Humiliation

Jennifer Homans has a powerful piece in the March 22, 2012, issue of The New York Review of Books. She is the widow of the historian and public intellectual (although he himself disliked being called that) Tony Judt. In the article, she describes how he completed his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, while combating the increasing ravages of ALS. Of the many significant comments she makes, one in particular stood out:

Justice, inequality, good-faith politics: these had always been the touchstones of Tony’s thought, but now other ideas were crowding in, ideas that needed to be made sense of privately and emotionally, but also — because this is how Tony was and how he thought — collectively and intellectually. Humiliation, shame, fear, anger: these were not just feelings. They were political ideas.

Humiliation was the most important. Tony felt it acutely and it was a theme in his correspondence with others afflicted by ALS. Many of these people were younger than Tony and destitute or medically uninsured, with narrow if not ruined life possibilities. They needed help — practical social and medical services. Humiliation was a terrible feeling, but, as he felt strongly, it was also — and should be treated as — an ugly social fact. “Night,” his essay describing his “imprisonment without parole,” was partly for these new friends, and so, in another key, was the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century, where Tony mounted as fierce — and felt — a case as ever he had for our need to “think socially”: to make human rather than monetary gain the goal of social policy. This was not the politics of disability or special interest; it was about collective responsibility and the duty of us all to each other.

Reinforcing this is Judt's comment in his essay 'Night':

Helplessness is humiliating even in a passing crisis — imagine or recall some occasion when you have fallen down or otherwise required physical assistance from strangers. Imagine the mind’s response to the knowledge that the peculiarly humiliating helplessness of ALS is a life sentence (we speak blithely of death sentences in this connection, but actually the latter would be a relief).

I claim that the strongest element of contemporary political discourse is the expression of helplessness, the inability of most people to have any useful impact on the direction of politics, and their deep awareness of that helplessness. Following Judt, humiliation is a violation of human dignity. Ergo, helplessness leads to the violation of human dignity. Ergo, it is a responsibility of social policy reduce helplessness. This is a direction for public policy, a determination of how society can achieve real human gain. For myself, I think that education is a part of the solution, and that's the tack I'm taking.

How it Used to Be

Saul of Tarsus said that it is better to marry than to burn. Perhaps that is the approach of the modern anti-sex movements. In his collection of stories and essays, In the American Grain (1925), William Carlos Williams tells of what this leads to:

It’s inevitable that men shall go down the scale until they strike what they want – or can get. There was the young medical fellow, a New Englander, in the State Asylum at Worcester, a periodic maniac; his history fascinated me. He is a clever physician, and a man of excellent antecedents. Shortly after college (and a medical education takes so long that a man is in his late twenties before he can afford to marry) he married a woman far below his class, – he had to to get her. Shortly realizing his fatal error, he promptly, being a sensitive man, went insane, – and was as promptly divorced and committed to the asylum by his wife, proving the soundness of his mind – fundamentally. He has married three times since and has always gone mad: a little like Strindberg. But the reasoning here is truly American. Trained a Puritan, he was bursting for lack of sexual satisfaction. Unwilling to commit the sin of fornication and being unable to get a wife of his own class, due to poverty, or what not – he married someone below his scale of aesthetic or emotional relief. Thus the greater was sacrificed to the lesser. Now he was overcome with anguish. His life was ruined. He bitterly assailed himself for his folly and lost all control. In the hospital, he worked well in the laboratory – but he was truly insane. There is no class to absorb this stress.

(From the essay 'Jacataqua')

Rational Incompetence

At last, a theoretical explanation for why federal agency heads are so often idiots. In the January 2012 issue of Journal of Theoretical Politics, Jinhee Jo and Lawrence S. Rothenberg provide a fairly simple model that seems to provide some insight.

Of course, the journal is not available if you don't have access to SAGE, but here is the basic idea:

Our analysis provides a rationale and conditions for what we label rational incompetence. Specifically, we present a model in which a President nominates and the Senate approves or rejects an appointee. Besides choosing where in an ideological space a nomination will lie, the President also can determine whether an appointee is competent or not, with lack of competence translating into greater variance over outcomes than is faced with competence. Interestingly, while the political actors are not inherently risk seeking, there is a set of conditions which generate empirical predictions for what Goemans and Fey (2009) label institutionally-induced risk taking, by which it is in both the President’s and the relevant filibuster pivot’s best interests to propose and approve an incompetent administrator in equilibrium. This provides a rationale for incompetence beyond pure loyalty or patronage, and seems roughly in accord with notable contemporary cases of incompetent administration.

And here is their conclusion:

It is intuitive to assume that elected decision makers always want agencies, and therefore those whom they appoint to guide them, to be competent. However, when one considers a separation of powers system, such as that found in the United States, intuition does not necessarily survive more careful analysis.

Rather, we have shown that conditions do exist in which both the chief executive and the Senate will prefer to take a gamble and appoint an incumbent about whom there is less certainty about which policy outcomes they will produce. This risk-taking behavior is induced by the strategic situation in which presidents and legislators find themselves rather than an inherent tendency to be risk-seeking. It is not shocking then that, when something goes terribly wrong at an agency, and a very bad, politically costly, outcome is realized, there is often a seemingly unqualified appointment to place blame on.

If you can get to it, there are some interesting case studies in the article.

Owen Flanagan on Studying the Ancients

In his new book, The Bodhisattva's Brain, Owen Flanagan 'naturalizes' Buddhism - i.e., sees what's left when you take out stuff like nirvana and karma - and finds that it is a wisdom tradition that could supplement Confucianism and Aristotelianism for the 21st century.

Talking about the book on berfrois, Flanagan adds this crisp statement that works for a lot of academic situations:

Some think that studying ancient wisdom traditions involves anachronism and ethnocentrism. One talks across too much time and one talks and thinks in a manner too biased by one’s own perspective for the inquiry and the reflection to be profitable. Plus, these are old dead people. I say, accept that such inquiry is anachronistic and ethnocentric and get over it. We live in the most exciting multicultural and cosmopolitan times, where people come from numerous different traditions. It is in paying respectful attention to where others are coming from that we can see more clearly how we see and do things, as well as the multifarious ways to do things differently.

Rest of interview at http://www.berfrois.com/2011/11/owen-flanagan-naturalistic-buddhism/.

Where is the Sweet Revolution?

From Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry story, 'Gedali', translated by Peter Constantine:

“So let’s say we say ‘yes’ to the Revolution. But does that mean that we’re supposed to say ‘no’ to the Sabbath?’” Gedali begins, enmeshing me in the silken cords of his smoky eyes. “Yes to the Revolution! Yes! But the Revolution keeps hiding from Gedali and sending gunfire ahead of itself.”

“The sun cannot enter eyes that are squeezed shut,” I say to the old man, “but we shall rip open those closed eyes!”

“The Pole has closed my eyes,” the old man whispers almost inaudibly. “The Pole, that evil dog! He grabs the Jew and rips out his beard, oy, the hound! But now they are beating him, the evil dog! This is marvelous, this is the Revolution! But then the same man who beat the Pole says to me, ‘Gedali, we are requisitioning your gramophone!’ ‘But gentlemen,’ I tell the Revolution, ‘I love music!’ And what does the Revolution answer me? ‘You don’t know what you love, Gedali! I am going to shoot you, and then you’ll know, and I cannot not shoot, because I am the Revolution!’”

“The Revolution cannot not shoot, Gedali,” I tell the old man, “because it is the Revolution.”

“But my dear Pan! The Pole did shoot, because he is the counterrevolution. And you shoot because you are the Revolution. But Revolution is happiness. And happiness does not like orphans in its house. A good man does good deeds. The Revolution is the good deed done by good men. But good men do not kill. Hence the Revolution is done by bad men. But the Poles are also bad men. Who is going to tell Gedali which is the Revolution and which the counterrevolution? I have studied the Talmud. I love the commentaries of Rashi and the books of Maimonides. And there are also other people in Zhitomir who understand. And so all of us learned men fall to the floor and shout with a single voice, ‘Woe unto us, where is the sweet Revolution?’”

The old man fell silent. And we saw the first star breaking through and meandering along the Milky Way.

An Uncomfortably Familiar Assessment

I have had plenty of time here to discover two of my capital faults, which have pursued and tormented me all my life. One is that I could never be bothered to learn the mechanical part of anything I wanted to work on or should have worked on. That is why, though I have plenty of natural ability, I have accomplished so little. Either I tried to master it by sheer force of intellect, in which case my success or failure was a matter of chance, or, if I wanted to do something really well and with proper deliberation, I had misgivings and could not finish it. My other fault, which is closely related to the first, is that I have never been prepared to devote as much time to any piece of work as it required. I possess the fortunate gift of being able to think of many things and see their connexions in a short time, but, in consequence, the detailed execution of a work, step by step, irritates and bores me. Now it is high time for me to mend my ways. I am in the land of the Arts; let me study them really thoroughly, so that I may find peace and joy for the rest of my life and be able to go on to something else.

That would be Goethe, from his Italian Journey.

A New Word

I have been trying to coin a word. Starting from satyagraha, or commitment to truth, which was coined by Gandhi to describe his 'philosophical school', I am proposing the word avidyagraha. Like satyagraha this is a portmanteau, combining the Sanskrit avidya ('ignorance') and agraha ('insistence'). It would be defined as either the act of closing your eyes, putting your fingers in your ears, and going 'lalalalalala!', or the mental equivalent thereof. I've long wanted a word for that.

New words are problematic. Knut Hamson has much to say about this in his novel Hunger:

All at once I snapped my fingers a couple of times and laughed. Hellfire and damnation! I suddenly imagined I had discovered a new word! I sat up in bed, and said: It is not in the language, I have discovered it – Kuboaa. It has letters just like a real word, by sweet Jesus, man, you have discovered a word!... Kuboaa… of tremendous linguistic significance.

The word stood out clearly in front of me in the dark.

I sat with wide eyes astonished at my discovery, laughing with joy. Then I fell to whispering: they could very well be spying on me, and I must act so as to keep my invention secret. I had arrived at the joyful insanity hunger was: I was empty and free of pain, and my thoughts no longer had any check. I debated everything silently with myself. My thoughts took amazing leaps as I tried to establish the meaning of my new word. It needn’t mean either God or the Tivoli Gardens, and who had said it had to mean cattle show? I clenched my fists hard and repeated again: Who said it had to mean cattle show? When I thought it over, it was in fact not even necessary that it mean padlock or sunrise. In a word like that it was very easy to find meaning. I would just wait and see. In the meantime, I would sleep on it.

I lay back on the cot and chuckled, but said nothing, did not commit myself either for or against. Some time went by and I remained excited, the new word plagued me incessantly, kept on returning, finally took control of my thoughts entirely and made me sober down. I had formulated my opinion on what the word did not mean, but I had not yet come to a decision on what it did mean. ‘That is a secondary matter!’ I said aloud to myself, and grabbed myself by the arm and repeated that it was a secondary matter. The word, thanks to God, has been discovered and that was the main thing. But thoughts pestered me constantly and kept me from falling asleep: nothing seemed to me good enough for this remarkable word. Finally I sat up a second time in bed, took my head between both hands, and said, ‘No, no, that is exactly what is impossible – letting it mean emigration or tobacco factory! If it could have meant something like that, I would have made the decision a long time ago and taken the consequences.’ No, the word was actually intended to mean something spiritual, a feeling, a state of mind – if I could only understand it? And I thought and thought to find something spiritual. It occurred to me that someone was talking, butting into my chat, and I answered angrily: ‘I beg your pardon? For an idiot, you are all alone in the field! Yarn? Go to hell!’ Why should I be obligated to let it mean yarn when I had a special aversion to its meaning yarn? I had discovered the word myself, and I was perfectly within my rights to let it mean whatever I wanted it to, for that matter. So far as I knew, I had not yet committed myself….