A show about getting out of debt. The confession: “I was a promiscuous spender!” (Repeated at the close of the segment.)

Even riskier behavior  than the profligate spender’s. When you’re letting loose with those dollars, dinars, lira, forints, kopeks and talents, it can get pretty wild.

Like most words, it developed from one meaning to a nearly opposite one.

It would be worth a longer, slower look. What exactly were the shifts and reframing, the incremental stuff, that made the near-reversal possible?

Carl Abel, you are rebutted but not forgotten.

Some of you may have been thinking this week about the “Marseillaise” scene in Casablanca. People around the world were taking a minute to go all out on the “Allons enfants de la patrie” number, “sang impur” and all. All right, marchons! But if I had to pick a scene for the times, it would be the one where the policeman asks: “Your nationality?” and receives the reply: “Alcoholic.” Me too.

Not in the clinical sense, I hasten to say. (At least, no one has given me a diagnosis or taken me aside for a Serious Talk. In my desk drawer is a small bottle of white-out, no whiskey.) But I glory in the name of casual drinker, a regular member of the sodality of people who kick back, have a drink (or not), and let the conversation go where it will. The Alcoholic, in my sense of the word, doesn’t even have to drink booze. Coffee will do– it’s not just a cute anecdote that the “public sphere” began, for Habermas, in coffee houses. Or tea. Even water, what the hell. And let’s get specific: although I could and would invite you to my house, that kind of space imposes a relation of guest to host. I have to run around looking for nuts and crackers to feed you, you are going to show good manners and disregard your cell phone, and all that kind of stuff. In a café, however, we meet as strangers and equals. That is, as particles of society at large. The weak relation of people merely coexisting in a chosen space is an oddly strong social bond, as one realizes when the possibility of doing that is threatened.

A lovely little book given me a few months ago by my friend Tim Brook lays out the case for Parisian cafés, with or without terraces, with or without juke-boxes, baby-foot, toilettes et téléphone, service à toute heure. There are many mansions in café-dom, from the stuffy to the scruffy, and Marc Augé, like the good ethnographer he is, has knocked back a coffee or a demi in a representative sample of them. He follows Maigret, Aragon, Benjamin and a host of other streetlife characters in and out of the pages of an abundant bar literature.

In light of last week’s scenes of horror– people shot dead where they sat on the terrace of the Bistrot Voltaire and suchlike, having a smoke, catching up with their friends, reading L’Équipe (you always find L’Équipe on the counter of a good bar)– this paragraph seemed to speak to me with a Benjaminian extra layer of prophecy:

” ‘Je ne fais que passer’: telle est la devise implicite du passant qui s’arrête un instant au bistrot, où il côtoie d’autres passants connus ou inconnus. Il ne fait que passer, même s’il s’attarde un peu ou si, comme aimanté par le lieu, il y passe une ou deux fois dans la même journée. Le bistrot, c’est la mesure du temps. Bien sûr parce qu’il a ses heures d’ouverture et de fermeture […] bien sûr aussi parce qu’il offre un asile à ceux qui, faute d’avoir pu maîtriser parfaitement leur emploi du temps, se trouvent soudain désoeuvrés, en avance, obligés d’attendre […] Mais aussi, et essentiellement, parce que, pour les vrais fidèles, sa fréquentation implique, plus largement, un rapport particulier avec la vie et avec la ville.”

” ‘Just passing through’– that’s the implicit motto of the passerby who stops for a few minutes in a café and stands alongside other passersby, familiar or unfamiliar. He’s just passing through, even if he stays a while or drops in once or twice more in the day as if the place exerted a magnetic power over him. A bar is a measurement of time. Naturally, because it has opening and closing hours […] and naturally because it offers a refuge to anyone who, having failed to organize their schedule perfectly, find themselves at a loose end, early for their meeting, obliged to wait. […] But also and especially because for a real devotee, hanging out at the bar attests more broadly to a special kind of relation with life and with the city.

Let’s hear it for Marc Augé, Éloge du bistrot parisien (In Praise of Parisian Cafés). Paris: Payot, 2015.

The Columbia Journalism Review usually does a good job on the meta– going behind the story to get at the story of the story. But in one recent piece, their writer Danny Funt slipped up by failing to question the assumptions of the subjects of the story. And, as isn’t always the case, it matters.

The piece is about the NYT‘s resident Conservative Sage(TM), David Brooks. Brooks, you know, who writes those columns full of harrumphing about how we have lost our way as a civilization and probably deserve what’s coming to us; Brooks who is currently teaching a course at Yale with the modest title “Humility,” and who is recommended in the CJR article by such Conservative Deep Thinkers as Robert P. George of Princeton. The article adopts without demurral Brooks’s (and other American conservatives’) picture of what “morality” is and how it functions.

Brooks thinks a tradition of journalists fluent, or at least conversant, in moral concepts dissipated in recent decades. Theologians were walled off within their denominations, and public discourse about values grew dysfunctional. A life of “meaning” by today’s standard, he wrote in his Times column to begin 2015, “is flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.”

In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”

So, cue up the old chestnut about “the Sixties,” when Ozzie and Harriet were replaced by Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. Where will the “saving remnant” be found? Where are the adults? And so on.

The motif of “doing what feels good” comes up in what the CJR journalist recognizes is a “jarring” context– a context that will moreover give me my opening to start hectoring the hectorers.

At times, [Brooks] evokes moral awareness in peculiar contexts. On Meet the Press, in 2011, David Gregory asked Brooks and E.J. Dionne about the lack of accountability in the Penn State child molestation scandal.

“We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is,” Brooks said. “And so, when people see things like that, they don’t have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it’s wrong, but they’ve been raised in a morality that says, If it feels all right for you, it’s probably okay.”

“I think David is way too abstract here,” Dionne interjected, perhaps appropriately.

Now let’s back up here a little bit. The Penn State scandal was about a former assistant coach of football who took advantage of his position to force his sexual attentions on underage boys whom he had attracted to his sports-camp charity; it was also about the university hierarchy’s willingness to look the other way, as long as the football team was winning and the charity generated favorable buzz for the university. Brooks instinctively reaches for the diagnosis of Moral Weakness. The problem here is that we as a society don’t have the moral fortitude to resist those temptations! And when we see our neighbor falling prey to sensual temptations, we lack the fiber to say anything but “Hey man, whatever floats your boat”! Lacking “moral judgment of any kind”!  Is the day of reckoning not at hand?

But the Penn State problem had to do with abuse of authority and a lack of concern for the powerless. It reminds one, doesn’t it, of the repeated scandals in the Catholic Church (that other wholesale purveyor of moral-collapse narratives), where it is priests, fortified by their sacramental function, power words like “evil” and “sin,” and the small likelihood that anyone above them is going to care, who prey on young, poor and thinly supported subordinates. Under the circumstances, I would think that the moral implement to start swinging around the room is not Weakness of Will, but rather Violations of Autonomy. And what do you know, there’s even a moral theory that takes autonomy to be its central value.

The ethics of autonomy arose with the Enlightenment, as I’m sorry to remind the fans of institutional religion who so often form the amen corner for the Brooks style of moralizing. Immanuel Kant said it well: Treat every other human being, not as a means to your end, but as an end in him- or herself.

When the other human being beside you is in a condition of impaired autonomy (underage, or starving, or in a coma, or unable to say No to you), you have a special duty to be exceptionally vigilant to preserve that person’s freedom of decision. If you prevail over that person, ignoring consent or the mere possibility of consent, you have, to say the least, failed in your duty to build the Kingdom of Ends. To put it in churchy language, you have sinned against the Likeness of God that is in every human being.

So who knew? Autonomy ethics is actually capable of producing statements about right and wrong! It can even turn back on Immanuel Kant and judge his performance unfavorably, when he treated as a matter of course the alleged incapacity of Africans to govern themselves, which was handy for making slavery less of a scandal. All this is well known in most parts of the world.

But in America, the person who treats “morality” like a personal franchise is the one who peddles narratives about promiscuity and indulgence, who pretends that autonomy is the same thing as indifference, who complains that the public square is a morality-free zone, who orients discussions toward a couple of personal favorites like the “collapse” of the family, the horror of abortion, and the lack of respect for elders and the law. (If the elders hadn’t so badly screwed up when they were in charge of the law, the young might respect them a little more.)

Also in America, the “morality” line skates right past such peccadilloes as organizing a massive campaign of lies and disinformation in order to pursue a needless war resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people; covering up the cover-ups of the cover-ups, when questions were raised; depriving people of much-needed medical care in the absence of real fiscal imperatives to do so; giving refugees the heavo-ho; and so on. Those can’t be sins, because they weren’t committed by the recognized sinners. Non-procreative sex– why, there’s a sin for you.

And this Robert P. George, surely a nice man in private life, has written copiously on the crisis that is unfettered democracy, when “democratic institutions become mechanisms of injustice and oppression, thus defying the moral law to which they, like all human institutions and actions, are subject.” This “moral law,” you will have guessed, is that endorsed by his own preferred church, and in order to guarantee that no conflict will occur between civil authority and moral law, Professor George of Princeton is ready to take away portions of the autonomy (the rights) presently enjoyed by large sectors of the population who don’t belong to that church. Professor George’s maître à penser, Germain Grisez, was a little franker about his readiness to call for armed resistance to democratic “tyranny.”

To autonomy theorists, theocracy must appear immoral for the same reasons as, say, rape: forced assent to something that should absolutely be left up to the person’s rational deliberative faculties. But what do I know? I’m not a conservative columnist and I don’t teach “Humility” at Yale. I’m just mowing the Kantian grass in the green fields of relatively free speech.

Earlier this week, Kathryn Stott, a junior New Yorker writer, experienced the most amazing succès d’estime. Her takedown of Henry David Thoreau, some 153 years dead, was so effective that virtually everyone of my Facebook acquaintance now has a visceral hatred of the man. It’s as if he had committed some unspeakable crime, like marriage with one’s own granddaughter. To mention a passage I had actually read – say, the one about “sleepers” from Walden – was akin to liking Woody Allen films. Needless to say, I made no friends that day or since on the basis of my getting through both volumes of the Library of America’s Thoreau, even though I was willing to admit that his poetry was not of the best.

I’m not going to make a pro-Thoreau argument, other than to say that if you have not spent a Sunday morning in a sunny alcove reading A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, you are missing out on a very pleasant and edifying experience. Rather, what all this brings up is mob mentality – I doubt that any of my acquaintances had his or her mind changed about the books – and the evergreen question of, if we have Thoreau cop a plea on Stott’s charges, can we allow the contributions of Bad People into our culture or our canon?

My sense is that if we expunged the Bad Chaps, we would have such holes in the tissue of our culture that all those missing Greek tragedies would seem a trifling loss. Certain high-achieving people, be they poets or CEOs, have a “Why do I care what other people think?” mentality, and that can lend itself to brilliant originality, despicable sociopathy, or both. Richard Wagner comes to mind. But just think of a world without musicians like Schwartzkopf, von Karajan, or Orff – or a world in which the U.S. had neither missiles nor a space program, courtesy of a von Braun who had been justly executed as the outcome of his denazification proceedings.

A Bad Chap, politically unsound, beyond the pale of civilized behavior – haven’t we seen these kinds of purges before? In Russia and China, they have been state-sponsored, but they have been taken up as amateur sport on the Internet and in academia. Eventually, when deciding to expunge someone’s work, you get to the same hollow justifications that they came to in Russia and China – “because he was in a textbook”; “because the previous generation valued him”; “because he told people what to do with themselves.” And at that point, it will be up to posterity to find the holes in the historical record.

For now, I am taking a vacation from Facebook and taking up my Thoreau again. “O Death, where is thy sting, O Stott, thy victory?”

I’ve been a bit too sparse on Printculture lately. Blame deadlines, children, moving, administration. It’s not for lack of things to talk about– but it’s in the nature of a notebook or a blog that if you let the moment pass, the thought that was gathering in your mind, like a droplet on a leaf, has already cascaded and can’t be hauled back up the track. “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.” The blogger’s life should be full of temporal bubbles. How about twenty minutes set aside every two hours to capture those roving thoughts? There must be a scheduling app for that…

If the widely-reported tendency of electronic media is to let Facebook and quasi-Facebook applications absorb the heretofore distinct media of email, blogging, news and shopping, I’d like to lie down athwart the tracks of progress. In the name of what? Well, like all the Luddites who’ve preceded me, in the name of “silence and slow time.” Over the last year or so I have been unable to repress an ever stronger urge to turn up the nose when glancing at my friends’ postings on the inevitable FB. The form is a composite of vices. Binary thinking: you “like” something or you write to denounce it. Competitiveness: you are encouraged to brag about your successes, your cute children, your artfully disposed lunch. Conformism: to post something that garners vast numbers of “likes” and “followers” is how you win the game of FB. Triviality: spend your time clicking on silly symbolic matters rather than getting together with people to deal with the root causes of violence, racism and drastic inequality. And most of all, snap judgment: you’re supposed to spring out with an instantaneous reaction to postings, before they scroll down and away, but that means posting before you can do any research, find out the background, do your own thinking. Short of being a troll, you are encouraged to conform, or to gravitate toward the group of people with whom you can most easily conform by “sharing” and “liking” the same things. I know social media are supposed to democratize, and in some ways they have acted to bring vast numbers of people together who might otherwise be moving in their separate channels, but the quality of interaction is low and causes people to act stupid. (I don’t mean to call anyone stupid; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in the constraints of the medium.)

Thus, in the last few months, we’ve seen rushes to condemn people as e.g. racists on the strength of somebody else’s say-so, or a generalized eagerness to mark oneself off from those racists over there; hasty approval and disapproval of public figures because of some kind of imputed association; threats of mayhem (amply “liked” by the like-minded); the joys of hyperbole and denunciation. Oh, did I fail to accuse so-and-so of some alleged bad attitude? Then I must share that bad attitude.

Although I was grousing two paragraphs ago about the instantaneous character of the medium, imposing rushes to judgment, I have to acknowledge another dimension of social-media temporality, and that is repetition. The pile-ons of self-approving approvals are never sufficient in their moment. If you go around in the same circles as me, you probably are likely to vote for B rather than T, are generally in favor of policies X, Y and Z and have a dim view of issues P, Q, and R. But if you are somebody I see in work or life, you probably don’t bother telling me what you think of (B+T+X+Y+Z+P+Q+R) two or three times a day; as a Facebook self-fashioner you probably let pass no opportunity to do so. On the surface of things, FB operates in its own sandbox, but if it’s true that FB users are getting most of their political news from it, that sandbox spills out into pragmatic public life. And it just works to flatten opinion, to make evidence-based thinking with room for history and exceptions impossible, to turn each of us into an obedient member of this or that mob.

Room for thinking, room for “play” (which means: considering the possibility that things are not what they seem). Blogs allow for these– books even more so– so it will have to be blogs and books for me. Reflection doesn’t need a faster chip. It needs more space for maneuver.

(Hat tip and thematic overlap to Evgeny Morozov.)

The brag, from Fordham University Press.
The Ethnography of Rhythm
Orality and Its Technologies
Haun Saussy

Who speaks? The author as producer, the contingency of the text, intertextuality, the “device”—core ideas of modern literary theory– were all pioneered in the shadow of oral literature. Authorless, loosely dated, and variable, oral texts have always posed a challenge to critical interpretation. When it began to be thought that culturally significant texts—starting with Homer and the Bible—had emerged from an oral tradition, assumptions on how to read these texts were greatly perturbed. Through readings that range from ancient Greece, Rome and China to the Cold War imaginary, The Ethnography of Rhythm situates the study of oral traditions in the contentious space of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinking about language, mind, and culture. It also demonstrates the role of technologies in framing this category of poetic creation. By making possible a new understanding of Maussian “techniques of the body” as belonging to the domain of Derridean “arche-writing,” Haun Saussy shows how oral tradition is a means of inscription in its own right, rather than an antecedent made obsolete by the written word or other media and data-storage devices.

264 pages, 13 b/w illustrations
978-0-8232-7047-7, Paper, $32.00 (01)
978-0-8232-7046-0, Cloth, $100.00 (06)
Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
March

The world’s terrors are without number, but none is more terrible than man.

Many traditions depict life as a pilgrimage. Though he spent much of his life in Chicago, I can’t imagine Tony otherwise than en route to somewhere. In him the seriousness of the Tang Monk was always mixed with the mischief of the Monkey King– these being the two main protagonists of the Journey to the West to which he dedicated many years of his full life. Like them, he had powers of perception and transformation that seemed superhuman, and any demons on his path had to reckon with his swift ripostes; and like them, he was restless in the pursuit of a world-embracing harmony with room for rebels and saints alike. If you had not been so vividly and undeniably part of our world, Tony, we might have thought someone like you could only have been dreamt up in fiction.

Jean-Luc Godard, at 84, can still do a good enfant terrible. See Sofilm #30 (May 2015):

–Since you’re interested in History, what do you think about the Greek demand that Germany pay them war indemnities?

— They’re completely right to do so! And I suggest you watch Chris Marker’s film “The Owl’s Legacy” which shows how we owe everything to Greek thought, which lasted two thousand years. He even shows it influencing Japan. Give yourself one evening to watch “The Owl’s Legacy” and you’ve solved the Greek-European-German problem. Europe and Germany ought to get down on their knees and say thank you to Greece. That’s all. Every time you utter a sentence and you use the word “therefore,” the Greeks ought to get ten dollars of royalties, and that would take care of the Greek debt.

…

— Do you consider yourself an “auteur”?

— These days everybody’s an “auteur.” The guy who claps the clapperboard wants to be the auteur of the clap. This question of royalties has swollen to grotesque proportions, especially with the Internet. … I got paid, and I don’t have any further rights in it. Afterward, let people do what they want. If they want to make off with the film, it’s not my business. A director should know how much he wants to be paid for his film, and once he’s received that, he can just hand over the excess to Amnesty or the Red Cross. …

…

The whole idea of intellectual property, of patents and copyrights, goes right over my head. I don’t even know who came up with three quarters of the dialogues in my films, I don’t write them down. I take snippets that interest me and I don’t care about the rights. If somebody sues me– but nobody ever has; sometimes I’d have welcomed a lawsuit. Once Anne-Marie [Miéville] and I were imagining she might sue me, just to create the precedent… Bottom line, it’s just literature, because it doesn’t exist except through texts, on paper. When the judge sentences you and says, “By virtue of the law such-and-such,” somebody is the author of that law too, and often the law bears the name of its author, the Tom-Dick-and-Harry Act, and so on. In France, there’s the Evin Act that regulates smoking. Somebody should ask the judge, “And how about you, are you paying royalties to M. Evin?”

— So the idea of the “auteur” is misused?

— Absolutely, but there’s a lot of money riding on this kind of thing, they put a sixty-year limit on it, pretty much the same time they put on archives before they’re declassified. What about news agencies, what royalties do they handle? Plenty of dead people have never seen a penny of their royalties. Three-quarters of the pictures in the paper come without a statement of ownership, you see a guy in poverty, a drowned girl. The TV stations and newspapers could put a little money aside and try to find out who really owns that. When there’s a close-up on the front page of the paper, the photographer got his salary, but the crash victim, she never got a penny. There are thousands of cases like this.

— The industry’s terrified of the Internet.

— Yeah, but “the industry,” it’s like “the market,” it’s made up of men and women. People say “the markets” the way they’d say “the dragons.”…

…

— Why did you give up your studio?… And are you happy like this?

— If you’re even slightly well-off, if you have a roof over your head, if you manage to think a little on your own, and have a few people around you that you can talk to, some landscapes and a dog, that’s such a huge stroke of luck that in some ways you just say: this is an amazing world. Because for a long time, it was changing and nobody saw it change; today, three-quarters of people can see that it’s changing right before their eyes. Whether it’s climate, politics, whatever…. People feel that it’s changing, and it’s beyond their control. …

Merci Jean-Luc.

(Translated HS. In the spirit of the interview, I didn’t ask anyone’s permission.)

Something came full circle the other day. On a mailing list for historians of France, H-FRANCE, someone had asked for good teaching materials about the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre and subsequent events. Many suggestions came forth, including some of the commentaries that blame the Charlie journalists for being Islamophobic (a view more common in the US and UK than in France). And this too:

As a former journalist in Charlie, really offended by what I read about my ex-magazine (a real antiracist newspaper who just did laugh about fanatics of all religions), I would love to be part of the discussion by adding this article : http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7185898

Thank you, Caroline Fourest

I would never deny Caroline Fourest the right to be “offended” by what she reads. I don’t doubt that her feelings are sincere. “Offended,” in this case, means “outraged to read things said about this group that I, as a member of the group, am sure are not true.”

Being offended has become the primary channel of response to works of art and the intellect, it seems to me sometimes. Not that everyone acts on their offense by pulling out the automatic weapons, mercifully; but rare it is that anybody bothers to pause and think about how something might have been constructed, or how one’s own perception delicately interacts with properties of the message proposed, or whether there is a looming situation or context that predetermines the way something will be taken– in short, whether there are mitigating factors. People are offended, they demand that the offending word be taken back or eliminated, and they usually preface their declarations with an “As…” clause. “As a former Comcast subscriber,” “As a graduate of a non-Ivy institution,” “As a sufferer from myopia,” I hereby announce to you that your words or images have the effect of demeaning me in the eyes of the world, and I call on you to retract, apologize, and right this wrong.

The judgment of offense is easier to put forth than the judgment of taste (at least as Manny Kant formulated it) because the latter seeks recognition as a “universal,” whereas to be offended, all you have to do is name yourself as a member of a group and claim that your particular group is wronged. And far from being “universal,” the judgment of offense can’t be subjected to dialectical testing (I can’t say “no, you’re not offended”; I can barely say, “you have no reason to be offended,” but that’s not often going to be accepted). Moreover, the relation between the truth and falsity of the representation at issue can be completely flexible. I might denounce your account of me because it is inaccurate, or I might denounce it because it is too accurate (but I don’t want to argue about its accuracy): the shriek of being offended obscures the matter of fact. If you wanted to prove that Charlie was not a racist periodical, there are ways of doing that. You show examples, you quote statements of policy, you do statistics, you tell stories about the editorial board (which counted several people of a non-Vieille-France background). But being “offended” seems to be beside the point.

Especially since the point of Charlie— and of so many journals that came before it, on the right and on the left– was to offend.

Is nothing sacred?

It was the first handshake that told me we were in De Selby territory. The dentist held out his wrist to me, as we do in bike repair shops. Only a bike repairman extends the wrist because his hand is covered in black grease, and Dr. Bellaiche’s were in green gloves.

The purpose of our little get-together was to extract a cracked eyetooth and replace it with an implant. I expected drilling, discomfort, time spent staring up at a bright light. I hadn’t anticipated such great strides forward on the path outlined for us by De Selby so many years ago.

I was aware I would leave with new substances filling new hollows in my body: metal, resin, fiberglass, even gutta-percha. But the fully realized De Selby moment came when the stalk for the implant was rooted, and the dentist screwed the crown on it: twist, twist, twist, and a last hard half-twist.

We mammals, unlike our friends the snails and shellfish, don’t have a lot of body parts with a spiral structure. Hard ones, at least (the labyrinth of the ear forming a semi-counterexample). This must have to do with the medium we spend most of our time in, the air, which is more easily parted than wet sand. The combatant creatures with twisted horns, like the gazelles and narwhals, are the other counterexample, and I don’t know whether the torsade is there for piercing effectively or for reinforcement.

So the tapping of a screw course into my upper jaw and the movement of a bolt-shaped object up it confirmed that I am conclusively on the way to a merger of man and bicycle. What sort of part could it be, the torsaded stem, if it had to serve as unit of human and cycle biomechanics simultaneously? I thought that as we have 32 teeth, and 32 spokes is a good number for a wheel (though less stout than a 36-spoke cross-laced), then today’s centaurification must have begun with a spoke, as good a place as any.

The repair was over. I rose to my feet, said thank you and staggered home. If you see me falling to the ground after abruptly jerking my head to the left or right, you’ll know that the transmutation is advancing.

Dr. Elizabeth Bennett
Registrar
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697

Dear Dr. Bennett:

In the course of job applications, I have recently requested transcripts from my undergraduate institution, Yale, and my graduate school, UCI. Both were obtained through the National Student Clearinghouse. The Yale transcript cost $7, without a convenience fee. UCI’s cost $17, with an additional convenience fee of $2.65.

I realize that it may be a point of Anteater pride, but surely you do not believe that UCI’s transcript is worth two-and-a-half times the price of Yale’s! Insofar as I can tell, the quality of the data, paper, and ink is the same. Given that I may require a dozen of these documents in the next six months, the added expense is both real and onerous. Please consider this when setting your fees.

Respectfully, Jonathan Cohen, MA ’91

[I have received no response to this message.]

1. The things that make life most worth living are “cost centers.”

2. One is human exactly insofar as one does not fit into someone else’s “business model.”

Some of my friends are outraged by the fact that one media story after another comes along analyzing to the nth degree the known facts in the case of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who committed suicide and took 150 strangers along with him, while at the same time the cold-blooded, deliberate murder of 148 university students in Kenya merits only a passing mention. Depending on your media feed, your results may differ: I’m not in the US and only rarely pick up the NYT, so I’ve seen less Lubitz and more Garissa– but not enough to make me feel that a just equality of attention has been applied to these two stories, analogous by number and by horror but different in so many other regards.

The hasty conclusion is that the Kenyans’ deaths matter less than the Europeans’ because they were black. And relatively less well-off (though as university students they were part of a lucky minority in their home country). To better gauge the proportion of sheer racism, however, read “The Structure of Foreign News” (1965) by the great peace scholar Johan Galtung, where it’s reported that the importance given to a news story will be a factor of geography (is it close to us?), of identification (did it happen to people like us?), legibility, confirmation bias, and other features– go read the article, it’s better than my ability to summarize today. So obviously for European media, the Germanwings crash ranks higher than a Kenyan massacre on many of these scores. But Galling wasn’t just observing that this is the way of the world: he was convinced that if this is the way of the world, it is wrong, and we should counterbalance our egocentric news media in order to give reality to the sufferings of people distant from us on this or that axis.

And another reason for paying more attention to Kenya and less to Germanwings. What happened in the Alps was a one-off thing, extremely unlikely to happen to you (though of course it could, despite whatever new security measures are installed). What happened at Garissa is a lamentably frequent thing these days, and could indeed happen to you, maybe not this week or this year, but sooner or later, if something is not done to rein in the free romp of heavily-armed religious madmen. I don’t specifically mean the madmen in the Villains of the Week Club; there’s a lot of madness to go around. Let us stop funding one bunch of madmen in the hopes that they will do something more agreeable to our interests than whatever the last bunch of madmen (possibly funded by us, or by people in competition with us) did. And (a far more subordinate issue) let us stop whingeing about whether the diagnosis of depression in the co-pilot’s case is stigmatizing for other depressed people, and blabbering about it with such frequency that this seems to be the major problem facing humanity at this moment. (People do tend to talk about what concerns them, and they like to fill the air with whatever they have expertise in, but enough is enough.) Let the ancient formula of damnatio memoriae be applied to Andreas what’s-his-name, and let the students of Garissa, the women of Nigeria, and all such victims of armed bigotry occupy our attention most urgently.

I was just flicking through Tolstoy’s writings on Christianity. Not very interesting reading, because I couldn’t find much to disagree with. The anarchist Count thought, as I do, that if your religion tells you to kill, torture, starve and maim people, it must not be a very good religion–it must rather be a tool of the devil. Whereas there is apparently a significant fraction of opinion today that conceives that killing people, the more the better, in the name of your religion glorifies that religion.

I do find it hard to turn the other cheek to that kind of diabolism.

(Some unintentional humor about Tolstoy’s break with religion here.)

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), last chapter:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now built on the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.

And then what?

A friend wrote to ask me to sign on to a petition demanding that the Modern Language Association, a scholarly society with “over 26,000 members in 100 countries,” apply the policies of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement toward Israeli universities and academics. I wrote back as follows:

I’ve been meaning to write you back but haven’t found the time or the words to do it right. I’m more than a little ambivalent about BDS. I share in the signers’ horror and anger about the occupation, continued settlement-building, harassment, denial of basic rights and necessities, etc., that have been the daily lot of most Palestinians for decades now. And Netanyahu’s promise to kill the two-state solution, which resulted in his reelection, just slams the door on the reasonable aspirations of all Palestinians. In all of this I’m with the proponents of BDS. But I can’t see myself as a co-signer because I don’t believe in boycotts based on nationality. In denying a platform to Israeli academics generally, a boycott would deny a platform to the “good Israelis” (the ones who are for peace, diplomacy, and neighborly relations with a Palestinian state) no less than to the “bad Israelis”; and since the “good Israelis” are in the disadvantaged position just now (the “bad Israelis” won’t give a damn about our boycott and will continue to appear in such fora as joint sessions of the US Congress), BDS would have the perverse effect of strengthening the dominance of the “bad Israelis” over political discourse concerning the future of Israel-Palestine. Although the statement says that it is directed at the Israeli state and not at individual Israeli academics, how is one to tell an Israeli colleague who has, let’s say, applied to give a paper at the MLA annual meeting that “it’s nothing personal” but s/he is not going to be accepted because of his/her nationality? I don’t think this is a good path for the MLA or any scholarly organization to go down. Free and open discourse, that’s what we should be about. I know that Palestinian intellectuals are routinely denied a platform for their views, and I am ready to protest and agitate for their freedom to travel, speak and have normal relations with their colleagues across the world.
You’ve probably heard all this before.
Anyway, that’s how I feel about it– it’s a little more complicated than “yes” or “no.”

We are living in horrible times. I don’t have a solution. But I can recognize a counterproductive measure.