Samir Chopra's Blog, page 130

Aimé Césaire’s Immortal, Eminently Quotable Line

From Notebook of a Return To My Native Land:

For it is not true that the work of man is finished,

That we have nothing more to do in the world,

That we are just parasites in this world,

That it is enough for us to walk in step with the world,

For the work of man is only just beginning and it remains to conquer all,

The violence entrenched in the recess of his passion,

And no race holds a monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of strength, and,

There is a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.

– Aimé Césaire

I read the closing line of that excerpt first in Edward Said‘s The Politics of Dispossesion: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination and since then, have quoted it extensively in conversation and also used it as the epigraph to the concluding chapter of my book Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket. (There, I quoted it in the translated form that I first encountered it: ‘there are enough spoils at the rendezvous of victory for everyone’.)

Why am I so enamored of this line?

It is, of course, as all great segments of poetry are, simple and powerful simultaneously. With one stroke it dismisses the notion of politics as a zero-sum game and dispenses with the temptation to indulge in the raising of false dichotomies as barriers to action. It is evocative: the ‘rendezvous of victory’ is a yet to be attained destination that calls for journey and sacrifice, but not alone, rather, we do so, in the company of others; and what we will find waiting for us at the ‘rendezvous’ will not be a grimly parceled out, diminishing set of ‘spoils’; rather the rendezvous promises enough for all. The translation in the excerpt above has some advantages over the one I first encountered: by speaking of ‘a place for all’ as opposed to ‘spoils’ we sense the table being set for all, an act of generosity that informs and enriches us even as man is sometimes opposed to man.

So with one beautifully phrased line Césaire exposes the falsity of the notion of inevitable conflict, of those who must lose in order to ‘let us win.’ It rejects the inevitability of a grimly Spencerian or Malthusian notion of survival, and the bleak vision of life it brings in its wake, and replaces it with one where man’s actions may lead to a flourishing of not just his life but that of others as well. Our interactions with others become not invitations to deprivation but opportunities for enrichment instead. Thus it urges us to imagine the ‘rendezvous of victory,’ of final attainment, of resolution as a more capacious, generous, place or notion than might have been imagined. Political conflict is typically painted for us in the relentlessly grim colors of survival, conjuring images of the polis red in tooth and claw, its ecology requiring inevitable sacrifice. Césaire urges us to replace it with the idea that political interactions with others can be mutually enabling.

Watching People Lift Heavy Things

I have written about my weightlifting experiences on this blog on previous occasions. (Sometimes, about my experiences with, feelings about, and lessons learned from, particular lifts like the squat or the clean.) Today, I am writing about watching others lift weights. More specifically, I am watching some friends of mine complete the so-called Crossfit Total: three attempts to establish maximum weights at the one lift of the back squat, deadlift and press.(I have also written on a pair of Crossfit Totals I have attempted in the past).

So why is watching other people lift a good idea?

For one thing, it is straightforwardly educational. Part of the process of becoming a good weightlifter is to study lifting technique and form. But studying weightlifting doesn’t just mean looking at YouTube videos or reading books about it (though both of those are certainly very useful activities and I have done my fair share). Yet another way to study it is to watch others lift weights–with an appraising eye. There is a wonderful variety in the human form: height, weight, the length of the legs and arms, the flexibility of hamstrings or the shoulder joints, all of which make a difference to the ease or difficulty of executing lifts. (Lifters with short legs have an easier time with the squat for instance; taller people face their own particular challenges when deadlifting.) A Total provides an opportunity to inspect the form of a diverse set of lifters attempting to resolve their own particular idiosyncratic take on a lift. Watching lifters solve these problems–sometimes on the fly, sometimes under extreme stress–is edificational in the extreme.Watching lifters lift close to the limits of their capacities is also instructional: how does their form change as they approach that maximum? Part of developing a strong critique of one’s own lifting is to look for common faults and see if they show up in these stress situations. Every lift, every attempt is a veritable laboratory, a chance to look and learn, and troubleshoot.

Then there is the inspirational aspect of it all. The lifters at this Total have finished eight weeks of training, they have worked hard three times a week, lifting progressively heavier weights building up to this crescendo. Now, they are faced with a test of that training and hard work. Some of the lifters are relative novices, having started from a baseline of not being able to lift very much weight at all. Yet others are more experienced hands, capable of squatting or deadlifting twice their bodyweight. But in each case, the effort remains the same: they strive for their limits, trying to find out how hard they can push themselves, whether they have it in them to dig themselves out of the ‘squatters hole’, whether they can find it in themselves to execute each lift as it gets harder and harder. Lifting is not easy; the platform is often an arena where one’s fears and anxieties bubble up to the surface; a weight on one’s back can be an implacable foe.  Watching an ordinary human being master these fears is euphoria inducing in its own way.

Lastly, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity. of weightlifting is a marvel in its own right. Yes, all of just boils down to: pick a weight up off the floor; raise a weight above your head; stand up with a weight on your back. But in each case, the devil lies in the details. Inspecting those details is where the fun begins.

Coming For You with Chuck D and Public Enemy

In reviewing Jay-Z‘s book Decoded–a collection of lyrics with extensive commentary–(‘Word‘, The New Yorker, December 6 2010) Kelefa Sanneh writes:

Too often, hip-hop’s embrace of crime narratives has been portrayed as a flaw or a mistake, a regrettable detour from the overtly ideological rhymes of groups like Public Enemy. But in Jay-Z’s view Public Enemy is an anomaly. “You rarely become Chuck D when you’re listening to Public Enemy,” he writes. “It’s more like watching a really, really lively speech.” By contrast, his tales of hustling were generous, because they made it easy for fans to imagine that they were part of the action. “I don’t think any listeners think I’m threatening them,” he writes. “I think they’re singing along with me, threatening someone else. They’re thinking, Yeah, I’m coming for you. And they might apply it to anything, to taking their next math test or straightening out that chick talking outta pocket in the next cubicle.”

Jay-Z is on to something here, though I disagree with him about the distinction he is trying to draw, a doubt induced by what he says about his own lyrics. In part, this is because Sanneh describes Public Enemy‘s lyrics/rhymes as ‘overtly ideological,’ (pop version: they are ‘preachy’ or ‘intend to deliver a message or raise consciousness’.) That is certainly true in one dimension. But more broadly, it is an inaccurate description of the effect of Public Enemy’s lyrics, for they work and achieve their effect on listeners, not just because of the ‘political message’ but also because they induce the same effect that Jay-Z claims for his lyrics.

Consider for instance, the following amazing closing sections of ‘Rebels without a Pause‘ from the brilliant It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back . These bring the sonic power of the preceding sections to a dynamic crescendo; here, the barely contained force that has been been building up through the song threatens to break loose, through the barricades:

No matter what the name – we’re all the same

Pieces in one big chess game

Yeah – the voice of power

Is in the house – go take a shower boy

P.E. a group, a crew – not singular

We were black Wranglers

We’re rap stranglers

You can’t angle us – I know you’re listenin’

I caught you pissin’ in you’re pants

You’re scared of us dissin’ us

The crowd is missin’ us

We’re on a mission boy

Terminator X

Attitude – when I’m on fire

Juice on the loose – electric wire

Simple and plain – give me the lane

I’ll throw it down your throat like Barkley

See the car keys – you’ll never get these

They belong to the 98 posse

You want some more son – you wanna get some

Rush the door on a store – pick up the album

You know the rhythm, the rhyme plus the beat is designed

So I can enter your mind – Boys

Bring the noise – my time

Step aside for the flex – Terminator X

The effect of these lyrics, I suggest, is precisely that which Jay-Z ascribes to his own. This is not just a ‘lively speech’ – this is a dynamic invocation of action. The listeners, even if they don’t ‘become Chuck D’, want to be him, they want to be the force that he summons up, ascribes to himself, and more importantly, seems to instantiate. And as Jay-Z suggests above, the listeners don’t think Chuck D is threatening them. Instead, they are singing along, trying to be the person, or the member of that group, which is capable of saying ”Attitude – when I’m on fire/Juice on the loose – electric wire/Simple and plain – give me the lane/I’ll throw it down your throat like Barkley’ or my personal favorite: ‘I caught you pissin’ in you’re pants/You’re scared of us dissin’ us.’

But Jay-Z is right: that mood can be invoked for almost anything. Besides ‘math tests’, for lifting weights, stepping out of a plane with a pack on your back, or meeting your future in-laws for the first time.

On The Lack of Women in Philosophy: The Dickhead Theory

Jennifer Saul over at  The Philosophers Magazine has an interesting article on the psychological biases in the field that are adversely affecting the role and presence of women in philosophy. Saul considers various explanations for why women are so poorly represented in philosophy, one of which is:

[T]he importantly distinct idea that women approach things differently, and that philosophy is the poorer for not fitting well with women’s ways of thinking. One version of this idea can be found in Carol Gilligan and another in very recent work by Wesley Buckwalter and Steve Stich. These claims of women’s difference, however, have never held up well empirically, as Louise Antony argues eloquently in her “Different Voices or Perfect Storm”. [links added]

I agree with Saul in general and have an alternative theory to offer as explanation for the lack of women in philosophy. I call it the Dickhead Theory.  The heart of the Dickhead Theory (DT) is contained in the email I sent to Saul:

One of the biggest problems is that philosophy is treated like a contact sport: an argument is a contest, a chance to knock your opponent down, to utterly destroy him. Look at the way male philosophers report on question-and-answer sessions at colloquia: “Oh, X just wiped the floor with Y; X just totally devastated Y’s objection’ and so on. Look at the hostility with which questioners confront speakers, or the bristling tone of most philosophy discussions. Are they doing philosophy or are they working out deep neuroses? I find all of this extremely distasteful and diligently avoid most philosophy talks simply because I cannot stand – pardon my French – all the dick-waving.

I understand that philosophy is structured around the construction, analysis and defense of arguments, and that as such, it is an adversarial discipline. However, I have yet to see any good argument that such activities are best conducted in an atmosphere that approximates the one described above.  Philosophy is, truth be told, seemingly overpopulated by male dickheads. And I don’t think women like being in disciplines where that is the case.

In response to my email, Saul directed me to a paper by Helen Beebee titled ‘Women and Deviance in Philosophy‘. In it, Beebee includes a section titled ‘The seminar as a philosophical battleground’, which I think, argues for the DT much more carefully and thoughtfully, and in much more temperate language. At the end of the section Bebee concludes:

The hard question remains, of course: do women in fact, in general – or perhaps just more often than their male colleagues – find the aggressive and competitive atmosphere that is often present in the philosophy seminar uncongenial, independently of any effect it may have via stereotype threat? I do not know the answer to that question. I myself do not enjoy being on the receiving end of aggressive and competitive behaviour, and…do not feel in the least bit demeaned by that confession. On the contrary: on my own personal list of thick moral concepts, these both fall under ‘vice’ rather than ‘virtue’. I cannot, of course, speak for others. But my point here has been that there are grounds for thinking that such an atmosphere is alienating for women – and hence good reasons to attempting to change the atmosphere of the seminar room when it is aggressive or competitive – whatever the answer to the hard question; so it is one that we can simply allow to lapse. The role of such an atmosphere in the pursuit of truth is, at best, neutral; at worst, it runs the risk of putting women off philosophy – thereby reinforcing the stereotype that philosophy is a man’s world.

Yeah. What she said.

Miguel De Unamuno: Conservative War-Lover?

My philosophical education, just like everyone else’s, is far from complete, and of course, never shall be. One omission from my readings has been the work of Miguel De Unamuno, whose The Tragic Sense of Life has been adorning my bookshelves for some twenty years now. Recently, I set out to clean up some shelf space and noticing that my paperback copy–picked up from a Broadway bookseller–was in especially ratty condition, resolved to dispose of it, but to do so only after reading it.

As I read The Tragic Sense of Life, a book committed to clarifying and expounding on its central thesis that ‘the essence of man lies in his endeavor to be forever,’ such that ‘faith in human hope, the desire for immortality sustained throughout a lifetime’ can be read as the meaning of the ‘tragic sense’ in question, I wondered about a dimly-remembered description of him as a conservative. While there are streaks of ‘conventional’ conservatism visible in his fulminations against Nietzsche, what really caught my eye were his invocations of war. I was especially struck by these passages as I was reminded of the description–in Corey Robin‘s The Reactionary Mind–of the conservative spirit as one fascinated by violence.

Here is Exhibit Numero Uno:

A human soul is worth all the universe, someone–I know not whom–has said and said magnificiently. A human soul, mind you! Not a human life. Not this life. And it happens that the less a man believes in the soul–that is to say in this conscious immortality, personal and concrete–the more he will exaggerate the worth of this poor transitory life. This is the source from which springs all that effeminate, sentimental ebullition against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but the death to be renounced is the death of the soul. ‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,’ says the Gospel; but it does not say ‘whosoever will save his soul,’ the immortal–or at any rate, which we believe and wish to be immortal.

What is striking here is the language of ‘effeminate’ and ‘sentimental’ as adjectives to be applied to ‘ebullition.’ Not only is the anti-war sentiment unhinged, it flirts dangerously with effeminacy and sentimentalism; it is weak and pathetic, reeking of bouquets and rosewater. Somehow, inescapably, Frederick the Great‘s lines ‘Dogs, would you live forever?’, snarled at reluctant soldiers at the Battle of Kolin in 1757 come to mind. There, humans were animal-like for fearing violence and death; here they are sentimental, weeping, women.

And here is Exhibit Numero Dos:

In the world of living beings, the struggle for life establishes an association, and a very close one, not only between those who unite together in combat against a common foe, but between the combatants themselves. And is there any possible association more intimate than that uniting the animal that eats another and the animal that is eaten, between the devourer and the devoured? And if this is clearly seen in the struggle between individuals, it is still more evident in the struggle between peoples. War has always been the most effective factor of progress, even more than commerce. It is through war that conquerors and conquered learn to know each other and in consequence to love each other.

This passage is imbued with a very particular romanticism in its invocation of the life-enriching power of violent struggle. More ambitiously, with the ascription of creative and progressive force to war: from destruction and chaos, a new order. That conservative vision certainly sounds familiar in these days and times.

The Sunday Evening Movie, Blues-Killer Sans Pareil

It’s a strange business to have written about ‘The Sunday Evening Blues‘ on this blog, in such plaintive fashion, because for many years, Sunday evening was the time of the week that promised a very particular form of entertainment: the Sunday evening movie, for many years, an institution in the life of any Indian household that owned, or had access to, a television. Long before the video cassette recorder, before hundreds of channels and endless movies playing around the clock became de rigueur on Indian television, there was only one way you could see movies outside the cinema: on television, on Sunday night, via a Bollywood offering broadcast on the one and only channel, the national one.

The Sunday evening movie began promptly at 6 and ran without commercials, with one break for the evening news at 8 PM. It then resumed, ending around 9:30 PM or so. (Most Bollywood movies then, as now, ran over three hours). But what made the Sunday evening movie distinctive was that for many years, my family did not own a television. So we had to travel, perhaps to a neighbor’s house, perhaps to a school friend’s living room, but most commonly, it meant visiting my grandparents’ home, several kilometers away. My two uncles–my mother’s brothers–lived there too, so it was a relatively large family gathering. Every Sunday evening followed, roughly, the same pattern: departure from home in well-timed fashion (my father, as noted before on this blog, was an Air Force pilot, so punctuality in this regard was never a problem), arrival at my grandmother’s home, a quick procurement of seats before the movie started. At my grandparents’ first residence in New Delhi, we watched the movie in the living room; at the second, we congregated in my grandparent’s bedroom. Somehow, quite effortlessly, the eight or nine or ten of us would seat ourselves and enter movie-land. Talking during the movie was discouraged; my grandmother was especially strict in enforcing this rule. If the movie happened to not be of interest to me–perhaps a tearjerker, perhaps a ponderous, meandering romance, as opposed to a thriller or comedy–I still felt strangely compelled to keep watching: it never occurred to me to leave that gathering alone and go bury myself in a book, the way I did when confronted with many other family-centered social occasions.

Perhaps the most dramatic effect of the Sunday movie was the way it cleared the city’s streets, markets and parks: cricket, soccer and hockey games were suspended as was housework and homework. Somehow, mysteriously, Indian parents knew there was no point in trying to get schoolchildren to do their assignments at that time, or perhaps it was considered cruel and unusual punishment. The desertion of the normally bustling streets was uncanny and made even more so by the movie soundtrack that could be heard on them; sometimes, if the resonance and amplification came together, you could hear line by line, the progression of the script as you walked down a street. Perhaps the closest Indian streets came to this emptiness was when a big cricket game was on or when election results were being announced. But even those didn’t quite match the effect of the Sunday movie.

The Sunday movie as a social event disappeared quickly with the advent of a television in our house. The trips to other movie-watching destinations ceased; the family gatherings became more nuclear. Later, with the VCR, the novelty of the movie at home completely wore off. But what really killed the Sunday movie for me was growing up, the sense that responsibilities had to be taken on come Monday morning.

Karl Steel on the Fallacious Animal-Human Distinction

Who is human? What is distinctively human? Answering this fairly intractable question of demarcation–one that students in philosophy of biology can see peeking around the corner at them when they tackle the subject of whether species exist– can often–if not always–involve defining and articulating the non-human.  One particularly well-established tradition of such attempts has been directed at animals, our companions, pets, food, and indeed, astonishingly varied facilitators of our modern lives. (Unsurprisingly, when we build robots, we build them in the shape of animals too; there are robotic pet dogs that are, for instance, supposed to be helpful in making old folks’ twilight days more pleasurable, and yet others that might approximate the functionality of Beagles or St. Bernard dogs.) These distinctions, once established through a variety of ideological maneuvers, then enable the varied uses of animals–shades of the Great Chain of Being–and establish our ‘unique’ place in nature and the world.

The particular definition of ourselves as human by way of violent contradistinction with animals in the is the subject of Karl Steel‘s provocative book How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Ohio State University Press, 2011; Intervention: New Studies in Medieval Culture); Steel’s primary focus is how violence directed against animals served to persuade humans that there were in fact, crucial and principled boundaries between them and animals. A self-serving circle of theorizing and action was thus set up: humans were not animals because animals were the kinds of beings that could be treated in ways that humans could not. And they could be treated in those ways because they did not possess uniquely human qualities. (Take your pick: a soul, mentality, language, reason, culture; the list goes on.)

In this brief note today I want to quickly point to a preliminary discussion in its opening pages, which should give us a hint of the kind of category upending that is, I think, one of the aims of Steel’s work. Steel notes that Heidegger in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics  distinguishes animals from humans by describing the latter as a kind of being ‘for which being itself is an issue.’  Animals cannot reflect on their being in this world even as they apprehend it. (Utterly inanimate objects do not even apprehend the world the way animals do.) Beings like us are aware of our deaths, and of the world’s endurance after it. Animals have no such capacity, they have no world that they inhabit; they are ‘unaware of the world’s existence apart from themselves, [they] do not die but merely cease.’ Steel notes that Heidegger’s arguments were inspired by ‘the founder of ethology‘ Jakob von Uexküll, who suggested the ‘subjective world of the tick, its umwelt, as limited by the means by which it sates its desires and reacts to stimuli….this is its whole world.’ This is not enough for Heidegger for whom it is improper to speak of the animal as having any kind of world.

Steel then points out:

Yet the creature’s worldless immersion in world, its (in)ability to discover the distinction between what it experiences as world and the world itself , should be the same, mutatis mutandis, for Uexküll’s tick as it is for a human, since every creature’s particular abilities (including its own ways of being aware of injuries and pleasures) constrain and shape its engagement and perception of the world; there is no good reason not to understand humans has also had by their own umwelt…since humans can also reflect upon the conditions of existence to a degree, why can’t animals each in its own way? Humans and animals both might engage with their own death without ever being able to fully appropriate it to their own consciousness….If humans cease to be thought of as possessing unique moral significance because of their purported sole possession of responsibility or their unique capacity for reflection, nonhuman animals would cease to be automatically available to humans as mere worldly objects available for use by their supposed betters.

That last sentence is of particular interest to me; in a future post, I hope to elaborate more on that theme. (Think artificial agents.)

Popper’s Undistinguished Take on Existentialism

In Chapter 18 ‘Utopia and Violence’, of Conjectures and Refutations, Karl Popper writes:

We can see here that the problem of the true and the false rationalisms [Utopianism] is part of a larger problem. Ultimately it is the problem of a sane attitude towards our own existence and its limitations–that very problem of which so much is made now by those who call themselves ‘Existentialists’, the expounders of a new theology without God. There is, I believe, a neurotic and even an hysterical element in this exaggerated emphasis upon the fundamental loneliness of man in a godless world, and upon the resulting tension between the self and the world. I have little doubt that this hysteria is closely akin to Utopian romanticism, and also to the ethic of hero-worship, to an ethic that can comprehend life only in terms of ‘dominate or prostrate yourself’. And I do not doubt that this hysteria is the secret of its strong appeal.

One thing Popper does well in this passage is instantiate irony. Here, in a chapter, which is an ode to non-dogmatic rationalism, he flirts with an especially dogmatic attitude towards existentialism. This produces an exceedingly peculiar piece of writing. After noting that the problems under consideration, those of true and false rationalisms, are part of a ‘larger problem’, that of devising the appropriate orientation to the basic fact of existence, Popper seems to suggest too much is made of it by the new theologians i.e., the existentialists. Thus, this problem is fundamental, but too much is made of it by other theorists. There clearly is no pleasing some people. It gets worse. Not only are the new theologians guilty of making perhaps too much of this problem, they do so neurotically or hysterically. It is more than extremely curious that Popper, the arch-critic of Freud and psychoanalysis, should have picked two terms straight from their vocabulary to  show just how severe his criticism is, how acute the pathology under consideration is. He does not explain why these terms, in particular, apply. Are there symptoms of interest on display that might help us make up our minds? Popper does not explain too, why one of the central theses of a doctrine amounts to an ‘exaggerated emphasis’ on its claims by the proponents of the doctrine. How is a thesis to acquire centrality without emphasis?

But the dogmatism doesn’t end there. There is no argument to make the case that this ‘hysteria’–whatever it might be and however it might be manifested–is indeed as similar to ‘Utopian romanticism’ as Popper claims it is. What is the evidence for such a claim and why is this term is applicable to the attitude Popper is describing? Perhaps we are to be reassured by his statement that he has ‘little doubt’ about it. Popper then switches to posing a false dichotomy: that the existentialist ethic insists on comprehending life in terms of either domination or prostration. Popper seems to be making some vague gestures here toward Nietzsche, but this, prima facie, does not seem like a very coherent reading of him. Finally, to deliver the finishing touches, Popper then again reassures us of just how he does not ‘doubt’ that the aforesaid ‘hysteria’ is the reason for existentialism’s ‘strong appeal.’

All in all, this is not a distinguished display by Popper. Passages like these are not uncommon in philosophical polemics; I only note this one because its placement renders it especially incoherent.

Writing Away From Home

I am writing today’s post in a coffee shop. This fact would not be so interesting were it not for the fact that I am often tempted to do so, but almost never do. Today, circumstances compel me to write away from home and so, here I am. But writing at venues other than my desk is hard. I have written almost every single one of my blog posts on this blog at the same desk; a mere handful have been written at my desk in my office at Brooklyn College, and another handful in other venues: in Baltimore, for instance. I like writing on my favorite desktop keyboard, attached to my ‘home machine’, and have never become comfortable with a laptop. The physical affordance of the keys and the screen is not the same; I am, as they say, not a traveling writer. I do not know if this amounts to a limitation in my writing capacities; perhaps I’m not sufficiently ‘bohemian’ or ‘free spirited’  to bang out inspired prose on the road, no matter what my physical location of circumstance. I suppose this preference does say something, possibly unflattering, about how my low my tolerance for disruption is when I write. (External distractions, that is. As I never tire of noting here, I am very successful at distracting myself with the ‘Net.)

I have tried on several occasions to write in coffee shops. It doesn’t work; I am too easily distracted, too easily drawn into an inspection of the various discomforts that afflict me there. The chairs aren’t comfortable; the music is more often than not, too loud; people talk, loudly enough to make me want to reprimand them, but of course, no one ever said that the coffee shop was a quiet zone. So I’ll confess mystification: I don’t get it. I don’t understand how people can be so productive in coffee shops, how students, writers, programmers, grant-writers, novelists, all get so much work done there.

In a coffee shop, I do not necessarily find the company of people comforting, or a relief from the loneliness at home, from my solitary occupancy of my home-bound work desk. Somehow, in a coffee shop, the company of other people turns into an  acute reminder of isolation. Somehow, surrounded by people, by music, by the diverse smells and aromas of a coffee shop, writing feels like a curious retreat, an odd act of seclusion in a public space.

If I do need a change from my regular writing venue, I would much rather pick a library, to be surrounded by books, the written word and the evidence of the massive labor of thousands of other writers. The library is not perfect, as I have complained on this blog before, it too can be a noise zone all its own. But somehow, the presence of large reading tables, the stacks of books, the sometimes visible names of authors, has a calming effect, and I can get to work, to trying to achieve a state of mind that brings me one step closer to joining the ranks of those that surround me. More often than not, it doesn’t work, but the sustained illusion is pleasant enough to pursue time and again.

Note: In one of the ‘distraction posts’ linked to above, I note how traveling away from a usual scene of distraction–in this case, my work desk at home–can be conducive to writing. I stand by that claim; I just don’t think the coffee shop has worked for me as an alternative.

Thomas Jefferson: Creepy, or Redeemed by the Declaration of Independence?

The Thomas Jefferson nightmare is on us again. Was the Mother of All Founding Fathers a dastardly racist, and perhaps worse, a hypocrite to boot? Paul Finkelman has an Op-Ed in The New York Times that makes that case: at the time he penned the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson owned 175 slaves; over the next fifty years he did not free all his slaves, not even after his death; he opposed private manumission and public emancipation; he punished slaves by selling them away from families and friends; he suggested expelling the offspring of mixed-race unions from Virginia; and in many writings, spoke disparagingly of slaves’ mental and moral qualities.

David Post over at The Volokh Conspiracy has a rejoinder that suggests the correct response to the Finkleman Op-Ed should be a resounding, and I quote ‘So what? So what?  Really – so what?’ because–as part of his evidence for this claim–Post notes that Lincoln cites Jefferson as the true inspiration for anti-slavery and abolition platforms in 1858:

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society….All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. [italics in Post's article]

and then goes on to say:

Even if Jefferson had done nothing more than pen those words and get them inserted into the foundational document for the new country— and he did plenty more, see my paper here — declaring that principle to be a self-evident truth and at the foundation of any legitimate government was an act of political courage, not cowardice or hypocrisy, at a time when slavery was at the heart of the way of life and an economy across vast swaths of colonial America.

If I’ve understood Post correctly, his claim–in this post at least, for I have not fully read the paper he links to above to make a longer case for Jefferson–is that Jefferson’s declaration of universal equality of man, made in the abstract, supersedes or at least ameliorates his slave-owning record. This kind of defense of the sordid personal side of a public figure is not unknown: the figure in question deserves our tolerance for the public record outweighs the personal lacunae.

The problem here, of course, is that Jefferson’s slavery record is not a mere personal peccadillo, and it is not in indirect conflict with his public record. Rather it is a straightforwardly direct repudiation of his publicly avowed political claims. Imagine, for instance, someone trying to get George W. Bush off the hook for his illegal war in Iraq and his violations of civil rights at home by pointing to his various speeches, at home and abroad, where he waxes eloquent about freedom and democracy. The invocation of Lincoln, I think, does even less work. As Ann Bartow pointed out, in a comment on Post’s Facebook page, ‘[I]t is likely that Lincoln was using Jefferson strategically. Selling the idea that black men were “men” was perhaps less threatening if you could tie someone like Jefferson to the idea.’

I’m afraid it isn’t so easy to wash out the blot of slavery. The ‘damned spot’ sticks.