Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 6

nobody learns anything

From a terrific column by Megan McArdle: 

Twitter never had that many users, compared with Instagram or Facebook. But it had a big group of influential users — politicians, policymakers, journalists and academics, all of whom were engaged in a 24/7 conversation about politics and current events.

That was a boon to progressives, who wielded outsize influence on the platform because they were early adopters who outnumbered the conservatives. They were also better organized and better networked, and had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees, who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals’ demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.

Moderation suppressed conservative users and stories that hurt the left — most notoriously, the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which Twitter throttled as “disinformation” in the run-up to the 2020 election. Of course, progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves, securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.

Thus, that national conversation ended up skewed toward liberal views, creating the illusion that their ideas were more popular than they actually were. That’s a major reason that institutions went all-in on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and why the 2020 Democratic primary field moved so far to the left that Kamala Harris was still struggling to backtrack four years later. All that changed when Musk bought Twitter. 

There’s a touching moment in Middlemarch (the first chapter of Book V) when our heroine Dorothea Casaubon pays a visit to a local doctor, Mr. Lydgate, with whom she hopes to do some charitable work. Mr. Lydgate, it turns out, is not home, but his young and beautiful wife Rosamond is there — along with someone Dorothea knows well: Will Ladislaw, a handsome young man with whom Rosamond is playing music.

Now, Dorothea — a married woman who wants to be faithful to her husband, as unhappy as their marriage is — has not yet acknowledged to herself just how attracted she is to Will; but Will, while keeping generally within the bounds of propriety, has made it unmistakably clear that he is deeply attached to Dorothea. So Dorothea is rather discomfited to see Will there with Rosamond in circumstances that look rather … romantic.

As she sets off in search of Mr. Lydgate, she has time to reflect:

Now that she was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man’s voice and the accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband’s absence. And then she could not help remembering that he had passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there be any unfitness in the fact? But Will was Mr. Casaubon’s relative, and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness. Still there had been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin’s visits during his own absence. “Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things,” said poor Dorothea to herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.

The slow pace of the horse-drawn carriage gives Dorothea time both to cry and to dry her tears; and the solitude gives her time to think. There may be a general lesson here.

Back in the day, if something happened in politics or culture that made you unhappy, you might or might not have had anyone to talk with about it. Maybe a spouse, or a few friends, or a co-worker or two. After a while, sitting and brooding about the dark turn things have taken, you might eventually have worked your way around to the thought that maybe, just maybe, you had gotten some things wrong. You had trusted those you should not have trusted, believed accounts you should not have believed, wrongly assessed the rules of the game or the way of the world. One of the primary purposes of short-form social media, it seems to me, is to prevent us from getting to that point of self-understanding. Bluesky means never having to say you’re sorry. 

I have a Bluesky account, and I’ve posted a few things there, in a desultory fashion. Some people insist that Bluesky is dramatically healthier than Twitter, less corrosive and rage-filled, but … well, to me it seems virtually identical, which would make sense, per Megan’s column: the dominant voices on Bluesky are people who really liked Twitter and want to reconstitute what they think was the best form of it.

Me, I hated, or came to hate, Twitter, and it seems to me that whether on Twitter or Bluesky, there are five major varieties of short-form social-media post:

“Here is some information”“Look at how funny I am”“Look at how stupid my enemies are”“Look at how smart my allies are for pointing out how stupid my enemies are”“Hello total stranger! You’re an idiot”

Obviously, posts in the first category are useful; posts in the second can be enjoyable when the poster actually is funny; and the remaining three are poisonous.

And one of the poisons readily injected there is the poison of smugness — because you can always find among your allies reassurance that We did everything We could for the righteous cause, that whatever went wrong is not Our fault, that Our enemies were probably even worse than We suspected, and generally speaking everything that has happened just proves that We were right all along. Group solidarity is powerful dope, even when it’s just solidarity among shitposters, and if you get it quickly enough you’ll never have the opportunity to sit and think and realize that perhaps you’ve been mistaken about many things.

Swing Street

As I’ve often said, I am a devoted fan of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories, of which there could never be enough. So I thought I would share, below, the first chapter of an otherwise lost Stout novel called Swing Street, set in the Year of Our Lord 1939. Regarding some of the places and characters here: IYKYK. 

Anyone treated to one of Fritz Brenner’s dinners wants to savor it for as long as possible, but I had work to do. After coffee — in Nero Wolfe’s house, coffee after dinner is not optional — I trotted upstairs to change clothes. Once I had the old frame suitably draped I trotted back down to the office and ducked in to give my regards to the boss. Wolfe was sitting at his desk with a several maps laid out before him, at which he stared angrily.

“I’m off,” I said. “And for the record, this shirt isn’t purple, it’s mauve.” Wolfe hates the color purple, which I think is pretty rich, considering his fondness for bright yellow shirts and pajamas.

“Pedantry doesn’t suit you, Archie,” he said. “and in any case today is not the day for it.”

I couldn’t disagree with him there. I turned and went out the front door, and standing there on the stoop I decided that I wouldn’t get the roadster after all. It was a good evening for a walk: not fall yet by any means, but the the edge of the heat had been sanded down, and in my lightweight suit I was unlikely to sweat. Not that it mattered, since where I was going if I sweated I’d be just one of the party.

I headed uptown. It was going to be a musical evening.

I’m a Flamingo Club guy myself. The big band dance music suits me fine, especially when I’m gliding around the dance floor with a suitable companion. Lily Rowan, for instance. But other people like other kinds of music, and I was going to be spending the evening with them. I needed to talk to one among their number.

I was headed for Swing Street — 52nd Street, as the maps call it — and one of its many jazz clubs. The problem was, I wasn’t sure which one. It was a jazzman I needed to talk to, or a man involved somehow with the jazz scene, and those guys floated from club to club like fireflies.

It was Friday night, and I knew that Swing Street would be jumping, and that not one person on the whole street would be thinking about the fact that Germany had invaded Poland today. Wolfe was thinking about it, of course; that’s why he had those maps on his desk. He had fought against the Germans in the previous European war; it wasn’t easy to figure who he had been fighting for, but more than once I had heard him say that he wished he had killed more Germans when he had the chance. How many he did kill, and how many would have been enough, I’ve never figured out. Anyway, as he looked at those maps he was thinking about what he personally could do to damage Germans, that I was sure of.

What it all might mean for me, and for other Americans, I couldn’t guess. That didn’t stop me from guessing as I walked. It took me less than half an hour, because I walk fast. 

When I got to 52nd Street I heaved a big sigh, because I could see more jazz clubs than I could count. I could be hunting for hours. I stood for a minute outside a place called Dizzy’s Club — I had heard that one of the hot new jazz musicians was named Dizzy. This place looked like it needed a thorough hosing-down, but didn’t they all, more or less?

As I was deciding whether to duck in, a man passed me heading for the door. Tallish fellow with blond hair in a suit so wrinkled and speckled with cigarette ash that I couldn’t stop myself from tsk-tsking, though because I was raised to be polite I did did my tsking quietly. He looked something like a Viking, if Vikings had had librarians. Or maybe he was a poet. The Vikings had a few of those, as I recall.

His hair needed combing and his shoelaces needed tying, and with a cigarette in one hand and a bundle of books and a notebook tucked under his other arm, he was hard-pressed to find a way to open the door. So I opened it for him. He thanked me in a pretty fancy British accent, which he probably wasn’t faking, and went in.

He found a seat in a corner and started spreading out his papers. He looked to be preparing for a lengthy stay, which I was not. The room was very full and very hot and very loud, and there wasn’t a dame in the place, just sailors and guys who dressed like sailors and guys who looked like they would be very interested in sailors. I was definitely not dressed for the environment, though I did get some approving looks I didn’t want, and since there was no live music — the noise came from a jukebox — I quickly decided that this wasn’t the joint for me and backed slowly out the door. I caught a slight grin from the Viking librarian on my way out and tipped my fedora to him.

There’s never a great deal of fresh air on Swing Street, but it smelled like springtime in the Catskills in comparison to the hothouse of Dizzy’s. But I had to keep trying until I found the right club.

The person I wanted wasn’t in the Three Deuces, but I found myself wishing that that had been the place for me because they had a guy playing piano there like nothing I’ve ever heard. He was a hefty guy — not quite Wolfe-sized but not far from it — who appeared to be blind or at least hard of seeing, and he was doing things to those ivories that I can’t even describe. It wasn’t really my kind of thing, or so I would’ve said before I heard it. On the way out I asked one of the waiters and he said the guy was a regular, played there several times a week. His name was Tatum. I made a note of it. Wolfe gives me the occaional off-night and I’m not afraid to use it to try something new. I felt a long way from the Flamingo Club, though, I don’t mind admitting.

A few stops down the street I finally found what I was looking for, though not without geeting a little more musical distraction that I hadn’t been expecting. On stage at a place called the Famous Door a small combo were doing their thing, and I had to listen to for a few minutes before getting back to work. The singer was a fair-skinned colored girl who had a lousy voice — reedy and thin — but you couldn’t not listen to her. She just had a way. I can’t explain it better than that, which I guess means that I can’t explain it. She seemed to have a particular connection with the tenor saxophone player, a big guy in a pork-pie hat, and man, he could play that sax something beautiful. Again I was hearing something that wasn’t my thing, wasn’t my thing at all, but could somehow become my thing if I didn’t watch out. Swing Street was starting to make sense to me.

Behind the bar a tall thin man was whispering in the ear of the bartender, a slight colored guy with alert eyes who seemed to be mixing three or four drinks at once but was also paying close attention to the message. The whisperer looked Italian, which from my perspective was a good thing because the man I was looking for was named Mariano. He had on a suit that cost about five times as much as mine and cut to specifications. He lifted his hand to shield his mouth and his diamond cufflinks came out like the sunrise. As I approached the bar he looked up, saw me coming, and slipped into a back room as smoothly and as quickly as humanly possible, or maybe a little more so.

The colored girl kept singing in that strangely fascinating way as I thought about whether to chase Mister Cufflinks to find out if his name was Mariano. The bartender finished making his drinks, put them on a tray for a waiter, turned to me, gave me a winning smile, and said, “What can I make for you, Mister Goodwin? And whatever you want, it’s on the house. Any friend of Nero Wolfe’s is a friend of ours.”

total action

In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that the epic as a genre is characterized by what he calls “total action” (318). The total action of a story begins with the initiation of the conflict and ends with its resolution — but the epic poem does not straightforwardly tell this whole story.

For instance, the total action of the Iliad begins with the Judgment of Paris, and it ends … well, it’s a bit difficult to say exactly where it ends. In one view of the matter, it ends when Troy falls; in another, it ends when when the major participants in the story have concluded their part in it. You could argue that the total action of the Iliad is not complete — and certainly the total action of the Odyssey is not complete — until Odysseus has performed penance assigned to him by Athena (building an altar to Poseidon in a place where that god had previously been unknown) and returned to Ithaca — his final homecoming. But in any case, the concept as Frye develops it, suggests that no epic will narrate its total action. It will zero in on something essential, perhaps the pivotal moment in the whole tale. So however you would describe the total action of the Iliad, the poem itself narrates just a few days in the long Trojan War: the days in which Achilles withdraws from the fighting, which leads to the death of Patroclus, which leads to Achilles’s re-entry into the battle, which leads to the death of Hector, which leads to the fall of Troy, since the city has now lost its great champion and the inspiration of its warriors.

The total action of the Aeneid is something vaster. You could argue, if you wanted to see things from Virgil’s point of view, that it extends from the Judgment of Paris ever onward, because the Pax Romana is the culmination of all history. (No, Virgil, no.) But the action of the poem itself begins with Aeneas’s escape from a burning Troy and ends in Italy with his killing of Turnus in battle.

In short: “total action” is a useful concept, and it seems to me that it is not relevant only to epics. Of the other genres of narrative, the one to which the concept of total action is most relevant is, it seems to me, the detective story, and more particularly the murder mystery. The total action of any murder mystery begins when the conflict that leads to the murder begins. When was that first seed planted? Perhaps it was when Aunt Mabel chose to give all of her money to your cousin instead of you; or the first time that Walter flirted with his married neighbor, Isobel. And it ends — well, again, that can be hard to say, but in societies that have the death penalty, the terminus ad quem of the total action is the execution of the convicted criminal. (Matters are less fully resolved when a murderer might eventually be released from prison.)

But however you think about it, murder mysteries, like epics, rarely seek to encompass the total action of the story. Often we do get the the terminus a quo, the initiation of the conflict, typically through backstory: it’s the kind of thing discovered along the way by the investigators, whoever they happen to be. But the terminus ad quem may be anticipated without being narrated. So, for instance, it’s quite common for a a murder mystery to end with the arrest of the murderer. We imagine the conviction and imprisonment and possibly the execution of the criminal as things that will happen as a matter of course. We don’t need to read all the details.

But if W. H. Auden’s view of what the murder mystery is all about — articulated in his famous but very bad 1948 essay “The Guilty Vicarage” — is correct even in broad outlines, then the novel can’t really stop before the arrest of the criminal. And that’s because in Auden’s view, the murder mystery is fundamentally a consoling revision of the story of Eden. It begins with a healthy (Auden would, wrongly, say “innocent”) community; that community is then profoundly disrupted by a killing; and what must happen in the course of the story is a restoration of the community’s orderly health. And that restoration of order is something that only happens if the criminal is captured, is identified, arrested, and convicted. “The phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law.”  

A small note en passant: In G. K. Chesterton’s stories we only sometimes see the arrest of the criminal Father Brown has identified, but that’s not because Chesterton is uninterested in the restoration of innocence. However, the innocence Father Brown wants to see restored is that in the conscience of the criminal. He doesn’t especially care about whether a criminal goes to jail, but he is passionately concerned to prevent the criminal from going to Hell. Confession and absolution restore a sinner to right relation with God, which is arguably more important that the kinds of restoration that many murder mysteries are concerned with. Arguably. Auden seems to accept the point, because he finds Father Brown to be one of the few wholly successful detectives.

In any case, if the restorative arc Auden describes is necessary to the murder mystery, then something funny is going on in the later mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers — the exception being her final one, Busman’s Honeymoon, which for certain specific reasons, perhaps to be discussed in another post, takes the story all the way to the execution of the criminal. That makes it very different than the other late novels, which I will have to describe in some detail. So if you haven’t read those stories, stop reading this post and go read them instead. They’re very much worth reading, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. I’ll say as little as I can about the details, but

SO MANY SPOILERS COMING

Consider Have His Carcase (1932), her eighth Lord Peter Wimsey novel and the second in which Harriet Vane appears. It’s quite a long novel, the longest that Sayers had written up until that point. It begins with Harriet, holidaying on England’s South Coast, discovering a dead man lying on a large rock at the seaside; we don’t see Lord Peter until the fourth chapter. In the final chapter, Lord Peter — working with Harriet, but he’s the one who stitches together the evidence — discovers who murdered the man, and also how, why, and when they did it. The whole shebang. But he and Harriet are then told by the local police inspector that if he tells the story to the Chief Constable, the Chief Constable may very well not believe it, or, even if he does believe it, may think a conviction sufficiently unlikely that prosecution is not worth seeking. In response, Peter and Harriet give up the whole situation as hopeless and return to London. The End.

So we never learn whether the murderers are convicted. We don’t even learn whether they’re arrested. And what makes that a little more disconcerting is that the circumstances which led them to commit murder are still in place. The story centers on a man who feels that he will be cheated out of his inheritance, and drafts two others to help him kill the man he fears will get the money that’s rightfully his. But by the end of the story it’s strongly hinted that that another person could get the inheritance the murderer wants. So his motive for murder remains: if he’s not arrested and convicted we have no reason to believe that he won’t try again. If what readers want from a story is the restoration of a pre-murder innocence, or even some sense of justice imperfectly done, they’re not getting any of that from this novel. 

Things are a little more complicated in The Nine Tailors (1934), because the great revelation in this case is that, while there is a dead man who gives every appearance of having been murdered, in fact he has not been. It is just possible that another man could have been accused of manslaughter in the case, or some other crime less serious than murder; but that man dies and therefore there’s nowhere for the story to go for resolution, at least the kind of resolution that Auden finds necessary. We are left with a feeling that the wheels of Justice have turned, that Nemesis has acted, and that the image or form of Nemesis is the bells of Fenchurch St. Paul; but all such matters are left to the imagination and the meditation of the reader. So we do, in a way, have the thing that Auden asked for, which is a restoration of of the moral order of the community. But it turns out that the moral order of this particular community was never actually disrupted in the way that it is when a member of a community is murdered by another member of the community.

And then in Gaudy Night (1935), once again, there is no murder. What we have at the end is the exposure of the person who is responsible for a good deal of illegal activity: vandalism, destruction of property, and at one point an attempted murder. (Also poison-pen letters, but while destructive of people’e peace of mind those may not be illegal — I’m not sure what British law was at that time.) When exposed, this person, far from regretting the attempted murder, declares that she wishes she could have murdered many people. But once more, Peter and Harriet at the end of a novel turn to their own personal interests, resolve the conflict that has kept them apart from each other. And what happens to the criminal is unknown: we are only told in the last chapter that “the problem is being medically dealt with,” which is frustratingly vague.

It’s frustrating primarily because, again, this person tried to commit murder and is only sorry that she failed. (The person she strangled was not the person she planned to strangle, but is among those she wishes to see dead.) So why is Sayers so reticent, or even evasive, on this key point?

One reason, I think is that the criminal is the mother of two young children, and it’s not at all clear what would become of those children if their mother were arrested and convicted of attempted murder. Saying that “the problem is being medically dealt with” is a way of preventing us from worrying too much about the kids. Sayers has other things she’s like for us to be thinking about, primarily the resolution of the complicated relationship between Peter and Harriet.

All this points to what I think is a serious problem with the construction of the plot. The criminal is obsessively concerned with the upbringing of her children — she thinks and talks constantly about them — but acts in ways that threaten to separate her from those children. She doesn’t think she’s going to be caught — criminals never think they’re going to be caught — but she knows that she could be caught, and if that happens then there’s a very good chance that she’ll never see her children again. She is to some extent irrational, but she’s not that irrational: for instance, she takes great pains to avoid being captured or identified. But she never ceases her campaign of hatred and violence; indeed she regularly escalates that campaign. Sayers never attempts to explain this radical incongruity. As I say, she’s interested in other things.

Sayers in her detective fiction is always interested in things other than the solution of the mystery. She often commented that her goal was to reconnect the tale of detection with the social novel, as she felt some of her 19th-century predecessors (especially Wilkie Colins) had done. In her novels she demonstrates a serious interest in the aftereffects of the Great War on returning soldiers, in the moral disorders of the aesthetic avant-garde, in the plight of the Superfluous Woman, in the sociology of women’s colleges, in the nature of good work, in the social consequences of modern advertising, in campanology and cryptography and cricket. And, of course, she was also interested in whether a highly intelligent and thoroughly independent woman can find happiness in marriage, and, if so, what a successful union might feel like, to both parties. The range of her curiosity is truly remarkable.

Now, those wide interests do not prevent her from working out her plots with great care. Except for The Five Red Herrings she didn’t do puzzle-novels in the vein of Freeman Wills Crofts and John Dickson Carr, but the details could be intricate, and she took pride in following, seriously if not always meticulously, the rules of the Detection Club, of which she was a founding member. It was just that her accountability to her fictional world ended, she thought, when she had provided a satisfactory solution to an appropriately challenging mystery. In writing Have His Carcase Sayers thought it necessary to have Lord Peter figure out whodunnit — who and how and why. But that’s where her responsibilities as a writer of mysteries ended. 

It’s interesting, I believe, that this was also Harriet Vane’s view. In Busman’s Honeymoon we’re told that Harriet’s detective novels proceed thus: 

Miss Harriet Vane, in those admirable detective novels with which she was accustomed to delight the hearts of murder-fans, usually made a point of finishing off on the top-note. Mr. Robert Templeton, that famous though eccentric sleuth, would unmask his murderer with a flourish of panache in the last chapter and retire promptly from the stage amid a thunder of applause, leaving somebody else to cope with the trivial details of putting the case together.

That very novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, though, carries the story right to the end of the total action: the execution of the murderer — as though to compensate for the abrupt conclusions of the other late novels. But if the community itself is in any way healed, we don’t learn about it. In its different way, this novel is as irresolute as its predecessors. 

Sayers did not seem to think that she owed it to the society imagined her her books to provide the kind of restoration of moral order that Auden felt necessary. As her career as a novelist went on, she was less and less concerned to provide comfort and reassurance, and more and more eager to see the incursion of crime into a community as a kind of apocalypse, that is, an unveiling or revelation of the conflicts — social, psychological, moral, spiritual — that we generally do a good job of not seeing. Auden did not think that this was the kind of thing the true detective novel does well, or should even attempt to do, which is probably why he did not like her books. Your mileage, however, may vary. Mine certainly does. 

peers

With the old institutions of knowledge collapsing all around us — something I write about occasionally, e.g. here — I want to pay brief tribute to one: peer review of academic writing.

When I was working on my biography of Paradise Lost — pub date: tomorrow! — I came to believe that Milton’s view of Eve was more ambivalent than I had previously thought. (You’ll need to read my book for the details.) But, I reasoned, it is a truth universally acknowledged that Milton was an absolutely unreconstructed misogynist who couldn’t possibly have portrayed Eve, at any stage of the story, in a positive light. So I suppressed my own inclinations and went on with the book. 

Then, when PUP sent the finished text out for peer review, I received from one reviewer a pretty scathing report. He or she liked much of the book, but thought that my neglect of a more positive interpretation of Eve was a damning oversight: even if I did not share that view myself I should certainly have acknowledged it as a possibility, since it is well-represented in the critical literature on the poem. This criticism, by the way, while quite severe, was expressed without rancor or insult or snark, and was accompanied by equally thoughtful praise for other elements of my book. 

Had I never entertained the idea that Milton commends Eve, this criticism would still have been very useful to me, because I do not know the critical literature on Paradise Lost as well as a Miltonist does. (Remember, my book is not about Paradise Lost itself so much as about its reception history, how people have read it and responded to it — an assignment much better suited to a generalist like me.) But the response was especially welcome to me because it gave me permission to write something I wanted to write but had believed I shouldn’t. 

The moral of this story: Honest peer review, even or especially when it’s highly critical, is a real gift to the scholar being reviewed. 

Ben Sasse:Higher education’s failures are high-profile ca...

Ben Sasse:

Higher education’s failures are high-profile case studies in our larger crisis of civil society. In institution after institution, in sector after sector, center-left leaders in recent decades went from understanding that most Americans are in the middle on most debates to making the bizarre misjudgment that the loudest voices on the culture-war left were the constituencies to which they were accountable. The result has been that the center-right plurality of Americans understandably judge normies as under assault, and thus they fearfully drift toward greater tolerance of meat-ax approaches from the right, whose illiberalism seems preferable to the illiberalism of the left. This “choice” between two illiberalisms is tragic because it is false. 

Yes, intellectually it is false — but practically it may be the only choice available. What major American university can claim to be liberal in its intellectual orientation, can legitimately claim to prize intellectual diversity and to expose students to a wide range of ideas? Maybe the University of Chicago. 

the plusses and minuses of Gioiatopia

I don’t think Ted Gioia seriously means everything in this post about ending AI cheating, but let’s go through it as though he does — as though he is seriously outlining the Academic Gioiatopia. He makes five points about the AI-proof experience he had at Oxford:

(1) EVERYTHING WAS HANDWRITTEN — WE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TYPEWRITERS.

A number of my colleagues in the Honors College here at Baylor are doing just this: using good old-fashioned blue books to administer in-class exams. Other colleagues are handing out spiral-bound notebooks — they buy them cheaply at Wal-Mart or Office Depot — and asking students to use them to keep commonplace books. But these are all seminar classes in the humanities, which are a tiny percentage of the overall offerings of a university. What would be the equivalents for Microeconomics, or Sociology 101, or Organic Chem?

(2) MY PROFESSORS TAUGHT ME AT TUTORIALS IN THEIR OFFICES. THEY WOULD GRILL ME VERBALLY — AND I WAS EXPECTED TO HAVE IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO ALL THEIR QUESTIONS.

Again, while this makes sense for the humanities and some versions of the social sciences — and is basically the only way to teach musical performance and some of the other arts — it’s hard to see how it translates into many other disciplines. And to implement something like it across the university would be enormously costly.

Ted knows this, sort of: he says, “US colleges could replace their bloated administrative bureaucracies with more teachers. If they did that, there would be plenty of tutors, and every student could receive this individualized attention.” Yes, they could do this, but that would require enormous changes to the way universities function, and you can’t do it just by snapping your fingers. (Though I guess Thanos could get rid of half the deans and deanlets that way. Hmmm….) Many current employees would have to be given notice; administrators would have to be asked to return to the classroom, probably with pay cuts; new searches would have to be initiated, pursued, completed; offices would have to be converted to classrooms.

And of course many disciplines would be required to change everything about how they teach. Think of those Intro to Sociology classes now held in big lecture halls with 200 students, featuring lots of PowerPoint slides, students responding to polls on their laptops, etc. In the academic Gioiatopia, where instead of one 200-student section of SOC 101 we now have 10 20-student sections, there would no longer be any use for those lecture halls … but the department would now need ten seminar rooms. Are those lying around unused? No they are not. So an enormous investment would have to be made in redesigning existing buildings and perhaps building new ones. Oh, and also you now need several more people to teach SOC 101.

Multiply this situation by a factor of 50 or so in each university and you have an idea of what Gioiatopia would require. How many American universities could muster the cash needed to do it — even if they were sure of a significant return on investment?

One more note here: Ted says that “professors in the US would refuse to spend so much time face-to-face with students. They would complain that the Oxford approach is too labor intensive, too demanding on their precious time.” I know many professors who would strongly prefer to spend more face-to-face time with their students — if they could be delivered from the responsibilities of regular publishing. Their time is precious: professors who take their teaching responsibilities seriously, even in the current regime, and also do the amount of scholarship required for tenure and promotion don’t have a lot of time left over. A regime in which teaching was given greater priority and the treadmill of publication slowed or halted altogether would be welcome to a great many academics. But those who have suffered through the current system seem disinclined to reduce the sufferings of the people who succeed them.

(3) ACADEMIC RESULTS WERE BASED ENTIRELY ON HANDWRITTEN AND ORAL EXAMS. YOU EITHER PASSED OR FAILED — AND MANY FAILED.

(4) THE SYSTEM WAS TOUGH AND UNFORGIVING — BUT THIS WAS INTENTIONAL. OTHERWISE THE CREDENTIAL GOT DEVALUED.

I’m treating these two together because they depend on the same context: One in which the credential offered by the university is scarce and hence valuable; one in which far more people desire such a credential than can possibly receive it. Indeed, the credential is perceived as so valuable that one would risk failure and no credential at all rather than forego it for something less precious. Of how many universities today can that be said? If, say, Princeton were to implement such a system but the other elite American universities did not, how many prospective students would think a Princeton degree so much more valuable than any alternative that they would take the risk of attending Princeton rather than choose another elite university where, thanks to grade inflation, they could only with difficulty end up with a GPA lower than 3.5?

Now add to that the simple fact that, if once upon a time university places were scarce and prospective students plentiful, we now have precisely the opposite problem: too many universities competing for a shrinking pool of applicants. And no possibility of that ratio altering for the better anytime … well, any time.

Which takes me back to my point above on “return on investment.” No university in need of students would restructure its curricula and pedagogical structures in order to ensure that more people fail. Today’s universities think about little other than recruitment and retention, because they desperately need the money: you’re going to tell them to adopt a system with the express purpose of producing less retention? — and at the same time tell them to find tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to reinvent their infrastructure?

Even the richest universities would find those recommendations nuts, because they know that even their massive endowments could very quickly be depleted by such a strategy (especially when they’re faced with a Presidential administration determined to cut off their access to federal funding).

(5) EVEN THE INFORMAL WAYS OF BUILDING YOUR REPUTATION WERE DONE FACE-TO-FACE — WITH NO TECHNOLOGY INVOLVED.

I’m gonna ignore this one because it’s not about preventing AI cheating, but rather about the equally important but distinct matter of one’s university years as a time not just to make social connections but to learn social skills.

One final question, and then its answer: Do students want the kind of experience Gioiatopia would provide? Some would, certainly — but how many? I would guess considerably less than one percent of the pool of applicants. For the overwhelming majority Gioiatopia would be a dystopia. Why? 

Most young people today feel, with considerable justification, that they live in an economically precarious time. They therefore want the credential that will open doors that lead to a good job, either directly or (by getting them into good graduate programs) indirectly. Their parents want the same thing, and perhaps want it even more intensely because they tend to be making an enormous financial investment in their children’s education.

But those same young people also want to have a good time in college, a period of social experience and experimentation that they (rightly) think will be harder to come by when they enter that working world. Many people sneer at universities that build lazy rivers and climbing walls, and devote every spare penny to their athletic programs — I’ve curled my lip at such things a few times over the decades — but the fact remains that such amenities are significant factors in recruitment. Many students like them; they’re part of the [insert university name here] Experience. 

Here’s the key thing: what most people call AI but what I call chatbot interfaces to machine-learning corpora (yes, we’ve finally gotten around to that) do a great deal to facilitate the simultaneous pursuit of these two competing goods. Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything. But the acquisition of knowledge is a third competing good, and if they pursue that one seriously they may well have to sacrifice one of the other two, or even both. Right now they can have two out of three, and as Meat Loaf taught us all long ago, two out of three ain’t bad.

The people who run universities understand all this also, even if they have their own regrets; and they’re not going to impede their income stream any further than it’s been impeded already by demographic realities. They will make the necessary accommodations to a chatbot-dependent clientele, because, especially when customers are scarce, the customer is always right. Those departments and programs that push back will be able to to do so only imperfectly, and probably at the cost of declining enrollments. So it goes. 

And the kind of learning that Ted Gioia and I prize will still go on. However, it will primarily thrive outside the university system — as it did for many centuries before universities became as large a part of the social order as they are now.

here we go again

Nicole Krauss: 

In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside cellphones, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

I guess if people keep writing this sort of thing I’ll keep responding with the same questions: 

When Krauss says “We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written,” who are “we”?Presumably she does not mean herself. She seems to be referring, rather, to “an entire culture.” But if our entire culture has “give[n] up on, and cease[d] to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language,” then how do we have novelists like Nicole Krauss? Krauss says that people have given up on the struggle to “translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share” — but is that true? When I look at the internet I see an astonishing amount of writing, writing done for others to read and share. Is an underproduction of writing really our problem? If “we have … begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are,” when did “we” have that attachment? When did “we” acquire it? 

Let me ride my old hobby-horse once more: The reading and writing of books — and when Krauss says “books” I think she’s primarily referring to novels — has always been a minority pursuit. Until recently Western cultures did not even aspire to universal literacy, and until quite recently no one imagined that universal literacy would extend to the reading and comprehension of novels and poems by all young people. The idea that Western culture as a whole should involve encounters with serious literature is largely a product of World War II and the period following. That’s when we saw the percentage of the population who read novels rise to the highest level in human history. As I wrote last year: 

The not wholly tangential question, of course, is what counts as “long-term.” The kind of variation in skills and interests that I have described can happen over a handful of years but also over decades and centuries. One might ask not just how American university students today compare to those of twenty or thirty years ago but also how they compare to students from a century ago. That would have been a much smaller population, for one thing, because before the G.I. Bill of 1944 sent millions of former soldiers to university, many of whom otherwise would never have considered it, a university education was not the passport to white-collar employment and a stable middle-class life that it has since become. As Kotsko’s essay indicates, we now expect what in historical perspective is a shockingly large percentage of our young adults to be able to read and write about complex texts in philosophy, literature, and related disciplines. But perhaps those are, over a truly long period of time, not reasonable expectations. What looks like a disastrous collapse in literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.

What percentage of English people could have read Paradise Lost when it appeared? What percentage of Americans could have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it appeared? We have to know things like this if we’re going to make comparative assertions. But people make comparative assertions all the time without even thinking about such matters. 

I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago? Hard to say. 

How many ambitious and masterful novels can we reasonably expect our culture to produce each year? How many thoughtful and sensitive readers can we reasonably expect those novels to have? I don’t find these questions easy to answer. 

when Auden was wrong

Anyone who has read much of my work knows how important W. H. Auden is to me, how much I love his poetry and revere him as a thinker. But as I am working on a biography of Dorothy L. Sayers I am reminded of something that I have often thought but never, until now, written: his famous essay on detective fiction, “The Guilty Vicarage,” is one of the worst things he ever wrote, and certainly the worst prominent essay he ever published. Let me count just some of the many ways. 

One: 

Greek tragedy and the detective story have one characteristic in common, in which they both differ from modern tragedy, namely, the characters are not changed in or by their actions: in Greek tragedy because their actions are fated, in the detective story because the decisive event, the murder, has already occurred.

How, exactly, does the occurence of the “decisive event” render it impossible for characters to be changed by their actions? The claim is evidently untrue: I can think of any number of detective novels in which one potentially defensible, or even accidental, killing leads to others, the killer becoming inured to murder or simply desperate. 

Two:

The detective story requires … a closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect (cf. the thriller, which requires an open society in which any stranger may be a friend or enemy in disguise).

Obviously, only some detective stories meet this criterion, so he cannot mean what he says. Probably, then, he means that any truly excellent detective story must meet this criterion. But he then goes on to praise Sherlock Holmes as one of three and only three “completely satisfying detectives,” and the Holmes stories rarely meet the criterion announced. Indeed, the bustle and anonymity of London’s “open society” are often essential to the development of Conan Doyle’s plots. Are we to think that Holmes remains an ideal detective but maintains his ideality in stories that do not even meet Auden’s first requirement? 

Three:

[The closed society] must appear to be an innocent society in a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis (for it reveals that some member has fallen and is no longer in a state of grace). The law becomes a reality and for a time all must live in its shadow, till the fallen one is identified. With his arrest, innocence is restored, and the law retires forever.

This too is absolute nonsense. In almost every detective story I can think of the society of the book, however peaceable it may appear, proves to be full of sins and crimes, jealousies and resentments, hatreds both rational and irrational. Indeed, if this were not the case then the story would lack multiple suspects: readers would be deprived of the pleasure of making their own guesses and the narrative would grow slack. Moreover, is there any imaginable society, no matter how small, in which the solving of one murder mystery would ensure the permanent retirement of the law? What is Auden even talking about here? 

Four:

The characters in a detective story should, therefore, be eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical) — good, that is, either in appearance, later shown to be false, or in reality, first concealed by an appearance of bad.

Well, if they’re good only “in appearance” then they’re not good. They’re not ethical at all, much less “instinctively ethical,” whatever that means. (Is anyone since Adam and Eve, and maybe not even them, ever “instinctively ethical”? Must we not all learn?) 

Five: 

It is a sound instinct that has made so many detective-story writers choose a college as a setting. The ruling passion of the ideal professor is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake so that he is related to other human beings only indirectly through their common relation to the truth; and those passions, like lust and avarice and envy, which relate individuals directly and may lead to murder are, in his case, ideally excluded. If a murder occurs in a college, therefore, it is a sign that some colleague is not only a bad man but also a bad professor. Further, as the basic premise of academic life is that truth is universal and to be shared with all, the gnosis of a concrete crime and the gnosis of abstract ideas nicely parallel and parody each other.

I have no idea what that last sentence means, but the previous ones are poppycock. There is absolutely no reason why a bad man must also be a bad professor. Indeed, in some university-based mysteries it is precisely the good professor — the one who not only knows his stuff but loves his students — who turns out to be the murderer. It would almost be malpractice on the part of the novelist not to make such a person the killer. And whatever passions are “ideally excluded” from Auden’s imagined college, none of them ever are in real life or in any collegiate mystery I know of. (This goes back to my earlier comment on Auden’s criteria for an ideal closed society.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough. The essay is not wholly without merit — his comment on Raymond Chandler is a shrewd one: “whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” — but its merits are few and small, and its crimes against logic and evidence very great.

A reasonable question at this point is: Why? Why did Auden, who wrote so brilliantly about many things, write so badly here?

My answer is that when he wrote it he was not really thinking about detective stories, but about his own poem-in-progress, The Age of Anxiety — a poem in which our universal anxiety arises from unacknowledged guilt, the murder we cannot allow ourselves to realize that we have committed. (Who is the victim? Perhaps the very one whose loss we grieve: “Mourn for him now, / Our lost dad, / Our colossal father.”) It is noteworthy that Auden writes this about Rosetta, the only woman in the poem and the character most closely connected to him: 

So she returned now to her favorite day-dream in which she indulged whenever she got a little high — which was rather too often — and conjured up, detail by detail, one of those landscapes familiar to all readers of English detective stories, those lovely innocent countrysides inhabited by charming eccentrics with independent means and amusing hobbies to whom, until the sudden intrusion of a horrid corpse onto the tennis court or into the greenhouse, work and law and guilt are just literary words.

“The Guilty Vicarage” was published in the May 1948 issue of Harper’s but had probably been written more than two years earlier: in a letter to T. S. Eliot on 30 January 1946 he said that he had just written a paper on detective fiction that he was going to read at a theological seminary. (I wish I knew which seminary, but I am guessing that it was Union.) At that time he was doing little else aside from his work on The Age of Anxiety — in the more than two years he devoted to it he wrote only one other poem — and my strong suspicion is that he wrote this essay only nominally about detective fiction: its real purpose was to analyze an existential condition that he believed was afflicting the entire Western world, and could be described analogically through a highly stylized picture of the typical Golden Age English murder mystery.

P.S.: Here is my introduction to The Age of Anxiety.

Alasdair Macintyre R.I.P.

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre — first After Virtue and then (more defining for me) Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry — was one of the most important events of my intellectual life. (I also remember reading Dependent Rational Animals with some students, one of whom commented that she didn’t think that was a good title for a book but would definitely be a great name for a band.)

MacIntyre’s work helped me to understand the ways that Auden’s poetry in the Forties and Fifties anticipated movements later to become important. Auden’s anti-Constantinianism, his theology of the body, his communitarianism, all of them were ahead of the game, and MacIntyre helped me to understand the ways that Auden was both participating in and helping to form a “tradition of moral inquiry.” 

In gratitude, I sent a copy of one of my early essays to MacIntyre and received this reply:

This was exceptionally encouraging to me, a response far more generous than I had expected. (I don’t think I expected any response at all.) It gave me confidence that I was thinking along potentially fruitful lines. The memory of it buoyed me when I was deflated, as I often was in those days. 

And of course I continued to read and profit from MacIntyre’s work, which seemed as though it would never end. (As Christopher Kaczor points out in this fine eulogy, MacIntyre’s publishing career spanned more than seventy years.) 

Here is a quotation from one of his last pieces, a tracing of his intellectual development: 

Two salient thoughts emerge from this narrative. The first concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of living on the margins, intellectually as well as politically, a necessary condition for being able to see things as they are. The two standpoints without which I would have been unable to understand either modern morality or twentieth-century moral philosophy are those of Thomism and of Marxism, and I therefore owe a large and unpayable debt of gratitude to those who sustained and enriched those marginal movements of thought in the inhospitable intellectual climate of capitalist modernity, including Thomists as various as Maritain, Garrigou-Lagrange, De Koninck, and McInerny, and Marxists as various as Lukacs, Goldmann, James, and Kidron. One way to make it highly improbable that you will enjoy outstanding academic success is to enter contemporary debates in moral philosophy as either a Thomist or a Marxist.

A second thought, perhaps in tension with the first, concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of nonetheless learning as much as she or he can from those at the academic center, those who have made definitive contributions to the ongoing debates of academic moral philosophy. For interestingly it is often they who supply the resources that one needs if one is to free oneself from the limitations of their standpoint. If one is to evaluate both the achievements and the defects of twentieth-century academic moral philosophy, it needs to be understood both from within and from a standpoint that is at once external and radically critical. It is such a standpoint that I have tried to define. 

In my own extremely small way, I have tried to assume a similar standpoint in relation to my own discipline, and though our fields are different, MacIntyre has been vital to me as an intellectual model. I have quoted him many times over the years, in essays and books, but those quotations do not suggest the greatness of my debt to him. 

He was in his way a great wizard, and like Prospero, he has now broken his staff and drowned his book. May light perpetual shine upon him. 

Doppelgänger

I very much enjoyed What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade, and wish I had been able to read it before I wrote my own book on the poem. I definitely would’ve stolen some references. I am especially grieved that until reading Reade’s book I did not know about the Mistick Crewe of Comus. 

Reading What In Me Is Dark was, for me, slightly disorienting. Not always in an unpleasant way — it was fun to see someone reflect on the many of the same readers of the poem I did, often using the same quotations, but deploy them in service to a different argument. Or a somewhat different argument. My book is about the reception history of Paradise Lost as a religious text and Reade’s is about its reception as a political text, but those categories are slippery, indeed radically unstable, and nowhere more so then in Milton’s great poem. 

The fundamental problem can be put, perhaps reductively but I hope usefully, thus: 

Paradise Lost is a poem written in defense of the Christian God: “To justify the ways of God to man”;   Satan in Paradise Lost rebels against a sovereign whom he believes to be a tyrant and usurper, and speaks passionately and articulately against that tyranny and in favor of his own cause;  Milton, in addition to being a poet, was a political figure who rebelled against a sovereign whom he believed to be a tyrant and usurper, and spoke passionately and articulately against that tyranny and in favor of his own cause;  Therefore the language that Satan uses in the poem often closely corresponds to the language Milton uses in his political tracts, even though Milton believes that Satan is wrong in every respect. 

This state of affairs generates and sustains an instability in the reader’s mind, a sense that almost every statement by almost every character in the poem can be interpreted in two opposing ways. (Note that this does not happen when people read Milton’s political tracts, since is he speaking there in his own voice: it is when he writes speeches for others that the slippage begins.) We try to define the difference between legitimate and illegitimate authority; between the absolute obedience we owe to God — if we know who God is — and the conditional authority we owe to political authorities, who may or may not have been give their place by God. We try to parse these complexities and soon enough find ourselves, like the demons in Paradise Lost inclined towards philosophical and theological disputation, “in wand’ring mazes lost.”  

It is noteworthy that, as Reade points out, “the part of the poem most often used by revolutionaries is Satan’s glittering speeches.” That slippage makes it possible for James Redpath, the anti-slavery activist who is the protagonist of one of Reade’s chapters, in writing an editorial for The Weekly Anglo-African, to find “an ingenious solution to the problem of identifying one’s own cause with Satan. Redpath … took Satan’s rhetoric, called it God’s, and put it in the mouths of Union cannons. This allowed him to recruit Milton’s epic poem for the abolitionist struggle.” 

One good reason to read What In Me Is Dark is to see the astonishingly wide range of uses to which Paradise Lost has been put, and if I may be so bold I will add that it’s a reason to read my book as well. As I told Phil Christman, the poem is astonishingly generative: people can’t seem to read it without commenting on it, putting it to use. And as Reade’s story demonstrates, outside of its place in the syllabi of English literature classes, it is a book that people have often, as David Copperfield says about his own childhood reading, read “as if for life.” (Kenneth Burke called this “Literature as Equipment for Living.”) 

Reade’s last chapter is about teaching Paradise Lost, and other things, to prisoners — that is, to people who aren’t reading for status or approval but for what they can use:

As the semester went on, I poured more and more time into the class, hoping to arrive at some new understanding by the end. When that came, I was exhausted and uncertain what conclusion we had reached. But the students had taught me to see something that I only realised in retrospect. As we looked at the literature of the past, they were respectful but not reverential. They weren’t reading in an abstract, academic way, they were reading in the context of their whole lives, as something that might help to explain why we had ended up where we were, and this was why they couldn’t relinquish the idea that poetry had something to do with the inequalities of the modern world.

Trying to sum up his “new understanding,” Reade says: “To see that is to want to read disobediently. Reading disobediently might, paradoxically, be the best way to honour Milton’s work…. [R]eading disobediently is a way of relating to the past, not as a burden but as a new beginning.” 

Maybe. But I think Milton would have a stern response to this, and it would begin with a question: What or whom are you disobeying? Presumably this would not be something to read disobediently: 

And the same, Milton would say, is true of God’s prohibition on eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To read that disobediently is to die. 

“Read disobediently” cannot be a categorical imperative: context is all. In order to make a sound judgment, we must know who issues the commandment — and who receives it. For Milton, it was an absolute duty to disobey King Charles and an absolute sin to disobey God. You may disagree on those particulars. But constant disobedience is never an option, for any of us. You’re gonna have to serve somebody.