Samir Chopra's Blog, page 34

Falstaff As Zarathustra

There is much that is admirable in Falstaff. He is funny; he has a flair for verbal pyrotechnics; he is lustful; he enjoys food and drink, he is a good friend; he might commit highway robbery, but it is not clear he would want to hurt anyone in the process. Moreover, one suspects he would only rob those who could afford to be robbed by him. Most admirably, he appears entirely unconcerned by the opinions of others; he is secure in his estimation of himself. We may–like Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One–mock him endlessly and mercilessly but it is unclear whether our barbs really do sink in, whether they cause more anguish to the reader than they do to Falstaff himself. Falstaff might be fat, out of shape, and a liar, but he seems to be malice and resentment-free; and those are not inconsiderable blessings. He mocks the so-called ‘kingly’ or ‘noble’ values in disdaining the notion of honor; the only time that he will deign to speak in the pompous, affected manner of the landed aristocracy and those who ascend to thrones is when he is role-playing. He understands that those who occupy such stations are engaged in a similar sort of acting and dissembling. He is artful and slippery; when caught in a lie, he quickly extracts himself from the social disaster that has resulted and quickly turns it to his advantage.

This sort of take on Falstaff’s character is not novel; germs of it appear in many assessments of one of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters. It should be evident though that these descriptions show that Falstaff also embodies many Nietzschean virtues: he does not seek to bring others down to his level but walks along his own chosen path; his qualities and traits might be out of sync with the surrounding normative order of appropriate speech and behavior, but Falstaff cares little for that; he has an acute understanding of his strengths and limitations and knows how to deploy them in a concerto of sorts so that he may ensure for himself the life he wants. Falstaff, in sum, even though appearing to be a ‘low-life’ in some respects is possessed of many ‘noble’ qualities; his character has its own distinctive ‘style‘ and it is his own ‘will to power‘ applied to the particulars of his life that has brought this style about. Falstaff’s presence in the ‘low scenes’ of the Shakespearean plays he appears in serve as an acute counterpoint to the values visible in the ‘high scenes’; thus through his actions and his words does he instantiate a peculiar and particular ‘inversion of values.’

Falstaff could be understood as a prophet heralding the presence of an alternative way of being, which could be ours if only we could shake off the encrusted weight of centuries of slavish obedience to inherited values. But we are bound too tightly to this mast; our socially constructed ambition drives us on. And so, like Hal, we must discard him, and bid him farewell. The time is not yet right for him. Perhaps it never will be.

Nietzsche’s ‘Supreme Principle of Education’

Nietzsche claims that the “supreme principle of education” is that “one should only offer food  to him who hungers for it.” That is, roughly, teaching should be guided not by the requirements of an abstract, generalized curriculum, but by the expressed needs of the learner. In keeping with Nietzsche’s generalized aristocratic and hierarchical sensibilities, education is not for all; it is only for those who express a desire to learn. Moreover, what they wish to learn will be guided by this desire, this hunger; they will not accept a substitute deemed necessary or desirable for them by some planner or designer of an educational system. Find out who wants to learn, and what they desire to learn (and why); education is thereby facilitated, and indeed, only becomes possible under these circumstances.

Nietzsche suggests that rather than having mathematics and physics forced upon us in the form of “thousands of…annoying, mortifying, irritating problems” our education should show us, in response to our lived experience of the world, that we “needed a knowledge of science and mathematics.” We should turn, perplexed by our interactions with a mysterious world that seems to embody regularities, to those whom we think know better and ask for guidance. Then, perhaps, we might find “delight in science.”

Needless to say, very little in our educational systems resembles the implementation of the prescription that Nietzsche offers here. They resemble instead, giant factories, which prepare and condition students for the world; rather than responding to the students’ hunger–of which they have plenty, even if inarticulately expressed–they seek to inculcate in them a hunger for a particular set of socially chosen aims and goals and ends. They are factories of ideology; they impress upon the student a value system that prepares them for efficient functioning in the world to which they are preparing to enter. A student might ‘choose’ a major but little about this choice is free; the student has been instructed and channeled for so long that his or her choices are all too plausibly viewed as the resultant effect of the various ‘educational’ (ideological) constraints  placed upon his or her learning.

A straightforward, ‘practical’ assessment of Nietzsche’s philosophy of education is that it is ‘impractical’ and implausible: students need to instructed, by those who know better, what they need to learn, so that they may make their way through this world as best as possible. But it is our desires, our ends, that predominate this discussion; there is little consultation with the students. Such an attitude is forced upon us, for we are in a terrible hurry to train our students, our children, and to send them out into the world to be productive and useful. There is a timetable of educational markers waiting after all; can we afford to let children play and explore and attempt to figure out this world and their educational needs for themselves when everyone knows that a child of four years must begin formal schooling in preschool and be out of high-school by the age of eighteen? Moreover, who has the time? Parents cannot spend such time with their children; they have to go to work, and must leave their children with other caretakers. Our society cannot afford so many little parasites running around, contributing little to the national GDP.  This is our train and it is headed for distant stations; there is no room for stragglers here, no time to seek out the hungry and ask what will nourish them.

Note: Excerpts from Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1991, Book III, Section 195, p. 115)

Drones And The Beautiful World They Reveal

Over the past year or so, I have, on multiple occasions, sat down with my toddler daughter to enjoy BBC’s epic nature documentary series Planet Earth. Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough, it offers up hour-long packages of visual delight in stunning high-definition: giant waterfalls, towering mountains and icebergs, gigantic flocks of birds, roaring volcanoes and river rapids, deep canyons, majestic creatures of all kinds; the eye-candy is plentiful, and it is dished out in large portions. While watching it, I’ve been moved to remark that my co-viewing of it in the company of my daughter–and sensing her delight as we do so–has been one of the highlights of my parental responsibilities.

Filming a documentary like Planet Earth, the most expensive ever, takes time and money and technical aid. The featurettes for the various episodes explain how they were filmed: sometimes using a cinebulle, sometimes “the Heligimbal, a powerful, gyro-stabilised camera mounted beneath a helicopter.” Now comes news that Planet Earth II, the second installment of the series will deploy even more advanced technology:

The BBC…has not only shot the whole thing in UHD, but it also used the latest camera stabilisation, remote recording, and aerial drone technology, too.

The use of drones should make perfectly good sense. Drones can be commandeered into remote and difficult to access territories and zones with great ease and precision; they can be made to wait for the perfect shot for long periods of time; they can generate huge amounts of visual image data which can then be sorted through to select the best images; without a doubt, their usage will result in the previously hidden–and beautiful–coming to light. Perhaps they will descend into the craters of volcanoes; perhaps they will hover above herds of animals, tracking their every move to record and reveal the mysteries of migration; perhaps they will enable closer looks at the dynamics of waterfalls and whirlpools; perhaps they will fly amidst flocks of birds.

Their use will remind us once again of the mixed blessings of technology. Drones can be used for surveillance, for privacy invasions, for the violations of human rights; they can be used to conduct warfare from on high, sending down deadly munitions directed at civilians; they can also be used to reveal the beauties of this world in a manner that reminds us, yet again, that our planet is a beautiful place, one worth preserving for the sake of future generations. Technology facilitates the exploitation of nature but also, hopefully, its conservation and sensible stewardship thanks to the beauties of the images brought back to us by the drones we use. The use of drones in Planet Earth II may refine our aesthetic sensibilities further: many of our aesthetic superlatives are drawn from nature, but that entity’s contours will now be revealed in ever greater detail, with more aspects brought front and center. And so, as we have never stopped noticing, even as technology makes the world more understandable, it reveals its ever greater mysteries.  Technology may make the world mundane, quantify it all the better to tame it, but it may also reveal facets of the world we may have been previously blind to, rendering some sensibilities duller and yet others more acute.

Nietzsche’s Six Methods For Combating Facebook Distraction

Nietzsche has something to say about everything. Including Facebook Distraction, an ‘impulse’ whose ‘vehemence’ we seek to combat, and for which he has found ‘not more than six essentially different methods.’ (‘The Dawn of Day‘, trans. JM Kennedy, Allen Unwin, 1924, Section 109)

First,

We may avoid the occasion for satisfying the impulse, weakening and mortifying it by refraining from satisfying it for long and ever-lengthening periods.

This, of course, is the methodology of the various ‘Freedom’ programs; we are made to refrain from satisfying the urge to look away from our work at our Facebook page. By blocking Internet access altogether or by blocking access just to Facebook.

Second,

We may impose a severe and regular order upon ourselves in regard to the satisfying of our appetites. By thus regulating the impulse and limiting its ebb and flow to fixed periods, we may obtain intervals in which it ceases to disturb us ; and by beginning in this way we may perhaps be able to pass on to the first method.

This is the method followed by those programs that seek to limit access to Facebook using soft or hard constraints like setting the number of hours we are blocked from using Facebook, or which seek to place a cap on the length of time we are allowed to access Facebook in a day.

Third,

We may deliberately give ourselves over to an unrestrained and unbounded gratification of the impulse in order that we may become disgusted with it, and to obtain by means of this very disgust a command over the impulse: provided, of course, that we do not imitate the rider who rides his horse to death and breaks his own neck in doing so. For this, unhappily, is generally the outcome of the application of this third method.

Indeed, sometimes I have tried this method, where I will try to kill time–perhaps between classes or while waiting for a student late to an office hours appointment–by just endlessly checking my Facebook. The result is indeed a kind of sickening, and a suicidal urge soon steals over me, which often acts as a downer when I next think of accessing Facebook.

Fourth,

There is an intellectual trick, which consists in associating the idea of the gratification so firmly with some painful thought, that after a little practice the thought of gratification is itself immediately felt as a very painful one. (For example, when the Christian accustoms himself to think of the presence and scorn of the devil in the course of sensual enjoyment…or if a man has often checked an intense desire for suicide by thinking of the grief and self-reproaches of his relations and friends, and has thus succeeded in balancing himself upon the edge of life : for, after some practice, these ideas follow one another in his mind like cause and effect.)

The closest I’ve come to this method is to bring to mind, by a deft act of mental recall, a memory of some Facebook friend whose online personality grates: he or she humblebrags incessantly, vaguebooks, just plain brags, picks fights, complains, moans, whines. Then, I wonder if I really want to encounter their latest production and at times, my tab-switching hand has been stayed. This does not work so well for there are times I seek to humblebrag or just plain brag myself and so the previously obnoxious behavior now can only be condemned on grounds of hypocrisy. Which I’m afflicted by but no matter, I press ahead.

Fifth,

We may bring about a dislocation of our powers by imposing upon ourselves a particularly difficult and fatiguing task, or by deliberately submitting to some new charm and pleasure in order thus to turn our thoughts and physical powers into other channels. It comes to the same thing if we temporarily favour another impulse by affording it numerous opportunities of gratification, and thus rendering it the squanderer of the power which would otherwise be commandeered, so to speak, by the tyrannical impulse.

Nietzsche seems to suggest that when the urge to switch tabs arises, we should give in to some other impulse: perhaps we should go make a cup of coffee–to placate the caffeine urge–eat ice-cream–to placate the sugar craving. I assume these techniques will be familiar to most. Our boredom and anxiety and insecurity and melancholia–which makes us reach for the Facebook tab–can be addressed in other ways.

Sixth, all else failing,

The man who can stand it, and thinks it reasonable to weaken and subdue his entire physical and psychical organisation, likewise, of course, attains the goal of weakening a single violent instinct; as, for example, those who starve their sensuality and at the same time their vigour, and often destroy their reason into the bargain, such as the ascetics.

This is a drastic solution indeed. All our resources are brought to bear on mastering our Facebook Distraction: we pick fights with actual friends to lose them as Facebook friends; we indulge in increasingly desperate maneuvers like throwing our laptops out the window, and so on. I haven’t reached this stage yet.

The bad news is that:

The will to combat the violence of a craving is beyond our power, equally with the method we adopt and the success we may have in applying it.

The good news is that:

Our intellect is rather merely the blind instrument of another rival craving, whether it be the impulse to repose, or the fear of disgrace and other evil consequences, or love.

The very fact that we are bothered by our Facebook Distraction is evidence that another drive seeks expression; perhaps a lust for power or glory through the completion of our unfinished drafts. This being Nietzsche, there is no getting away from the jihad that lies ahead:

While ” we ” thus imagine that we are complaining of the violence of an impulse, it is at bottom merely one impulse which is complaining of another, i.e. the perception of the violent suffering which is being caused us presupposes that there is another equally or more violent impulse, and that a struggle is impending in which our intellect must take part.

Roger Lowenstein, Investment Banker, Mansplains Elizabeth Warren

Roger Lowenstein, a director of the Sequoia Fund–the flagship fund of Ruane, Cuniff & Goldfarb–wants to explain how regulation works to Elizabeth Warren, who he describes as “the nation’s unelected regulatory czar” and someone who–dear, oh dear–paints “bankers with as broad a brush as Donald J. Trump uses to demean Muslims.” He does so in an Op-Ed that is destined to be used as a prime example of mansplaining at its worst.

Lowenstein kicks things off by providing an example of Warren’s inability to understand regulation:

 Ms. Warren’s latest provocation was to send a letter to President Obama this month demanding the removal of Mary Jo White, chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ms. White, she said, had demonstrated her unsuitability for the role by failing to have the S.E.C. draft rules requiring corporations to disclose details of their political spending.

Last time I checked, the S.E.C. was a regulatory agency of the executive branch, in which Ms. Warren is not, in fact, employed. President Obama was quick to retort that Ms. White was right for the position. You could imagine him protesting, sotto voce, “Hey, firing agency heads is my job.”

Lowenstein should stick to investment banking for he seems not to understand how politics or democracy works. (Indeed, I suspect he does not understand how the English language works because he does not seem to know the meanings of those words.) I could write a letter to President Obama ‘demanding’ the removal of the chair of the SEC if I wanted. (Perhaps I could write an Op-Ed in the New York Times that lays out my argument.) Perhaps I could make a case for the chair’s incompetence; perhaps I could make note of a gross violation of professional ethics that had come to my attention. The President could take my advice into consideration if he so wanted; or perhaps he could hit ‘delete’ on my email. Firing administrative agency heads remains his job; my job as a concerned citizen–which is what I presume Elizabeth Warren is, in addition to being a US Senator–is to let him know my opinion on matters of interest to me. Elizabeth Warren cannot fire agency heads; if she sought to do so, then she’d be overstepping her legislative function.  Does Lowenstein imagine that US Senators or state representatives never make their opinions known on matters of national interest to the President? They know very well that executive authority rests with the President. In the example above, does Lowenstein imagine that Warren is saying “I’m going to go ahead and fire Mary Jo White?”

Lowenstein suggests that there is no “good evidence” that “her pointed criticism of John G. Stumpf, the chief executive of Wells Fargo, during his appearance in September before the Senate Banking Committee, was responsible for his resignation this month.” Well, if by “good” you mean we have no admission from Stumpf that he was resigning because of Warrne’s tongue-lashing of him, then he is correct. But we are reasonable folks, and we infer to the best explanation. After Wells Fargo’s disaster, there was no move from Stumpf to resign; but after his public dressing-down by Warren went viral on social media he did so. Public shaming works; it causes many to fall on their swords. That knowledge of human psychology plus the conjunction of the two events–the shaming and the resignation–offers us reasonably good evidence that Warren’s criticism did cause Stumpf to resign.

Lowenstein accuses Warren of another “power grab” in her objecting to “President Obama’s nomination of Antonio Weiss for the job of under secretary for domestic finance”:

Mr. Weiss’s ostensible failing was to have been employed at an investment bank, Lazard. Ms. Warren…protested that the president should “loosen the hold that Wall Street banks have over economic policy making.” That demand ignores the obvious fact that bankers know something about economic policy, and that many of the best financial regulators, from Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in the 1930s through Arthur Levitt Jr. and Henry M. Paulson Jr. in more recent decades, have come from Wall Street.

Notice the italics above–they are meant to provide a contrast to Warren’s ostensible ignorance of economic policy. But I agree with Lowenstein here. Bankers do know something about economic policy; they know how to make it work for banks and their CEOs. As for the “best financial regulators” coming “from Wall Street,” well, I suppose having foxes in the chicken coop is one way to keep the chickens safe. As the 2008 financial disaster showed us all so well.

Lowenstein goes on to claim that:

Confronted with Ms. Warren’s opposition, President Obama did an end run. Mr. Weiss withdrew from contention for the post and instead became an adviser to the secretary of the Treasury, Jacob J. Lew. What sort of nefarious deeds has Mr. Weiss perpetrated in that role? Well, he recently brokered a highly praised law to restructure Puerto Rico’s debt.

Ironically, in the very link that Lowenstein provides it is noted that the “highly-praised law” he makes note of was also criticized for “the anti-democratic nature of the oversight board, the relatively arcane restructuring process and a provision that could lower the minimum wage for young workers.”

Returning to Warren’s letter to President Obama, Lowenstein writes:

Ms. Warren wrote that by not developing a political spending disclosure rule Ms. White was “ignoring the S.E.C.’s core mission of investor protection.” Actually, dredging up the details of political spending has nothing to do with protecting investors, though it might fall into the category of “things corporations do that some people do not like.”

Wrong and right. Transparency about political spending does protect investors who have a right to know how their invested funds are being spent; and yes, being opaque about the details of your political contributions is something that “some people” do not like. Joint stock companies have a fiduciary duty to their investors because:

The ability of corporate executives to spend company resources for political purposes without shareholders’ knowledge raises significant investor protection and corporate governance concerns. Without transparency or disclosure, executives are free to spend funds invested by shareholders without accountability or monitoring.

Lowenstein’s Op-Ed reeks of butt-hurt and it is not a pleasant aroma. He should rest content with the billions he makes and the many he immiserates; and leave the regulation to folks who know how it–and politics and democracy–works.

Robert Caruso, Clinton Campaign Fellow, Advocates War Crimes (Before Denying He Did So)

Hillary Clinton’s reputation as a warmongering hawk is a well-established one. As the New York Times reported back in April in an essay titled “How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk,” she could talk the hawk talk, and walk the hawk talk too:

Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst who conducted Obama’s initial review on the Afghanistan war, says: “I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent.”

Other than the financial shenanigans of the Clinton Foundation and the in-bed relationship with Wall Street, no other issue has exercised progressives quite as much. A hawkish American foreign policy means never-ending war, and with it, interminable violations of human rights, moral hypocrisy, budget overruns, appeasement of the military industrial complex, secrecy and surveillance and violations of civil rights at home. A hawkish American foreign policy is a pernicious rot at the roots of the republic; it is, without exaggeration, a cancer that needs excising from the American body politic.

Progressive worries about the Clinton presidency that is looming will not be assuaged by reading a remarkable article by “a former official in Hillary Clinton’s State Department and an associate of the Hillary for America PAC,” Robert Caruso, which lays out a policy argument for a no-fly zone in Syria that included the following gem:

Russia intends to exert political pressure and create the illusion a `shooting war’ would erupt if a no-fly zone was constituted. This is unserious, and should be dismissed as the naked Kremlin talking points they are where ever encountered….It is Russia, not the United States, that should fear American intervention in Syria

But the luster of that jewel pares in comparison to the following:

By no means is the United States limited to overt military intervention in Syria…Henry Kissinger’s strategies in Laos and Chile are models of success that should be emulated, not criticized.

In case it is not perfectly clear: Caruso is recommending the US emulate the actions of a mass-murdering war criminal and engage in murderous, illegal actions like the ones that Kissinger organized.

Caruso’s cheerleading for genocide did not go unnoticed; Huffington Post took down the passage from which the above lines had been excerpted and the online version of the post now no longer carries them. Quite naturally, Huffington Post has not added any editorial notes explaining their excision of this material.

But the entertainment does not end there. When Caruso was pointed to these lines on Twitter, he immediately replied with the following Trumpish denial:

Never said that, and from now on anyone repeating what you say about me is working for Russia.

Well, I’m clearly working for Russia, because I’m repeating it here; I read the article yesterday which had the full paragraph–now immortalized in a screenshot taken by Wikileaks:

Perhaps the only reassurance afforded here that Caruso does not have the integrity to stand by his words, knowing quite well they are calls to criminal action. Small mercies indeed.

Addendum: The LinkedIn page for Robert Caruso seems to indicate he might not be a Clinton ‘insider’ at all. So his rantings above are certainly not indicative–in any definitive sense–of the contours of a future Clinton foreign policy.

The Words We Mutter Under Our Breath

Some years ago, as I waited to be served food by a prickly employee of an eating establishment, I sensed my temper flaring. She and I had had run-ins before; she had always seemed unnecessarily querulous and brusque in her interactions with me; the  milk of human kindness seemed to have curdled long ago in her. I anticipated more trouble in this encounter; I was on edge, wondering which pronouncement of mine would be met with curtness or indifference. I wasn’t mistaken; a few seconds later, I was subjected to a familiar, rage-inducing rudeness. I placed my order, picked up my food, and walked away. As I did so, I muttered under my breath, “Fuck you, you fucking stupid bitch.” My short and bitter rant was loud enough to be overheard by someone–not a complete stranger–standing next to me, who promptly did a double-take and said something to the effect of “Wow, that’s harsh.” Now mortified, I mumbled something about having a bad day and walked quickly away. (I was especially embarrassed because I had just interacted with a service worker, someone who at the best of times is underpaid and overworked.)

It wasn’t the first time–and sadly, I don’t think it will be the last–that I will say something quite unhinged, in a hushed tone of voice, in words only audible to myself. On various occasions over the years I’ve deployed almost exactly that same line above on the conclusion of an aggravating social encounter–with ‘bitch’ replaced by some other derogatory term, sometimes racist, sometimes homophobic, sometimes sexist, sometimes fat-shaming. In the encounter I make note of above, I had been detected and called out; on most occasions, I am the only audience for these private expressions of my feelings.

I do not know if this history means that deep down at heart I’m a sexist, racist, misogynistic, homophobic person; I do know that I’m afflicted with many kinds of implicit bias, and they play a role in my understanding of the world and my relationships with those who inhabit it; I do know that being exposed to all those strands of thought as I grew up, and living in societies that still suffer from those afflictions predisposes me to fall back, lazily, in the cauldron of unfavorable circumstance, to those very same attitudes when I express anger. They suggest themselves to me as the right kind of ammunition to deploy against my imagined foes, the only balms that will assuage my psychic wounds. (Conversely, with probability one, someone has referred to me in precisely the terms above after an aggravating encounter with me, with their favorite prejudiced expression for folks of my ethnic persuasion inserted into the schema above.)

These are not flattering reflections on oneself; my utterances are only partially excused by being made in a fit of anger. Perhaps I can congratulate myself on having found a ‘safe outlet’ for my frustrations; after all, all I did was rant a bit to myself. My words did not lead to prejudiced action or violence or politics or some form of systematic discrimination against those who, unknown to themselves, had been subjected to abuse my me. But perhaps that lets me too easily off the hook; and perhaps it lets off our societies and our times too easily as well.

The 2016 Elections, The ‘Bernie Revolution,’ And A Familiar Pattern

In The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 Eric Hobsbawm  writes:

In brief, the main shape of…all subsequent bourgeois revolutionary politics were by now clearly visible. This dramatic dialectical dance was to dominate the future generations. Time and again we shall see moderate middle class reformers mobilizing the masses against die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing beyond the moderates’ aims to their own social revolutions, and the moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making common cause with the reactionaries, and a left wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help of the masses, even at the risk of losing control over them. And so on through repetitions and variations of the pattern of resistance—mass mobilization—shift to the left—split among- moderates-and-shift-to-the-right—until either the bulk of the middle class passed into the henceforth conservative camp, or was defeated by social revolution. In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed…we increasingly find…that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy.

Hobswawm was writing these words in 1962–about the post-Bastille, pre-Jacobin, pre-Terror, French Revolution–so he knew well of what he spoke. He could well have been speaking of contemporary times and politics, of the American election season of 2016, and its ‘revolution that did not come to be’ – the Bernie Sanders Insurgency.

On November 9th, American liberals and progressives of a particular bent will wake up to find out they’ve been snookered yet again by the Democratic Party, by the same old trick that has been reliably used to make sure the minds and attention of their reliable voting demographics will not go wandering, looking for alternatives. Their support for the ‘Bernie Revolution’ earned them little other than the abuse of their own supposed ‘comrades,’ the ‘liberal’ coalition that backs Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: they were reviled as sexist, tainted by white privilege, as unrealistic nihilists.  They were urged to make cause with their political foes, urged to pull back from the brink to which they were marching the nation; they were urged to settle for a chance to ‘pull Clinton to the left,’ to get ‘their demands written into the party platform.’ Meanwhile, that mythical creature, ‘the moderate Republican’ was also persuaded to join the Clinton Coalition. That fundamentally conservative bent in American politics–which reveres that undemocratic document, the US Constitution, which claims American exceptionalism is a wholly understandable and justified attitude–asserted itself all over again, all the better with which to discredit the nascent stirrings of a mass movement (which in its populist strains found some curious resonances in the groups who supported Donald Trump’s candidacy.)

When the smoke clears, for all the sound and fury of this interminable season, little will have changed: the Republican Party will have disowned Donald Trump and gone back to its reactionary ways; the Democratic Party, having long ago moved into territory occupied by the Right, will pat itself on its back for having performed a remarkable act of sheepdogging. A familiar pattern indeed.

Black Mirror’s Third Season Nosedives In The First Episode

Black Mirror used to be the real deal: a television show that brought us clever, scary satire about the brave new dystopic, over-technologized world that we are already living in. It was creepy; it was brutal in its exposure of human frailty in the face of technology’s encroachment on our sense of self and our personal relationships.  We are fast becoming–indeed, we already are–slaves to our technology in ways that are warping our moral and psychological being; we are changing, and not always in ways that are pleasant.

That old Black Mirror is no longer so–at least, if the first episode of the rebooted third season is any indication. (Netflix has made the show its own; six new episodes are on display starting yesterday.) In particular, the show has been ‘Americanized’–in the worst way possible, by being made melodramatic. This has been accomplished by violating one of the cardinal principles of storytelling: show, don’t tell.

Season three’s first episode–‘Nosedive‘–takes our current fears about social media and elevates them in the context of a ratings scheme for the offline social world–complete with likes and indexed scores of social likeability based on instant assessments of everyone by everyone as they interact with each other in various social settings. See a person, interact with them, rate them; then, draw on your cumulative indexed score to score social benefits. Or, be locked out of society because your score, your social quotient, the number that reflects how others see you, is too low.

The stuff of nightmares, you’ll agree. Except that ‘Nosedive’ doesn’t pull it off. Its central character, Lacie Pound, a young woman overly anxious about her social ranking, commits to attending a social encounter that will hopefully raise her social quotient, thus enabling her to qualify for a loan discount and a dream apartment; but the journey to that encounter, and her actual presence there, is a catastrophe that has exactly the opposite effect. In the hands of the right director and writer this could have been a devastating tale.

But ‘Nosedive’s makers are not content to let the story and the characters speak for themselves. Instead, they beat us over the head with gratuitous moralizing, largely by inserting two superfluous characters: a brother who seems to exist merely to lecture the young woman about her misguided subscription to current social media fashions, and a kindly old outcast woman–with a low social quotient, natch–who suggests there is more to life than getting the best possible ranking. These characters are irritating and misplaced; they drag the story down, telling us much that only needed to be shown, sonorously droning on about how the show is meant to be understood. It is as if the show’s makers did not trust their viewers to make the kinds of inferences they think we should be making.

The old Black Mirror was austere and grim; its humor was black. This new season’s first episode was confused in tone: almost as if it felt its darkness needed to leavened by some heavy-handed relief. I’ll keep watching for now; perhaps the gloom will return.

Academics And Their Secretaries

In the preface to The Age of Revolution 1789-1848  (Signet Classic, New York, 1962, p. xvi) Eric Hobsbawm writes:

Miss P. Ralph helped considerably as secretary and research assistant Miss E. Mason compiled the index.

In the preface to the new edition (1969) of Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (University of Stanford Press, Cultural Memory in the Present Series, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, p. xi, 2002) Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer write:

No one who was not involved in the writing could easily understand to what extent we feel responsible for every sentence. We dictated long stretches together; the Dialectic derives its vital energy from the tension between the two intellectual temperaments which came together in writing it. [emphasis added]

In the preface to The Morality of Law (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1964, p. vi), Lon Fuller writes:

In closing I want to express an appreciation for the contribution made to this book (and to my peace of mind) by Martha Anne Ellis, my secretary….[her] dedication and perception have largely lifted from my concern the time-consuming and anxiety-producing details that always accompany the conversion of a manuscript into final printed form.

If you’ve looked long enough at the prefaces and acknowledgements of academic books written in the past century you will often find notes thanking secretaries for typing up the manuscript of the book. Presumably the secretaries in question took a pile of handwritten pages and painstakingly converted them into typed form before sending them off to the publisher for reviewing, typesetting, and then finally printing. (My guess is that the secretaries of Messrs Hobsbawm and Fuller typed their ‘bosses’ manuscripts as part of the ‘help’ and ‘contributions’ they provided.) Matters might be thought considerably different these days when sophisticated desktop publishing software sits on everyone’s desk, and publishers demand camera-ready copies of manuscripts and articles. But you would not lose too much money on betting that where academics can afford it–mostly at private universities–they will draw upon the assistance of their department secretaries in preparing their manuscripts. Most of whom, if not all, will still be women.

Intellectual work is always facilitated by the work of others. Back in the good old days, when most academics were men, they could count on the faithful support of their wives at home who would cook, clean, and bring up their children, and of their secretaries at work, who would type up manuscripts, prepare indices, make coffee and copies, and perhaps place calls to publishers in addition to typing up letters to them. Those with grace acknowledge such assistance in their prefaces and acknowledgments; others carry on blithely, secure in the comfort of knowing they live in a world which traffics in the myth of the ‘solitary genius,’ the ‘lone artist,’ the ‘brilliant individual.’ They imagine their reputation is constructed by their mental labors alone; they do not notice that it is propped up by the labors of others too. Theirs was the glamorous bit; the unglamorous bit is easily forgotten.

It takes a village to raise a child; it took an entire departmental office to write a book.