Gerry also managed to score the gimme goal by comparing this to Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image:
So what was left for me to do except invoke Super Duck to tie it all together in one great big circle?
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Super Duck vs. Rabbitman!
Stealing this unbelievably fabulous image directly from Gerry:
Gerry also managed to score the gimme goal by comparing this to Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image:
So what was left for me to do except invoke Super Duck to tie it all together in one great big circle?
Gerry also managed to score the gimme goal by comparing this to Wittgenstein's famous duck-rabbit image:
So what was left for me to do except invoke Super Duck to tie it all together in one great big circle?
Stray Thoughts on William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other
A week or two ago, preparing for class, I reread William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883). After doing so, I jotted down some of the stray thoughts that occurred to me while rereading it -- nothing fully thought through, just my first impressions -- a set of reader reactions of the sort that I asked my students to do and hand in. But I thought it might make for a nice blog post. Then I forgot to post it.
Coming across the saved post, I had the sad thought that its time had passed, and that it was now too late to post it. I then further reflected that every human being on earth, save a paltry 21 of them, is not in my class; and by no measure aside from the fact that my syllabus has passed it by is this post on a 128-year-old book any more or less relevant now than it was a week and a half ago. So here it is.
In case you've never read Sumner -- and I wouldn't particularly recommend it to anyone who isn't studying intellectual history; unlike many of the books I'm assigning, I don't think it's a Valuable Book That Ought To Be Widely Read (even if it was an influential one, a usefully representative one, and one that made for a good assignment) -- his basic answer to the question of "well, what do social classes owe each other?" is "nothing". (In fact, when I asked my class that very question early on, one student piped up with that entirely apt one-word answer (much to my relief: it showed they got the basic point.))
As a book, I'd have to say that it was both rhetorically masterful and intellectually shoddy.
Rhetorically masterful: even if you don't agree with his viewpoint (and while a lot of contemporary right-wingers say things which are along the same lines, I imagine that fairly few of them would actually support the repeal of, say, child-labor laws), he sweeps you along, until you are filled with emotion over the visceral injustice of taxing one person to help another. How dare you! It is an argument that has a lot of easy, intuitive persuasiveness (as Sumner made it but also -- importantly -- even divorced from his particular articulation of it (hence its insidiousness.)) It sounds right at first blush as long as you don't think about it too hard.
To be sure, Sumner rhetoric isn't particularly subtle. (But then, to be effective, it doesn't have to be.) One aspect that struck me was the language he chose to describe what it is that those pushing social programs (which Sumner mostly defines as not only any economic assistance but even most economic regulation, as well as such things as public schools (I say "mostly" because, as I'll get to in a moment, he isn't always consistent about it)) seek to do for others. Sumner says that the desire was to make the worse off "as comfortable" as others, to fulfill their "desires", give them "everything of which they feel the need", grant them "satisfaction": terms that make you think of an evening out of luxuries. Only once does he let slip and admit that one of the realities that the programs he decries seek to prevent is that of people literally starving to death. (To say nothing of children neglected by their parents, children being denied schooling, people being forced by market conditions to work twelve hour days, working under unsafe conditions, and so forth.) His talk of comfort, desire and satisfaction are, at the least, shockingly misleading, if not downright dishonest.
And considered just as a rational argument the book is a mess. This is true in far too many ways for me to enumerate, so I'll just touch on a few.
Sumner is woefully inconsistent in how he uses terms and in his reasoning. For example: one of Sumner's key ideas is that of the "Forgotten Man". But he doesn't use this notion at all consistently. Here's how he defines it early on:
Now already we're in a conceptual muddle, since Sumner never even notices the possibility that A, B, C and D might be different people in the case of different programs -- that looking at an entire government everyone might variously play the roles of C and D. Perhaps he means that, overall, the sheer dollar-value one gets from or contributes to the programs can be added up. But he doesn't say that; that's me trying to clear up a mess he leaves.
And of course it gets worse if you consider that, over time, the roles of C and D might switch. A child who goes to public school and gains benefit thereby (playing D) then grows up to be a productive taxpayer (playing C).* This complexity -- hardly a particularly obscure possibility -- is never mentioned, and makes utter hash out of a great many of Sumner's arguments.
Instead of following his own rigorous definition (while not abandoning it either, but always returning to it whenever convenient for his purposes) Sumner clearly has an image of who he takes the "forgotten man" to be, just as he has an image of those he takes to be the beneficiaries of government largess too. Here's how he describes the "forgotten man" latter on:
What's going on, clearly, is that Sumner is working with an imaged representative example of what he takes the "forgotten man" to be. (The same is true with those who get help, who propose that the government do it, and other roles in his little medieval morality play.) And either through deliberate distortion or through simply sloppiness he varies between his strict, "scientific" definition and his fictional, platonic character. It's an understandable slippage -- people typically think about concepts by comparing cases to core examples, even if we try to formally define them -- but it doesn't make it any less sloppy.
And of course that's just one example. Vague claims, poorly defined terms, inconsistent arguments, key points asserted with neither argument nor evidence to back them up, unnoticed assumptions -- and on and on, ad nauseum -- all abound.
Another example that struck me, for instance, was that Sumner was inconsistent about why a strict laissez-faire system was desirable. Often he seemed to be making a moral claim, saying that it is simply unjust to tax any one person to benefit another; at other times, however, he seemed to be making a practical argument, that such schemes always leave people worse off (everyone? or on average? in how long a term? -- he's not clear.) Again, which one he's saying matters -- some of his claims fail one test, some fail another, but he conveniently slips back and forth depending on what he needs to establish at the time.
He's inconsistent about what he thinks the state should do -- in some places he seems to be a minarchist, supporting only police, soldiers and the enforcement of contracts; in other cases he implies that there are genuine things the state should do for the public interest besides that, "public interests and common necessities" -- transportation infrastructure, I suppose. Maybe parks. But he not only fails to establish what divides those things which are genuinely good state interests from those that are immoral/unwise attempts to coerce charity (why do bridges and police pass the test while public schools and food safety inspectors do not?), he doesn't even seem to notice that this is an issue he needs to address. But a strict minarchist could apply lightly edited arguments from Sumner against the idea (which, again, he inconsistently supports) of any public works; and an anarchist could apply them against the minarchist. (If D needs police or contract enforcement and C doesn't, isn't it robbery to tax C to hire police to protect D? Let D hire private security and private-sector contract enforcers; if they don't, then they deserve whatever they get.) I'm not saying that such lines can't be drawn, but they clearly need to be drawn, not taken as obvious.
And so forth. Anyone looking for evidence that conservative ideas are nothing more than "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" will find plenty to go on here. Dressed up as science, it's all an emotional screed based on some romanticized image of the hardworking forgotten man.
The book is a mess. A philosophy class in basic argumentative errors could profitably use this as a text -- but, then again, so could a class in rhetoric. Because it's persuasive. Which is the really horrifying thing.
A few odds and ends. I think that Robert Bannister is clearly right (in his book Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1989)) that "social Darwinism" isn't playing much of a role here. (Contradicting the earlier, influential argument by Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944, 2nd ed. 1955) which made Sumner the poster boy for Social Darwinism.) Sumner is arguing a classic laissez-faire position based on economics and some poorly thought-through political philosophy.
In his final chapter, Sumner compares the sociologist (which is what he called himself -- and, indeed, he is one of the founders of American sociology) to a physicist, and says that he has simply described the workings of the world without moral judgments, and that anyone who complains that he is ignoring moral judgments doesn't understand how science works. If you take it as humor, it's kind of funny.
Sumner said that, given government assistance, it's better to be poor than to be rich, since the latter have to support the former. It's an argument that was made again.
Finally, I kept thinking while reading the book that you could probably run for office as a Republican in this country using only quotes from Sumner for your speeches and soundbites. It feels quite contemporary -- or, perhaps, late 90's: the Republican party since 2001 has had such a large strain of fear-mongering about terrorism (and, after that, about undocumented immigrants and then Obama) that that part seems wildly missing. But as far as the attitude towards social policy goes, it's quite current. I kept thinking of Phil Gramm (my least favorite politician until the advent of W.) Oddly enough, though -- here and there, in the corners -- Sumner comes across as quite Victorian in some of his moral assumptions, beliefs in progress, and so forth. Not much -- you could edit them out pretty easily and still have plenty left for a Congressional campaign. But they integrate far more naturally than I might have guessed beforehand.
__________________
*This particular example is complicated by the fact that, here and there, Sumner seems to argue that the person who would be playing C in this example are the parents, who are getting someone else to pay for their kids' education, and not the children themselves. But he seems perfectly content to let the children suffer for the sins of their parents, which means they are either going to be "D" (i.e. helped by the state) or the victims of Sumner's hoped-for neglect.
Coming across the saved post, I had the sad thought that its time had passed, and that it was now too late to post it. I then further reflected that every human being on earth, save a paltry 21 of them, is not in my class; and by no measure aside from the fact that my syllabus has passed it by is this post on a 128-year-old book any more or less relevant now than it was a week and a half ago. So here it is.
In case you've never read Sumner -- and I wouldn't particularly recommend it to anyone who isn't studying intellectual history; unlike many of the books I'm assigning, I don't think it's a Valuable Book That Ought To Be Widely Read (even if it was an influential one, a usefully representative one, and one that made for a good assignment) -- his basic answer to the question of "well, what do social classes owe each other?" is "nothing". (In fact, when I asked my class that very question early on, one student piped up with that entirely apt one-word answer (much to my relief: it showed they got the basic point.))
As a book, I'd have to say that it was both rhetorically masterful and intellectually shoddy.
Rhetorically masterful: even if you don't agree with his viewpoint (and while a lot of contemporary right-wingers say things which are along the same lines, I imagine that fairly few of them would actually support the repeal of, say, child-labor laws), he sweeps you along, until you are filled with emotion over the visceral injustice of taxing one person to help another. How dare you! It is an argument that has a lot of easy, intuitive persuasiveness (as Sumner made it but also -- importantly -- even divorced from his particular articulation of it (hence its insidiousness.)) It sounds right at first blush as long as you don't think about it too hard.
To be sure, Sumner rhetoric isn't particularly subtle. (But then, to be effective, it doesn't have to be.) One aspect that struck me was the language he chose to describe what it is that those pushing social programs (which Sumner mostly defines as not only any economic assistance but even most economic regulation, as well as such things as public schools (I say "mostly" because, as I'll get to in a moment, he isn't always consistent about it)) seek to do for others. Sumner says that the desire was to make the worse off "as comfortable" as others, to fulfill their "desires", give them "everything of which they feel the need", grant them "satisfaction": terms that make you think of an evening out of luxuries. Only once does he let slip and admit that one of the realities that the programs he decries seek to prevent is that of people literally starving to death. (To say nothing of children neglected by their parents, children being denied schooling, people being forced by market conditions to work twelve hour days, working under unsafe conditions, and so forth.) His talk of comfort, desire and satisfaction are, at the least, shockingly misleading, if not downright dishonest.
And considered just as a rational argument the book is a mess. This is true in far too many ways for me to enumerate, so I'll just touch on a few.
Sumner is woefully inconsistent in how he uses terms and in his reasoning. For example: one of Sumner's key ideas is that of the "Forgotten Man". But he doesn't use this notion at all consistently. Here's how he defines it early on:
In all these schemes and projects the organized intervention of society through the State is either planned or hoped for, and the State is thus made to become the protector and guardian of certain classes. The agents who are to direct the State action are, of course, the reformers and philanthropists. Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type--that A and B decide what C shall do for D. It will be interesting to inquire, at a later period of our discussion, who C is, and what the effect is upon him of all these arrangements. In all the discussions attention is concentrated on A and B, the noble social reformers, and on D, the "poor man." I call C the Forgotten Man, because I have never seen that any notice was taken of him in any of the discussions.Under this definition -- and it's not a throwaway, it's one he returns to multiple times -- the "Forgotten Man" is anyone who pays taxes for a social program while not benefiting from it.
Now already we're in a conceptual muddle, since Sumner never even notices the possibility that A, B, C and D might be different people in the case of different programs -- that looking at an entire government everyone might variously play the roles of C and D. Perhaps he means that, overall, the sheer dollar-value one gets from or contributes to the programs can be added up. But he doesn't say that; that's me trying to clear up a mess he leaves.
And of course it gets worse if you consider that, over time, the roles of C and D might switch. A child who goes to public school and gains benefit thereby (playing D) then grows up to be a productive taxpayer (playing C).* This complexity -- hardly a particularly obscure possibility -- is never mentioned, and makes utter hash out of a great many of Sumner's arguments.
Instead of following his own rigorous definition (while not abandoning it either, but always returning to it whenever convenient for his purposes) Sumner clearly has an image of who he takes the "forgotten man" to be, just as he has an image of those he takes to be the beneficiaries of government largess too. Here's how he describes the "forgotten man" latter on:
He is the Forgotten Man. If we go to find him, we shall find him hard at work tilling the soil to get out of it the fund for all the jobbery, the object of all the plunder, the cost of all the economic quackery, and the pay of all the politicians and statesmen who have sacrificed his interests to his enemies. We shall find him an honest, sober, industrious citizen, unknown outside his little circle, paying his debts and his taxes, supporting the church and the school, reading his party newspaper, and cheering for his pet politician.Needless to say, this is wildly more specific than his actual definition -- unless you assume (as Sumner at times, but not always, seems to) that everyone who does not benefit from Government help will be honest, sober, industrious, unknown, and so forth -- a fairly far-fetched notion.
What's going on, clearly, is that Sumner is working with an imaged representative example of what he takes the "forgotten man" to be. (The same is true with those who get help, who propose that the government do it, and other roles in his little medieval morality play.) And either through deliberate distortion or through simply sloppiness he varies between his strict, "scientific" definition and his fictional, platonic character. It's an understandable slippage -- people typically think about concepts by comparing cases to core examples, even if we try to formally define them -- but it doesn't make it any less sloppy.
And of course that's just one example. Vague claims, poorly defined terms, inconsistent arguments, key points asserted with neither argument nor evidence to back them up, unnoticed assumptions -- and on and on, ad nauseum -- all abound.
Another example that struck me, for instance, was that Sumner was inconsistent about why a strict laissez-faire system was desirable. Often he seemed to be making a moral claim, saying that it is simply unjust to tax any one person to benefit another; at other times, however, he seemed to be making a practical argument, that such schemes always leave people worse off (everyone? or on average? in how long a term? -- he's not clear.) Again, which one he's saying matters -- some of his claims fail one test, some fail another, but he conveniently slips back and forth depending on what he needs to establish at the time.
He's inconsistent about what he thinks the state should do -- in some places he seems to be a minarchist, supporting only police, soldiers and the enforcement of contracts; in other cases he implies that there are genuine things the state should do for the public interest besides that, "public interests and common necessities" -- transportation infrastructure, I suppose. Maybe parks. But he not only fails to establish what divides those things which are genuinely good state interests from those that are immoral/unwise attempts to coerce charity (why do bridges and police pass the test while public schools and food safety inspectors do not?), he doesn't even seem to notice that this is an issue he needs to address. But a strict minarchist could apply lightly edited arguments from Sumner against the idea (which, again, he inconsistently supports) of any public works; and an anarchist could apply them against the minarchist. (If D needs police or contract enforcement and C doesn't, isn't it robbery to tax C to hire police to protect D? Let D hire private security and private-sector contract enforcers; if they don't, then they deserve whatever they get.) I'm not saying that such lines can't be drawn, but they clearly need to be drawn, not taken as obvious.
And so forth. Anyone looking for evidence that conservative ideas are nothing more than "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas" will find plenty to go on here. Dressed up as science, it's all an emotional screed based on some romanticized image of the hardworking forgotten man.
The book is a mess. A philosophy class in basic argumentative errors could profitably use this as a text -- but, then again, so could a class in rhetoric. Because it's persuasive. Which is the really horrifying thing.
A few odds and ends. I think that Robert Bannister is clearly right (in his book Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1989)) that "social Darwinism" isn't playing much of a role here. (Contradicting the earlier, influential argument by Richard Hofstadter in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944, 2nd ed. 1955) which made Sumner the poster boy for Social Darwinism.) Sumner is arguing a classic laissez-faire position based on economics and some poorly thought-through political philosophy.
In his final chapter, Sumner compares the sociologist (which is what he called himself -- and, indeed, he is one of the founders of American sociology) to a physicist, and says that he has simply described the workings of the world without moral judgments, and that anyone who complains that he is ignoring moral judgments doesn't understand how science works. If you take it as humor, it's kind of funny.
Sumner said that, given government assistance, it's better to be poor than to be rich, since the latter have to support the former. It's an argument that was made again.
Finally, I kept thinking while reading the book that you could probably run for office as a Republican in this country using only quotes from Sumner for your speeches and soundbites. It feels quite contemporary -- or, perhaps, late 90's: the Republican party since 2001 has had such a large strain of fear-mongering about terrorism (and, after that, about undocumented immigrants and then Obama) that that part seems wildly missing. But as far as the attitude towards social policy goes, it's quite current. I kept thinking of Phil Gramm (my least favorite politician until the advent of W.) Oddly enough, though -- here and there, in the corners -- Sumner comes across as quite Victorian in some of his moral assumptions, beliefs in progress, and so forth. Not much -- you could edit them out pretty easily and still have plenty left for a Congressional campaign. But they integrate far more naturally than I might have guessed beforehand.
__________________
*This particular example is complicated by the fact that, here and there, Sumner seems to argue that the person who would be playing C in this example are the parents, who are getting someone else to pay for their kids' education, and not the children themselves. But he seems perfectly content to let the children suffer for the sins of their parents, which means they are either going to be "D" (i.e. helped by the state) or the victims of Sumner's hoped-for neglect.
Tuesday, February 08, 2011
REPOST: Is This Man Worth Two Presidents?
So I just figured out how to use title text (put your mouse over those words to see it)! And following in the footsteps of Alas, I thought it'd be a good idea to put the text of footnotes in the title text as well as at the bottom of the page. I tried it, and it worked! Hooray. So in celebration I'm reposting an old post, from November, 2006, which I really always liked but which no one else seemed to care for much. The humor in the piece, however, depended a lot on its footnotes... which people might have missed. So now you can read them just by hovering over them with your mouse.
What you can't read that way, however, are the footnotes on the footnotes... of which there are four. To read those, you'll have to bop down to the actual footnotes, and read the footnotes on the footnotes in the title text *there* (or just scroll still further). Unless anyone has a solution for this?
Original post follows:
The first interesting thing I learned from this article was why the Sacagawea dollars didn't go over. Everyone** knows that the Susan B. Anthony dollars didn't work because they were too much like quarters: people would get confused, and be shortchanged by a factor of 75%. Apt to make anyone cranky. But they learned from this experience, and the Sacagawea dollars are quite distinct in size, feel and color. So what went wrong that time?
Well, there's the fact that the U.S. population seems to be plain old resistant to using dollar coins. (For what it's worth, I'm for it: the dollar has dropped to coin-level worth some time since. England, for instance, uses a pound coin even though a pound is worth almost $2. But it's hardly one of my major concerns.) But the other factor apparently was that "limited Sacagawea quantities led to too many being stashed away by collectors, reducing circulation and thus familiarity." That's a pretty silly mistake: if you're going to roll out a new coin, do it right.
Anyway, we're up to take three here... except it's sort of like take three, four.... up to at least thirty-nine, and probably beyond. Borrowing an idea from their (apparently successful) "50-state" quarters, they are going to start releasing a coin for every U.S. President, in order, at four a year.
Or almost every President, I should say: U.S. law (quite properly and wisely) forbids the putting of any living person on currency. So, as of now, Ford, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 are off-limits. Which is presumably why, if you examine the schedule, you see that the last currently announced coin is the 37th President, Richard Nixon, scheduled for roll-out in 2016. This is what drove boingboing batty: that "Richard 'Lying Scumbag' Nixon" is getting his face on a coin.
And while I certainly appreciate the accurate historical memory of Nixon as a lying scumbag, the truth is that far too many Presidents have been liars; and not a few have been scumbags. After all, when the current President finally goes to his eternal reward -- and if there is any justice in the universe *** he'll go from a jail cell to a far worse place -- he'll also presumably be stamped on a shiny new dollar, and then someone who (astonishing as it is) outdoes Nixon in both the "lying" and the "scumbag" department will be on a coin.
No, what gets me is another thing. You see one President is going to have two different coins in the series with his shinny face on them.
I'm speaking, of course, about Grover Cleveland.
I wouldn't really be surprised if some non-trivial proportion of my Noble Readers said Who?
Grover Cleveland comes from the list of Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt 26 (as opposed to Roosevelt 32, natch) -- in other words, the Presidents no one ever remembers -- largely deservedly so, really: they're a fairly undistinguished bunch all around, although you can make cases for the odd one here and there. ****
But what distinguishes Grover Cleveland, in a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others sort of way, from all the other Presidents, is that he served two nonconsecutive terms, 1885 - 1889 and 1893 - 1897.
Parenthetically, the reason he served two non-consecutive terms is the same reason that the current lying scumbag had the opportunity to toss our country down the toilet: the Electoral College. Cleveland actually won the popular vote in the 1888 election, just as he did in the 1884 and 1892 elections (thereby being one of only three men ever to win a plurality of the popular vote more than twice.*****) So to the Electoral College -- which has so many other negatives to its credit -- this minor irritation can also be ascribed.
In any event, once this occurred, the inevitable question occurred: how do we number Cleveland among the Presidents?
The first 23 are easy, Washington to Harrison (and how's that for a diminution?) But should Cleveland be simply the 22nd President, Harrison the 23rd -- with the quick-step to the 24th, William McKinley, interrupted by a brief return to the 22nd... or was Cleveland actually not only the 22nd, but also the 24th, President, with McKinley therefore actually the 25th?
Congress, leaping into action on important matters, officially declared****** that Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President.
Well, I think they blew it.
Obviously there is a good case to be made that Grover Cleveland was the perpetrator of both the 22nd and the 24th Presidencies. But honestly, when do we think about that?******* If you're going to think about that, you might as well talk about Presidential terms, which admittedly gets you instantly tangled up in fractions given the nine Presidential terms that were divided between two people,******** but still, they're more important.
Usually, when we're not talking about Presidential terms, we're talking about Presidents. As in the people. As in the ugly ass white men who get their faces on legal motherfucking tender.
And Grover Cleveland, say what you will about him, was one guy.
So I think Congress made the wrong call.*********
Here's the best argument against their position, though. If you say that Cleveland was just the 22nd (individual to hold the office of) President, you get the odd situation that the 22nd President was after as well as before the 23rd. But that is a localized oddity: it will only come up when you're thinking about the Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt 26. Which, let's face it, people hardly ever do, since they were an undistinguished bunch, as mentioned previously. But if you hold to the Official Position Of The United States Government and say that Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President, then it comes up every time you think about any post-Harrison Presidential ranking, and you need to constantly include footnotes********** to the effect that Bush 43 might be the 43rd President, but there were still only 42 people to hold the office. It's a choice that instead of localizing the oddity -- an oddity that is, after all, real and odd but also local -- distributes from now until the end of time, the end of the Presidency as an institution, or the next time the Electoral College decides to fuck us in our collective ass, depending. In other words, given the choice they made, you get more oddities than you would otherwise.
Including not one but two dollar coins for Grover Cleveland.
And not because he deserves his own coin, like Lincoln on the penny, Jefferson on the nickel, Roosevelt 32 on the dime, Washington on the quarter or JFK on the half-dollar. But because... well. Because.
It's silly.
I readily admit that this is an issue on which intelligent people can disagree. In fact, it is pretty much a good candidate for the archetypal issue on which there is no "correct" decision. For instance, my beloved wife, who is usually right about everything,is wrong about disagrees with me about this.
But I think the localized-versus-distributed-oddity argument is a clincher, personally.
But Congress disagrees, so in 2012 we'll get two separate Grover Cleveland dollars. (Kevin Drum points out that 2012 will be a banner year all around for dollar coins, what with Chester Arthur and Benjamin Harrison joining Cleveland 22 and Cleveland 24 as their poster boys for the year.)
Otherwise, I have to say, the dollars look pretty well designed. They will be designed like Sacagawea dollars, so that the millions... er, thousands... well, all the machines that were re-designed to accept those will accept the new ones. And they will have three of the traditional inscriptions for coins -- the date, "E Pluribus Unum" and "In Ba'al We Trust"*********** -- on the coins' edges, which is frankly pretty cool. Anyway, I, for one, am looking forward to them.
But a lot of Presidents -- possibly a majority of those who weren't firmly in the lying scumbag category (and some who were in the "lying but not a scumbag" category) -- already have their faces on coins. It might be fun to put out a series of forty coins with other notable Americans on them, joining Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea with non-Presidential currency portraits. Martin Luther King might be a good place to start, since today everyone either admires his work or has to pretend they do. ************ At any rate, it would be more fun than all forty-three of the forty-two men who have served as President of the United States.
But I suppose that ain't no ugly ass white man get his face on no legal motherfucking tender, 'cept he president.
And people other than white men -- particularly after the failure of the Anthony & Sacagawea dollars -- need not apply at all.
Update: Matthew Yglesias says that the mining lobby was the force behind the new coins.
______________________________
* I really hope I don't need to point out that Wallace, not D'Angelo, is correct here -- Alexander Hamilton never was President? (He was Secretary of the Treasury, and an important pre-Constitutional figure too.) For that matter, Benjamin Franklin, on the $100 bill, wasn't a President either (he died in 1791, during the first term of the first President, (who is currently gracing the $1 bill and the quarter.)) And it somehow seems typical of The Wire that they let the character who is wrong get the last word...
** Defined tautologically as those who actually know the information in question.
*** There isn't.§
**** You can make a case for almost anything, really.
***** Andrew Jackson, who was cheated of the Presidency by a combination of the Electoral College and the odd constitutional procedures for when there isn't a majority within it in 1824 (and then went on to win outright in 1828 and 1832), and Roosevelt 32, who of course did so not thrice but in quadruplicate.§§
****** I've known this for years, but a brief Google doesn't turn up the actual date of Congress's important decision on this matter. And I don't care enough to do a prolonged Googling.
******* I mean, even those of us who think about these things.
******** Sigh. 1841-1845, 1849-1853, 1865-1869, 1881-1885, 1901-1905, 1921-1925, 1945-1949, 1961-1965 and 1973-1977. Four natural deaths, four assassinations, and one lying scumbag. And no, I didn't need to look anything up to type all that out; I do this for a living.§§§
********* Shocking, I know. Try to control yourself. (As Orson Scott Card might say.)
********** And footnotes, as everyone knows, are an incredible nuisance.§§§§
*********** What? Why would that bother you? It's just ceremonial Ba'alism, which, as everyone§§§§§ knows, is not any sort of violation of the first amendment. Really. The Supreme Court has said so. Would they ever get anything wrong?
************ Otherwise, they might end up demoted from Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate to Minority Whip -- a shocking fall from being the most powerful Republican in the Senate to the second-most powerful Republican in the Senate.
_________________________________
§ Except what we put there. We could do the jail cell part, if we want. I, for one, am for it.
§§ There really isn't another in the sequence "once, twice, thrice..." is there? Or am I just not thinking of it?
§§§ Which means that I probably made a mistake somewhere. So you'd better look it up yourself if you care. You're always safer looking things up. Well, depending where you look.
§§§§ Don't you think?
§§§§§ Yes, tautologically defined. Wasn't this where we came in?
_________________________________
Postscript, 2011: So the program proceeds apace. The latest release is Lincoln, although you can see designs now up through Garfield -- Johnson, Grant, Hayes & Garfield being the four luminaries to be honored this year. And doesn't it just warm your heart to know that all four of those worthies are going to get their face on a coin? (Grant might actually deserve it (Lincoln deserves it, but already had it.))
And, it turns out, there is a First Ladies Coin program - each of the wives is going to get her face on a $10 gold coin, released in tandem with their husbands' $1 coin. (At least Abigail Adams might actually deserve it.) From the schedule it looks like both Mrs. Wilsons, Ellen and Edith, will be getting their own coins. And what about Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren & Buchanan, who were either widowers or bachelors for their entire presidencies? They get a coin with a picture of liberty on it. How sweet. Personally, I think that for Jefferson they should have made a Sally Hemmings coin: would have been historically accurate, and would have served the cause of racial diversity on American currency. (Have they ever put any African Americans on money? Or do we have to wait until a few years after Obama kicks?)
Actually the most interesting thing about the $10 coin program is that it's actually called the First Spouse Program and not the First Ladies Program -- despite the fact that all the people scheduled to be on it were, in fact, women and have traditionally been called "First Ladies" in their day. It looks like they're laying the linguistic groundwork for their Bill or Todd coins.
What you can't read that way, however, are the footnotes on the footnotes... of which there are four. To read those, you'll have to bop down to the actual footnotes, and read the footnotes on the footnotes in the title text *there* (or just scroll still further). Unless anyone has a solution for this?
Original post follows:
Wallace: Hamilton? He ain't no president.Via boingboing, I learn that the U.S. Mint is planning on releasing a new series of dollar coins -- a third attempt after the earlier unsuccessful Susan B. Anthony dollars and Sacagawea dollars.
D'Angelo: ...Ain't no ugly ass white man get his face on no legal motherfucking tender, 'cept he president.
-- The Wire, Episode 1, "The Target" *
The first interesting thing I learned from this article was why the Sacagawea dollars didn't go over. Everyone** knows that the Susan B. Anthony dollars didn't work because they were too much like quarters: people would get confused, and be shortchanged by a factor of 75%. Apt to make anyone cranky. But they learned from this experience, and the Sacagawea dollars are quite distinct in size, feel and color. So what went wrong that time?
Well, there's the fact that the U.S. population seems to be plain old resistant to using dollar coins. (For what it's worth, I'm for it: the dollar has dropped to coin-level worth some time since. England, for instance, uses a pound coin even though a pound is worth almost $2. But it's hardly one of my major concerns.) But the other factor apparently was that "limited Sacagawea quantities led to too many being stashed away by collectors, reducing circulation and thus familiarity." That's a pretty silly mistake: if you're going to roll out a new coin, do it right.
Anyway, we're up to take three here... except it's sort of like take three, four.... up to at least thirty-nine, and probably beyond. Borrowing an idea from their (apparently successful) "50-state" quarters, they are going to start releasing a coin for every U.S. President, in order, at four a year.
Or almost every President, I should say: U.S. law (quite properly and wisely) forbids the putting of any living person on currency. So, as of now, Ford, Carter, Bush 41, Clinton and Bush 43 are off-limits. Which is presumably why, if you examine the schedule, you see that the last currently announced coin is the 37th President, Richard Nixon, scheduled for roll-out in 2016. This is what drove boingboing batty: that "Richard 'Lying Scumbag' Nixon" is getting his face on a coin.
And while I certainly appreciate the accurate historical memory of Nixon as a lying scumbag, the truth is that far too many Presidents have been liars; and not a few have been scumbags. After all, when the current President finally goes to his eternal reward -- and if there is any justice in the universe *** he'll go from a jail cell to a far worse place -- he'll also presumably be stamped on a shiny new dollar, and then someone who (astonishing as it is) outdoes Nixon in both the "lying" and the "scumbag" department will be on a coin.
No, what gets me is another thing. You see one President is going to have two different coins in the series with his shinny face on them.
I'm speaking, of course, about Grover Cleveland.
I wouldn't really be surprised if some non-trivial proportion of my Noble Readers said Who?
Grover Cleveland comes from the list of Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt 26 (as opposed to Roosevelt 32, natch) -- in other words, the Presidents no one ever remembers -- largely deservedly so, really: they're a fairly undistinguished bunch all around, although you can make cases for the odd one here and there. ****
But what distinguishes Grover Cleveland, in a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others sort of way, from all the other Presidents, is that he served two nonconsecutive terms, 1885 - 1889 and 1893 - 1897.
Parenthetically, the reason he served two non-consecutive terms is the same reason that the current lying scumbag had the opportunity to toss our country down the toilet: the Electoral College. Cleveland actually won the popular vote in the 1888 election, just as he did in the 1884 and 1892 elections (thereby being one of only three men ever to win a plurality of the popular vote more than twice.*****) So to the Electoral College -- which has so many other negatives to its credit -- this minor irritation can also be ascribed.
In any event, once this occurred, the inevitable question occurred: how do we number Cleveland among the Presidents?
The first 23 are easy, Washington to Harrison (and how's that for a diminution?) But should Cleveland be simply the 22nd President, Harrison the 23rd -- with the quick-step to the 24th, William McKinley, interrupted by a brief return to the 22nd... or was Cleveland actually not only the 22nd, but also the 24th, President, with McKinley therefore actually the 25th?
Congress, leaping into action on important matters, officially declared****** that Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President.
Well, I think they blew it.
Obviously there is a good case to be made that Grover Cleveland was the perpetrator of both the 22nd and the 24th Presidencies. But honestly, when do we think about that?******* If you're going to think about that, you might as well talk about Presidential terms, which admittedly gets you instantly tangled up in fractions given the nine Presidential terms that were divided between two people,******** but still, they're more important.
Usually, when we're not talking about Presidential terms, we're talking about Presidents. As in the people. As in the ugly ass white men who get their faces on legal motherfucking tender.
And Grover Cleveland, say what you will about him, was one guy.
So I think Congress made the wrong call.*********
Here's the best argument against their position, though. If you say that Cleveland was just the 22nd (individual to hold the office of) President, you get the odd situation that the 22nd President was after as well as before the 23rd. But that is a localized oddity: it will only come up when you're thinking about the Presidents between Lincoln and Roosevelt 26. Which, let's face it, people hardly ever do, since they were an undistinguished bunch, as mentioned previously. But if you hold to the Official Position Of The United States Government and say that Cleveland was both the 22nd and the 24th President, then it comes up every time you think about any post-Harrison Presidential ranking, and you need to constantly include footnotes********** to the effect that Bush 43 might be the 43rd President, but there were still only 42 people to hold the office. It's a choice that instead of localizing the oddity -- an oddity that is, after all, real and odd but also local -- distributes from now until the end of time, the end of the Presidency as an institution, or the next time the Electoral College decides to fuck us in our collective ass, depending. In other words, given the choice they made, you get more oddities than you would otherwise.
Including not one but two dollar coins for Grover Cleveland.
And not because he deserves his own coin, like Lincoln on the penny, Jefferson on the nickel, Roosevelt 32 on the dime, Washington on the quarter or JFK on the half-dollar. But because... well. Because.
It's silly.
I readily admit that this is an issue on which intelligent people can disagree. In fact, it is pretty much a good candidate for the archetypal issue on which there is no "correct" decision. For instance, my beloved wife, who is usually right about everything,
But I think the localized-versus-distributed-oddity argument is a clincher, personally.
But Congress disagrees, so in 2012 we'll get two separate Grover Cleveland dollars. (Kevin Drum points out that 2012 will be a banner year all around for dollar coins, what with Chester Arthur and Benjamin Harrison joining Cleveland 22 and Cleveland 24 as their poster boys for the year.)
Otherwise, I have to say, the dollars look pretty well designed. They will be designed like Sacagawea dollars, so that the millions... er, thousands... well, all the machines that were re-designed to accept those will accept the new ones. And they will have three of the traditional inscriptions for coins -- the date, "E Pluribus Unum" and "In Ba'al We Trust"*********** -- on the coins' edges, which is frankly pretty cool. Anyway, I, for one, am looking forward to them.
But a lot of Presidents -- possibly a majority of those who weren't firmly in the lying scumbag category (and some who were in the "lying but not a scumbag" category) -- already have their faces on coins. It might be fun to put out a series of forty coins with other notable Americans on them, joining Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea with non-Presidential currency portraits. Martin Luther King might be a good place to start, since today everyone either admires his work or has to pretend they do. ************ At any rate, it would be more fun than all forty-three of the forty-two men who have served as President of the United States.
But I suppose that ain't no ugly ass white man get his face on no legal motherfucking tender, 'cept he president.
And people other than white men -- particularly after the failure of the Anthony & Sacagawea dollars -- need not apply at all.
Update: Matthew Yglesias says that the mining lobby was the force behind the new coins.
______________________________
* I really hope I don't need to point out that Wallace, not D'Angelo, is correct here -- Alexander Hamilton never was President? (He was Secretary of the Treasury, and an important pre-Constitutional figure too.) For that matter, Benjamin Franklin, on the $100 bill, wasn't a President either (he died in 1791, during the first term of the first President, (who is currently gracing the $1 bill and the quarter.)) And it somehow seems typical of The Wire that they let the character who is wrong get the last word...
** Defined tautologically as those who actually know the information in question.
*** There isn't.§
**** You can make a case for almost anything, really.
***** Andrew Jackson, who was cheated of the Presidency by a combination of the Electoral College and the odd constitutional procedures for when there isn't a majority within it in 1824 (and then went on to win outright in 1828 and 1832), and Roosevelt 32, who of course did so not thrice but in quadruplicate.§§
****** I've known this for years, but a brief Google doesn't turn up the actual date of Congress's important decision on this matter. And I don't care enough to do a prolonged Googling.
******* I mean, even those of us who think about these things.
******** Sigh. 1841-1845, 1849-1853, 1865-1869, 1881-1885, 1901-1905, 1921-1925, 1945-1949, 1961-1965 and 1973-1977. Four natural deaths, four assassinations, and one lying scumbag. And no, I didn't need to look anything up to type all that out; I do this for a living.§§§
********* Shocking, I know. Try to control yourself. (As Orson Scott Card might say.)
********** And footnotes, as everyone knows, are an incredible nuisance.§§§§
*********** What? Why would that bother you? It's just ceremonial Ba'alism, which, as everyone§§§§§ knows, is not any sort of violation of the first amendment. Really. The Supreme Court has said so. Would they ever get anything wrong?
************ Otherwise, they might end up demoted from Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate to Minority Whip -- a shocking fall from being the most powerful Republican in the Senate to the second-most powerful Republican in the Senate.
_________________________________
§ Except what we put there. We could do the jail cell part, if we want. I, for one, am for it.
§§ There really isn't another in the sequence "once, twice, thrice..." is there? Or am I just not thinking of it?
§§§ Which means that I probably made a mistake somewhere. So you'd better look it up yourself if you care. You're always safer looking things up. Well, depending where you look.
§§§§ Don't you think?
§§§§§ Yes, tautologically defined. Wasn't this where we came in?
_________________________________
Postscript, 2011: So the program proceeds apace. The latest release is Lincoln, although you can see designs now up through Garfield -- Johnson, Grant, Hayes & Garfield being the four luminaries to be honored this year. And doesn't it just warm your heart to know that all four of those worthies are going to get their face on a coin? (Grant might actually deserve it (Lincoln deserves it, but already had it.))
And, it turns out, there is a First Ladies Coin program - each of the wives is going to get her face on a $10 gold coin, released in tandem with their husbands' $1 coin. (At least Abigail Adams might actually deserve it.) From the schedule it looks like both Mrs. Wilsons, Ellen and Edith, will be getting their own coins. And what about Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren & Buchanan, who were either widowers or bachelors for their entire presidencies? They get a coin with a picture of liberty on it. How sweet. Personally, I think that for Jefferson they should have made a Sally Hemmings coin: would have been historically accurate, and would have served the cause of racial diversity on American currency. (Have they ever put any African Americans on money? Or do we have to wait until a few years after Obama kicks?)
Actually the most interesting thing about the $10 coin program is that it's actually called the First Spouse Program and not the First Ladies Program -- despite the fact that all the people scheduled to be on it were, in fact, women and have traditionally been called "First Ladies" in their day. It looks like they're laying the linguistic groundwork for their Bill or Todd coins.
Did You Know That Henry James Participated In a Round-Robin Novel?
I didn't. But it seems he did: The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors (1908) includes a chapter by Henry James -- Chapter 7, "The Married Son". I wouldn't have guessed it.
(A round-robin story is a story written by multiple authors -- essentially a stunt, although there have been a fair number of them.)
Aside from James, the other author involved who's still read today is William Dean Howells, who wrote the first chapter, "The Father" (and seems to have conceived of the whole project). I haven't read it, but if you want to, you can find the book on Gutenberg. (Aside from Howells and James, the authors are, today, mostly forgotten.)
In other Jamesiana, Alice James, the diarist and sister of novelist Henry and philosopher & psychologist William, was born on August 7, 1848. This wouldn't be worth mentioning save that a surprising number of web sites -- PBS, and the "about" page for the publisher Alice James Books are two -- list her as born in 1850. I'm not sure how this alternative date got started. I'm pretty sure it's wrong, although both are quite prominently listed. (One telling fact is that the specific day is always associated with the year 1848.) Does anyone have any information on this? (To confuse things further, Alice was also the name of William James's wife; she was born 1849.)
Update: While I'm sharing stray oddities about the James siblings, I'll mention one more, which isn't widely known (although Louis Menand talks about it in his fabulous book The Metaphysical Club), which is that the third child of Henry James Sr. (after philosopher William and novelist Henry (Jr), but before diarist Alice) was Garth Wilkinson James -- called Wilky James -- who was one of the (white) officers in the (all-black infantry) 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War -- the regiment whose formation and attack on Fort Wagner is depicted in the movie Glory. Wilky James was wounded in the attack on Fort Wagner, and never fully recovered, suffering from various pains and ailments until his death at age 38.
(A round-robin story is a story written by multiple authors -- essentially a stunt, although there have been a fair number of them.)
Aside from James, the other author involved who's still read today is William Dean Howells, who wrote the first chapter, "The Father" (and seems to have conceived of the whole project). I haven't read it, but if you want to, you can find the book on Gutenberg. (Aside from Howells and James, the authors are, today, mostly forgotten.)
In other Jamesiana, Alice James, the diarist and sister of novelist Henry and philosopher & psychologist William, was born on August 7, 1848. This wouldn't be worth mentioning save that a surprising number of web sites -- PBS, and the "about" page for the publisher Alice James Books are two -- list her as born in 1850. I'm not sure how this alternative date got started. I'm pretty sure it's wrong, although both are quite prominently listed. (One telling fact is that the specific day is always associated with the year 1848.) Does anyone have any information on this? (To confuse things further, Alice was also the name of William James's wife; she was born 1849.)
Update: While I'm sharing stray oddities about the James siblings, I'll mention one more, which isn't widely known (although Louis Menand talks about it in his fabulous book The Metaphysical Club), which is that the third child of Henry James Sr. (after philosopher William and novelist Henry (Jr), but before diarist Alice) was Garth Wilkinson James -- called Wilky James -- who was one of the (white) officers in the (all-black infantry) 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Civil War -- the regiment whose formation and attack on Fort Wagner is depicted in the movie Glory. Wilky James was wounded in the attack on Fort Wagner, and never fully recovered, suffering from various pains and ailments until his death at age 38.
Quote of the Day: Peirce Contra Descartes
American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839—1914) goes at the central move in the philosophy of the robot-lover Descartes, in this fabulous passage from his 1868 essay "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities":
We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up.... A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.I have removed what I took to be a rather unhelpful metaphor. If you, understandably, would rather take Peirce's words over mine in this case -- or if you're interested in the other three principles of Descartes's (besides universal doubt) that Peirce takes on in his essay -- I recommend you read the whole thing.
Monday, February 07, 2011
My Head May Explode From the Sheer Awesomeness of This
John Lewis -- former head of SNCC, participant in the Freedom Rides, and, for the past twenty-five years, a member of Congress (from Georgia) -- is one of the few people I can think of in American life that I would unhesitatingly and unabashedly label a hero.
For those of you who don't know, he was at the center of the Civil Rights Movement in its key years in the early 1960's -- a participant at the lunch counter sit-ins in the early 60's, a freedom rider, head of SNCC, a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech (and where Lewis's speech was deemed to radical for the other organizers and speakers and he -- reluctantly, when asked by A. Philip Randolph -- revised it (you can read the original draft here)), and the lead walker at the climactic confrontation of the Movement, the walk over Pettus Bridge, which directly led to the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A man of matchless wisdom and courage, my admiration for him is really hard to express.
And he's writing a comic book.
No, really: he just signed a contract with Top Shelf to (co) write a graphic novel based on his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, tentatively titled March.
Can I pre-order it yet?
Now, I will admit that my confidence that it will be good is very low. Lewis is a fine writer of prose, but writing prose is a very different task than writing comics -- and most writers of prose who try to make the transition do a poor job of it. Writing a comics script is as different from writing prose as writing a play or a film script is: it requires a real understanding of the medium. If you just think that you've written books, you can write a graphic novel, well, you're wrong. It's not just like writing a book with pictures.*
Nor am I encouraged by the fact that Lewis's co-author, Andrew Aydin, is a member of his staff -- that is, someone who is primarily engaged in politics. Presumably Lewis can tell his own story, after all; what he needs for this project is someone who can help him tell it in the medium of comics.
Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Lewis is a long-time comics reader. Or maybe he's thought about the nature of the medium. But, y'know, he's been busy doing other things -- like, say, being a brilliant activist and politician. So I'm worried that he isn't and hasn't. I'm somewhat more hopeful that Aydin might be knowledgeable about comics; maybe he'll bring a good handle on the medium to the table. But, I fear, that he's been hired much as a politician might hire someone to co-write their prose memoirs, i.e. someone to help with the work, but without any particular sense of the medium.
To make this work, they'll need a really good -- and confident and self-assertive -- artist. And Chris Staros, the editor & publisher of Top Shelf, had better be on his game.
(Incidentally, they are, apparently, still in the process of settling on an artist. If you're a comics artist, I recommend dropping everything and seeing if you can nab it. It'll be the job of a lifetime.)
And even if it doesn't work, y'know what? I'm there. I'm reading it. Because even if it isn't a fabulous artistic production, I'm sure it will be very interesting, and have some insights into a key period of history.
And besides, John Lewis -- John !!@#$%ing Lewis -- is writing a !@#$% graphic novel. It's had to get more awesome than that. In this matter, quality is would be just a bonus.
___________________________
* Actually, I suspect that, done properly, writing a book with pictures isn't just like writing a book without them, either. But it's closer.
For those of you who don't know, he was at the center of the Civil Rights Movement in its key years in the early 1960's -- a participant at the lunch counter sit-ins in the early 60's, a freedom rider, head of SNCC, a speaker at the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech (and where Lewis's speech was deemed to radical for the other organizers and speakers and he -- reluctantly, when asked by A. Philip Randolph -- revised it (you can read the original draft here)), and the lead walker at the climactic confrontation of the Movement, the walk over Pettus Bridge, which directly led to the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A man of matchless wisdom and courage, my admiration for him is really hard to express.
And he's writing a comic book.
No, really: he just signed a contract with Top Shelf to (co) write a graphic novel based on his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, tentatively titled March.
Can I pre-order it yet?
Now, I will admit that my confidence that it will be good is very low. Lewis is a fine writer of prose, but writing prose is a very different task than writing comics -- and most writers of prose who try to make the transition do a poor job of it. Writing a comics script is as different from writing prose as writing a play or a film script is: it requires a real understanding of the medium. If you just think that you've written books, you can write a graphic novel, well, you're wrong. It's not just like writing a book with pictures.*
Nor am I encouraged by the fact that Lewis's co-author, Andrew Aydin, is a member of his staff -- that is, someone who is primarily engaged in politics. Presumably Lewis can tell his own story, after all; what he needs for this project is someone who can help him tell it in the medium of comics.
Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Lewis is a long-time comics reader. Or maybe he's thought about the nature of the medium. But, y'know, he's been busy doing other things -- like, say, being a brilliant activist and politician. So I'm worried that he isn't and hasn't. I'm somewhat more hopeful that Aydin might be knowledgeable about comics; maybe he'll bring a good handle on the medium to the table. But, I fear, that he's been hired much as a politician might hire someone to co-write their prose memoirs, i.e. someone to help with the work, but without any particular sense of the medium.
To make this work, they'll need a really good -- and confident and self-assertive -- artist. And Chris Staros, the editor & publisher of Top Shelf, had better be on his game.
(Incidentally, they are, apparently, still in the process of settling on an artist. If you're a comics artist, I recommend dropping everything and seeing if you can nab it. It'll be the job of a lifetime.)
And even if it doesn't work, y'know what? I'm there. I'm reading it. Because even if it isn't a fabulous artistic production, I'm sure it will be very interesting, and have some insights into a key period of history.
And besides, John Lewis -- John !!@#$%ing Lewis -- is writing a !@#$% graphic novel. It's had to get more awesome than that. In this matter, quality is would be just a bonus.
___________________________
* Actually, I suspect that, done properly, writing a book with pictures isn't just like writing a book without them, either. But it's closer.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Descartes's Robot; plus: Thomas Aquinas vs. Robot -- to the death!!!
The early prehistory of robots -- and inflatable sex dolls! From Stephen Graukroger, Descartes: an Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995), p. 1:
Those who prefer that their great tales not be ruined by truth will want to stop there. Those who think that fiction survives a dusting of dull fact will want to read the next paragraph as well (pp. 1-2):
And those with the spirit of a Sub-Sub Librarian, such as myself, will want to read the first footnote, so for your convenience I reproduce it here (from p. 418 of Graukroger):
I'm disappointed that the footnote doesn't mention which of Anatole France's novels is on "the theme" of Descartes's robot (a quick googling indicates that none of his works seem to have been explicitly about Descartes by name). Does anyone happen to know? [Update: A commentator comes through! The novel in question is La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893), translated as At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque (1922, available online at the link). Thanks to B. McCarthy; see his comments below for more on this, as well as the Rosenfield book discussed below.]
Incidentally (more Sub-Subness here) the author of From Beast-Machine to Man Machine seems to have been Leonora C. Rosenfield, not G. as reported by Mr. Graukroger. A quick google indicates that seems to have published as Leonora Cohen Rosenfield (although Amazon, for no discernable reason, lists her as Leonora Davidson Rosenfield). Obviously, given the Cohen -> G. mistake, to say nothing of the obvious omission of the story of the golem from the aforequoted list of "philosophical robot" stories, the only possible interpretation is that Mr. Graukroger is a raving antisemite. These things don't happen by accident, you know.
At any rate, since neither google books nor amazon has a "look inside" feature for Rosenfield's work, my researches must stop here for the moment. Alas. If anyone has a copy of From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine handy, however, please leave any interesting tidbits in the comments.
Since the eighteenth century, there has been in circulation a curious story about Descartes. It is said that in later life he was always accompanied in his travels by a mechanical life-sized female doll which, we are told by one source, he himself had constructed 'to show that animals are only machines and have no souls'. He had named the doll after his illegitimate daughter, Francine, and some versions of events have it that she was so lifelike that the two were indistinguishable. Descartes and the doll were evidently inseparable, and he is said to have slept with her encased in a trunk at his side. Once, during a crossing over the Holland Sea some time in the early 1640s, while Descartes was sleeping, the captain of the ship, suspicious about the contents of the trunk, stole into the cabin and opened it. To his horror, he discovered the mechanical monstrosity, dragged her from the trunk and across the decks, and finally managed to throw her into the water. We are not told whether she put up a struggle.
Those who prefer that their great tales not be ruined by truth will want to stop there. Those who think that fiction survives a dusting of dull fact will want to read the next paragraph as well (pp. 1-2):
The story had a wide currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at one stage being taken as a theme for a novel by Anatole France. It exists in a number of versions, some of them explicitly fictional, some purporting to be factual, and the detail varies quite considerably from version to version. So far as I can tell, the story originates no early than the eighteenth century, and it received most attention in an era preoccupied with the theories of La Mettrie, the French Enlightenment philosophe who, in his infamous L'Homme Machine (1747), had extended the idea of animals being automata -- developed by Descartes in his L'Homme -- to human beings, offering a materialist account of the mind, and suggesting that Descartes himself had held such a view, but that judicious self-censorship had prevented him making the theory public. There is, in fact, absolutely no evidence that any version of the story is true. Its origins are rather obscure, but by the second half of the eighteenth century it was a propaganda weapon in the fight against La Mettrie's materialism, Descartes himself being seen as the ultimate instigator of this pernicious doctrine. Given this context, the story has all the elements of propaganda, including that favorite propaganda weapon, sexual innuendo, and I have little doubt that it originated as a tool of the eighteenth-century struggle against materialism.
And those with the spirit of a Sub-Sub Librarian, such as myself, will want to read the first footnote, so for your convenience I reproduce it here (from p. 418 of Graukroger):
I first came across this story in print in a recent book on the history of robotics, where it is presented as fact, although no references are given. Investigation showed the story to have had a wide currency between the late eighteenth century and the early decades of this century. For the different versions of the story and their sources see Leonora G. Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man Machine, rev. edn. (New York, 1968), 202-3, and the accompanying notes on p. 236. Descartes is not the first philosopher reputed to have constructed a mechanical companion. Albertus Magnus was said to have had a robot that could move and greet visitors with the salutation Salve! ('How are you!'). Thomas Aquinas, his pupil at the time, is reported to have attacked and broken the gregarious android when he came across it unexpectedly in the night. The story is reported, with references I have not followed up, in G. A. Lindeboom, Descartes and medicine (Amsterdam, 1979), 62.How like a scholar to hide the Aquinas vs. Robot death match in a footnote like that. It should go in the preview, man: how else do you expect to get buts in the seats eating popcorn?
I'm disappointed that the footnote doesn't mention which of Anatole France's novels is on "the theme" of Descartes's robot (a quick googling indicates that none of his works seem to have been explicitly about Descartes by name). Does anyone happen to know? [Update: A commentator comes through! The novel in question is La Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque (1893), translated as At the Sign of the Reine Pedauque (1922, available online at the link). Thanks to B. McCarthy; see his comments below for more on this, as well as the Rosenfield book discussed below.]
Incidentally (more Sub-Subness here) the author of From Beast-Machine to Man Machine seems to have been Leonora C. Rosenfield, not G. as reported by Mr. Graukroger. A quick google indicates that seems to have published as Leonora Cohen Rosenfield (although Amazon, for no discernable reason, lists her as Leonora Davidson Rosenfield). Obviously, given the Cohen -> G. mistake, to say nothing of the obvious omission of the story of the golem from the aforequoted list of "philosophical robot" stories, the only possible interpretation is that Mr. Graukroger is a raving antisemite. These things don't happen by accident, you know.
At any rate, since neither google books nor amazon has a "look inside" feature for Rosenfield's work, my researches must stop here for the moment. Alas. If anyone has a copy of From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine handy, however, please leave any interesting tidbits in the comments.
Friday, February 04, 2011
I Wish I Wasn't Too Cynical To Believe This
Nothing new, no time-saving devices, -- simply old time-glorified methods of delving for Truth, and searching out the hidden beauties of life, and learning the good of living. The riddle of existence is the college curriculum that was laid before the Pharaohs, that was taught in the groves by Plato, that formed the trivium and quadrivium, and is to-day laid before the freedmen's sons by Atlanta University. And this course of study will not change; its methods will grow more deft and effectual, its content richer by toil of scholar and sight of seer; but the true college will ever have one goal, -- not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.
-- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chapter 5
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Same As It Ever Was
I'm interrupted every moment by students come to fight about their marks.
-- William James
(Quoted in Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought, p. 35)
The Onion Continues to Live Up To Its Tag Line, "America's Finest News Source"
The newspaper that brought you the single story that told you everything you really needed to know about the Bush administration before it happened now brings you the essential political story of the current moment. The headline and the first paragraph:
Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For EarthI found the story via Ezra Klein (in turn via Gerry), but Ezra leaves out some of the best bits of humor, which are in some of the details. It has the miserable cowardice and smallness of the Democrats pegged, for instance:
In a strong rebuke of President Obama and his domestic agenda, all 242 House Republicans voted Wednesday to repeal the Asteroid Destruction and American Preservation Act, which was signed into law last year to destroy the immense asteroid currently hurtling toward Earth.
In support of their position, Democrats have pointed to estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that show repealing the law could result in a loss of up to $14 trillion in the nation's GDP.They've also got the news media pegged too:
[...]
"...While I recognize that intelligent minds may disagree on this issue, I believe we have an obligation to prevent our citizens from having their flesh seared off in a global firestorm that transforms our planet into a broiling molten wasteland," Obama added.
"If efforts to destroy the asteroid are successfully overturned, then there will be major ramifications for both Obama and his Republican opposition, as well as the American populace at large," political scientist Alan Abramowitz said on Face The Nation Sunday. "This could have a huge impact come 2012."Oh, and in case anyone thinks this is satire: I guess technically it is, but only slightly. Really it's just euphemism. To decode it, just read "environmental destruction due to global warming" for "immense asteroid". Then it stops being funny -- but doesn't, alas, stop being true.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Some People Are Really Just Overly Talented
Headline in the NY Times earlier this week: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution Is Vindicated. (via) Some details:
Someone needs to update this book.
Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related. At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile [...]This is just breathtakingly cool. Now, I've loved his fiction for years (I first read Pnin in high school, then took a course called "Nabokov" back in college), so I'm wildly biased. Still... breathtakingly cool.
Dr. [Naomi] Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov’s work while preparing an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. She was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. “It was an amazing, bold hypothesis,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we could test this.’" [...]
Dr. Pierce and her colleagues concluded that five waves of butterflies came from Asia to the New World — just as Nabokov had speculated. “By God, he got every one right,” Dr. Pierce said. “I couldn’t get over it — I was blown away.”
-- Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, January 25, 2011
Someone needs to update this book.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Publish and Perish, or, The Strange Customs of Foreign Peoples
Oxford had a long tradition of not publishing during one's lifetime, indeed it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish. People who did publish a lot, like A. J. Ayer, were regarded as remiss for having published too much too soon. As far as having a career and making a reputation were concerned, the attitude in Oxford was that the only opinions that really matter are the opinions of people in Oxford, and perhaps a few in Cambridge and London, and they will know about one's work anyway. One does not need to publish. What one does not want is a lot of graduate students somewhere, picking over one's half-backed publish texts and -- horror of horrors -- finding mistakes.
- John Searle, "J. L. Austin", in A Companion to Analytic Philosophy, ed. Aloysius Martinich & Dzvid Sosa (Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 227
Friday, January 14, 2011
William James Contra the Ph.D. Degree
...is not our growing tendency to appoint no instructors who are not also doctors [i.e. holders of a Ph.D.] an instance of pure sham? Will any one pretend for a moment that the doctor's degree is a guarantee that its possessor will be successful as a teacher? Notoriously his moral, social, and personal characteristics may utterly disqualify him for success in the class-room; and of these characteristics his doctor's examination is unable to take any account whatever. Certain bare human beings will always be better candidates for a given place than all the doctor-applicants on hand; and to exclude the former by a rigid rule, and in the end to have to sift the latter by private inquiry into their personal peculiarities among those who know them, just as if they were not doctors at all, is to stultify one's own procedure..... The truth is that the Doctor-Monopoly in teaching, which is becoming so rooted an American custom, can show no serious grounds whatsoever for itself in reason. As it actually prevails and grows in vogue among us, it is due to childish motives exclusively. In reality it is but a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges....not really against the Ph.D. entirely, but against their monopoly in teaching and the general importance placed on them.
-- William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" (1903)
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Two Languagehat Links, One Temporary
Two links, both via the blog Languagehat:
1) Through February 5, the OED online is having a free trial; log in using "trynewoed" as both the name & the password. (Hint: it's three three-letter words written with no spaces.)
2) A blog called Quote Investigator which specializes in tracking down the provenance of obscure, multiply-attributed or otherwise troublesome quotes -- a practice that I've occasionally engaged in myself, but it's fun to see someone focus on it.
1) Through February 5, the OED online is having a free trial; log in using "trynewoed" as both the name & the password. (Hint: it's three three-letter words written with no spaces.)
2) A blog called Quote Investigator which specializes in tracking down the provenance of obscure, multiply-attributed or otherwise troublesome quotes -- a practice that I've occasionally engaged in myself, but it's fun to see someone focus on it.
Exchanges You Don't Expect To See In Interviews With Distinguished Elderly Philosophers
The late Dr. Marjorie Grene -- a distinguished (if fairly obscure to non-philosophers) American philosopher, one of the (if not the) founders of the sub-field of the philosophy of biology, the first woman to be featured in the Library of Living Philosophers (which had previously featured notables such as John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Sartre and Quine) -- in an interview with Believer magazine:
The entire interview is kind of a hoot, although nothing is quite up to that. Still, a few more of my favorite tidbits. The magazine on what it took to get an interview with her:
Anyway, it's all sort of fun, although I must admit you don't get much sense of her actual, y'know, philosophy (although you do get a sense of what she wrote about, at least).
Oh, and Lakatos? Here's the complete exchange:
Believer: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos—...I kinda couldn't get over that one. Shades of Kinbote (so to speak).
Grene: I didn’t kill him!!
The entire interview is kind of a hoot, although nothing is quite up to that. Still, a few more of my favorite tidbits. The magazine on what it took to get an interview with her:
After convincing her that the Believer was not religiously affiliated—which required three verbal assurances, two hyperlinks, and finally a hard copy of the Ice Cube issue—we met in her office...And then, three bits of a series in which the interviewer starts asking about her opinion of various philosophical and scientific writers (a series in which the Lakatos question occurred). First, Michael Ruse:
Believer: Before we started, you said something about Michael Ruse. What’s wrong with him?And on Richard Rorty:
Grene:: What’s wrong with him? He’s totally uninteresting.
Believer: ...about Richard Rorty. You’re friends with him, though you don’t agree with his philosophy?And on Darwin:
Grene:: We are friends, but you can’t agree with his philosophy. It doesn’t exist! He’s a wit! He should’ve lived in the eighteenth century. He just makes clever remarks that don’t mean anything.
Believer: Do you like Darwin?...the bit about the 'stupid question' was hardly the only such comment, and made me feel a bit sorry for the interviewer.
Grene:: Like him? What a stupid question. How can anybody say that? How can anybody not like him? What do you mean?
Anyway, it's all sort of fun, although I must admit you don't get much sense of her actual, y'know, philosophy (although you do get a sense of what she wrote about, at least).
Oh, and Lakatos? Here's the complete exchange:
Believer: You know, I forgot to ask about philosopher of science Imre Lakatos—...for which you can hardly blame the poor interviewer, I think.
Grene: I didn’t kill him!!
Believer: Why does everyone say you had a part in it?
Grene: Because once he helped me out of a taxi in London and he hit his head on the door. And I didn’t kill him! He died soon, and I don’t know if it was the head bump. But it wasn’t because of me! [Laughing heartily]
Believer: OK, we won’t get into that.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Arizona Massacre Quotes and Links
This post by Conor Friedersdorf (via) is fabulous, and I hope he'll forgive me if I quote the lion's share of it:
But ultimately, I think that in Conor's post is the reason that Ezra Klein's thoughtful self-reflection about his own rhetoric is unwarranted: the substance matters, and not just the rhetoric. Still, while I think he errs (fundamentally) in applying the thought to his own rhetoric, this point is still well expressed:
Other things I read on the massacre that said things that struck me:
* James Fallows on political assassinations
* Mark Kleiman on the role the end of a gun-control provision played in the scale of the horrors in Arizona. (In the NYT, Gail Collins made a similar point.)
* Digby on where the line between just heated rhetoric and beyond-the-pale extremism should be drawn.
* Steve Benen on the fact that a Republican Senator felt a need to hide behind anonymity when making an anodyne point about some right-wing rhetoric going too far.
...I’d argue that tone is overemphasized in these conversations about political discourse, while substance is mostly ignored.Yow. In fairness, I should note that (I believe) Conor is a conservative (just a sane one), so I suspect he'd draw different conclusions from this than I. But sticking to just what he said: word.
What if we took the opposite approach? I don’t think that Sarah Palin bears any responsibility for the shooting in Arizona, or that her rhetoric is the most egregious you’ll find on the right. I don’t have any problem with her poster putting various Congressional districts in cross-hairs. It’s a commonly used visual metaphor, for better or worse, and the substance being communicated is basically that the GOP wants to take back or “target” certain seats. The “tone” is arguably extreme, but what’s being said, the ultimate message, is perfectly acceptable: beat these people at the polls.
In contrast, Palin’s remarks about death panels communicated an untruth: the notion that Barack Obama’s health care reform effort sought to empower a panel of bureaucrats who’d sit in judgment about whether an old person’s life would be saved or not. That is the sort of thing we ought to find objectionable, even if the substance is communicated in the most dry language imaginable, because were it true, radicalism would be an appropriate response. “They’re going to start killing old people? We’ve got to stop this!”
[...]
Since Barack Obama took office, prominent voices on the right have called him an ally of Islamist radicals in their Grand Jihad against America, a radical Kenyan anti-colonialist, a man who pals around with terrorists and used a financial crisis to deliberately weaken America, an usurper who was born abroad and isn’t even eligible to be president, a guy who has somehow made it so that it’s okay for black kids to beat up white kids on buses, etc. I haven’t even touched on the conspiracy theories of Glenn Beck. The birthers excepted, the people making these chargers are celebrated by movement conservatives – they’re given book deals, awards, and speaking engagements.
If all of these charges were true, a radicalized citizenry would be an appropriate response. But even the conservatives who defend Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, D’Souza, McCarthy, and so many others don’t behave as if they believe all the nonsense they assert. The strongest case against these people isn’t that their rhetoric inspires political violence. It’s that they frequently utter indefensible nonsense. The problem isn’t their tone. It’s that the substance of what they’re saying is so blinkered that it isn’t even taken seriously by their ideological allies (even if they’re too cowardly, mercenary or team driven to admit as much).
They’re in a tough spot these days partly because it’s impossible for them to mount the defense of their rhetoric that is true: “I am a frivolous person, and I don’t choose my words based on their meaning. Rather, I behave like the worst caricature of a politician. If you think my rhetoric logically implies that people should behave violently, you’re mistaken – neither my audience nor my peers in the conservative movement are engaged in a logical enterprise, and it’s unfair of you to imply that people take what I say so seriously that I can be blamed for a real world event. Don’t you see that this is all a big game? This is how politics works. Stop pretending you’re not in on the joke.”
But ultimately, I think that in Conor's post is the reason that Ezra Klein's thoughtful self-reflection about his own rhetoric is unwarranted: the substance matters, and not just the rhetoric. Still, while I think he errs (fundamentally) in applying the thought to his own rhetoric, this point is still well expressed:
Many of us have known people who, after watching a loved one die of an awful disease, have begun taking better care of their own health. It's not that they were at risk of whatever killed their relative. But the awful experience focused attention on how they were living their own life. That's how I view the situation we're now in. Did the talk of "Second Amendment remedies" and "armed and dangerous" resistance lead anyone to pick up a gun and start shooting? It didn't. But seeing what an unbalanced person might do if convinced of the need for a violent remedy has been sobering.
Other things I read on the massacre that said things that struck me:
* James Fallows on political assassinations
* Mark Kleiman on the role the end of a gun-control provision played in the scale of the horrors in Arizona. (In the NYT, Gail Collins made a similar point.)
* Digby on where the line between just heated rhetoric and beyond-the-pale extremism should be drawn.
* Steve Benen on the fact that a Republican Senator felt a need to hide behind anonymity when making an anodyne point about some right-wing rhetoric going too far.
Poem of the Day: Donald Justice's "Men at Forty"
Men At FortyI turn forty in March, a fact that has not escaped my attention over the past... well, year really. So this poem has recurred to me recently. I learned about from Hugo Schwyzer, who quotes it frequently,
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret
And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
-- Donald Justice
Saturday, January 08, 2011
Syllabus for The History of American Thought Since 1865, Spring 2011
Starting a week and a half from now, I'm teaching (for the first time) an upper-level course on U.S. intellectual history, entitled The History of American Thought Since 1865. (That is, it's the first time I've taught it; it has been offered for many years by a senior member of the HWS history department who also teaches -- most recently this past fall -- the companion course, The History of American Thought To 1865. (I should say that it's his course title; I'd prefer one with "intellectual history" rather than "American thought" as the key term -- perhaps since the latter can be read to imply a unity that I don't think exists, but possibly just because it sounds old fashioned.) I thought I'd tell you about it.
First I should say that this is not, in fact, the complete syllabus for the course -- I don't see any particular reason that anyone save my students would be interested in my grading policies or my office hours. But since I've been interested when other academic bloggers have posted their syllabi, and since, in putting together this course, I benefited from looking at the online syllabi of instructors at other institutions who were generous enough to share them with the world, I thought I would pay it forward and give the interesting parts of the syllabus, namely, the required readings and some indications of the nature of the assignments.
One thing I'd note is that there is (I believe) a wider range in what is taught as the basic material for U. S. Intellectual History than for any other sub-field of history -- not only in books taught, but in subjects covered. Its comparable, I think, to courses like "Introduction to Philosophy" or "The U.S. Novel Since 1945", where you wouldn't be surprised to see entirely nonintersecting topic lists appear on multiple syllabi: there's simply too many different ways to approach the material. Thus, despite my filling the shoes of a senior (and, IMHO, quite fabulous) scholar, I am teaching the course quite differently than he does -- and, indeed, quite differently than did any of those whose syllabi I've seen, online or elsewhere. Perhaps doing so is cheeky, but I think that even those of us who are but Sub-Sub Academics (as Melville might have put it) have to approach a topic as we ourselves see it -- something which is shaped by, but not copied from, our elders & betters. At any rate, you should know that this is my particular take on this material; if you look at any other online syllabi, you'll see very different ones.
So. The term has fourteen weeks of classes (not counting the week of spring break that interrupts it). It starts and ends mid-week, so there are thirteen full weeks, plus two partial bookends. I will be assigning a book (or significant chunk of one) every week -- an unusually heavy load in this time, I'll admit. We'll have one discussion a week, on the readings; the other two weekly classes will be devoted to lecture, when I will attempt to put into context what we do read, and to talk a little about the thousands of equally important books that didn't make my list of 13.
Here are the thirteen reading assignments:
Precisely which chapters of the Dewey, the Kirk and the Rorty will be assigned is something I'm still mulling over. (I might even assign all of the Rorty -- it's hard, but it's not that long.) From the Kirk I'll assign the American chapters (he does the U.S. and Britain) -- but I might cut down on those further. Dewey I just need to cut down for length -- but I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet. (That's one of the things I need to do between now and the first day of class.)
As for why I'm assigning a few articles to accompany "The Waste Land", although I don't for the others: it's just a very different sort of text. The other twelve writers, however complex they may be, are each trying to make an argument; Eliot writes a poem. Thus its connection to the course material will be more obscure. Also, it's a difficult poem to read for the first time. So I'm going to assign a few articles to (hopefully) help the students through these stumbling blocks.
To anyone who wants to say: "this is insanely ambitious": I know, and I agree. Let's move on.
The assignments will be threefold. The students will write a one-page reaction paper every week, making an observation and asking a question about the book; I'll have a few students read these aloud each week to serve as a jumping off point for our discussion. (These papers are largely intended to make sure students both do and think about the reading.)
There will be a final paper of 10-12 pages, due on the last day of class. As a concession to the "this is already insanely ambitious" point, I've decided not to make this a research paper; it will be a paper on some selection of the books for the course, tracing some intellectual issue (race, gender, democracy, class, the nature of scientific knowledge, the role of the state in society, etc, etc) through a number of the works. (Thus, if an ordinary upper-level course requires a lot of reading, plus a fair amount of reading for a final paper, this will hopefully balance out by just making the students write about the course material.)
And, finally, there will be a final exam, based largely (but not entirely) on the lectures, to make sure that portion of the instruction is tested and evaluated in some way (i.e. to make sure they come, listen and try to remember what I say). I'm going to pass out sheets each lecture with key terms (people, books, names of ideas, etc.) to help with this, since there isn't otherwise a textbook.
I'll have one student enrolled in the course for graduate credit. In addition to the books listed above, she'll read an additional three books -- secondary rather than primary sources -- and write two-page response papers on them; we'll also meet to discuss those books separately. The first of those books is Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which is one of the most engaging and accessible of the secondary sources on this material; the other two I'll pick in consultation with her, to match her interests. Her final paper will be 15-20 pages, rather than 10-12, and will have to work at least one of the additional readings in in a significant way.
And that's my course. Putting this together -- and preparing the lectures -- has taken an insane amount of my time over the past few months, in particular in the weeks since last semester ended. Various other projects that I care deeply -- in certain cases, much more deeply -- about have been put on the back burner, if not all the way in the fridge. But it's been a fun course to prepare. If the students have half as much fun taking it as I have had putting it together, they'll love it. And if they do a tenth as much work, they'll ace it. Let's hope they all do. (Nothing would make me happier than to give everyone an A.)
Comments are welcome, bearing in mind that it's too late to make more than minor modifications for this spring (e.g. the bookstore has already ordered all the books). So even if you argue, convincingly, that I should throw this out and start again, I won't be able to.
Update, Spring 2012: I am teaching the class again with just about the same syllabus. I added a fourteenth book (as you can see I was already thinking of last year if you read the comments) -- Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (between Baldwin and Rorty, for week 12, knocking Rorty and Chomsky to 13 and 14 respectively). And in a few cases I'm shorting the readings somewhat -- not out of a concern for length particularly, and certainly not to balance adding the Gilligan (it doesn't), but because a slight shortening of some particularly difficult readings seemed in order; so I'm omitting a chapter from James's Pragmatism (chapter 4), one from Chomsky's lectures (chapter 4) and saying that students needn't read the (second-edition) postscript to Kuhn, only the text as originally published in 1962. Otherwise the syllabus is essentially unchanged.
First I should say that this is not, in fact, the complete syllabus for the course -- I don't see any particular reason that anyone save my students would be interested in my grading policies or my office hours. But since I've been interested when other academic bloggers have posted their syllabi, and since, in putting together this course, I benefited from looking at the online syllabi of instructors at other institutions who were generous enough to share them with the world, I thought I would pay it forward and give the interesting parts of the syllabus, namely, the required readings and some indications of the nature of the assignments.
One thing I'd note is that there is (I believe) a wider range in what is taught as the basic material for U. S. Intellectual History than for any other sub-field of history -- not only in books taught, but in subjects covered. Its comparable, I think, to courses like "Introduction to Philosophy" or "The U.S. Novel Since 1945", where you wouldn't be surprised to see entirely nonintersecting topic lists appear on multiple syllabi: there's simply too many different ways to approach the material. Thus, despite my filling the shoes of a senior (and, IMHO, quite fabulous) scholar, I am teaching the course quite differently than he does -- and, indeed, quite differently than did any of those whose syllabi I've seen, online or elsewhere. Perhaps doing so is cheeky, but I think that even those of us who are but Sub-Sub Academics (as Melville might have put it) have to approach a topic as we ourselves see it -- something which is shaped by, but not copied from, our elders & betters. At any rate, you should know that this is my particular take on this material; if you look at any other online syllabi, you'll see very different ones.
So. The term has fourteen weeks of classes (not counting the week of spring break that interrupts it). It starts and ends mid-week, so there are thirteen full weeks, plus two partial bookends. I will be assigning a book (or significant chunk of one) every week -- an unusually heavy load in this time, I'll admit. We'll have one discussion a week, on the readings; the other two weekly classes will be devoted to lecture, when I will attempt to put into context what we do read, and to talk a little about the thousands of equally important books that didn't make my list of 13.
Here are the thirteen reading assignments:
- William Graham Sumner, What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883)
- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
- William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907) and "The Will to Believe" (1896)
- John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916) (select chapters only)
- Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Women and Economics (1898)
- Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)
- T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" (1922), plus a few critical articles on it
- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (1952)
- Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, (1953) (select chapters only)
- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
- Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, (1989) (select chapters only)
- Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge: the Managua Lectures (1987)
Precisely which chapters of the Dewey, the Kirk and the Rorty will be assigned is something I'm still mulling over. (I might even assign all of the Rorty -- it's hard, but it's not that long.) From the Kirk I'll assign the American chapters (he does the U.S. and Britain) -- but I might cut down on those further. Dewey I just need to cut down for length -- but I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet. (That's one of the things I need to do between now and the first day of class.)
As for why I'm assigning a few articles to accompany "The Waste Land", although I don't for the others: it's just a very different sort of text. The other twelve writers, however complex they may be, are each trying to make an argument; Eliot writes a poem. Thus its connection to the course material will be more obscure. Also, it's a difficult poem to read for the first time. So I'm going to assign a few articles to (hopefully) help the students through these stumbling blocks.
To anyone who wants to say: "this is insanely ambitious": I know, and I agree. Let's move on.
The assignments will be threefold. The students will write a one-page reaction paper every week, making an observation and asking a question about the book; I'll have a few students read these aloud each week to serve as a jumping off point for our discussion. (These papers are largely intended to make sure students both do and think about the reading.)
There will be a final paper of 10-12 pages, due on the last day of class. As a concession to the "this is already insanely ambitious" point, I've decided not to make this a research paper; it will be a paper on some selection of the books for the course, tracing some intellectual issue (race, gender, democracy, class, the nature of scientific knowledge, the role of the state in society, etc, etc) through a number of the works. (Thus, if an ordinary upper-level course requires a lot of reading, plus a fair amount of reading for a final paper, this will hopefully balance out by just making the students write about the course material.)
And, finally, there will be a final exam, based largely (but not entirely) on the lectures, to make sure that portion of the instruction is tested and evaluated in some way (i.e. to make sure they come, listen and try to remember what I say). I'm going to pass out sheets each lecture with key terms (people, books, names of ideas, etc.) to help with this, since there isn't otherwise a textbook.
I'll have one student enrolled in the course for graduate credit. In addition to the books listed above, she'll read an additional three books -- secondary rather than primary sources -- and write two-page response papers on them; we'll also meet to discuss those books separately. The first of those books is Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which is one of the most engaging and accessible of the secondary sources on this material; the other two I'll pick in consultation with her, to match her interests. Her final paper will be 15-20 pages, rather than 10-12, and will have to work at least one of the additional readings in in a significant way.
And that's my course. Putting this together -- and preparing the lectures -- has taken an insane amount of my time over the past few months, in particular in the weeks since last semester ended. Various other projects that I care deeply -- in certain cases, much more deeply -- about have been put on the back burner, if not all the way in the fridge. But it's been a fun course to prepare. If the students have half as much fun taking it as I have had putting it together, they'll love it. And if they do a tenth as much work, they'll ace it. Let's hope they all do. (Nothing would make me happier than to give everyone an A.)
Comments are welcome, bearing in mind that it's too late to make more than minor modifications for this spring (e.g. the bookstore has already ordered all the books). So even if you argue, convincingly, that I should throw this out and start again, I won't be able to.
Update, Spring 2012: I am teaching the class again with just about the same syllabus. I added a fourteenth book (as you can see I was already thinking of last year if you read the comments) -- Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice (between Baldwin and Rorty, for week 12, knocking Rorty and Chomsky to 13 and 14 respectively). And in a few cases I'm shorting the readings somewhat -- not out of a concern for length particularly, and certainly not to balance adding the Gilligan (it doesn't), but because a slight shortening of some particularly difficult readings seemed in order; so I'm omitting a chapter from James's Pragmatism (chapter 4), one from Chomsky's lectures (chapter 4) and saying that students needn't read the (second-edition) postscript to Kuhn, only the text as originally published in 1962. Otherwise the syllabus is essentially unchanged.
Thursday, January 06, 2011
The Hidden Dumbing-Down Threat
Everyone's been abuzz about the new edition of Huckleberry Finn that will rewrite Twain, replacing the n-word with "slave" in every single instance. (A lack of respect for the history, the literary integrity of the work, a need to honestly confront America's racist past -- you can write most of the dialogue yourself.) But hidden in that NY Times story about the fracas is the following:
Ok -- the heck with all the dead birds dropping out of the sky. That, Noble Readers, is a sign of the fucking apocalypse.
“I’m not offended by anything in ‘Huck Finn,’ ” said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. “I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class.”I'm sorry -- what? She would teach about slavery and the context of the time... except that Huckleberry Finn is too long?
Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes “Huck Finn” available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.
“I think authors’ language should be left alone,” she said. “If it’s too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that’s something I’d talk about in teaching it.”
Ok -- the heck with all the dead birds dropping out of the sky. That, Noble Readers, is a sign of the fucking apocalypse.
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
Not Resigned to the Inevitable
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
There is, I would claim, something almost indescribably profound about this lack of resignation to that which is most inevitable. It connects, I think, to the spirit of fighting without hope that (as the best Tolkien critic I know of, Tom Shippey, persuasively argues) is so central to the worldview of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings -- the "spirit of the north" as he called it,* which he identified as a determination to fight for what is right even in the face of hopelessness -- with a belief in the idea that even ultimate defeat does not imply that a cause was wrong -- with a refusal to despair even when all hope is, in fact, lost. (Tolkien himself, as a Christian, thought there was an ultimate hope of course -- blunting the spirit that he himself saw in the pagan writers he admired, that of fighting in the face of genuine, inevitable defeat.) And what is more hopeless than the fight against death?
Hopeless: genuinely, eternally hopeless. And yet, and yet: I am not resigned. As a poetic contemporary of Millay's put it: rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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* If memory serves. I don't have my copy of Shippey's work right now, and neither Google Books nor Amazon will let me search inside for the precise phrase. But it's something in that vein.
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