Samir Chopra's Blog, page 68

Praising One Partner, Dissing The Other

Sometimes, on Facebook, an innocent will post a photograph of himself and his female partner, and be greeted with a slew of admiring comments and ‘likes’. These will often be things like ‘you guys look great together’ or ‘fabulous couple!’ Sometimes there are  comments about the wife or girlfriend’s looks: ‘X is beautiful’ or ‘X is so lovely.’ And sometimes, some comments make the same point while taking a dig at their male friend: ‘Dude, she is so above your pay grade’ or ‘you are batting well above your average here’. Or something like that. These are all friendly enough, I suppose, but I must admit to feeling a little uncomfortable about the last cluster. (Perhaps people make these kinds of remarks in face-to-face settings as well, but this behavior is more easily and often observed on social media.)

The folks making that last kind of remark are indulging, of course, in some good-natured joshing: man, you really lucked out. This commentary–which women also direct at their male friends–is a sub-species of that special way that men have of expressing affection for each other wherein they call each other vaguely derogatory names as a sign of affection. Still, I wonder, don’t these kinds of comments also ‘good-naturedly’ tell the woman she is slumming it with her partner? You know: Hey, you’re being charitable here, dispensing your favors to our ‘plain’ friend? That she could have, you know, done better? Are the folks making this kind of joke, one directed at their male friends, also as comfortable making this kind of implied remark about the woman? (Note: this kind of commentary is almost never directed at women by their female friends. No one ever, as far as I can tell, tells a woman that she has really gotten lucky by ‘snagging’ such a hottie who is so clearly deserving of someone better looking than her.) I know the folks making this kind of remark are complimenting the woman’s looks–but in an odd sort of way, really, because they also seem to be suggesting she has lost out in the ‘looks stakes.’ Despite being blessed with an abundance of good looks. So not only is she unlucky, but she also lacks judgment.

I wonder if the discomfort that I’m expressing has as its root, an acute discomfort at the idea that people ‘snag’ or ‘catch’ partners, that there is some ‘physical matching’ involved between people, so that folks with similar rankings on our scale of aesthetic appreciation should be paired off with each other, and that thus, a ‘mismatch’ in looks is notable. In a way. I get that physical attraction has a great deal to do with the initial expression of romantic interest but still, we know enough about what makes relationships work to know that there is a great deal beyond the initial ‘flush.’ Most of which has to do with our complex personalities and the way our partner addresses our most felt needs. Which only emerge, more often than not, once the initial stage of courtship is over, and are rarely known to those outside the intimate circle partners create for each other.

I don’t mean to be a pedant here, or a killjoy. I’m just curious about whether the folks who talk like this have thought about some of the possible implications of their seemingly innocent remarks.

Note: On reading a draft of this post, my wife remarked:

I feel like you touch on but don’t explicitly say something that seems the most problematic about such comments. I think the reason that the same thing would not be said to a woman is because society believes a woman’s looks to be the most important thing about her whereas they are only a minor component of a man’s overall status. You can insult a man’s looks without insulting a man, but you can’t do the same to a woman.

She’s right.

 

The Organ In The Chapel

For the two years that I attended boarding school, I was subject to a non-negotiable, uncompromising rule: daily attendance at an Anglican chapel service was required. The bell calling us to service would ring out, loud and clear and persistent; we would make our way to the chapel and file in obediently, taking our pre-assigned positions–arranged by grades. We were led through a service by one of our masters; we sang hymns, said the Lord’s Prayer; we knelt down, we stood up; we listened to the occasional ‘sermon.’ And then, as the service came to a close, and as the gathered congregation stood in silence, waiting to file out, we were treated to a short organ recital that served as epilogue.

I knew little of the organ and the music it produced; I knew even less about the many pieces I heard. Still, my body and my aural senses knew what they liked, and there was little doubt that the organ recital was the highlight of the service. I knew the master who played, up above in the loft that held the choir, was a short and stocky man, with hands like little cudgels. (Rumor had it Mr. Paul had been a boxer in his school days, and was still capable of landing a fearsome slap or box to the ears of the insolent.) I could imagine him bent over the keys, his fingers busy at work, the ‘pipes’ towering over him, his feet working the pedals, sending out those notes, sonorous, commanding, filling the spaces of the chapel and my imagination.

My musical tastes, as I indicated, were not too sophisticated. Still, I acquired an early favorite: Bach‘s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. (I had first heard it on the soundtrack of Rollerball; when I first heard it in the chapel, I was curious and excited enough to find out more about this melody that had so intrigued me.) Mr. Paul, our organist, only played it occasionally, and every one of those occasions made the proverbial hairs stand on end, my skin prickling.

I was not a religious person then; indeed, I had lost whatever little religious belief I had in the years following my father’s death. I participated in the chapel service because I was required to; I was used to being subjected to school discipline, so mouthing the hymns and prayers and going through the motions of rising and kneeling in unison came easily to me. It was all a bit of a performance, and I was well aware of it. We were in chapel for no longer than fifteen minutes at most, and though I chafed occasionally at the service’s constraints, I put up with it, much like I did with all the disciplinary codes of this highly structured home away home.

But that little organ recital did not fail to induce an emotional response in me; it made me look forward to the service, if only its end. (Of course, the organ accompanied our hymns too, and thus, in them as well, I found much stirring within me.)

Mr. Paul often practiced in the evenings; on some those occasions, I, along with a friend or two, would sneak down to the chapel and treat ourselves to a free concert, standing outside the back wall. These were short, for our days were tightly scheduled. But they were memorable; I could see the Himalayas towering ahead, the well-groomed gardens of the campus laid about. And through the walls, I could hear that mighty instrument, an accompaniment to the sacral, but also capable of uplifting the profane.

Paying Attention To The Muses’ Visits

In The Year of Magical Thinking–a book on which I will write a bit more anon–Joan Didion quotes her late husband, John Gregory Dunne, as saying that having a notebook handy–to write down a thought, an idea, filed away for future reference and deployment–was the difference between being able to write and not.

There is much truth in this utterance of Dunne’s.

A couple of years ago, when I started blogging here, I would find myself thinking about blogging topics as I walked to and from work (or my gym). On those occasions, I would wait till I got home to scribble my thoughts on a notepad on my desk. But sometimes, those thoughts were too fleeting to survive; I would, with some dismay, and often, mounting panic, rummage in my memory stores, seeking desperately to find that little flash of inspiration that had suggested itself as such a fertile avenue of written exploration. Bizarrely enough, it took a few months before I started to do something about this state of affairs.

Unsurprisingly enough, I relied on a technical aid: the ubiquitous smartphone. I began making tiny notes on a ‘scratchpad’ on my phone, quickly writing down, misspellings and all, the fragments of whatever thought had crossed my mind as I rode the subway and read a book. I hoped to return to these later. Sometimes I did, and found the seed was still viable one, and I would turn it into a full post. Sometimes, on re-inspection, I found a mere incoherent ramble, a passing fancy that would not bear the weight of writing on it.

I did not just write down ideas for blog posts, of course. On some occasions, a tactic for resolving a  sticky section of writing in a book project would suggest itself to me–‘get rid of the section on X‘ or ‘move the bit about Y to the end of the chapter’–and a way out of an impasse would become crystal clear. Again, here too, on actually sitting down and confronting the text, my assessment of the worth of the putative brainwave could change; my visit from the muse had not been as fruitful as I had previously imagined.

There are times, and I always pay for them, when I forget the wisdom of Dunne’s observation, and I am too lazy to pull out my phone to write down my supposed inspiration. I cannot be bothered to put down my book; my phone is in my backpack; the subway is too crowded. Whatever the reason, I reassure myself I will make notes when I arrive at my destination. But I almost never do. And thanks to a peculiar transience associated with such thoughts, they do not survive and persist. Irate at my lack of attention, they move on to more attentive and grateful minds. I call out again and again, but they are gone, leaving not even a wispy trace in their wake.  There is no way to call them back again, except perhaps to get back to work.

Naguib Mahfouz On Forgetting And Habit

In Naguib Mahfouz‘s Autumn Quail, Isa, the corrupt bureaucrat whose long, slow, and painful decline after a purge following the 1952 revolution in Egypt the novel tracks, brings back Riri, a woman of the night, to his home. The next day,

He woke up about noon and looked with curiosity at the naked girl sleeping next to him. Recollections of the previous night came back and he told himself that as long as oblivion and habit still existed, everything remained possible. [Anchor Books, 2000, pp. 374]

Many a student of human nature is puzzled by the subject of his study. Why do humans behave as irrationally and self-destructively as they do? Why do they hurt the ones they love? Why can they not learn from their mistakes?

Perhaps because they forget; perhaps because they are compelled.

If memory can be so constitutive of identity, then forgetting gives us the chance to make ourselves anew. Forgetting ensures pain and joy once experienced are consigned to the past, and cannot act as guides to the future: they cannot inhibit, they cannot impel us to repeat a once-experienced pleasure, they cannot make us shrink from the venue of an older disaster. The burnt child fears the fire, but the forgotten fire provides no instruction for action when a flame is encountered again. Then the child becomes the moth; our expectation of its behavior is reconfigured. We may too, pass by a previously experienced domain of pleasure, now strangely reluctant to sample its joys again; we have already buried, pushed out into oblivion, memories of our times within its confines. We carry on, unaware that we have foregone an opportunity to experience that which once enthralled us so. This blithe ignorance may take us elsewhere, toward experiences and interactions, which are provocative of novel responses from us.

Habits, conditioned and impressed, sent deep into the innermost recesses of our being,  continue to drive us on too. They may become more than mere regularities in behavior; they may appear as instincts, innate and congenital. We may mark out zones of catastrophe, and expect no one will venture into their precincts, but the persona habitually conditioned to push open its doors and enter will continue to do so. And habits may send us, again and again, long after the shocks and the pleasures of the new have worn off, seeking old exaltations and ecstasies, hoping they will be as productive of joy as they once were. The resultant inevitable disappointment, so clearly visible to the observer, and which should seem to act as inhibitor, does not have that effect; the habitual commissioner of acts continues to do so long after all assessments of his actions as reasonable have ceased.

Forgetting and habit send us on into this world as a curious mixture of the new and the archaic. Such a creature is curiously open to possibility while simultaneously entrenched in older ways of being. The interaction between the two can be productive of much that might appear initially implausible.  ‘Everything remains possible’ indeed.

A Most Irritating Affectation

The most irritating affectation of the modern intellectual is to pretend to be technically incompetent. I exaggerate, of course, but I hope you catch my drift. Especially if you’ve encountered the specimen of humanity that I have in mind. (Mostly on social media, but often in person too.)

The type is clearly identified: a clearly intellectually accomplished individual–perhaps by dint of academic pedigree, perhaps by a body of public work, or just plain old clearly visible ‘smarts’–claims that they are incompetent in modern technology, that they simply cannot master it, that their puny minds cannot wrap their heads around the tools that so many of their friends and colleagues seem to have so effortlessly mastered. (‘Oh, I have no idea how to print double-sided'; ‘Oh, I have no idea what you mean by hypertext’). They are just a little too busy, you see, with their reading–good ol’ dead-tree books, no Kindles or Nooks here!–and writing–well, not on typewriters sadly, but word processors, for some change really cannot be resisted. Rest assured though, that they have to call for help every time they need to change the margins or fonts or underline some text.

This absorption in old-fashioned methodologies and materials of learning thus marks them as gloriously archaic holdovers from an era which we all know to have been characterized by a greater intellectual rectitude than ours. While the rest of us are slaves to fashion, scurrying around after technology, desperately trying to keep up with the technical Joneses, our hero is occupied with the life of the mind. So noble; such a pristine life, marked by utter devotion to the intellect and free of grubby mucking around with mere craft.

Why do I find this claim of incompetence to be an irritating affectation? My suspicion is easily provoked because I do find posturing in all too many places–as I did above in expressions of faux modesty, sometimes called humblebrags in the modern vernacular, but here, I think, is the rub. Those who profess such incompetence merely outsource the work of learning the tools we all learn to do our work to us. They are unwilling to put in the time to learn; they are too busy with their important work; we are not for we have, after all, shown that we have time to spare to learn. We should help–it is now our duty to aid their intellectual adventures.

A claim to incompetence should not be occasion for cheer, but it is. We are, after all, ambivalent about the technology that so dominates, regulates, and permeates our life; we are, all too often, willing to cheer on evidence that not all is well in this picture of utter and complete absorption in technique. We applaud this disdain; we wish we were so serene, so securely devoted to our pursuit of knowledge. We are also, of course, clapping wildly for a rebellion of sorts, a push-back against the creeping march of technology into every corner of our lives.

I think we can find better heroes.

Note: I’m willing to make some concessions for those over the age of fifty, but anyone younger than that bragging about their technical klutziness needs a rhetorical kneecapping.

The Fall Of Norman (And Norma) Bates

We know the story of Norman Bates:

Norman had been excessively dominated by his mother since childhood, and when she took a lover, he became insanely jealous that she had “replaced” him, then murdered his mother and her lover. Later, he developed a split personality to erase the crime of matricide from his memory and “immortalize” his mother by stealing and “preserving” her corpse. When he feels any sexual attraction towards someone, as was the case with Marion [Crane], the “Mother” side of his mind becomes jealous and enraged. At times, he is able to function as Norman but other times, the “Mother” personality completely dominates him….Norman, in his “Mother” state, had killed two missing girls prior to Marion [Crane].

Sometimes you can know the ending, and not worry about spoilers. This is certainly the case when watching Bates Motel–the television series which supplies a prequel to Psycho. We are well aware we are about to view the descent into madness, into full-blown psychosis, of a young man who, well before we came to know him as a cross-dressing, knife-wielding, homicidal maniac, was a sweet and shy young man. This knowledge, this dissipation of suspense, does not diminish the tragedy unfolding before us; it makes it all the more tragic because we see the characters inexorably moving toward their pre-determined fates. (This fact, this eventual degradation and decline, one in part caused by the psychological trauma our personal relationships can inflict on us, makes for difficult watching at times; I suspect some of my sensitivities are particularly acute because I’m a parent now.)

Bates Motel is not an ordinary prequel; it is a reboot, for it displaces the original Psycho in both space and time (from California to Oregon, and from the 1960s to the present era). But by retaining its central characters and pathologies, it ensures it does not stray too far from the original’s creepiness. And indeed, it might be that it supplies what was always the most intriguing and understated aspect of the original, one only touched upon briefly in its resolution: How did Norman become Norman? What was his relationship with his mother like? Who was his mother? What was she like?

Psycho is sometimes described as the first psychoanalytical thriller; fittingly, Bates Motel‘s primary virtue is that it enables an archaeology of its story. It fills out and makes available for inspection, the contours of Norman and Norma’s pre-history; it tells the story that Norman might have recounted on a therapist’s couch. Bates Motel clearly considers the task of supplying a full-blown causal story to account for Norman’s psychosis a task that is lies beyond its competence, for its writers assume some pre-existent pathology, but even then, we are promised some development and ‘progression’–hopefully, an artful blend of responses to both innate dysfunction and environmental abuse.

Bates Motel can only end with Marion Crane’s car pulling into the parking-lot. In this series at least, we know what the finale will be; we can now get back to clucking over the details that get us there.

Book Release Announcement: Eye on Cricket: Reflections On The Great Game

I’m pleased to announce the release of my second book on on cricket–‘the game, not the animal, or the cartoon character': Eye on Cricket: Reflections on the Great Game (HarperCollins, 2015; online sale point in India here). This brings together a collection of essays based on my blogging over at ESPN-Cricinfo–over the past six years. (These essays are not mere reproductions of those posts but significant extensions, revisions, and reworkings.)

Here is the cover:

Here is a foreword by Gideon Haigh, cricket’s pre-eminent historian:

I suspect that Samir Chopra and I were born to at least correspond. His blog profile lists as his interests ‘cricket, free software, military history, military aviation, hiking, tattoos, industrial music, travelling’. I don’t necessarily share those interests—although the military and musical tastes overlap—but they are interesting, and he brings to his cricket writing the sort of well-stocked and free-ranging mind ever in short supply.

Cricket bloggers have a tendency to come and go, say what they have to say, and move on. Samir, I think, gets better and better. I enjoy his style of taking a stray or miscellaneous pensée, then comparing and contrasting, unpicking and elaborating, until a surprisingly rigorous argument has been constructed and a provocative conclusion reached, whether it’s that Andy Flower had a nerve asking India to withdraw its run-out appeal for Ian Bell at Trent Bridge in 2011, or that Fire in Babylon was frankly overpraised—views I happen to share, although that is less the point that Samir makes such trenchant yet civil cases. They are like watching cricket with a thoughtful and challenging companion. Perhaps these are the conversations Samir would like to have had with someone at a Test match, but, alas, has had to conduct with himself in his self-imposed east-coast American exile. If so, we’re fortunate that he’s condemned to partake of his cricket by the interwebs in splendid isolation, as he describes in another lovely cameo here.

There was a lot that set me nodding in Eye on Cricket, in recognition and assent. Yes, sport is grossly overstuffed with martial imagery; yes, I also tend to appraise every library by what is on the shelves at 796.358. Being one himself, Samir understands the ‘playing fan’ and the vernacular cricketer with great acuity. ‘No game, no physical or cultural endeavour, can survive or be sustainable if held aloft only by the efforts of those most proficient at it,’ should hang in a gilded frame in the office of every cricket  administrator. I revelled in cricket-nerdish references to a light appeal by Sew Shivnarine, and to ‘Kirti Azad’s Finest Hour’ too. I’d read many of these pieces previously, yet was struck by how well they cohered in this collection—it was almost as though Samir had been unconsciously working towards this totality all along. I am surprised only that he has never written anything about Jade Dernbach. After all, it would bring together two of his interests. Over to you, Samir.

Here is the jacket description:

In Eye on Cricket, Samir Chopra, a professor of philosophy and a long-time blogger at ESPNcricinfo, offers us a deeply personal take on a game that has entranced him his entire life in the several lands he has called home.

In these essays, Chopra reflects on a childhood centred on cricket, the many obsessions of fandom, the intersection of the personal and the political, expatriate experiences of cricket, historical regrets and remembrances, and cricket writing and media.

Nostalgic, passionate and meditative, Eye on Cricket is steeped in cricket’s history and its cultural significance, and reminds the most devoted spectators of the game that they are not alone. It shows how a game may, by offering a common language of understanding, bring together even those separated by time and space and culture.

On Becoming Canadian

I’ve become Canadian. By that, I don’t mean that I’ve acquired Canadian citizenship, begun enjoying universal healthcare and ice hockey, started bragging about how much bigger Canadian grizzlies are than American ones or how much better Molson’s is than Miller’s. And so on. Rather, it’s just that I have become blasé about the cold weather that has been gripping the US East Coast this winter. And saying things like “This is such a beautiful day” on days when the temperature is just above freezing point.

There was a time, not so long ago, when temperatures below the freezing point were conversation-worthy and worth dressing up for. The thermometer would drop below 32F–or 0 C as we Canadians like to put it–and I would hasten to wear a pair of long-johns before heading out for the day. Hat and gloves were, needless to say, de rigeur. And on arriving at my destination, I would make sure to say something like “Damn, its freezing out there.” The roaring twenties induced this sort of reaction in me all too easily; the teens, ever so rare, provoked adjectives that were rather more extravagant.

But this winter, the twenties and the teens have been all too common, almost as common as the many, many snowflakes that have come drifting down from the heavens.  And indeed, so have single-digit temperatures. (Dropping as low as 2F or -19C at one point.) I know residents of the American Midwest and the great Canadian plains will snicker at this city slicker dropping these piddling temperatures about him like badges of pride. But trust me; I know why you feel that way now.

For now, I find myself increasingly unfazed by the cold. I don’t wear long-johns any more; I’ve just become used to a pair of frozen lower extremities. (Please don’t be distracted by the double entendre.) Hats and gloves, common accessories for the twenties, are now only so for the teens. And I hardly ever talk about the weather. (I just blog about it. The fact that the weather has made it to this blog should perhaps indicate that I’ve run out of things to say. That may be so.)

In this new, complacent-about-the-cold state, many deep thoughts occur to me: Is it true that cold is just relative? That man can get used to just about anything? (Nietzsche did say once that man could tolerate anything so long as he knew the ‘why’ of it. I have to admit that the technical details of this year’s cold snap, which involve depressing news about the melting of the Arctic ice cap, its effect on ocean currents, the jet stream, and masses of cold air sitting on Siberia, have certainly made this year’s cold comprehensible.) Will privation make me appreciate abundance? (That is, will this year’s spring or summer seem especially salubrious?)

I’ll admit that I don’t know the answers to these profound inquiries. I do know that the Niagara Falls are prettier on the Canadian side, that Wayne Gretzky is the greatest, and that everything tastes better with maple syrup.

A Bad Teaching Day

Yesterday, I had a bad teaching day.

First, I was scattered and disorganized in my Twentieth Century Philosophy class; I repeated a great deal of material we had already covered; I offered only superficial explanations of some important portions of the assigned reading; I did not answer questions from students satisfactorily. (It was pretty clear to me by the end of the class that I did not know how to explain Wittgenstein’s argument against private languages to a novice.)

Then, fifteen minutes later, I walked into my Philosophical Issues in Literature class-where we were scheduled to discuss Jose Saramago‘s Blindness–and floundered again. (Though not as badly.) Here, I largely failed to satisfy myself that I had covered all the bases I wanted to. For instance, I was unable bring the class discussion around to a consideration of Saramago’s satirical tone, his view of humanity, the novel’s take on technology and the reaction of the state to sudden catastrophe–all important in studying Blindness. Instead, the discussion ran in several different directions and I felt entirely unsure that I had done a good job in keeping it coherent.

Later, after a break of a couple of hours, I traveled to Manhattan to teach my graduate Nature of Law seminar. Now, I struggled because of faulty syllabus design. My fifth and sixth weeks of the class were ostensibly to be devoted to studying legal realism. For the first of these two weeks, I assigned three essays by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; for the second, a selection of articles from an edited anthology. There were two problems with this choice. First, the readings were disproportionately assigned to the two weeks–the first required the students to read a mere forty-five pages, the second, approximately two hundred and twenty. Second, and more seriously, some of the readings for the second week should really have been assigned as companions to the Holmes essays. This poor design almost immediately manifested itself in the class discussion.

It was quite difficult to discuss Holmes essays without the surrounding context–historical and legal–that the additional readings would have provided. As a result, my students and I found ourselves either listening to me lecturing about that missing component, or returning, again and again, to discuss threadbare, the same central theses of Holmes that had begun the class session. (Indeed, I found myself repeating some points ad nauseam.) As the class wore on, I could not fail to notice that my students were losing interest; perhaps the assigned readings hadn’t been substantive or provocative enough. Perhaps.

That expression, of students fading out, is a killer. I almost ended the class early–one normally scheduled to run for two hours–but not wanting to admit surrender, hung on for dear life. With ten minutes to go, my students were packing up. I desperately sought to show them the reading at hand had more depth in it, looking for a money quote that would illustrate, brilliantly, a point I had just been trying to make. I didn’t find the one I was looking for, and had to settle for a lame substitute.

Which is how the class ended, lamely.

Hours later, after I had reached home, had dinner, and begun to settle down for the night I was still fuming. This morning, it continued. And here I am, writing a blog post about the whole day.

Teaching can be a wonderfully invigorating experience; it can also be painfully demoralizing.

Mary McCarthy On Henry Mulcahy’s Selfishness

In Mary McCarthy‘s The Groves of Academe, John Bentkoop, a faculty member at Jocelyn College, offers his take on his beleaguered colleague, Henry Mulcahy, who has set in motion schemes of varying deviousness in his bid to hang on to his precious position after receiving a dismissal notice from the college president:

Hen has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It’s a rare asset; it could be useful to him in politics or religion….He’s capable of commanding great loyalty because he’s unswervingly loyal to himself….Very few of us have that. It’s a species of self-alienation. He’s loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause. In the world today, there’s a great deal of free-floating, circumambient loyalty that fixes itself on such people, who seem to offer, by their own example, the possibility of a separation from the self that will lead to a higher union with the self objectified in an idea. It’s Hen’s fortune or his fate to have achieved this union within his own personality; he’s foregone his subjectivity and hypostatized himself as an object.

There is no doubt Mulcahy’s ‘gift’ speaks to what could be a great and valuable skill: it enables the kind of fidelity and commitment to a greater purpose that is so often conducive to desirable forms of self-disciplining and to a channeling of personal energies towards a sought-after goal. (This goal will be, in all probability, one only of interest to Mulcahy.) Indeed, it is Mulcahy’s greatest strength–such as it is–that he is so utterly dedicated to himself and his life’s projects. He knows, with little self-doubt, who is number one. Bentkoop does not invoke narcissism here but there is no doubt the loyalty he refers to flirts with such notions.

Bentkoop’s suggestion that Mulcahy’s self-loyalty would be of most use in politics and religion is thus, entirely appropriate: a determined politician or preacher needs to sound–most of all, to himself or herself–entirely sure about his or her political or moral rectitude. Only someone with utter loyalty to themselves could be so convinced.

Mulcahy thus seems to have achieved what many others seek so desperately: some cause, some leader, some channeling of our otherwise all-too disparate energies toward a coherent objective. Fidelity and commitment to something–if only we knew what it was! Mulcahy has the answer: first, engage in a psychological maneuver–unspecified by Bentkoop–to transcend one’s own subjectivity, and then, regard oneself–and our goals–as a distant other to be approached with loyalty and desire. Thus, perhaps, who knows, we might even find the desirable balance between narcissism and self-abnegation.

As The Groves of Academe shows, the problem with Mulcahy’s loyalty to himself is that he does not find this balance: he is all too quick to sacrifice others to his cause. His colleagues, his family, his students, are all merely pawns, incidentals in a larger enterprise. McCarthy’s view of Mulcahy’s moral failings–forced upon by him by the news of his possible firing–is acutely unsparing.

The readers of her novel are not the first, and neither the last, to discover that self-loyalty is sometimes just an exalted name for selfishness.