for example, reading has never been a majority pastime, and the kind of literacy associated in the West with printed matter is only a few centuries old, even younger when you take into account how few people were literate until the 1800s or so), then to forget his concessions and go back to playing Ain't It Awful? I also noticed that he is blind to the possibility that the difficulty with reading he sometimes experiences might not just be the fault of Teh Intertoobz and videogames, not even related to his job as a professional book reviewer, but simply what I'd call Life-Cycle changes.

I've been reading for about fifty-five years now, voraciously and promiscuously but not steadily. Sometimes (like the past week or two, for example) I just don't feel like reading much. This is not because of Teh Intertooobz or videogames but because I'm reading some books that are slow going: The Lost Art of Reading was one that acted like a brake, but I'm presently in the middle of History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (Knopf, 1998) by Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree and Ross E. Dunn; and of Khatru Symposium: Women in Science Fiction, originally published in the 1970s but reprinted in 2009 by the James Tiptreee Award. Both are intensely interesting, but slow going for some reason. Every time I slow down like this, and it happens a few times each year, I feel a twinge of panic that I'm losing my ability to read or my interest in reading. (Omighod! Incipient Alzheimer's! Old age!) But then soon enough I move on to something more digestible, and I'm zooming along as usual. I also remind myself that since I began keeping my reading log in 1977, there has never been a year when I read fewer than 150 books. That's more, I suspect, than many Americans read in a lifetime. What for me is Molasses in January, is for most people "Gee, Duncan, you sure read a lot!"

And what's more, I still get a lot of pleasure from reading. I still get immersed in stories, intoxicate myself with good writing. And I often get great pleasure from non-fiction, even scholarly writing. I blazed through Jonathan Arac's Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target as if it were a Jane Austen novel (and I went through Pride and Prejudice in one evening last fall). It's true that I don't read unselfconsciously, the way I did in grade school, but that's not a bad thing. Growing up is on the whole a gain, not a loss, and when I read something good, I get as lost in it as I did when I first read Stuart Little or The Boxcar Children in third grade.

Ulin recalls how he read as an adolescent, and quotes at length from Frank Conroy's 1967 memoir Stop-Time this account of "his own initiation into literature as a high school kid on the Upper West Side (12):

Night after night, I'd lie in bed, with a glass of milk and a package of oatmeal cookies beside me, and read one paperback after another until two or three in the morning. I read everything, without selection, buying all the fiction on the racks of the local drugstore -- D. H. Lawrence, Moravia, Stuart Engstrand, Aldous Huxley, Frank Yerby, Mailer, Twain, Gide, Dickens, Philip Wylie, Tolstoi ... and dozens more. I borrowed from the public library ten blocks away and from the rental library at Womrath's on Madison Avenue. I read very rapidly, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another. Safe in my room with milk and cookies I disappeared into inner space. The real world dissolved and I was free to drift in fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than my own.

Ulin enthusiastically seconds this account, and I recognize a lot of myself in it too. (The overlaps in the reading list are interesting too, even though Conroy is fifteen years my senior and I am ten years older than Ulin. Ulin's admission that only "(certain) adolescents read" like this is telling. There was no golden age when most Americans read widely, as far as I can tell. When I was a kid, I had to dodge the attentions of adults who tried to get me to put down my book and go out and get some fresh air, play like a real boy. Which I wasn't, dammit. Most of my peers couldn't wait to get outside at recess or at the end of the school day; I wanted unobstructed access to the books I couldn't get enough of. Ulin knows this, but he can't helping looking back wistfully to a time when things were different, and better. As I remember them, they were always terrible.

So, for example, Ulin cites something called The Sabbath Manifesto, which articulates ten principles "open for your unique interpretation ... as we carve a weekly time-out into our lives" (86) One is "Avoid technology." (Like movable type?)  Another, number 4, is "Get outside." (Nuh-uh! Just let me finish this chapter...) "Avoid commerce," "Light candles," "Drink wine," "Eat bread," "Find silence" (I could, if Ulin would just quit noodging me all the time!), and "Give back." Not a bad bunch of ideas, I concede. But Ulin wails, "At the same time, the idea that we have to give ourselves these sorts of conscious reminders tells us something about the culture in which we live" (87). Why does he think the original Sabbath was codified, if not as a conscious reminder to provide such space in very different times and cultures? And for all that, the scholars had to erect a fence around the Sabbath to make sure that people didn't start stretching the boundaries a bit and getting busy again when they were supposed to be resting. Ours is not the first culture to have too much to do and too little time to do it in.

Ulin also quotes from another jeremiad about the death of literature, Jane Smiley's 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (102-3):

When we talk about the death of the novel, what we are really talking about is the possibility that empathy, however, minimal, would no longer be attainable by those for whom the novel has died. ...

My guess is that mere technology will not kill the novel. It is too different from movies and other forms of visual entertainment to be replaced by them, nor do I believe that novels are bannable. Too many of them reside in private hands: they would be as hard to get rid of as guns and bullets. But novels can be sidelined -- dismissed to the seraglio, where they are read by women and children and have no effect on those in power. When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people who speak rather like us and look rather like us but who have no way of understanding us or each other.

This quotation saves me the trouble of reading Smiley's tract, and maybe her novels too. My first reaction was that the novel is, like print, a relatively young and technologically dependent phenomenon. (Yes, novels were written before there was printing, but can you imagine making your own handwritten copy of, say, The Tale of Genji?) What did people do for empathy before The Novel came along? Why, they listened to bards, to storytellers, to ballads, and when they could they watched plays. The idea that the novel uniquely gives us access to empathy seems willfully dismissive of other methods of access to the feelings of others. My second reaction is that the novel is capable of eroding empathy -- Ayn Rand's potboilers are monuments to the hermetically-sealed ego, and I just recently found this chilling discussion of the best-selling John Ringo, whose books I've seen but never looked into, and probably won't; and they're merely one especially degraded pole of a subliterature (or paraliterature, as I think Samuel Delany would call it) of very popular books for overgrown boys. Barack Obama seems to have read his share of serious novels, yet he seems to have lost all empathy and most of his humanity.

As I said, I should know better than to read books like The Lost Art of Reading. There are alternatives, like Laura Miller's The Magician's Book (Little, Brown, 2008), a wonderful account of what it means to become a reader without the whining about how it's all going downhill and oh my god we're doomed as we all turn into Morlocks except for a few superior beings hiding in the catacombs until we are hunted down and killed. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep reading, except when I'm writing, and vice versa.

A Match Made in Heaven

This entertaining image from two years ago has been making the rounds; I found it at, or rather via, the Sideshow. The tie-in for Crooks and Liars was a study which found that Hummer owners get almost five times as many traffic tickets as average drivers.

I saw some speculation that the picture had been Photoshopped, but evidently it's legitimate. Even more interesting is the story behind it, as I found when I tracked it down.

Police said Sabrina Trotter, 44, the driver of an Indianapolis Public Schools bus, stopped on the road to take a cell phone call from her mother. Police said the driver of a Hummer, John Northrop, 54, was going northbound and was tuning his radio when he plowed into the back of the bus.

Northrop suffered minor injuries. Police ticketed Trotter for an improper stop.

No children were on the bus at the time, apparently.

Becalmed Among The Great Unwashed

You know, I don’t think I’m going to finish reading Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. I imagine Jacoby feels better for having written it, vented her bile, and talked to the press about it. But I don’t feel better for having read the first eighty pages, so I’m gonna vent my bile right here.

As I expected, The Age of American Unreason is an extended and not very skillful game of “Ain’t It Awful.” In a way, it’s frustrating to read, because I do dislike most of the things she dislikes, but then I don’t need her to tell me about them. On the other hand, I don’t share her fury over the use of “folks”:

a plague spread by the President of the United States, television anchors, radio talk show hosts, preachers in megachurches, self-help gurus, and anyone else attempting to demonstrate his or her identification with ordinary, presumably wholesome American values. Only a few decades ago, Americans were addressed as people or, in the more distant past, ladies and gentlemen. Now we are all folks.

A plague? Darling, get a grip. Reading this, one wants to deliver a Hollywood-style hysterics-stopping slap upside Jacoby’s head, and wipe the flecks of foam from her quivering lips. Someone who gets as worked up over “folks” as about creationism, infotainment, and Larry Summers’s slighting remarks about lady academics – and, as far as I can tell, more upset than she gets about the US war in Iraq – needs to work on her priorities. (Two hundred years ago, Jonathan Swift threw a similar hissyfit over the word “mob”, which would never take the place of “rabble” in his heart. I agree with the writer Jay Quinn that it's a shame Swift didn’t win that battle, so we could talk today about rock stars being “rabbled” by their fans.) If she opposes the war in Iraq, it seems to be because of Bush’s belief that he is Yahweh’s instrument, not because innocent people are getting, like, hurt and killed there. There’s an odd lack of ordinary humanity in Jacoby’s jeremiad. (How can you worry about dying children when Americans are misusing apostrophes?)

Nor has she convinced me that things are that much different from the way they used to be, especially since her own evidence has a way of refuting her. She thinks that reactionary Christian religion is more influential in American life than it was in the 1800s, though she documents plenty of anti-intellectualism and Christian square-headedness from that era, which managed to flourish without the aid of today’s mass media. She brushes aside the Second Great Awakening with a sniff, to focus on an oration by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Harvard College’s Class of 1837. Emerson told his audience that “The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself” – making basically the same complaint then that Jacoby’s making now, only without videogames and Oprah. Ironically, the burden of Emerson’s oration was that it was time for American culture to stand on its own two feet, rather than leaning on Europe; Jacoby regards Europe today as a comparatively enlightened place where Christians don’t keep Darwin out of the schools. She also admits that “American freethought” was “never a majority movement,” which is probably putting it mildly, but it still undermines her thesis that things used to be better.

Oh yeah – I asked a dozen or so undergraduates around the dorm where I work if they knew what Pearl Harbor was, since Jacoby told the New York Times that her book was inspired by overhearing two yuppies in a bar on the night of September 11, 2001, who seemed to have no idea about it. Everyone I asked knew that the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese led to the US entry to World War II. Jacoby will be relieved to know that the coming generation of college students know their history pretty well, even if that fact takes some wind out of her book’s sails.