Hildegarde

But not the kind in the old Ellery Queen novels.

A friend of mine sent me a list of ten modern writers he thinks will still be being read a hundred years from now. 

I couldn’t come up with twelve, but I did come up with some. 

But in coming up with them, it occurred to me that the issue here has substantially changed since the 19th century, when people first tried to make such lists.

It’s not so much that literacy is more widespread than it was when Matthew Arnold wrote Culture and Anarchy. In fact, in some ways, it’s probably not.

But what is more widespread is our ability to publish. 

Even print publication is monumentally easier and cheaper than it used to be, but you can add to that ebooks, audiobooks and all the rest of it. 

Books that would have sunk without a trace fifty years ago can now reach the much-lowered critical mass to keep themselves alive without a problem. 

And that changes the nature of the exercise.  A book that beat overwhelming odds to last a hundred years had to have a quality we needed to pay attention to.  A book that beat very small odds to last that long, not so much.

But, for what it’s worth, the following are the writers I think are going to make it, plus three individual books.  They’re in no particular order.

1) W. Somerset Maugham

2) Ernest Hemingway

3) Stephen King

4) Robert Heinlein

5) J.R.R. Tolkein

6) Arthur Conan Doyle

7) William Faulkner

8) Flannery O’Connor

9) The Godfather

10) Gone With The Wind

11)Atlas Shrugged

Please note:  I am NOT saying that any of these are “great literature.” 

I’m just saying I think they’ll still be around in 2100.

Now give me yours–not what you like, or what you think is “good,” but what you think will last.

So, it is Sunday, and I’m doing my usual Sunday morning thing.  Gustav Leonhardt is playing the harpsichord with The Well-Tempered Clavier on the CD player behind me, and I’ve just spent the entire first disc reading more of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times.

I’ve just reached the point of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, but what interests me more at the moment is the account of Stalin’s rise to power in the USSR.

And what interests me there is not Stalin  himself, who seems to have been mostly a common grade thug with good opportunities, but the response of European and American intellectuals and artists to him. 

Every once in a while, I make mention here of a long essay by the critic George Steiner called “The Archives of Eden.” 

In it, Steiner makes the point, repeatedly, that although  he is willing to grant that democracies do in fact make life infinitely better for the vast majorities of mankind, only authoritarian societies can produce great art, or great civilization.

Great art, Steiner says, needs either to be supported by a class recognized as superior to the common run of mankind, or actively resisted by a class bent on destroying it. 

In both cases, art is recognized as serious and important and as having a standard that is not relative, that is not merely “taste” but that has an objective basis that must be learned and is not entirely natural.

Democratic society, being what it is, recognizes only taste, and implicitly implies that one man’s taste is just as good as another’s.  This leaves only one standard for the worth of art:  popularity.   

This need to seek validation is the acclaim of the multitude corrupts all art because it draws the artist into a position where he is required to satisfy the public taste rather than the internal and objective requirements of his art.

The public taste, in this case, means not only the obvious public taste (like, say, Die Hard movies), but the taste of the kind of people who run the National Endowment for the Arts or PBS.   Although the percentage of the public that supports the kind of art supported by these organizations is small than the percentage that supports action movies, they still, at base, accept the idea that art is entertainment, that it is a minor part of life, and not the most important thing.

Now, I’ve got a lot of problems with Steiner’s thesis, not the least of them being that I think that last bit–art becomes merely entertainment and a minor part of life–is just plain wrong.  It’s of course true that some people in democratic societies look on art that way, but my guess is that some people in authoritarian societies do, too.   But I also think that if you look around you in this society, you’ll find plenty of people who believe passionately that art is the most important thing.  It’s just not necessarily the kind of art Mr. Steiner would call “great.”

But right now, what I want to look at is Steiner himself, as a person, at least as he presents himself in what he writes.

Because Steiner doesn’t just say that authoritarian societies are the only ones that produce great art, but that the suffering of larger numbers of people in those societies is an acceptible price to pay for that great art.

I think that would be a questionable thing to say no matter who said it, but coming from Steiner, it stops me cold.

Steiner is here, in the United States, because his father pulled his immediate family out of German just ahead of the Nazis.  Of the uncles, aunts, and cousins who refused to believe that Hitler had to be taken seriously, not a single one of them survived the war. 

I don’t know if Steiner thinks that any of the art that came out of (or out of the resistance to) Nazi Germany is great, but he certainly does think that some of the art that came out of the Communist USSR is. 

To be fair, of course, I should note that his preferred authoritarian and hierarchical societies are not the totalitarian ones, but the aristocratic ones.   He is not nostalgic for repression and terror as public policy, but for a world in which categories of human beings and their habits and tastes are recognized on a hierarchical scale.

All that being said, however, the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I read this essay is that Steiner ought to know better.  Creating a society where the vast majority of human beings not only get to live reasonably well but get to develop into decent and moral people is not a small thing, and it’s also certainly worth the possibility that no one in it will ever create a David or an Eroica.

But knowing better is something it seems that a certain kind of  intellectual mind is not capable of. 

One of the things that is very clear in reading a history of the period strictly chronologically is that it becomes impossible to avoid the knowledge that virtually every single thing we think of as a signature of Naziism was in fact done at least a decade earlier by Stalin. 

The first concentration camps and death camps were instituted by Stalin, almost 10 years before Hitler ever became Chancellor. Mass executions without trial, forced starvation of particular ethnic groups (note the racism), the knock on the door in the middle of the night, the coercion of children into reporting their parents–all of it was invented not by Hitler but by either Lenin or Stalin, and where Lenin was the inventor, Stalin was the perfecter.

 What interests me here is this:  there was, during the Twenties and Thirties, a positive parade of English and American writers and artists who visited the new Soviet Union and declared it a paradise, or the next best thing to one.

Some of these were people–like Lincoln Steffens–who had prior commitments as Communists.  Most of them, however, were not. 

They did, of course, have the vaguely “socialist” leanings that were common on most levels of Society in the Thirties and common in intellectual circles in the Twenties as well. 

For most of my life, the explanation I’ve heard about how this all happened was that the writers and artists involved, shell shocked from the Great War and further traumatized by the Depression, were so desperate to believe in something that they deluded themselves about the things they say in Russia.

The more I read in the history of the period, however, the more obvious it is that this cannot be true.  They saw and they were not deluded.  They just lied.

And not only did they lie, they lied on a scale so monumental, it can sometimes be difficult to take in.  They looked on labor camps, general starvation, state terror, and all the rest of it and then just made stuff up to send as “reports” back home. 

And, what’s worse, in some ways, many of them are still doing it.  The Nation devoted an issue, a few months back, on what was good about the Soviet Union.  They left out all the labor camps and the engineered famines and the mass summary executions, but they left them out as if they’d never existed, as if they weren’t something we needed to take into account about the society in question.

But it’s worse than this, really, because in spite of the frequently made claims that intellectuals only make these allowances on the Left, the fact is that they have no trouble at all making the same allowances on the Right.

And big allowances.

You could make a case that Nietzsche’s message was distorted by his devotees, but Martin Heidigger was a Nazi.  He was a member of the Nazi Party, and he personally carried out the policy of removing Jews from the faculty of his own university after Hitler came to power.  Paul de Man was a Nazi collaborator during the German occupation of France, and it’s not possible to look very long at the wartime behavior of Jean-Paul Sartre without realizing that he was one, too.  After the war, he became a doctrinaire Stalinist, because that’s how that works, and Sartre was always doctrinaire.

Steiner’s take on the conditions necessary for the production of great art is one possible explanation for this behavior, as is Johnson’s that these were the people who, in a believing age, would have been the clergy, and they were just looking for another religion to be the clergy of.

But these explanations seem to me to be grossly inadequate, as does the one that says these people expect to be part of the ruling class rather than the ruled.

In fact, for most of these people–the historical people now, Bernard Shaw and Lady Astor and the Webbs–the issue seems not to be wanting to be part of a ruling class as wanting to have a ruling class to look up to. 

They all seem to be looking, desperately, for somebody or something to worship.

What I want to know, at the moment, is something more basic.

I want to know if there is something inherent in certain kinds of intellectual work that predisposes people to be apostles of totalitarianism. 

Or if this is an aberration brought about by the particular history of the West in modernty.

In a couple of minutes, I have to go into the other room and correct my first set of papers of the term.  I have friends who say I shouldn’t assign the things this early.  I have friends who say I shouldn’t assign the damned things this early, but here we are.

At any rate:

1) I looked at the comments to the lost post, and I have to say that I didn’t designate the curriculum on purpose.

I was asking a question of principle, IF we think that some things are good to know in themselves (whether or not the student will eventually “use” them in a job), THEN shouldn’t we do everything we can to make sure that all children learn them.

For the purposes of this question, WHAT we decide is necessary for all children to learn is irrelevant–it could be long division, or carpentry, or the complete works of Lord Paul McCartney.

Once we have decided that it is important for all children to learn whatever it is, it seems to be to be necessary to make sure that children do in fact learn them.

What we do now is to put a bunch of children in a room and accept–even under our various accountability schemes–that some children will simply never get it. 

And that’s why I said I think that we don’t really mean it when we say we want all children to learn X.  We run, rather, a kind of sorting scheme–X serves as a standard by which we separate sheep from goats from aspidistra plants.

2) When I said that if we do want all children to learn X, then we must consider X useful in and of itself in some way and  not just “useful” in the ordinary sense.

Consider, for a moment, algebra.

If Susan is a student of very low academic ability who will, no matter what we teach her, be unable to do any job but that of a fast food server or a convenience store clerk, should we insist she learn basic algebra?

How about Jack, who is brighter than that, but only wants to spend his life as a garage mechanic?

Bringing Susan to the pont where she can do algebra is going to take a lot of time and tons of money–but if we think algebra is important for people to  know, then we should spend both in the project of getting her where she needs to do.

But neither Susan nor Jack will likely “use” algebra in their adult lives.  If we want them to know algebra, then there is something about algebra that is “good in itself,” that functions in some way for Susan and Jack and for the rest of us.

Maybe it provides good mental training and makes the people who understand it more intellectually disciplined than they would be otherwise.  Maybe we think all children should be inducted into the cult of Protagoras.

We had a huge fuss over just this issue a few years ago in Connecticut, when the state Board of Education put out guidelines requiring schools to emphasize “practical” mathematics and not the “theoretical” kind, because most people can’t learn that stuff to begin with and nobody will ever use it again after they leave school.

When we commit to bringing all children up to speed on whatever set of standards we decide to have, we must know at the beginning that some subset of them will never use the information they get. 

If we still think it’s important that they learn it, then we must think the information and skills it imparts (algebra, carpentry, whatever) is “good in itself,” functions for us beyond the basically utilitarian.

3) It is possible that we do NOT think there is anything that is important for all children to learn–that what we’re looking at is a system meant not to make sure all children learn X, but to separate children who learn X easily from those who don’t, and shuffling them to their respective vocational destinies.

The system we have now certainly behaves as if this is the case. 

And I have a lot of objections to sorting systems, not the least of which is that they almost always end up sorting for the wrong things.

But if this is what we’re doing, and what we want to do, I think we should say so.

4) This sort of thing would, of course, be very, very expensive, but a lot of things are very, very expensive.  If we think they’re important to do, we do them.

Like I said, the answer here may be very simple.  We may not really be after doing what we say we are doing.  We may not think that algebra, or even reading comprehension, is important for every child to learn.  We may only want to separate “bright” children from the other kind.

5) When I was much younger, I used to think the educational system was set up the way it was (and is) so that society could say, “It’s not OUR fault that you ended up going nowhere in life.  YOU screwed up.  Just look at your grades!”

I’d better go correct those papers.

I suppose the real news is that fall is definitely coming.  This is the second day in a row I’ve woken up to find myself cold enough to want the heat on.  I haven’t actually put the heat on, mind you.  I’ve got some deep seated ideological resistance to putting the heat on before October. And later in the day, the air will warm up enough for me to want the air conditioner.

Still, just a week ago I’d come downstairs and wait the air on as fast a I could get the machine to work. 

So the term has started, the weather is cooler in the mornings, and I’m reading a book by a man who has always seen a great many similarities between the student unrest in Weimar and the student unrest in the US in the Sixties.

I’ve started getting up very early and going to bed very early and being nearly catatonic by midafternoon. 

Lately, I’ve been catatonic while watching a little movie called The Blind Side, which is one of those things based on a true story, and based on one whose main characters are all still living.

It would be something to consider, I think, just how close to reality we need things “based on a true story” to be, but for right now, I want to take the story in this movie as if it were completely real, because it’s made me think about something.

For those of you who have never seen it, The Blind Side is the story of  how a homeless black teenager named Michael Oher was taken in by the (very) well-off family of Sean and Leigh Ann Tuohy, shepherded through high school, helped through college and–well.

These days, Michael Oher is an offensive tackle for the Baltimore Ravens. 

I could use this story to go on a rant about the way we require people who are good at playing football and want to play football to suffer their way through college just to get a chance to play professionally, but there’s something else going on here.

If the movie is to be believed, Michael Oher only managed to make the minimal high school grade point average to be eligible for college football scholarships because the Tuohys provided him with a tutor, and he only maintained his eligibility at the University of Mississippi because the Tuohys paid for that same tutor through all four  years, including providing her with an apartment near campus.

In other words, Michael Oher was extremely talented athletically, but he was not talented at all academically.  In an everyday world, he might have stumbled through school with a D average and then out into the world to flip burgers.  In fact, athletic talent or not, that’s almost certainly what would have happened to him if the Tuohys hadn’t found him, assuming he managed to finish high school at all.

The Tuohys did find him, however, and the tutoring did work.   Oher even made the Dean’s list at Mississippi at least once. 

The chances are good that other kids, given that kind of intense tutoring, could learn at at least the same level. 

But lacking the athletic ability, or some other kind of talent, that would learn at that level in order to end up flipping the same burgers they would have flipped without it. 

Would it therefore make any sense for us to teach it to them, to push them until they reached a standard they could never reach without pushing and that they would almost certainly fall away from as their lives went out?

One of the things about discussions of schools and learning is that we all of us–no matter what side of the issues we’re on–tend to tacitly assume that the major function of education is sorting.  We separate smart people from less smart ones and shuffle them each off to their proper spheres of life.

This tacit assumption is the same for the people who want to maintain standards and allow a lot of kids to just plain fail, and for the people who know that if standards are maintained a lot of kids will fail and who therefore want to lower or corrupt the standards. 

For all the yelling and screaming about whether kids can find the United States on a globe or write a standard English sentence or divide 4,954 by 72, all we are really talking about is sorting, and how it ought to be done.

What if, instead of doing that, we do for every kid–and I mean every kid, not just “disadvantaged” ones or ones with “learning disabilities”–what the Tuohys did with Michael Oher. 

If there is some intrinsic worth to the information we want children and adolescents to learn in schools and colleges–if the standards they are asked to meet have some point beyond giving us a handy little tool to judge them , why aren’t we making sure that all children learn it, whether they’re academically gifted or not?

This would, of course, require a lot more than the kinds of “accommodations” now required under various forms of education policy. 

And it would cost a lot of money.

And if we mean “everyone,” then some children would be using that tutoring time to start learning differential equations in eighth grade or to read Moby Dick in fifth.

What I am suggesting here is not a plan for reducing inequality of results among students.  It might even exacerbate them, as children with higher levels of talent would almost certainly find themselves in a position to outpace their slower classmates even more than they do now.

But if we actually think it’s important for people to know how to do long division and what caused the War of 1812, then maybe we should do whatever it takes to get them to know it. 

And yes, I know that’s what all the educational reform projects say they’re trying to do, but it isn’t what they’re actually doing. 

It’s not even what they’re trying to do. 

A Michael Oher would never be able to sit in a classroom, absorb a bunch of information and then regurgitate it.  It doesn’t matter what kind of pedagogy is on offer, or how good his teacher is. 

Some students are simply not going to get it without truly heroic, and intensely i ndividualized, kinds of help.

The question is–does it make any sense to give it to them?  Is the content of the material we want them to learn valuable in and of itself, even if it doesn’t lead to a “good job” or a college education?

Will their lives be better in some way if they learn these things?  Will our lives be better in some way if they learn these things?

What is it we’re actually trying to do here?

It is the first Sunday of the term, and therefore the first Sunday I’ve had in a long time that fits the pattern of my Official Day Off. 

It’s also the first day in five without the depredations of Extreme Weather, including violent thunder and wind storms and ongoing tornado warnings.  Today is just pleasant and sunny and nice, and I don’t have to worry about the electricity going off any second.   I may even get a chicken cooked for dinner this evening without being on pins and needles that I’m about to lose the use of my oven. 

In other words, I’m actually fairly calm.

I therefore spent the morning with a huge cup of Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey tea, a copy of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, and a lot of Elgar, including the Enigma Variations.

I have what I can only call a variable taste for Elgar.  The early work tends to a triumphalism that makes me uncomfortable.  A lot of the later work is so depressing it’s hard to listen to without drifting into thoughts of suicide. 

Johnson, however, is someone I can recommend without hesitation.  I discussed one of his books on this blog a couple of years ago–Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky–but most of what he writes is straightforward history, and that includes Modern Times. 

Johnson is interesting to me on a lot of levels, including being himself interested in the connection between the history of ideas and the history of events, but what I can never forget is that he’s made a life for himself as an historian outside the university. 

There’s a certain ongoing history of that in the UK that is not so evident here, especially lately.  It makes a difference, I think, to the way the history is understood and treated.

In Modern Times, Johnson traces the influences of four men–Marx, Freud, Darwin and Nietzsche–on the formation and eventual character of what we think of as, well, now.

What all this reading and calmness brought me back to was that long discussion about education back there, which stopped before the Enlightenment period. 

I always did mean to get back to that place, and I think I’m coming up on doing it in the next few days, but before that I want to ask a question:  why is it that all the periods of history that I truly admire are unstable?

In fact, it’s not just that those periods are unstable.  It’s that they seem to be inherently unstable.  It’s as if the aspects of them that make them congenial to me also make them incapable of lasting very long.

In a way, of course, this is less of a puzzle that it seems.  Western civilization is itself more unstable than many others. 

Every once in a while, when we have discussions about Natural Rights Theory (modern version),  someone here will chime in with “there are lots of civilizations which last for millennia without observing  individual rights!”

And, of course, there are.  But there is no phase of Western civilization that lasts more than a few centuries.  The Classical world gave way to the Dark Ages which gave way to the Medieval which gave way to the Renaissance which gave way to the Enlightenment which gave way to whatever it is we have now. 

And although there definitely were continuities between them, each phase was and is distinctly its own,

This is, I think, our legacy from the Greeks, a group of people who could never take yes for an answer–and if you think they’ve changed, you should pay more attention to the news from Europe.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates is supposed to have said, and we’ve been obsessively analyzing ourself, our neighbors, our institutions, and the very claim that existence is a fact ever since.

It’s the kind of thing that makes me think Aristophanes may have had a point.

(If you’re new here and you don’t get that reference, I suggest you get hold of Aristophanes’s play The Clouds and give it a shot.  You’d be amazed at how much nothing has changed in 3000 years.)

At any rate, the kinds of civilizations I admire seem to require lots of thinking and questioning and pushing and pulling, and because they require those things, they are unstable.

The bigger question here is why these periods always seem to collapse into awfulness of one kind or the other.

That’s not to say that they lead to nothing but awfulness.  They don’t. Without the Dark Ages, there could have been no Middle Ages and no Renaissance.  Without the mess in the wake of the Reformation, there could have been no   Victorian era as we know it.  Without the squalid and murderous Twenties-to-Thirties, there could have been no Forties-to-Fifties. 

I keep looking at things like that and hoping that the mess we created with the Sixties will eventually result in another admirable era down the road.

What’s undeniable, however, is that whenever the crash and burn happens, it happens because people are rebelling not against the worst of the era, but against the best of it. 

Luther wanted to obliterate not only the manifest crimes of the Renaissance church, but the movement to rely on reason and empirical observation as a method to understand the world.  The nationalist revolutionary movements that arose after the First World War sought to break up those consolidations that had finally put an end to ethnic warfare in Europe for close to 100 years.

It’s enough to give you the idea that Freud was right in one and only one thing:  that human beings do have something called a death wish, an internal and sometimes unstoppable craving  for suicide.

In the meantime, I have come up with some preliminary notes on what it is societies have to have to seem to be admirable to me.

Maybe I’ll get to that tomorrow.  It’s a nice day, for once, and I could actually be getting something done.

So, it really is the start of the term, and at the end of the first week, I’m completely exhausted.  I’m exhausted even though I slept in this morning as much as I ever sleep in if I’m not sick.  I think I made it all the way to six o’clock before.

And maybe it was because I was tired, but when I got onto the computer this morning, instead of working, I read articles.  Just before I logged on to the computer, I finished the Roger Kimball book I was talking about last time.

Why is it that some people are almost fanatically addicted to the idea of “equality.”

I put the scare quotes around that word because we have to be very careful with it.  There are all kinds of equality, and some of them are in direct contradiction to other kinds.

There is equality before the law, which should mean that Wall Street bankers go to jail when they break it just like low level drug dealers do. 

Lately, this kind of equality seems to have been completely obliterated in this nation. 

 And there has, of course, been no time in all of history when equality before the law operated perfectly.  Human nature is what it is. 

A lot of people decrying “income inequality” today claim that they want to make people’s incomes more equal because by doing so, they will make it more likely that there will be equality before the law.

But this is not true, at least on an historical level.  Societies with enforced equality of condition (well, for most people) have in fact had far less equality before the law than societies without it.  What changes is  not the abuses of power, but the people abusing it.   It’s really not progress when “rich guy can buy better lawyer to get him off” is exchanged for “the law is what the regulator says it is, so if he doesn’t like you, you’re screwed.”

Then there is equality before God, which is in fact where our idea of equality before the law comes from–the largely Christian idea that each and every one of us is responsible morally on exactly the same terms, before a judge who doesn’t give a whit for things like rank and power, money and race.

Some of us believe in God and some of us don’t, but the fact is that those two kinds of equality are not only admirable in themselves, but actually possible in the real world. 

Given the nature of human beings, we may only be able to approximate equality before the law, but we can approximate it fairly closely–and we’ve done it, and not necessarily at times when equality of condition was anywhere evident.

As for equality before God–well, that would depend on whether God exists, and whether, if he exists, he follows a description at least similar to the Christian story.

There is then equality of condition, which seems–also from the historical record–to be largely impossible at any level of social organization above the most basically tribal.  Stone Age societies had equality of condition.  At any level of society beyond that, what we see is increasingly inequality of condition. 

Some people say, of course, that there ought to be equality of condition, that we should make it happen even if it does happen.

The underlying assumption there, of course, is that none of us “deserves” any more than anybody else, or that none of us “deserves” any more above a certain level, usually left vague, if not completely undefined.

In order to argue this, however, we must do one of two things.

Either we have to say that nothing matter but our initial born formal equality:  that what each of us “deserves” is to be defined by the fact that we are equal in the sense of being equal before the law or equal before God, and nothing else about us actually matters.

Or we must make a case that the obvious inequalities between us do not really exist.

This is the “social contruction” argument about human differences.

It’s  not true that we are born with different aptitudes, and it’s not true that our choices are actually choices. 

Rather, our aptitudes develop and our choices are determined by the environments in which we grow up, by the attitudes and prejudices of the people around us, by the opportunities we were offered and the judgments we received from the people around us.

The problem with arguing against this sort of thing is that it’s half true, and the half that is true is largely trivial except in very extreme cases. Yes, of course, environment, education and culture all have an impact on how human beings grow, behave, and choose,   but in any even relatively open society they are not definitive for most people.

And they don’t, in fact, obliterate what is born into us–an ability to sing or tone deafness, a facility at thinking abstractly or a talent for mechanics.

There’s also a purely pragmatic argument to be made for providing every child out there with the best resources available to us–we may not be able to turn every John Henry into a nuclear physicist or the next Mozart, but it surely can’t hurt him (and can only help us) to give him a shot and learning what’s out there to be learned.

What’s really interesting to me, however, is the fact that the people who clamor most for equality of condition do not in fact believe that people are equal in this sense–that they are born with the same talents and abilities and only fail to develop them because of inequality of condition.

In fact, nobody believes this.  It is so obviously untrue, it’s staggering to me that anybody ever pretends otherwise. 

But what’s even more staggering is that these same people also do not believe that talent is evenly spread across races and sexes.

If you want to find people who truly and deeply hold the idea that ability and behavior have nothing to do with race, you go to any community college classroom in the Northeast.  You don’t go to the Ivies, because there isn’t anybody there who honestly believes that race is irrelevant. 

To a man and women, they think people are born smart or not, and that’s an end to it.  A friend of mine, who teaches at an Ivy located in the New England states–there are three of them–says that feminism was a Godsend to the upper tier because it made it possible to limit the number of people who just couldn’t cut it that they would have to accommodate on campus.  “Diversity” might be an imperative, but it could be achieved by your daughter’s first class mind instead of by keeping a a smile on your face while some barely literate product of the black middle class tried to sound intellectual at the departmental Christmas party.

These are not pleasant attitudes, and these are not very pleasant–or in any sane sense moral–people, but my question is this:

Since these people obviously do not believe that ability and behavior are socially determined (no matter what they say), and since they do not believe talent is equally distributed by race and ethnicity–why do they want to say they do.

I think part of it can be attributed to an overflow of the envy factor. 

What they really resent is that other people–people they don’t respect very much, like popular writers and single-minded entrepreneurs who cater to the mass taste–make so much more than they do and (inevitably) get so much more respect from society at large.

They leveling they really want to do is not to bring up people from the bottom, but to bring down people from the top, so that their own condition is more equal to that of those now materially above them.

But the entire thing gets too hysterical for that to be the entire explanation. 

Part of it is surely a deep seated moral guilt.  On the most important moral issue of their time–the relative inborn abilities between races–they’re on the wrong side, even if they pretend not to be when they’re speaking in public.

But the phenomenon is still very confusing to me.

Or sort of.  Well, it has in fact started, and this time, for me, with one bollocks after another.  I have no idea if I’ve spelled that word right.

I have been reading–a book called The Fortunes of Permanence, by Roger Kimball.  It’s a strange sort of thing.  Kimball is one of the people who has edited The New Criterion, which is a “conservative” journal of (mostly) high culture.

Kimball is always talking about the “chapters” in this book, but I don’t think the pieces were really written, orginally, as chapters.  The book has the feel of a collection, and as a collection, some of it is very interesting.

One of the things I would recommend here is the chapter/essay on Rudyard Kipling.Kimball  has a lot to say about what is valuable and lasting in Kipling’s work, and also about why he has been for so long persona non grata in academic and high culture circles.

The Kipling piece and several others are obviously book reviews, of the long and discursive kind.  There’s one on The Dangerous Book for Boys that makes me feel a lot happier about it than the reports I’ve heard up to now have made me.

And there are some beautiful pieces on the depredations of “modern” art and architecture–stairs that go nowhere! floating penises!–that are almost impossibly funny.

The problem, for me, comes with the chapters on relativism in modern life that are meant to be the overarching structure of the book. 

There’s nothing wrong with these chapters, exactly, except that they feel a little lost or banal or–I don’t know.

Kimball is a conservative of the T.S. Eliot variety.  He wants a return to the standards of high culture.

On the other hand, he is very much aware that what passes for high culture these days–staircases that go nowhere! floating penises!–is often  not authentically high culture at all.

In fact, some of the best chapters in the book are the ones in which he eviscerates what passes for high art and high literature on the contemporary scene.

The problem, I think, is something that has become endemic among high culture conservatives–how to find a position that will allow you to say that Shakespeare is objectively better than Ann Beattie, but that will not automatically land you in a place where you’re forced to say that Jersey Shore is just as much literature as Shakespeare is.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the question is wrong–that we get sidetracked into questions of what is or isn’t high art, when the real question is what’s wrong with the existence and popularity of both Jersey Shore andAmerican Beauty,about Lady Gaga and all those floating penises.

The issue is not what is “good” art and what is “bad,” or what is “literature” and what is “trash.”

The issue is why so much of the culture–both high and popular, both elite and mass–has come to concentrate so singlemindedly on the ugly and the stupid and  the nihilistic. 

That issue is a lot larger, and more important, than any standards we might want to issue for painting or sculpture or film or books. 

It transcends that discussion, because the ugliness phenomenon exists these days o n every cultural level.  Sometimes I think it has become the defining cultural phenomenon of our age.

Kimball calls it a “return to animality,” and I know what he means–and what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas would have meant, because they’d have thought the same thing if they were alive and writing now-

I don’t know if it’s the right term.  But it’s something.

I wonder why everybody has so much trouble with this.

I don’t agree with Cheryl.  I don’t think it is impossible to separate the moral and the legal when it comes to making law.

In fact, not only is it not impossible, it is desperately necessary.  The law exists to keep the peace.  That’s all it exists for.  It is not a substitute for morality, and it cannot safely be used to enforce morality.

JD and Mique give me arguments–and they are, again, all MORAL arguments, not legal ones.

Nor is it my suggestion that would take us on a path to Peter Singer–it’s Mique’s, JD’s, and the rest.

Consider this: 

First, there is the suggestion that abortion is MORALLY all right if there has been a rape, because in that case the woman is an “innocent victim.”

But the child didn’t commit the rape–why is it morally all right to kill it?  Isn’t the child still innocent?

And if it IS morally all right to kill it, then what else is morally all right–can I kill my rapist’s child by another woman? 

If I can morally murder an innocent person because of an immoral act committed against me by a third party, where does my moral right to kill end? 

When women declare that men who oppose legal abortion are interested in punishing women for having sex, and not in preserving the life of the child, this is the kind of argument they mean. 

The child in this case is just as “innocent” as the woman is.

The issue here is this:  what may a government be allowed to require of its citizens?

If the government may require some of its citizens to put their physical bodies to the use and benefit of other people against the donor’s will, what are its limitations (if any) in making such a demand?

At the very least–if we are to uphold the principle that there must be no double standards–the government should require that men provide the same sort or services to their biological children.  If the men don’t want to, they should be arrest, tied down and forced. 

Any other course of action would be to give the game away–to return LEGAL abortion policy into a regime for punishing women for having sex.

If it’s really the child’s life we care about, then surely both parents, and not just one, should be obligated to provide the use of their bodies to keep the child alive.

But why limit the right of the government to command such services just to  your biological children? 

If we’ve searched the country and there is no other available donor, why shouldn’t you be required, whether you want to or not, to provide the kidney or the bone marrow or whatever is needed?  After all, the child has done nothing to deserve to die.

And no, I don’t think “you don’t have to do anything to kill the child” takes kidney donation, et al, off the table. 

Leave the kid to starve, or let it play unsupervised in a dangerous area, and watch how fast you’ll be charged with negligent homicide. 

It seems to me self-evident that no government should be allowed to have any such power over its citizens.  And, on top of that, it has a number of advantages over the present legal reasoning on abortion:

1) it leaves the moral case against abortion intact, and in no way implies that it is morally acceptable to kill of f people who are disabled or ill.

That is, in fact, what our current legal reasoning on abortion does–it allows abortions when otherwise banned (in, for instance, the second trimester) if the child is likely to be born with birth defects or a congenital illness.

And that is, as well, where Peter Singer’s ideas get their force–because he’s quite right.  There isn’t much difference between aborting before birth or “aborting” after it, and if we can kill the child because it is disabled in the womb, we have no reason to refuse a right to kill the child once it is out of it.

What I’m saying here is that you have no right to kill the child at all.

You only have a right to terminate the pregnancy. 

At the present state of technology, you often  have to do the second to get the first–but technology marches on, and if it becomes possible to keep the child alive outside the womb, then removing the child from the womb will be all you have a right to expect to have no interference with.

2) The second advantage this approach has is that it requires no tortuous readings of the Constitution, no resort to privacy rights or penumbras.

When these arguments have been made on issues of organ donation, etc, they have been made on 13th amendment grounds–that is, as issues of slavery and involunary servitude. 

These are not small things. 

A month or so ago, I wrote a post that outlined my position on the legality of abortion.

Note–I said the LEGALITY.

The moral issue is entirely different.

I am ONLY talking about whether or not a government has a right to compel a woman to continue a pregnancy against her will.

This is important, because my take on the morality of (most) abortions is much different than my take on their legality.

My take on the LEGALITY is this–law and precedent are clear that no person can be compelled to give the use and benefit of  his physical body (NOT his time, or his money, but his actual blood and skin and bone) to another person against his ( and I should hope also her) will.

If your twelve year old child requires  your bone marrow to survive leukemia, or one of your kidneys to survive childhood diabetes–even if, without it, there is a certainly the child will die, the courts have said you cannot be compelled to provide the body part.

This seems to me to be an exact analogy to abortion–a child in the womb makes use and has the benefit of its mother’s body, the mothers’ blood and skin and bone, through all nine months of pregnancy.

If that mother could not be compelled to provide bone marrow to that child once born, why can she be compelled to provide her digestive system, circulatory system and all the rest to a child in her womb?  Why can she even be compelled to provide the housing?

Somebody commented on that post by saying that the two cases were not similar, and I couldn’t make them similar just by saying so.

And I didn’t respond to that at the time.

I didn’t respond to it because I was just flabbergasted–I can’t find a way in which the two cases are NOT similar? 

In fact, the only thing that is at all dissimilar between the two things is that pregnancy is far more invasive on just about every level.

The commenter said that the two cases couldn’t be similar “just because the mother provided nourishment.”

But in fact the provision of nourishment as a taking of her physical body WOULD make the two cases similar, all on its own.

And in pregnancy, the woman does NOT “just provide nourishment.”

In fact, for many months, the child uses almost all the mother’s body systems, and uses them in such a way that they alter the mother’s body functions as long as she lives.

Sometimes that alteration is minor, and sometimes it is major, but it always occurs. 

So I’ll ask now what I should have asked then:

In what way is pregnancy NOT a case where one human being (the fetus) is making use of the physical body (blood and skin and bone) of another human being (the mother).

And if the child is definitely doing that–and I really can’t see how you can argue otherwise–then why may the mother be compelled to provide the service against her will, when a few short months later she could NOT be compelled to provide bone marrow or a kidney to that same child?

This is what happens when I try to take a day off.

I have a very odd relationship to television.  I spent a lot of my life without it.  From the time I left home to live at school until I married Bill, I never owned one, and only lived with a roommate who owned one for about six months.  And over the course of the years since Bill died, I’ve cancelled out cable service for long periods on at least three occasions, usually because I thought the boys were watching too much of it.

And even when I’ve had television in the house, it’s often been off by decree.  For most of their younger school lives, Greg and Matt were not allowed to watch television at all (even on week-ends) during the term time (except for the news, which I watch), and they were only allowed to watch television during vacations if they could pass a quiz I’d set up for them first.  Every day.

One year, Greg couldn’t get permission to watch television during the summer until he was able to recite the Bill of Rights verbatin, explain them, and identify and give a summary of about 15 SCOTUS cases dealing with them.

If anybody ever came up to one of my children to do one of those surveys about “what Americans know,” they would NOT be among those who think that “from each according to his ability” is in the Bill of Rights, and they would be able to find the US on a globe.

Okay, whatever.  It’s one of those things.

I do watch television beyond the news sometimes, and what I seem to get sucked into are those long miniseries things–Band of Brothers, Boss, Political Animals–that all the mininetworks now seem to be very interested in producing.

My big favorite of these at the moment is a thing called The Newsroom, written and produced by Aaron Sorkin, who did the same for The West Wing.

But, me being me, I don’t watch these things when they’re on.  I almost never even know when they’re on.  I watch them when they hit the FOD, and then I watch episodes in bunches.

A couple of days ago, after I finished work, I ran about four episodes of The Newsroom in succession.  It’s very well done, even though, being by Aaron Sorkin, you can figure out the politics before  you start.  The rumor is that Sorkin researched the way a newsroom operates by investigating the operations of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, and you can sort of see it.  The main character (Will McAvoy) is played by Jeff Daniels, who sort of looks like Olbermann.  And the snippets we get of actual segments of the show sort of sound like Olbermann.

On the other hand, much as I loved Countdown while it was still on, I wouldn’t call it a news show, and I don’t think MSNBC called it that, either.

I don’t think even Olbermann himself would have called it that.

I am not going to recommend the show–a lot of you are just going to be annoyed by the politics.  Aaron Sorkin is Aaron Sorkin.  I think the term “liberal bubble” was invented just for him. 

For those of you who will not be annoyed by the politics, though–this thing is really, really, really well done.

And in this last set of episodes I watched, it also managed to bring up and interesting issue–something else Sorkin is good at, so good at that I keep wishing he’d develop more scope in his understanding of ideas.

It’s not the issue of news vs entertainment per se that comes up–although of course it does, as a foundation.  But the broad issue so described is about things like the doings of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, vs reports on the debt ceiling or the war in Iraq.

And on that level, the issue is easy to figure out.  Yes, what’s happening in the war in Iraq is Real News, and what is happening to Lindsay Lohan really is not.

On The Newsroom, however, what happens is this.  There’s a big story out there which the show is (as one character says) “too highbrow to cover,” and as a result, the show loses fully half its viewers to another station in the same time slot that is covering that story.

My problem is what the story is–it’s the Casey Anthony thing. 

Now, I have no problem at all with people who say that celebrity stories aren’t Real News, because I don’t think they are.  And that impression is getting stronger and stronger as the years go by and more and more of the “celebrities” are people I don’t recognize. 

But is it really the case that something like the Casey Anthony investigation and trial is not Real News?

It would seem to me that crime in general, and murder in particular, is almost the definition of Real News. 

This would be true without reservation in any local context.  One of the most important things the news does is to tell us what is happening to our friends and neighbors, and what is happening in our communities that could affect our lives.

And crime does, in fact, affect our lives.  We make different decisions about what to do and where to go based on whether or not we think the area and the activity is safe.  Crime rates are one of the things our local and state governments need to take into account when they make decisions about laws, about police presence, about lots of things.

Given that, the underlying assumption of the episode must have been that the Casey Anthony case was not Real News because the television program in question had national, rather than local or regional, reach–that is, that crime, and especially sensational crime and murder, is not information important for people to have if they live outside the locality where it occurred.

And in this, I think the show was just wrong.

I do understand the objections to the way in which the Casey Anthony case was covered by most news outlets. 

The approach taken by people like Nancy Grace–it’s her show that gets half of Will McAvoy’s audience when Will won’t cover Casey–

Anyway, I think the approach taken by people like Nancy Grace was in fact to turn the story into entertainment, to not so much report the facts as to make the entire thing into a circus.  See Casey Anthony’s hair in court today?  What does that say about her state of mind?  Look at her face–she shows no remorse at all!  There are rumors coming from reputable sources that say Casey Anthony intended to have an abortion and her parents forced her not to!

This sort of thing is not Real News, and I understand the position of a serious news program not to be involved with it.  In fact, I’ll go farther.  This sort of thing is not only not Real News, it’s destructive. It creates  a climate in which the general assumption is that you can “just tell” if the accused is guilty or not–he cried or he didn’t, he sat stonyfaced and that means he had no emotions.

But there is a difference between that kind of thing and the honest reporting of a story about a murder. 

And it’s not true, any longer, that such stories only concern the localities in which they happen.

This is most clear in the case of serial killers, who can be very mobile and operate in several states.  Ted Bundy, after all, murdered his victims in Washington state, Colorado, Michigan and Florida, to name just some.  That’s a national murder story if there every was one.

But even much more localized cases tell us something about the state of our nation and the characters of our fellow citizens.  They tell us what the pathologies are, and where they are.

They tell us where the fault line are.

We don’t, of course, pay attention to every local murder.  We know the stats on the usual stupid stuff.  The unusual ones, though, raise questions, and they’re questions we should be prepared to answer.

One of the characters on The Newsroom explained the appeal of the Nancy-Grace style reporting of these things as being one where the viewer could watch and tell herself:  that child deserved so much more than that mother gave her; she deserved a mother like ME.

And maybe that is the appeal of that kind of thing.  I tend to be bored by it, mostly because it feels repetitious and trivial.

But it’s one thing to say that the way some stories are reported is wrong.

And it’s another to say that those stories should not be reported at all.

Whatever Sorkin wants, the rest of us don’t turn into the news for economic analysis and policy debates to the exclusion of everything else happening on the planet.