Wills Are Made to Be Broken

The pandemic drags on, with deaths declining and illnesses rising across the US.  My home state of Indiana is now lifting most restrictions, with masks recommended rather than required at the state level; even before the order was lifted, I saw increased numbers of people shopping without masks on.  Municipalities can continue their own control orders, but good luck enforcing them. The county next door wrestled with the problem, and a newspaper story reported that a councilman opposed a mask mandate on the ground that "people don't want to be told what to do."

That's probably true for many, and I initially fumed inwardly because such people think of quarantines and protective gear as something Authority does just to keep them from having fun: they don't take the virus seriously, until they themselves get sick or die.  It isn't, I believe, because the reasons for the restrictions haven't been explained to them, because they have.  I think they react reflexively, like a two-year-old saying "No" automatically and without thought, and it probably helps that most of the time they face no serious penalty for refusing to cooperate -- not even being sent to their rooms with no TV.

Then I happened to reread an older post of mine about boys' and young men's reflexive resistance to rules.  (Large numbers of the older adults we've seen throwing tantrums over having to wear a mask in stores have been women, so it turns out that this reflex isn't exclusively or even mostly male.)  I've noticed before that the same young men who feel oppressed by grownups and their rules also "aspired to join the military or professional sports", which feels odd to me: don't they realize that they'll be forced to conform to far more encompassing chickenshit rules, many of which really are there just to provoke them to disobey, so that they can be slapped down with far more brutality than they ever encountered in school?  It used to be, and still may for all I know, that judges would give boys who kept clashing with the local law a choice between jail and joining the service.  Either way they were going to be beaten, more or less literally, into submission.

(This syndrome wasn't limited to stereotypical bad boys: it was also common among young scientists who chafed at Mom telling them to carry out the garbage or clean their rooms, and retaliated by making stink bombs in the basement. They sought freedom in places like Los Alamos, where they could play with explosives for the fun of it.)

The fantasy was that the process would "make a man out of them," which might be true if "a man" is someone who's been beaten into mindless obedience.  And that's the opposite of what the bold anti-masking brigades claim for themselves.  A similar conflict seems to motivate much of the Trump base: they talk trash about authority, but they also love it, though only as long as Trump tells them what they want to hear.  Maybe that's what they wanted, though, to be taken in hand, their heads shaved, kept in barracks, hemmed in by barbed wire, and forced to comply with a maze of chickenshit regulations?  Maybe all the resistance to masks, distancing, and restrictions on public gatherings was really a cry for help, a plea to be forcibly conscripted into Pandemic Boot Camp for some Tough Love.

Losing My Innocence, One Chunk at a Time

An old and wise friend posted this meme on Facebook today.  Of course my first reaction was doubt about the attribution.  One might think that an organization like UNESCO would never post a bogus quotation, but one has learned otherwise over the years.

So I looked it up, and sure enough, it is probably not an African proverb.  I found it attributed to the poet Maya Angelou, though in that version she went on to contradict herself: "I have respect for the past, but I'm a person of the moment. I'm here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I'm at, then I go forward to the next place."

I also found a version from the British fantasy writer and satirist Terry Pratchett: "If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong."  And another variation by the novelist and essayist James Baldwin: “Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.”  It sounds to me like it's a platitudinous proverb that might have come from anywhere.

But, and I think this is more important, I don't think it's true, whether it refers to individuals or to societies and countries.  Life as a journey is a very old metaphor, but it makes little sense if you literalize it.  I know that I came from a woman's body, I'm going, ultimately, to a crematorium.  For many people, I think this platitude is connected to the poisonous metaphor of "roots," that people are determined not only by where they were born, but where their ancestors were born and who their ancestors were.  As far as I know, my ancestors came from two or three European countries, and none of them has much to do with who I am.  Where I was born -- northern Indiana -- is more relevant, but it doesn't determine who I am either, nor did it tell me what to do with my life.  In most respects, my background is utterly opposed to where I've gone: as a gay man, an atheist, an anti-racist, a critic of my government and my country.  Nothing of where I came from told me where I was going, and when it did, I didn't listen.

The same applies to history, especially since so much "history" in all cultures is myth and propaganda.  Nobody knows where we're going, because the future is not determined; the past can be and generally is used to discourage people from doing what they think right.  It's doubtful that the past has much to teach us, even if we have reliable information about it, because no one knows which lessons to draw from history.  Usually people construct a historical narrative to suit their wishes and plans, but to repeat: the future is not determined.  The events of the past few years, most dramatically the coronavirus pandemic, have shown us very forcefully how little we can predict the future from the past.  It was a good idea to prepare for future epidemics, and a very bad idea for Trump to dismantle the agency set up to make such preparations, but little specific knowledge of history was needed to know that.  Nor did it take much knowledge of history to know that the current economic system was going to lead to another crash and depression eventually; it only took working knowledge of events in living memory, and both Obama and Trump ignored that.

It makes me very uncomfortable to say all this, I admit: I grew up on Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", I've read a lot of history, it interests me and it feels important to me.  But when I think about it, I wonder how much it really matters, not despite but because I've read so much history.  And while experience can teach us some things, such as the necessity of planning for disasters, it can't tell us where we're going.

As Barack Obama's presidency destroyed the last remnants of my naive faith in the effectiveness of voting; as the flipflops of epidemiological experts on the value of masks (and other matters) have undermined what remained of my trust in scientific expertise; so this meme revealed the crumbling of my faith in the value of history.  What will go next, I wonder?

Shoot the Arbiter

It's funny, the flexible relation many people have to authority.

Today someone complained on Facebook that there are too many books with the title Something Rich and Strange, referring to a review of such a one in the New York Times, a collection of stories by Ron Rash.  The comments quickly focused on the reviewer's calling the collection an "anthology," which should mean a collection of work by a variety of authors instead of just one.  Thus:

The distinction between "anthology" and "collection" is so clear and obvious that the inability of major venues to acknowledge it makes me want to poke my eyes out with a fork.

Okay, I probably wouldn't got that far. Even so . . .

Another commenter, a novelist, chimed in:

It is dismaying to see it in the NYT ... I sort of count on them to help keep the roof from leaking

The next commenter, a distinguished writer, critic and academic, replied that

the NY Times gave that task up back in the seventies when they finally gave up as well on their "Information Desk," a service where you could phone in, ask any question you wanted, and generally get an answer pretty much immediately from one of the twenty-five or so smart people in that office at the time, with a few reference books and a couple of encyclopedias in with them, whose job it was to answer such queries. I called them up once, when I was twelve, to find out the meaning of "serendipity" (because it wasn't in my dictionary back then) and the person who answered the phone told me, without missing a beat, all about "The Three Princes of Serendip," its sixteenth century publication date in Venice, and its coiner in English, Horace Walpole. Neat . . . The NY Times may still be the paper of record, but it is no longer an arbiter of American English and hasn't even aspired to that for some fifty years.

Well, who can blame the Times, really, for abdicating that position?  First, in 1961, Merriam-Webster published its Third New International Dictionary, a "descriptivist" work that the Times and other establishment publications attacked editorially and in reviews.  The Times declared its intention to use only the Third's 1934 predecessor, though the writer Bergen Evans mischievously showed that the Times regularly allowed usage that the Second rejected, and only the Third accepted.

But the Enemies of Language weren't done with the Times.  Gay activists pressured the Grey Lady to refer to them as "gay," rather than "homosexual."  In 1987, their campaign succeeded.  So, with Authority crumbling, why shouldn't the Times simply decide that Anything Goes?  

Still, I'm not so sure it has done so.  Arbiters are entitled to change their minds, though they pretend they don't.  What the last writer I quoted objected to was that the "arbiter of American English" had made a decision he rejected.  But if the Times really is such an authority (and who appointed it to that office, anyway?), then who is he to challenge it?  I happen to agree with the "anthology" / "collection" distinction, but I have no authority.  As I said, it's funny how people will invoke this or that person or institution as Authority -- until it makes a decision they don't like.  Like it or not -- and I don't, particularly -- the New York Times regards "anthology" and "collection" as equivalent.  Language changes.

Cooperation, Not Obedience

I hadn’t planned to read Nicholson Baker’s new book , Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, but I’m beginning to think I should. Reviewing Human Smoke in the New York Times, Colm Toibin called it “a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism. He has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.” “The debate about pacifism”? Where is that going on?

Katha Pollitt began her attack on the book in The Nation by declaring, “By the time I finished the book I felt something I had never felt before: fury at pacifists.” Damn, girl! Before I can judge her reading, I’ll have to read the book, but Pollitt’s wrath is mild compared to the New Republic reviewer, one Anne Applebaum (“a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post” -- not the greatest recommendation nowadays). Applebaum seems to be even more angry at the book’s form, which she uses as a springboard to rant at length on some of her (presumably) personal hobbyhorses, Wikipedia and “the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the “ ‘mainstream media’ is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper.” Baker is on record as liking Wikipedia, so he’s fair game I guess.

In a display of typical mainstream media balance, Applebaum allows:

It is true that there are many excellent, well-educated bloggers, whose contributions to public debates are invaluable, and who have served to prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder. At the same time, there are also many bloggers who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the "mainstream media, " or the "conventional histories," simply because they are self-appointed "critics," whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts. The result of their efforts is that quality -- accuracy, truthfulness, learnedness -- is disappearing beneath the sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information.

You know, Applebaum has picked a bad time to trumpet “the establishment institutions” of journalism. During the leadup to the Iraq War, the Washington Post and the New York Times functioned as propaganda arms for the Bush administration. This is not just the gripe of a disaffected anti-expert blogger: the Post and the Times have both admitted as much. And this was nothing new; the corporate media have been coasting on the Post’s Watergate coverage and the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers for decades now, to cover up their generally craven collaboration with the state. Thanks to the concentration of media ownership which left most American cities with only one major newspaper, conditions have probably worsened since the 1970s, when those last gasps of rebellion took place. But most of the mainstream media’s war coverage, before and since, has consisted precisely of a “sheer quantity of random, wrong, and irrelevant information”, most of it generated by “experts”: government officials speaking on and off the record, political scientists in the pay of mostly right-leaning think tanks, high-ranking military, and the like. It really is the most sensible course, when faced with mainstream media coverage of important political issues, to treat them with extreme skepticism.

Just for the hell of it, Applebaum lumps Baker in with Dan Brown, author of the dread Da Vinci Code, which I’ll certainly agree is one of the dumbest books I’ve ever read, though I don’t think that’s really Applebaum’s objection to it. What she means by expertise is really authority, the people who somehow know what’s best for us and whom we should obey without question. But why? It’s false to call Brown “anti-expert” – he appeals to an expertise based on conventionally serious scholarship that comes to unorthodox conclusions; his main character is an Ivy League academic, and one of the (inadvertently) funniest moments in that leaden book was when Sir Leigh Teabing impressed protagonist Robert Langdon with his ability to write the entire Hebrew alphabet from memory. (An intellectual feat which any Israeli schoolchild can probably match – it ain’t rocket science.) What enraged so many Roman Catholics about the book was its disrespect for Church authority, which is augmented by but not built on expertise: its scholars and theologians are servants answerable to the church, and with the resurgence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Wojtyla and Ratzinger it’s hardly a radical observation that their expertise is limited by the “establishment institution.”

Brown’s alternative Christian history is bogus, but so is much of the standard version. Outside of Catholicism, credentialed Christian academics who wander too far from mainstream positions can expect to be attacked, viciously and largely inaccurately, by their more conservative and conformist colleagues. One thing that struck me while I was studying early Christianity in the 1980s was how much sheer nonsense a mainstream Bible scholar could publish without real consequences. (Of course, picking each other’s work apart in journal articles is the fun part of being an academic.) Outside of academia, who even cares that a right-wing evangelical like D. James Kennedy publishes outrageous howlers in his apologetics? What counts is that he accepts the authority of orthodoxy. No one complains when a layperson like Anne Rice attacks the expertise of perfessors who don’t think the gospels are historically accurate, because she does so in the context of her return to the Roman Catholic fold, submitting to its authority. (It’s worth remembering that Jesus and the early Christians challenged the religious experts of their day without expertise, relying instead on the charismatic authority of the Spirit. And they were derided for it, dismissed as unlettered and rebellious – which they were. Ironically, the authority of the Church is founded on its founders’ rejection of authority.)

The democratic movements of the 1950s and later, which as Noam Chomsky says terrified rulers in the US and around the world, also refused to defer to duly constituted authority, and rightly so. The Civil Rights movement, for example, defied experts who cautioned against too-rapid change (that is, any substantive change at all) and urged African-Americans to be patient; after all, such people said in the mainstream media, it wasn’t certain that “the Negro” was ready for equal rights. (Male) experts also delineated Woman’s proper place, tut-tutted the crazy notion that homosexuals weren’t sick, and so on. Similar problems turned up during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when straight doctors, mostly ill-informed and often downright bigoted, were challenged by people with AIDS who developed their own expertise. (This example shows another side of the problem, as many AIDS activists were co-opted by the establishment.)

I, of course, belong to the 60s generation that attacked not expertise so much as authority, though some of us did confuse the two, because we’d seen expertise abused so much. Women and gay men challenged the authority of the medical and psychiatric professions to declare us sick and then hold out the offer of “cure.” When women did so, however, they set out to construct their own expertise: Our Bodies, Ourselves didn’t throw out medicine, only pointed out its masculist bias and argued that it should serve women rather than control them. There were psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who questioned the sickness consensus about homosexuality, but they didn’t control the discourse; gay men and lesbians decided that we would decide whose expertise to use.

Experts aren’t always wrong; they aren’t always right either. So how to decide which expert to believe? Applebaum wants laypeople to wait quietly while the professionals duke it out, perhaps assisted by a few exceptional but deferential critics who “prod the establishment institutions of many professions to try harder.” Professionals generally don’t take well to criticism by outsiders, no matter how well the latter have done their homework; after all, they don’t even take well to criticism by other insiders. They’re much happier if they’re in charge, which is humanly understandable but not acceptable. (See Nina Eliasoph’s Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life [Cambridge, 1998] for an exploration of this problem.)

I can relate somewhat to Applebaum’s distaste for people, not just bloggers, “who, without any knowledge or expertise whatsoever, believe their opinions must by definition surpass those found in the ‘mainstream media,’ or the ‘conventional histories,’ simply because they are self-appointed ‘critics,’ whether right-wing, left-wing, or off the charts.” But those people’s skepticism is justified, and again, laypeople who accept authoritative lies and obfuscation are no better, though authorities seldom criticize them. It may be that relatively few people are willing to make the effort necessary for an informed critique; what if anything can be done about that, I don’t know. But I’m sure the answer is not more deference to expertise and authority. We’ve already seen the results of that.