Samir Chopra's Blog, page 124

O. Henry on the South (Mainly Nashville)

I’ve only read a couple of short stories by O. Henry but have long owned an omnibus collection of them (presented to me on my twenty-eighth birthday). I’ve finally taken a gander at it, and stumbled on his classic A Municipal Report. Henry was a Southerner transplanted to the East Coast, so I find the narrator’s voice–a supposed ‘outsider’ speaking of the South–of particular interest. This developing ‘attitude’ towards Nashville (and its people) leads to several memorable, witty descriptions. Here are a few of my favorites.

On Southern weather:

Take a London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.

The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup; but ’tis enough – ’twill serve.

On Southern hotels, hospitality, and history (race and the Civil War too!):

I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self-suppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and driven by something dark and emancipated.

I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old “marster” or anything that happened “befo’ de wah.”

The hotel was one of the kind described as ‘renovated.” That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle.

Tobacco chewing:

All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the tobacco-chewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass cuspidors in the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed that the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant. But, although a terrible battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered. Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched, they stood. But, shades of Jefferson Brick! the tile floor – the beautiful tile floor! I could not avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions about hereditary marksmanship. [links added]

The Southern gentleman, Major Wentworth Carswell:

I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant enough to percieve that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles; so I side-stepped so promptly that the major seized the opportunity to apologize to a noncombatant. He had the blabbing lip. In four minutes he had become my friend and had dragged me to the bar.

I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer….Major Caswell banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox I began to hope.

The Nightmare of the Lost Semester

It has just come to my notice that the New York Review of Books has been running a series on dreams. Thus far, entries include Georges Perec’s “Fifty Kilos of Quality Meat,” Charles Simic’s “Dreams I’ve Had (and Some I Haven’t),”Michael Chabon’s “Why I Hate Dreams” and Nicholson Baker’s ‘On the Stovetop of Sleep.’ Inspired by this, and remembering my recounting of an anxious dream related to copy-editing in the face of a publisher’s deadline, I thought I’d put down a brief note about my dreams.

Like most people that dream, some of mine are repeats, variations on whose themes occur repeatedly in my sleeping hours. These in turn are made up of some of familiar types: anxiety-laden nightmares about heights and wild rivers that threaten to drown me being especially prominent ones. Some of these have their own escape hatches built into them. For instance, when stuck on a threatening height, a surefire tactic for ending the dream is to, wait for it, jump. But some dreams are more stubborn than others; they offer no easy way out.

A classic entry in this list is the Dream of the Lost Semester. In this dream, I find myself late in a semester, staring at my teaching schedule, horror-struck by the realization that I have failed to attend even a single meeting of a class assigned to me. I have not given my students their syllabus; no readings have been assigned. As I realize this, I panic. If I start attending classes now, my students will heap scorn on me: where have I been all this while? They will jeer me, mock me, as I walk in.  I would have to stand there, the target of their derision, the man who had kept them waiting in such utter futility for so many weeks now. The shame of such a public humiliation would be too much to bear. In the construction of the dream, no complaints have been tendered to my department, students have not dropped the class, or anything like that. Instead, somehow, I believe that attendance has taken place as usual, the students patiently waiting for their Godot-like professor to show up, sometime. The absurdity of this, somehow, bubbles through, and slowly I convince myself the college has found a substitute for me, even as I continue to teach my other classes. The relief from this ‘realization’ does not last; wouldn’t someone have contacted me about such a replacement by now? Perhaps my class is just as orphaned as I imagine it to be. So, again, I consider starting up the semester, even if a few weeks late. This courage lasts only a few seconds; I return to seeking refuge in the hope that the university has found out about the abandoned class and arranged for a substitute. And so it goes.

The Dream of the Lost Semester finds its roots, quite obviously I think, in the anxiety that precedes the start of every semester, as I finalize reading lists and syllabi, order books, check bookstore inventories and so on. And no matter how long I teach, I still suffer from stage-fright, those little jitters that afflict me just before I step into a new classroom for the first time each semester. Add those two up and you get this creepy little insidious entry into my subconscious, one that bubbles up every now and then to remind me of the centrality of teaching to my life.

Ethnocentricity, Moral Beliefs and Moral Truth

Adam Etinson writes in The Stone on ethnocentrism (defined as ‘our culture’s tendency to twist our judgment in favor of homegrown beliefs and practices and against foreign alternatives’), skepticism about universal morality and the existence of moral facts as  a response to it, and finally, on whether such skepticism is warranted. To wit, concern about ethnocentrism in the domain of morality finds its grounding in universally acknowledged datum: that disagreements are extensive, intractable (and disagreeable), that ‘culture and upbringing’ play a significant role in such clashes. Is moral relativism or skepticism about the existence of objective moral facts an appropriate response?

Etinson thinks not:

For one, however obvious it may be that culture plays an important role in our moral education, it is nevertheless very hard to prove that our moral beliefs are entirely determined by our culture, or to rule out the possibility that cultures themselves take some direction from objective moral facts….Second, moral relativism, for its part, seems like an odd and unwarranted response to ethnocentrism. For it’s not at all clear why the influence of culture on our moral beliefs should be taken as evidence that cultures influence the moral truth itself  — so that, for instance, child sacrifice would be morally permissible in any community with enough members that believe it to be so. Not only does that conclusion seem unmotivated by the phenomenon under discussion, it would also paradoxically convert ethnocentrism into a kind of virtue (since assimilating the views of one’s culture would be a way of tapping into the moral truth), which is at odds with the generally pejorative understanding of the term.

These are curious responses to make.

The first is made in the face of the acknowledged data (about disagreement over moral beliefs and the existence of cultural variance in moral practices). If ‘cultures themselves take some direction from objective moral facts’ then surely there should be greater agreement over our moral beliefs? Perhaps Etinson takes our existing moral agreements to be the evidence of such influence, no matter how attenuated?

The second response, contra moral relativism, assumes that there is a ‘moral truth’ out there, one influenced by cultures. But the skepticism about moral facts that goes by the name of ‘moral relativism’ is not committed to any such truth; it takes all its cues from its claim that the empirical particulars of cultures generate moral beliefs, which vary by time and place. That kind of relativism does not think that a ‘moral truth’ is the product of a culture’s influences; rather, the culture merely generates a set of permissible actions. There is no commitment here to the notion of a moral truth that would be made accessible by ‘assimilating the views of one’s culture’; rather one brings oneself into line with one’s culture and what it deems permissible by assimilating its views. (Note that Etinson himself, in writing of ‘moral truth’ in connection with moral relativism adds the caveat, ‘for any given people.’) This would ensure that ethnocentrism retains its non-virtuous standing, a concern important to Etinson, for presumably it leaves open the possibility that these sets of permissible actions could remain the subject of moral critique.  But having made this concession, a further question is almost immediately prompted: isn’t the assumption of objective moral truth and facts our primary, if not sole, reason for imagining ethnocentrism to be non-virtuous in the domain of morality? If so, then is Etinson’s skepticism about moral relativism warranted?

The Sidewalk Book Disposal Scheme

New York has lots of books: in stores, libraries, shelves in private collections, sidewalk sales, and sometimes, in boxes on sidewalks, being given away, with or without a sign that says ‘help yourself.’ These books have been abandoned; their former owners do not have the space (or time) for them any more.  Perhaps a move is in the offing and a ruthless culling is called for, perhaps tastes have changed. They have not earned the privilege of a yard sale; rather, they are to be consigned quickly into the custody of a stranger for free. Take my book(s), please. I have never walked past such an offering without stopping. Who knows what goodies might lurk there? Human nature being what it is, my initial reaction is also invariably tinged with the slightest touch of suspicion: exactly why are these tomes being given away for free? But then I remember this city’s brutal space crunch, and my attitude softens just a bit: they’ve just happened to lose out in the relentless competition, the nonstop jostling for a home in a New York apartment. That battle for space has caused relationships to come apart, small wonder that books sometimes bear the brunt of the space manager’s machinations.

So, I stop, and look, and search. Many books are old and tattered; the reasons for their disposal are all too apparent. (I have disposed of many well-worn veterans too, though I have always handed them over to my neighborhood used bookseller, unable to leave them exposed to the elements.) Some are textbooks; their owner has presumably graduated or dropped out. Some are bestsellers; perhaps flavors of the day unlikely to endure as classics. Some are well-worn classics, perhaps easily replaceable because they will never go out of print. (My battered copy of War and Peace, a book I rather stupidly bought as a paperback will meet this fate someday; I will replace it with a hardcover at that point.) Sometimes, it is apparent an academic has cleansed his shelves; monographs bought in a rash moment of excessive ambition, never read, now face the prospect of tantalizing someone else with their promise of the esoteric. (Some of the books on the shelves in my university office will go out this way.) A special category all by itself is the cookbook and the self-help book; these show up with interesting regularity in sidewalk disposals; tastes change and so do one’s aspirations, I suppose.

Over the past couple of years most of my pickups have taken place on the same three-block stretch in Park Slope in Brooklyn, as I walk to and from my gym. (Some of my procurements have been real scores, yet others have made it home with me because the price has been right.) There doesn’t seem to have been any significant slowing of the pace of disposals, a clear indication that life in that part of Brooklyn is proceeding normally.

But as the digital book becomes ever more ubiquitous, it might displace the sidewalk disposal as well. Then, a mere drag to the Recycle Bin will do, with no need for a display of old-fashioned generosity. No more sidewalk pickups then.

Ten Years After: The Anti-War March of Feb 15, 2003

Exactly ten years ago, I gathered with hundreds of thousands of others, on a freezing cold day in New York City, to take part in an anti-war march. I was still hungover from a friend’s book party the previous night. We marched, got corralled into pens, felt our extremities freeze, jousted with policemen, lost friends, made new ones, read angry, witty, colorful banners, shouted slogans, marched some more, and then finally, late in the evening, exhausted, numb, hungry, finally stumbled off the streets. (In my case, straight into a bar, to drink a couple of large whiskies. Yes, the hangover had worn off by then, and my rapidly dropping blood circulation seemed to call for rather vigorous stimulation.)

The march ‘didn’t work’: it was perhaps the visible zenith of the anti-war moment; an illegal, unjust and cruel war kicked off five days later. (I joined another protest march on the night news of the first bombings came in; it was pure unadulterated misery in cold, freezing rain, one only made barely palatable thanks to the running induced by attempted escapes from over-enthusiastic baton-wielding policemen.) Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of Americans would die, and the next stage of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld nightmare began. Whatever its ramifications for the US, those for the Iraqi people were much worse: sectarian warfare would be the least of them.

I learned several important things that February 15th, ten years ago: massive mobilization of anti-war sentiment was possible some seventeen months after 9/11; a government committed to war is perhaps the most intransigent of all; policing of demonstrations was entering a new restrictive phase, one in which the First Amendment would be merely paid lip service and in which protest was to be as attenuated as possible. The first one was heartening and awe-inspiring; I learned later of the massive amount of organizing that the march required. The latter two were harbingers of further atrocities to come. (I also learned protective clothing for winters needs to be considerably enhanced if sustained, long-term exposure  lies ahead; I had worn long-johns, a heavy coat, gloves, and a hat, and I was still frozen after merely thirty minutes outside.)

Ten years on, war continues. The spectacular shock-and-awe bombing raids, the rumbling tanks, are gone, replaced by special forces operations and silent drone attacks, conducted from the US and felt far away. But non-combatants continue to die. The motivation for the war remains mysterious; the expenses for it steadily pile up, bankrupting budgets and national priorities. Two presidents got themselves elected to second terms using as a central campaign prop, the promise that they would pursue war as vigorously as possible. The Constitution took a battering; torture was defended; ‘rendition’ entered our vocabulary; war criminals were let off, and we were urged to move on. Veterans came home, sometimes in body bags, sometimes in wheelchairs; some committed suicide, others went off to try to adjust to ‘normal life.’ In their case, as with the dead children and civilians we were urged to look away.

All war, all the time. Ten years of it. I’ve seen better decades.

Michelle Rhee Shoulda Gotten An Education

Late last night, I stumbled across an ‘interview’ with Michelle Rhee (linked to by John Protevi on Facebook). (‘Michelle Rhee Gets an Education,’ New York Times Magazine, 2 February 2013). The comments section is absolutely priceless, and well worth a read. Here, I want to address a couple of her responses, because they offer us excellent insights into an extremely alarming person’s mind, one that has been appointed ‘reformer’ of ‘America’s schools’ but who instead, comes across as more of a destroyer than anything else.

Exhibit Numero Uno:

You write that you were offended by a sign in a Washington public school that read, “Teachers cannot make up for what parents and students will not do.” That didn’t make sense to you? 

As educators, we have to approach our job believing that anything is possible. It is incredibly important that we constantly communicate to kids that they can accomplish anything when they put their minds to it.

Translation: To me, that sign looked like an excuse made by lazy teachers.

Rhee does not like teachers, that much is clear. What she also revealed by her taking offense at the sign is that she lacks an understanding of the circumstances that may impinge on a student’s education. She forgets that schools are placed in very particular social and economic circumstances, as are their classrooms, and what takes place in them is not impervious to what happens outside. Her ‘anything is possible’ affirmation isn’t one; it’s an ostrich-like responses to material factors that affect school success. Unsurprisingly, she is fixated on test scores.

Exhibit Numero Dos:

You offered thousands of dollars to teachers and principals who brought up their schools’ test scores. Did you ever consider that it would encourage some to cheat? 

Teachers have integrity. And if money was the motivating factor, they wouldn’t be in education.

But money is enough of a motivating factor to get them to work toward your objectives? There is something more insidious at play here: Rhee wants to insist that teachers should work for the ‘love of it’ and shut up and put up about wages and working conditions. All those unions, asking for raises and better working hours. Shouldn’t you guys be working instead? As I’ve noted here before, the only Americans allowed to do the best for themselves are CEOs. The rest of us have to work for the love of it.

Exhibit Numero Tres:

Your reputation has been partly informed by the fact that you allowed a PBS news crew to film you firing a principal. Was that a terrible idea in retrospect? 

When I became chancellor, for the first two years of the job I was incredibly naïve about the press. I thought that my job was to run the school district, and that was what I was focused on. Now in retrospect I know how naïve it was.

At least Rhee is unapologetic. What she really wanted to say: ‘I quite enjoyed firing a principal on television; it let me show the teachers who’s boss.’

My sniping at Rhee here is inadequate; the real treat for the reader lies in the comments section of the interview. And in reading the always-wonderful Diane Ravitch on her.

‘What One Cannot Or Will Not See, Says Something About You’

From Rachel Cohen‘s A Chance Meeting:

There was something of the mystic about [Beauford] Delaney. His friends regarded him as a kind of minor deity, and his stories and observations often had the quality of parables. [James] Baldwin told the story again and again of standing on Broadway and being told by Delaney to look down. Delaney asked him what he saw and Baldwin said a puddle. Delaney said, ‘Look again,’ and then Baldwin saw the reflections of the buildings, distorted and radiant in the oil in the puddle. He taught me to see, Baldwin said, and that ‘what one cannot or will not see, says something about you.’ [links added]

Many years ago, I spent a day traipsing through Central Delhi with a photographer friend of mine. He had chosen to forego college to concentrate on his aspirations for a career in photography; I was already in awe of the work he produced. Paid work was hard to come by but at that point in time, he was undeterred, producing one dazzling portfolio after another of peoples, places and objects. On that hot summer day, we planned to walk through the center of the city, each of us carrying a camera, and to shoot photos of whatever caught our fancy.

With a twist: whatever I decided to take a photo of would be captured by my friend too, and vice-versa. Our equipment was almost identical in its technical specifications: I was using a spare camera of his, one loaned to me for the day’s exercise.  There was a lesson brewing in the comparison between our work that would ensue when our prints were developed, but I did not know what it would be. I hoped it wouldn’t be a simple exercise in humiliation. The similarity of the cameras had, of course, dispensed with any reliance on the quality of the camera as a crutch.

We both shot a roll of black and white film that day. There was little conversation between us as we did our work; the idea was to shoot first and compare later.  When the day’s work was finally developed and printed, I was stunned. We had taken photos of the ‘same things’ but our work was radically dissimilar. It was as if we had not even been present in the same place at the same time.

Some of this dissimilarity was quickly attributed to the technical parameters chosen for each exposure but overwhelmingly, the reason why our work stood apart so distinctly was that we saw different things when we looked through the lens. We framed and cropped differently; the central object in our frames varied sharply. What was chosen for inclusion was important; what was chosen for exclusion even more so. The skill of photography was more developed in one of us but even then, our minds brought with them their own distinct imperatives and priorities, attenuating the selection of those elements of the world that were to make it into our compositions. The world was ordered and ranked and classified differently by us.

Contra Ed Smith, Plain and Clear Language is Still a Virtue

In the New Statesman Ed Smith pushes back at Orwell‘s classic ‘Politics and the English Language‘:

When politicians or corporate front men have to bridge a gap between what they are saying and what they know to be true, their preferred technique is to convey authenticity by speaking with misleading simplicity. The ubiquitous injunction ‘Let’s be clear’, followed by a list of five bogus bullet-points, is a much more common refuge than the Latinate diction and Byzantine sentence structure that Orwell deplored….There is a new puritanism about the way we use words, as though someone with a broad vocabulary or the ability to sustain a complex sentence is innately untrustworthy. Out with mandarin obfuscation and donnish paradoxes, in with lists and bullet points. But one method of avoiding awkward truths has been replaced by another. The political class now speaks as it dresses: in matt navy suits and open-necked white shirts. Elaborate adjectives have suffered the same fate as flowery ties. But this is not moral progress, it is just fashion. (‘Don’t be beguiled by Orwell: using plain and clear language is not always a moral virtue‘, New Statesman, 9 February 2013).

Smith is right (in a way), but his invocation of Orwell is misleading; the point that Smith wants to make can be made without suggesting that Orwell’s thesis is up for contestation. The politician or corporate shill is not ‘speaking with misleading simplicity’; rather, he is not being simple at all. There is nothing ‘misleading’ about his ‘simplicity’ for there is none to speak of. Mere conciseness or brevity does not equal simplicity, for otherwise a straightforward reductio of Orwell’s thesis would present itself: speak and communicate as little as possible. When Orwell spoke of writing simply, he had in mind a very particular kind of economy and clarity: use the most felicitous combination of words that express your meanings, no more, no less; there is a Aristotelian golden mean to be determined here, one that a good writer aims for constantly. Sometimes he overshoots and bores his readers with loquaciousness; sometimes he undershoots and leaves his readers mystified.  And it is not just the numerical measure of his writing–in words or length of description–that Orwell had in mind, but the particular choice of words. The bullet-pointed list can be extremely vague too.

The dabbler in lists and bullet points is engaging, not in simplicity or conciseness, but in obfuscation; he is peddling in the modern version of the jargon that Orwell deplored. The management consultant that puts up Powerpoint slides full of concentric circles, arrowheads, and other members of the geometric menagerie is not relying on the ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ compaction thesis; rather, he is relying on distraction: look at these fancy, beguiling figures, while I indulge in some artful bullshit peddling. The bullet pointed-list and the consultancy chart shorten descriptions, but they leave out a great deal, giving us not just a skeleton but a misleading one.

If Orwell were to be brought to a corporate boardroom and subjected to the execrable management consultant presentation, he would rewrite his essay to include this modern abomination as an example of the bad ‘writing’ he had in mind.

Note: Yet again, a H/T to Corey Robin (and Doug Henwood) for pointing me to Ed Smith’s article.

Meek’s Cutoff and the Terror of the Beautiful

In the summer of 1998, during an epic road-trip out to the American West, I drove from Idaho into Oregon, heading for Eugene. I was still recovering from the surprise of having found out that the landscape of Idaho had been nothing quite like I expected it to be. (Idaho; potatoes, right? So, flat fields, you’d reckon? Well, no. Try pine forests, foaming rivers, and mountains instead.) Another surprise awaited me as I entered Oregon. I associated that state with the Pacific Northwest, with lush green forests, grey skies, cold and damp days, and much of the scenery that I had just passed through in Idaho. But eastern Oregon was arid, stark, parched landscape dotted with scrub and brush, rocky and often thorny.  I realized the Pacific coast was a long way away, that the visions of the Pacific Northwest that had so entranced me and brought me here were still a day’s drive away.

I wonder if my surprise was a much milder version that might have afflicted travelers like those portrayed in Kelly Reichardt‘s Meek’s Cutoff, as they wander, lost, disoriented, and thirsty, through a landscape that must have seemed nothing quite like that promised them before they set off on their journey to the magical West. As we watch their trials and travails, transfixed by our present knowledge that a straight journey west will bring them to the unimaginable lushness of the Oregon coast, we are also daunted by the knowledge that their journey is one infected and crippled by uncertainty and fear: our hapless journeyers do not know where they are, they are not sure where they are heading, they do not trust their guide, and they are ever so conscious that for the original inhabitants of this land, their presence is not a welcome one.  They might be, as often described, ‘pioneers’ but for now, they seem to have taken on a task of now unimaginable complexity, one requiring physical and mental fortitude that might be beyond many, if not most of them.

I have written before on this blog, on the beautiful and deadly combination of the cruel and the sublime that characterizes the American West (for instance: here and here). Meek’s Cutoff is a stark cinematic testament to that: we are riveted by the land’s colors that change through the day as the sun describes its merciless march through the sky, by its stark expanses, its brooding silences. But we are also made uneasy by its utter indifference to human plans and bonds: whether water will be found and parched lips assuaged, whether loved ones will live on or die by the wayside, whether dreams will be sundered or realized, these are all of little interest to it. It merely provides the canvas; the humans describe their fates on it. And then, of course, there is the violence: we are reminded that when strangers met strangers in this land, the resulting encounters were often fatal.

Meek’s Cutoff is not an easy movie to watch, but it is rewarding all the same; the landscapes are entrancing, the human tensions are real; most importantly, the pace of the movie keeps step with that of its characters and reminds us of their daily state of being: slow, painful, grinding onward movement, all the while not knowing whether each step onward is progress or not.

Adam Gopnik on the Scientist’s Lack of ‘Heroic Morals’

In an essay reviewing some contemporary historical work on Galileo, (‘Moon Man: What Galileo saw‘, The New Yorker, February 11, 2013), Adam Gopnik, noting Galileo’s less-than-heroic quasi-recantation before the Catholic Church, writes:

Could he, as Brecht might have wanted, have done otherwise, acted more heroically? Milton’s Galileo was a free man imprisoned by intolerance. What would Shakespeare’s Galileo have been, one wonders, had he ever written him? Well, in a sense, he had written him, as Falstaff, the man of appetite and wit who sees through the game of honor and fidelity. Galileo’s myth is not unlike the fat knight’s, the story of a medieval ethic of courage and honor supplanted by the modern one of cunning, wit, and self-knowledge. Martyrdom is the test of faith, but the test of truth is truth. Once the book was published, who cared what transparent lies you had to tell to save your life? The best reason we have to believe in miracles is the miracle that people are prepared to die for them. But the best reason that we have to believe in the moons of Jupiter is that no one has to be prepared to die for them in order for them to be real.

So the scientist can shrug at the torturer and say, Any way you want me to tell it, I will. You’ve got the waterboard. The stars are still there. It may be no accident that so many of the great scientists really have followed Galileo, in ducking and avoiding the consequences of what they discovered. In the roster of genius, evasion of worldly responsibility seems practically a fixed theme. Newton escaped the world through nuttiness, Darwin through elaborate evasive courtesies and by farming out the politics to Huxley. Heisenberg’s uncertainty was political—he did nuclear-fission research for Hitler—as well as quantum-mechanical. Science demands heroic minds, but not heroic morals. It’s one of the things that make it move.

Gopnik’s conclusion is a curious one: he seems to have made a curiously reductive statement about science and the scientist, and he does so by ensnaring the scientist in a net that brings in a bigger catch. For the distance of the scientist from his work, its import and its consequences, is equally that of the artist from this creations. I do not think it a coincidence that Gopnik refers to ‘genius’ as broadly as he does. For after all, ‘evasion of worldly responsibility’ is often claimed as a ‘fixed theme’ for the artist as well: the work stands on its own, it needs no moral justification, it need not take a moral stance and so on. Perhaps this is the viewpoint of the aesthete alone, but it is one often associated with the artist’s place in the world and his supposed moral responsibilities. The claim that Gopnik makes about the scientist, in attempting to portray him as amoral adventurer, is a narrowly restricted one: the ability of the scientist to manipulate, intervene, poke and prod at the world makes him into an actor too, one that might be required to act in conformance with moral codes, ones which might be internalized by the scientist. Human creativity always requires little more than ‘heroic minds’; the ‘heroic morals’ always come much, much later, determined by a nexus of needs and interests, historically situated.

Gopnik relies too, on a curiously non-socially-situated view of science: its truths endure, independent of man’s activities. But again, he does not believe this himself, for as he notes, Galileo gets to stop caring about his ‘transparent lies’ only after his book was published. Not before. Perhaps the scientist needs to do more to have his ‘truths’ accepted and recognized. They get to endure once his ‘community’ says they do.

Note: H/T to Corey Robin who excerpted the Gopnik quote above on his Facebook page.