Elective affinities

There’s an interesting multiblog conversation going on about the merits, functions, affects and effects of writing in “difficult” style. What’s meant is mostly not (although maybe it should be) the difficulty that any learner has as they raise their ‘game’ from Dr. Seuss and cereal boxes to elementary textbooks, introductory university texts, specialized field monographs, and so on. Rather, the discussion is about high-theoretical styles in the humanities that seem or are explicitly “difficult” on purpose. These texts require a substantial commitment of time and attention to unpack, sometimes for little evident gain. They have been pithily described as producing “academic Stockholm syndrome.”

The most extensive discussion I’ve seen has been on Larval Subjects. The focus there has been precisely on the nefarious ability of such texts to colonize the minds of their victims, turning them into abject disciples doomed to a twilight existence as slaves to the master text (I’m caricaturing a rich discussion outrageously, but this is in fact the drift of much of the fretting). My contribution there has been to offer the dead vole that such texts only have the power readers give them – like this blog, of course, feel free to practice your liberation strategies here – so perhaps we might want to look at why some readers but not others are inclined to such reverential or even masochistic responses to the text. After being mistakenly accused of missing the point about the real existence of such reader communities (of course there are) we reached a nice point of agreement that it might be worth looking into why they are disposed to select and react to texts in this apparently-troubling way. But since that line of inquiry was promptly dropped there, I’m picking it up here.

At one level there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about this dynamic of text identification except the fact that all these smart people seem to think it’s remarkable. Every text from Dr. Seuss on up, difficult or not, has the charismatic potential to generate reverent reading communities that might be described as ‘priesthoods’. My own experience is with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theorist who wrote about complex things quite clearly, all in all. There are a lot of pages of Gramsci, most of them in prison notebooks that he never had a chance to edit into a linear text, many of them on topics that very few people could care less about. This of course creates the opportunity for a mystery cult for those few who have virtuously read through all of it, sort of like the Kabbalah or the Hadith. Here are instances where the reading community in effect ADDS difficulty to the sacred text by digging out and canonizing every little detail, aside, and tangent. The characteristic assertion is that the plainish meanings of the core writings must be supplemented or even amended in light of these exclusive arcana. (Translation fetishists from the Qur’an to Weber and Foucault work the same way. Translations are not just workably second-best but unacceptable in comparison to the sacred revelation of the original.)

People choose these texts and these reading strategies for all the usual reasons they choose religions (and reject other religions). They may be born into them, or disposed toward them by cultural marking of the text. They may be seeking identity and collective effervescence in a community. The text may be culturally marked as normative or transgressive, enabling the effervescence of dominant or rebellious subculture identification. There may accordingly be a component of acceptance and/or rejection of authority, be it the father’s or the group’s. These are choices within structured fields of options and decision strategies. All of this falls under the sociology of what Weber called elective affinity and Bourdieu elaborated as the schemes of the habitus.

A sense of special belonging in something larger than oneself is, Durkheim tells us, the payoff for any religious affiliation. The content of this feeling is society, community. As I remarked in the previous post, a characteristic of modern societies is the weakening of traditional communities in favor of the elevation of the individual to sacred status. This is because of economic and demographic growth that creates a highly articulated and interdependent division of labor. Because we do so many things and serve so many functions, out of each others’ view so to speak (modern foucauldian surveillance has nothing on the continuous intimate familiarity of the medieval village, but we feel it much more keenly), we are only loosely able to regulate each other with collective morals.

The individual becomes the focus of modern societies’ sense of the sacred because it is only at that level that moral order can be established and enforced. As Durkheim noted in Suicide, this puts tremendous pressure on individuals to self-regulate, which is in principle impossible (by the same power I make a rule for myself I can break it, and so on). An internalized feel for our interdependence is needed, but that’s tricky to reconcile with the general message of individualism. The diagnostic malaise of the modern age is accordingly anomie, an anxious drifting sense of valueless disconnection.

The disposition to become religiously devoted to a text may certainly be found here in the ordinary dynamics of mismatch between the pressure put on individuals by their relative moral autonomy and their yearning for authoritative regulation in enfolding communities. The text offers direction, identity, belonging. This does not yet fully explain, however, why some readers are drawn to texts that they perceive to be harsh, demanding, inscrutable, and ultimately abusive. The problem with the “Stockholm syndrome” analogy is that books do not have guns and getaway cars; their covers may be shut at any time by a reader who feels her autonomy being threatened. The relationship is entirely at the reader’s option. Nor is an analogy to emotionally or physically abusive personal relationships, although tempting, entirely satisfactory. We often wonder why one partner stays with another who beats them, but there are often quite practical reasons having to do with plausible alternatives, livelihood, realistic physical fear, obligations to children or to relationship ideologies, and so on. None of these quite fits devotion to an abusive text.

There seems to be a completely sui generis personal commitment to misery at work, enacted or publicized as domination by the text despite the self-evident power mismatch between a book and a person. This is what makes a diagnosis of masochism so tempting. The deferral of gratification that marks the “spirit of capitalism” in Weber’s famous analysis if the Protestant character may also be at work, although this explanation may suffer from anachronism. Fortunately, Bourdieu extends this analysis of self-denial into later capitalism and connects the dots on a sociology of masochism by reference to the climbing strategies of the petty bourgeoisie. He refers to “cultural goodwill” as their disposition to practice extreme moral rigor and to accept subserviently the cultural authority of the dominant class fraction’s artifacts in exchange for imagined communion with their betters, a communion that is of course never entirely achieved.

Another possibility is that there’s nothing that advertises one’s mastery of difficult texts like complaint about the rigors of devotion to difficult texts. Except perhaps one-upping this move with a cultural meta-analysis of reading dispositions, as I’m doing here. There are also some people who seem to be complaining about something no matter what. This is apparently rooted in the evolutionary diversification of attention-getting strategies in infants as a function of brain chemistry – some laugh, some wail. Of course none of these explanations is mutually exclusive. Anyway, I read books and sometimes I get stuff I can use from them, sometimes I don’t. I personally recommend this strategy.

Giving offense

As I get more and more drug into the world of blogging I find exciting new friends to swap ideas with. This is a great pleasure. I also find all sorts of tender feelings to trample upon, virtual shoulders covered in virtual chips. I’m still thinking this all through, although, as a lifelong bull in a china shop, I’ve already got some firm ideas on the subject (see, e.g., this post and this page).

It strikes me in a half-baked way (I’m not even sure if I’m just talking about the blogosphere or I have a larger historical point to make) that there are two basic ways to give offense, with corresponding ways to manage courtesy. The first is to offend a role, position, or status with which the person is identified. The second is to offend the individual as such. Following Durkheim (tongue in cheek, since he ended up regretting this formulation), I’ll call these mechanical offense and organic offense. I am not making fun here, although I am personally very hard to offend and emotionally baffled by easy offense-taking. Both mechanical and organic offense are ‘robust’ in the sense that they connect back to the deepest ways in which our societies assign sacred values.

The core of mechanical offense is an idea of special privilege or “honor” within a status hierarchy as exemplified by “nobility.” Those nobles guarded their special privilege with a fierce sense of honor backed up by ritual violence (the duel). One had to be really careful what one said and how one said it to nobles because they were really chippy and spent a lot of time training with the weaponry at hand. Elaborate rules of courtesy were devised to intercept any possible infraction. As the nobles lost control of the means of legitimate state violence during the modernizing process (I’m talking, as usual, mostly about western Europe here) their private honor became even more chippy and even more ritually violent, until eventually you just weren’t a man in central Europe if you couldn’t ‘give satisfaction’ in a duel, weren’t in a dueling society and didn’t have duelling scars on your cheeks.

I’ve noticed a fair amount of dueling on the blogosphere. In a nietzschean way I kind of enjoy it as an enactment of a robuster form of self-assertion. But the core of any taking of offense is insecurity; and most of the offending and defending I see is of the second, more overtly insecure type which I’ve called organic offense. Here it is the individual her/himself who is considered sacred and inviolable, not their role, position or status. Accordingly, the person may assign offendable meaning to anything about her/himself whatsoever; in principle, only she/he can decide when a line has been crossed. This makes any detailed system of courtesy like the nobles had impossible.

It is therefore courteous to announce what one’s delicate areas are, but in the free flow of the web such announcements would need to be constantly refreshed or they would be left outside the reasonable attention of any given interlocutor. This would create quite a lot of clutter. On a blog where there may be dozens of commenters it is unrealistic to suppose that each new one would ascertain the personal rules and boundaries of all the others before posting. As a result, there’s a lot of casual giving and taking of offense, as well as clustering of offense communities. There’s also a lot of not saying anything but ‘excuse me, pardon me, coming through’ as all of the possible hurt feelings are anticipated and intercepted. The fussbudget veto is powerful and the pressure to self-edit is enormous. And the aggregate of offendables is virtually infinite; it may be impossible to say anything that would not offend someone.

All of this ties back to a more general feature of modern societies, again diagnosed by Durkheim. As traditional role and status hierarchies break down and the division of labor creates massive networks of functional interdependence, the individual becomes the focus of societies’ sense of sacredness. We just don’t know enough about each other to regulate each other, so self-regulation becomes the norm (within general systems like professional ethics and civic morals). These new morally-empowered individuals therefore enjoy all the personal sense of entitlement that the old nobilities did, only now there are millions of them, all out there with their fierce sense of personal honor, their chippiness and their sense of violence when violated. Yet it’s hard to really feel special when what makes one so is shared by everyone else.

What a mess.

Position and movement

There’s a thread over on Rough Theory that got me thinking a stray thought I didn’t want to clutter up that excellent site with, but did want to write down so I could see if I agreed with it. Without going into too much detail, the thread concerns what to make of Marx’s way of doing theory in general, and whether there’s something useful in the idea of ‘emergence’ in particular.

The conversation between N. Pepperell and Daniel strikes me as a classic sort of contrast between two very different ways of thinking about things, which I’ve tried to capture in my title for this post by hijacking Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as a rough analogy. Daniel is an excellent philosopher, and he is oriented toward position. N. Pepperell is also a outstanding philosopher, oriented toward movement. The uncertainty principle tells us that we can know either position or movement, but not both. Since this has to do with quantum physics (which I understand only vaguely) the analogy is a real stretch; let’s see if I can pull it off.

One way to do philosophy, speaking very roughly indeed, is to attempt to gain certainty – or at least clarity – by defining entities very precisely. The entities may be words, concepts, percepts, ideals, things (-in-themselves), or whatnot. Socrates’ dialogues are a famous example of this sort of philosophy. Through a process of logical questioning, Socrates attempts to determine the exact nature of a series of important concepts. In principle, it is possible to pin down exactly what ‘justice’ is, for example, or ‘the good’, and what the relations are between them.

To do great violence to a complex history, this kind of philosophical thinking passes up through Descartes and Kant (a mixed case) to analytic philosophy. The common project is to get the world and our thinking about it to sit still so that we can say clear and definite things about clear and definite things. The “sitting still” part is the “position” part I’m getting at.

The philosophy of position has often contrasted itself polemically against “sophism”, the kind of slick and slippery wordplay of which all philosophers are accused by their detractors. This is a defensive red herring. Meanwhile, playing in the branches of the family tree of positional philosophy are monkeys for whom things and thoughts cannot be pulled out of context and nailed down schematically without killing them, or at least denaturing them. These are the philosophers of movement, for whom it is often precisely the messy (from a positional perspective) relationality and changeability of things and concepts as they arise and bounce around in the world that characterizes them. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Dewey, Beauvoir, and late (but not early) Wittgenstein are this sort of philosopher. Nietzsche charmingly called his monkeying the “philosophy of the dangerous maybe.”

Marx was not a maybe kind of guy, but he did monkey around with concepts. Over on Rough Theory N. Pepperell is doing something very interesting at the moment: dissecting an instance of what happens when a philosopher of position (Georg Lukacs) attempts to explicate a philosopher of movement (Marx). Lukacs takes single instances of what Marx says and pins them down to static meanings in a static relationship to each other, then derives conclusions from this alignment, just as positional philosophy says one oughta. Meanwhile, Marx has taken what he said, realigned it with other concepts, added ‘context’, worked it all through a dynamical process in which each element is transformed in specific relations and interactions with the others, and come to quite different conclusions.

This process is ‘emergence’, but to a philosopher of position it just looks ‘confused’ because as Heisenberg told us, you can’t see motion if you’re trying to determine location. It just looks like a blur that needs to be resolved – by taking a snapshot!

The question of ‘intentionality’ is mixed up in all this, but I’ve muddied the waters enough for one post.

UPDATE: I am now satisfied that the “Daniel” simulacrum I used as the ‘philosopher of position’ has little relationship to the Daniel with whom I have been sharing pleasant and edifying chat in the comments to this post. I will leave faux “Daniel” there as an imaginary philosopher and, perhaps, a cautionary tale.

UPDATE: Ah. Thanks to the keen eyes at Perverse Egalitarianism, here is a better examplar of the type.

10 Ways to Be a Better Teacher

Just picked up this great quote on teaching from Rough Theory:

“…the first thing I learned as a teacher was that nobody is a good teacher for everybody, which I found a very bitter lesson. Slightly later in life I learned the corollary, which I found even worse in a way – that just about everybody is a good teacher for somebody. You meet these incredible klutzes, and it turns out there is somebody out there for whom they have made all of the difference. This observation led me to conclude that teaching is not a method, it’s a name for a whole group of social situations in which all kinds of things happen and about which it is not possible to say anything really very useful on a technical level.” – James Renfield

I can attest to all of this, including the further corollaries that we all look like incredible klutzes to someone; exactly the thing that makes us good in one situation makes us lousy in another; and being someone’s most favorite teacher unavoidably means being someone’s least.

Does this mean that “it’s all good?” Not by a long shot. But it does suggest that a certain diversity of teaching approach is a desirable thing, if not in individuals then certainly in departments and schools.

Conversations with Enkerli

On this and Enkerli’s blog a conversation about conversation has been developing. Conversation (thanks, Enkerli, for that link) is one of the things Enkerli is expert at, along with coffee, beer, and moving. I realize for many people this sort of “meta” analysis is a dead snooze, but not me! I never met a nalysis I didn’t like.

Enkerli has this really profound and admirable way of appreciating and teasing all at once. I dig it. He appreciates and teases me for speaking directly. Egad! Enkerli himself never fails to say what he wants to say, but his style is more gentle and diplomatic. I just can’t recommend his blog enough, not just for what he says, but for how he says it.

OK, I’m hoping I’ve reeled my friend Enkerli in for a more direct conversation about conversation here. Hey, Enkerli, here’s a case study for you. I wonder if you’ll tell me what you make of it? (Others who may be lurking, please feel free to join our conversation.)

My wife Rachel and I are both, more or less directly, from the northeastern U.S. We now live in the southeastern U.S., in the vicinity of Raleigh NC, where we have discovered that we are conversational barbarians.

Neither of us care to talk when we have nothing in particular to say. When we do, we both think it’s important, polite even, to plainly and directly say what we think. We take this to be an ethic about the content of conversation, and also a compliment to the general functionality of our partners in conversation.

We are aware that tender feelings may be hurt by directness. We ourselves have tender feelings and they are frequently bruised by the utterances of others. Our view is that this is our problem, not theirs. We think it’s our job to manage our own feelings, it’s other people’s job to manage theirs, and in the meantime the contents of conversations should be plain, direct and substantive. We’d rather know if our butts look fat in these jeans, and we’re not going to ask if we can’t handle the real answer. We bond pleasantly with people who share this conversational style; for example, we are well matched with each other.

Here in the South there are just a whole raft of things wrong with what I just said. In this culture content is important, but conversation’s function as a ritual of sociability is much more highly developed. Lots of talk with no overt content whatsoever happens here — its entire purpose seems to be to convey, without ever saying this, the message “I see you, I know you” (I refer to these, insensitively, as ‘butt-sniffing’ conversations).

Endless circumlocutions are used (including a lot of passive voice) to avoid giving any sort of direct offense to tender feelings. This seems nice, and it often really is. Yet, a fascinating thing is that offenses are being delivered, but it’s all subtly targeted and done under the cover of splendid courtesy and solicitude. It seems to me that as a result, Southerners intend all of their insults (and feel them all the more keenly), whereas Rachel and I just blunder into them (and cut others a lot of slack). I mean, if I want to tell you something you said is dumb I tell you “That’s dumb.” I don’t mean anything personal there — that sentence would be “You’re dumb.” If a Southerner wants to deliver the same message, ambiguous in the noted variants, he may say something like “What a fascinating way to think! I’ve hardly seen anything like it. You remind me so much of my sweet cousin Cletus.”

I know much better than to think one or the other of these conversational styles is ‘better’; or rather, I think they’re each probably ‘better’ for different purposes. I actually know how to perform ‘Southern’, although I’m far from expert. But it’s exhausting for me, and therefore I’m honestly baffled about what’s supposed to happen when these or other styles come into contact with each other. Enkerli, any thoughts? Or is this/am I just dumb?

There are two kinds of teachers in this world, Tuco.

Two kinds.

Those who teach, and those who discipline.

The disciplined questioning of discipline is most of good teaching.

(The undisciplined questioning of discipline is mere laziness.)

“The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous” –Shunryu Suzuki.

Work it, baby

The subject of academic work (often filtered through the issue of tenure) is all over the blogosphere, e.g. here and here. I also hear from my own colleagues about this regularly. In general, the consensus seems to be that academic work is hard, poorly paid, and underappreciated, with special tortures at tenure and promotion time.

This is not how I see things.

It’s true that academic work is hard at times. I’ve read over 4000 pages of student work so far this year, mostly in introductory World history — which will make one’s brain melt out one’s ears if anything will — and I’m feeling a little ptsd about the roughly 1000 pages of final papers and journals that will be coming in over the next couple of weeks. Committee work is often mere drudgery, and academic advising offers few inherent rewards. It’s also a bit of a strain to hold a clear thought in my head for long enough to write this blog, let alone produce quality scholarship.

Yada yada. Work is work. There’s always something ‘hard’ about work if that’s what you want to focus on. Golly am I glad I’m not working at a sewage treatment plant or mopping other people’s floors. As for getting paid more, what lawyers do looks pretty unappealing to me (I was married to one for quite a while) and I’d rather eat bark than be other people’s boss for a living.

As I wrote to a valued colleague with whom I disagree about all this, work is an ordinary feature of life. It’s a thing everyone does because they have to as responsible adults. If they don’t, they’re getting away with something. Most work, because it’s ordinary, is neither good nor bad, hard nor easy, it’s just a fact. Complaint is always available, but it’s not self-evidently a value, nor does complaining per se count as ‘critical thinking’.

Getting praise or recognition for ordinary work is really beside the point. It’s like wanting recognition for breathing or having two arms. You work, I work, everyone works, it is what it is. We get paid at market rate like anyone else. It’s all equally important and equally “hard” and equally ordinary to our general getting along together.

This all being said, there are kinds of work that seem more privileged or desirable than others, where the ordinariness of work is (occasionally) enhanced by an inherent feeling of fulfillment and accomplishment and value. (“Unalienated labor” in the marxist tradition.) Academic work is one of those, by common social agreement. Again, the job is what it is, so it’s really beside the point to talk about how hard it is or to expect recognition for it, although that’s always nice. But in a world full of ordinary jobs it’s odd to expect special recognition for doing work that is in itself especially rewarding. Not to mention the status.

In short, this work is a pretty sweet deal. I think it’s always a bad argument to try to claim sympathy for privileged work. It’s bad because it’s a quick way to get people who understand work to be an ordinary feature of human life, like university administrators, to stop taking you seriously.

This consideration leads to another. I read and hear colleagues talking about ‘how much’ they work, as if this is the point. See above for why it’s not. But let’s say that it is. Now the discussion is about quantitative measures of work. So my colleague says she works 60 hours or more a week. I actually doubt this; but it does depend on how you count, and since counting has been introduced as the standard, the way to settle the discussion is for her to start keeping timesheets in which she accounts for all her time. Just like lawyers or factory workers. And there should probably be some standards of efficiency — it’s not just how long you work, but how well (you don’t get sympathy or compensation for noodling around aimlessly on the clock for hours).

So now, if I’m a reasonable person faced with complaining about workload from someone who looks to people who work for a living like a spoiled privileged clueless twit, I’m going to have a strong incentive to install all manner of workplace reporting and surveillance and scrutiny to see that this work is, in fact, happening and efficiently too. We’re going to have to start talking about tangible work product. We may need to devise quantification schemes and tables of equivalence for different sorts of academic output. Let’s talk productivity. Welcome to the modern academy.

Well, fine. Accountability is a nice idea, in principle. But notice that the venerable vocation of teacher and scholar has by a strange and awful alchemy been converted into a mere job subject to the same managerial supervision as any other. No doubt this is comfortingly familiar to the academicized working class who entered and now dominate the profession as a result of the expansion of higher education in the U.S. over the last fifty years. At this point there’s nothing left but to join a union, the ultimate gesture of workplace proletarianization, to haggle over the details of this self-alienated labor.

Around here we’re going through an accreditation. Lots of scrutiny about what we do and how we do it. Everyone hates it. But we have very little to resist it with. It would be nice if we at least had our professional dignity, but no; instead, we ‘work hard’.

Sprinkler systems, Viagra, 4WD.

What do these things have in common? They’re all, in the context of contemporary consumer society, expensive preparations for unlikely contingencies.

I’ve covered the (responsible) hedonism side of consumerism already in the mirror, mirror post. Consuming stuff as such is obviously the essence; fiddling with what’s consumed exactly and according to what rules and standards is a matter of niche.

But it’s struck me for some time that there’s another side to consumption, what might be called the ‘risk management’ side. Here, what’s being purchased is not so much a thing as a relationship with the world.

(Veblen, Bourdieu and conspicuous consumption cut across both categories, so yes, I am aware that every ‘thing’ we buy and/or consume also has symbolic value as a statement in a conversation with significant others about our status. That’s not what I’m talking about yet.)

The immediate prompt for this thought bubbling to the surface was a story Rachel read this morning during coffee+newspaper time about a renovation project down in Fayetteville NC. There are some lovely old brick buildings there that are being urban-renewed – apparently at enormous cost, because the owner of one was talking about the inspectors coming out, noodling around with the discrepancies between original building code and new code, and ultimately requiring $500k-worth of redundant sprinklers. His quote was something like, “I tell people now that they’ll drown before they burn.”

Now, I suppose I’d rather drown than burn if I had to choose. But the main thought I had when she was telling this story is that this is a lot of money to spend on something that might, but probably won’t happen; in a world where many people still live without indoor plumbing of any kind.

This dredged up all my old thoughts about SUVs, which may be pleasing to my friend the Compulsive Pedestrian. They’re big, expensive, hard to drive safely, and use a lot of fuel. All of this seems like a bad idea to me, but when I ask people why they drive them, I get some interesting answers. For one, they hold a lot of people. So if all your friends wanted to go somewhere all at once, they would each drive their own SUV could all pile in for a nice carpool, yay. They’re also big, heavy and powerful (possibly your friends, definitely the SUVs), which means that in the event of some kind of carjacking emergency or road rage situation you can crash and roll over many times kick some ass and get home safe. Finally, they have 4wd (four-wheel drive), which means that if you happen to get a yen for the great outdoors you can drive on roads to the paved campground, then drive much deeper into the woods to disrupt serene nature access nature’s wonders in style; if it snows you can get a false sense of invulnerability and become a hurtling menace to all conduct your life normally; and if there’s some sort of nuclear or bacterial apocalypse you can be killed and have it stolen by someone who knows how to use a gun better than you off-road your family to safety in the wilderness.

In short, the appeal of SUVs is that they are (questionable) insurance against highly unlikely contingencies. Rolling gated communities, I sometimes call them. The luxury of insulation from life’s little insults. The farther away we can push the unlikely danger, the better (and more expensive). Look at how much the U.S. is spending in Iraq – hundreds of billions of dollars to date – to intercept the vanishingly-unlikely contingency that Saddam or al-Quaeda could seriously hurt us with WMDs.

I’m suggesting that the amount we can spend on preparing for increasingly unlikely contingencies is some kind of direct index of our wealth and power. Viagra can probably hang as an example of what I mean without too much comment. Apparently one makes the likelihood of actually needing it significantly higher if one uses it with hookers. I invite suggestions about other consumption practices that fit this description (the unlikely contingency thing, not the more likely with hookers thing).

Steam train revisited: thinking through the Edict of Nantes

In the textbook we use to teach introductory World history there’s a picture of a peasant leader from the Peasants’ War in the Holy Roman Empire during the early 16th C. He’s a handsome bearded man with his arms tied behind him, attached to a stake with a short line. The stake is surrounded a couple of paces out with a ring of dry burning wood. He is undoubtedly roasting slowly to death.

This seems sort of unfriendly to the students, and I’d have to agree. But since it’s a History class we have to try to figure out what was going on in the heads of everyone involved where it ‘made sense’ to them. There were of course various dimensions of political and class conflict in these events, but the religious conflict of the early Reformation is easier to get at and revealing of the profound cultural differences that help to make history worth studying, so I focus at first on that.

One obvious wonder has to do with the disconnect between this seemingly-unfriendly treatment and what we today would think of as ordinary human rights. We might not like someone, we may even think it’s ok to kill them. But doing so by inflicting lengthy extraordinary pain is beyond a kind of threshold to us. (I tease students that if the threat of this kind of punishment did not deter the peasant leader, what chance does painless execution have to be deterrent? I also look outward to the history of the Atlantic slave trade and point out that if Europeans were acting in nasty burny ways toward ‘each other’, there’s not much point in being shocked about how badly they treated the Indians and Africans.)

So what was the moral context in which this sort of public spectacle of pain made sense? Was it just the amoral brutality of war? Yes, there was some of that. When you’ve just got done stabbing and hacking at other people’s flesh with edged weapons, and perhaps been carved like deli meat a bit yourself, a little extra fire might not seem like a big deal. Among the participants in this particular war were early mass armies with little sense of noblesse oblige, along with rural knights whose self-restraint was being seriously tested by a shift of power to the towns that soon made them obsolete.

This explanation won’t do the whole trick, however. There’s a symbolic, even ritually sacred quality to the execution that isn’t captured by mere brutality or resentment. I suggest to the students that we take seriously for a moment the idea of heaven and hell, eternal reward and punishment. Let’s say we really believed that. It would start to matter a whole lot how we lived our lives here. There’s no sense in talking about hell if ‘it’s all good’, so apparently there are ways of living that will send you or others there; and given the scale of the punishment, it would be very important to avoid them. It would also be nice and friendly to do everything in your power to save others from this fate.

In the scale of eternity, this peasant’s torturous end is fleeting. Nor is the pain of earthly fire any comparison to the furnaces of hell. Furthermore, from his perpective this pain is also as nothing compared to an eternity of bliss. At the individual level, therefore, his torture is of little consequence; but at the symbolic level it represents a vivid contrast between an object lesson in the wages of sin, on the one hand, and his own virtuous martyrdom, on the other. (The former is why the execution had to be done in public. The latter is part of why eventually executions were moved away from public view.)

‘Human rights’ are quite beside the point here. They are about the secular sacredness of the human individual, but the flesh being fried here is much bigger – ideas of fundamental truth and eternal salvation or damnation. No individual can measure up to this level of moral universalism.

Which is why the Edict of Nantes and its various analogs are so significant. It’s not actually that Henry IV said ‘it’s all good’. What the Edict actually says, in context, is that we think you’re still wrong and you’re still going to hell, but we’re exhausted by all the killing each other over it so we’re not going to try to stop you anymore; and if you can talk other poor fools into following you there, so be it. This turned the murderous logic of moral absolutism into a pragmatic policy of toleration.

It was for the intervening centuries and processes I hope to get to in good time to turn this license to be wrong into the notion that each of us is right in our own way.

Mirror, mirror

I’ve been trying to figure out the deeper logic of ‘fair trade’ bananas, coffee, etc.; certified organics; Priuses (Prii?) and other obviously righteous consumer responses to the world’s many injustices.

Right on the spot they make loads of sense. Fair, organic, green, check. My confusion comes from tracking them back as attempts to subvert the destructive exploitativeness of the free market. I’m not clear on how they can do that. These alternatives are expensive. For example fair trade coffee, by definition, costs more than unfair trade coffee. According to the logic of the market this makes it a luxury niche commodity. It may be ‘worth it’ for two basic reasons: because a happy worker grows better coffee, and/or because morally pure coffee ‘tastes’ better than the exploitative kind. So far, so good I guess.

But where’d that extra money come from to spend on the version of the commodity deluxified by fairness? Given the core/periphery asymmetries of the global economy, in which billions of people can’t afford daily coffee at all, the answer would seem to me to track back to exploitation no matter what. We have the money to buy coffee ‘fairly’ only because we’re playing the buy low-sell high game well somewhere else in the economy. So who’s getting screwed to make us feel better about our caffeine fix?