The left intellectuals and the God trick

I’ve had bits of a thought on some recent blog exchanges on intellectual activism and the role of the left intellectual stuck in my throat for the last little while, and since I’m now right up against my deadline for the Rethinking Marxism talk I have to prepare I’m just going to hack them up in a little pile. Pardon the mess.

Dysphoria is currently a theme for radical exploration – ‘a loss of symbolic attachments’ – really? How is this not just routine existential crises, anomie? In modern life someone who hasn’t had at least one existential crisis yet isn’t even in the game. That’s like an ante.

But it is interesting to think that it takes the shape of an simple intensification of the anomie and alienation that constitute modern experience in general, the very anomie and alienation that make collective politics difficult to establish – and it might, thus, lead one to suspect, because of this, that it is an unlikely place to set forward as a basis point for a radical politics. But strong arguments general start from unlikely places – this is what makes them arguments and not simply restatements of conventional wisdom.

As ads without products goes on to say, it would be cool if this diagnosis then turned toward an unexpected new cure. No such luck so far: first we figure out what’s wrong, get militant, then maybe we can figure something out. Is the anti-energy of angst politically tappable? For sure: see Fascists, Nazis, al Qaeda. Teh question is whether it can be channeled appealingly.

There’s trouble with the moralizing that animates the Left when it relies on Big Principles, so that the theoretical push tends toward the Big Problem, Big Enemy and Big Solution, a whole theology. There’s always the danger of producing and reproducing the Big Other to sustain our sense of the Big Us. This God trick may give revolutionaries the leverage to act (in part by creating what they fight against). Along the way it may generate Orthodoxy struggles – who’s on the side of the angels, who’s a dupe, a shill, a renegade, an enemy of the people.

Further, if the Other construct and the Us construct are mythologies, it’s a gamble whether the messier assemblages of real situations and processes can be horsed into a close enough approximation of the model to get it to work. More likely the projective everywhere of the Big Other and the functional nowhere of the Big Us are just paralyzing, leading to a spastic cycle of spectacular gesture and dysphoric despond. This is especially true if anything short of the Big Revolutionary Gesture is stigmatized as complicity with The Man.

I don’t find very productive the kind of analysis where ‘capitalism’ (or ‘patriarchy’, or ‘white supremacy’, or ‘Satan’) turns out just to be a name for everything that pisses us off. Nor do I think every malaise and dispepsia is potentially a little slice of revolution. How they might become so needs some work that isn’t just a smokescreen for self-validation. And therefore I agree with Duncan that “if intellectuals want to be politically useful in some way, as intellectuals, some of the more useful things they can do are 1) provide an adequate analysis of current social, economic and political conditions; 2) start generating concrete proposals [based on 1)] for social, political and economic alternatives.”

Again, my apologies for the mess.

Existential infinity

I suspect that the ‘infinity standard’ is a dead, beaten and buried horse, but for my own amusement I have a ribbon to wrap it in. Consider this post collateral damage from a long commute alone with my thoughts during an NPR pledge drive.

To recap for convenience, in comments on the first post of the thread Kvond perceptively noted that “the Common Sense digestion of the guilt people feel for ‘not doing enough’ probably has very [little] to do with… an Infinity Standard. It probably has to do with letting specific people or models down that one feels they can’t live up to (not Infinite Models), and has to do with the prior, one might almost say, a priori establishment of subjectivity itself as a condition for guilt (at least in the West), a mechanism of storing up energies of self-infliction, much more locally organized and defined from any logic of infinity (real or imagined).”

I agreed that the subjective experience of an infinity standard was properly understood not as the product of a top-down logical argument from principles, but of a bottom-up accumulation of local obligations and their affective baggage. I think that’s how morals actually work; as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Bourdieu show in their various ways, systematic moral philosophies range from attempts to universalize local practices to reports on the fantasies of their authors. The feeling of infinity comes when the local claims on one’s moral action overload the buffer on one’s attention and energy, producing a paralyzing system crash. As I metaphorized it later in the thread, the resulting guilt effect is like “the shrapnel of moral artillery being fired by various competing communities tear[ing] into those of us with a sense of obligation to something larger than ourselves but no stable sense of what that might be.”

The key point is the locality of effective standards and obligations. Kvond reports feeling those local claims as dispiriting straight-jackets. Seen this way, the abstraction of infinity offers a liberating expansion of possibility. For any of us who grew up in tight-knit families, small towns or other relatively insular communities this argument is immediately evocative. Over-regulation can be a problem (corresponding to the “dualism/received knowledge” positions in Perry’s cognitive/ethical development schema).

But abstract infinity is only abstractly liberating, just as Marx argued in “On the Jewish Question” that abstract liberty is only abstractly liberating. In practice, Durkheim said, one must be regulated by a moral system that offers definite guidelines and goals, otherwise ‘it’s all good’ and ‘it’s all bad’ become equally available and equally unavoidable as floating judgments (corresponding to the “multiplicity/subjective knowledge” positions in Perry). Goffman’s warning against the tyranny of diffuse aims is on point here: when it’s not clear what the standards are, it can’t be clear what counts as accomplishment and an infinity of judgment is enabled.

We’re probably alright as long as we remain focused on personal liberation from a specific set of restrictive local morals, because they remain regulative even in their negation. Infinity looks like possibility from this vantage. The harrowing moment comes when we decenter our own locality and fully enter a world of multiple other local moral systems and agendas, each with equally coherent and valid claims on our attention and effort. Here the over-regulation is not coming from narrowness, but from overwhelming saturation. The syndrome is not claustrophobia, but agoraphobia.

As Neddy Merrill put it recently in quite a different context,

if we follow the ‘do the most good’ thought wherever it leads, we end up having really robust obligations that don’t leave room for our projects and commitments, e.g. friendships, hobbies, and so on. Or, in another version, the ‘do the most good’ thought leaves us alienated or estranged from our projects because of the way it prompts us to think of their value from the impartial point of view.

This is the question in relation to the trivially narrow yuppie quandary of whether to give money to Harvard University, and already it’s oversaturated. If we open the discussion up to all the possible wrongs that could be addressed by all the possible rights, any particular course of action recommended by one compelling standard becomes not just hopelessly inadequate by the plurality of standards but actively pernicious by other compelling standards. There are a lot of goalposts, they’re all a-wiggle, and the holder may not be on our team.

Be the target, Charlie Brown.

As wonderful as the internet and the world of blogging are for increasing our interaction density and enabling liberation from narrow, constraining provincialisms of practice, thought and ethic, that very same decentering dynamic potentially exposes us to an overwhelming multiplicity of compelling claims on our attention and energy, and potential judgments of our practice. The internet is just the most richly interactive of many modern media that not only delocalize us but then relocalize us in a much larger, more kaleidoscopic field of effective standards and obligations. Closing off or artificially limiting this paralyzing legion of ‘trolls’ and ‘grey vampires’, as a number of bloggers have done recently, is certainly one coherent coping strategy, and could suggest a relativist or perhaps merely multiplicity/subjectivist position in Perry’s old cognitive/ethical schema.

Perry suggests instead that we move to what he called “commitment:” “An affirmation, choice, or decision … made in the awareness of relativism (distinct from commitments never questioned). Agency is experienced as within the individual with a fully internalized and coherent value structure.” Yes, I end up saying, there are many other good things one might do, but this is the one I’m doing. Or as Weber said in his famous speech on politics as a vocation,

it is immensely moving when a mature man [sic]… is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’.

The trick, I guess, is to be open to other people’s projects and even their criticisms of one’s own, without getting diverted into the swamps of Shoulds and What Ifs. It’s an infinitely open question where to draw that line.

You and me, and baby makes infinity

(Brace for lengthy preamble:) I’m teaching a section of the freshman orientation seminar again as an overload. The class is the usual product of episodic collective decision-making, a hodgepodge of boilerplate pedagogical imperatives trailing admirable goals and good intentions behind them like toilet paper stuck to shoes. There’s not a lot of clarity about what the class is for or how to accomplish it, or rather there are various clarities which produce a muddy tinge when mixed together. This means I can mostly do what I want with it, so I’m happy.

There’s a book and a textbook, neither of which I picked but both of which I like fine. The book is Paul Cuadros’ A Home on the Field, about a plucky team of Latino kids, many undocumented, who momentarily overcome their destiny as cheap labor for consumer America and win the North Carolina state high-school soccer championship. Its narrative is engaging enough and its points about aspiration, fairness and Othering are obvious enough to engage freshmen right at the margin of the academic habitus.

The textbook is Ethics and College Student Life, which uses case studies to encourage ethical reflection across a range of principles (categorical imperative, utilitarianism, community, relationship, character growth). Among the things I like about this book is that the cases are mostly not easy stereotypes of right and wrong, and therefore to make any headway with them it’s necessary to unpack the conventions, dispositions and values that cluster with formal ethics to create situated ethical reasonings.

Well, for some reason I don’t remember ‘helicopter parenting’ was in the air at the beginning of the term, so I started with that as an informal talking-point to introduce the students to the procedures of coordinating abstract thinking with concrete examples. Most of the students have been helicoptered to varying degrees, adding further value to making that ‘normal’ relationship a matter of reflective investigation for them. I bracketed the good/bad kind of moral judgment to take the sting out of the discussion and offered a more ethnographic view of ethics as practices aspiring to universality. The question was then, what kind of people and relationships do helicopter practices create, and what kind of world do they aspire to?

The resulting discussion was a rough first day on the trail, so I won’t linger on it except to say that the students were engaged and began to see the fun of using their noggins in new ways. Where I’m going with this post is to note that the ethic of helicopter parenting is another of those places where the infinity standard pops up. There is always more you can do for your child, infinity.

Which is new for ‘people like me’ since I was a lad, when we (the suburban petite-bourgeoisie) were still making the transition from the low investment, children-as-asset paradigm to the high investment, children-as-status-display paradigm that is now virtually complete.

Careful not to oversauce.

Along these lines, as captain of a USTA tennis team I’m befuddled to find that it’s sometimes hard to line guys up to play on evenings and weekends (which is pretty much when there is for working adults to play) because they are attending the organized sporting events of their offspring. Huh? As I understand it, there is some pride for the parent who never misses a spectation opportunity, and some shame in being the parent who does. The standard of parental attention seems to be infinity. Now by way of contrast, I remember reading a Rolling Stone interview with Tip O’Neill about how proud he was of his generation of Democratic legislators for the workplace legislation that made sure fathers wouldn’t routinely be working 80-90 hour weeks and thus never see their kids. And even later, when I was growing up, walking ten miles to school through the perennial snow uphill both ways, and I was on the high school tennis team (we played in the snow uphill both ways), I’m pretty dang sure my parents never came to a single match. This might have damaged my delicate psyche if anyone else’s parents had come out, but to my recollection they did not. (No doubt years of expensive therapy could implant those memories to get me caught up with the state of the art.)

There was a late bus to take me home from team practices and matches. It was sometimes an hour or so between the end of something (I was also in some school theater and so on) and when the late bus went, so I waited. The late bus wound around all creation to take various kids to various homes; I was pretty far out in farm country so that was another hour, give or take. If I missed the late bus for some reason I knew I could call and Mom or Dad would come get me, when they got around to it after they finished what they were doing. This also involved waiting. Necessity seeks its virtue, and mine is patience. I’m also used to thinking of other people’s agendas as having some value independent of my immediate convenience.

The main point of these organized sporting activities of my youth, as far as I can tell, was to add a few hours onto the time when parents did not have to pay attention to their children.

To practice out of season I would ride my bike about 5 miles to the courts, play a few hours, then ride home. My idea of privilege was to not have chores at home that I was shirking; it did not occur to me that my parents should be available to drop everything and give me rides to the courts, nor did they make any visible point of fretting over the very real chances that I would get sideswiped into the ditches on our narrow country roads or that I would not have a good time. Necessity’s virtues were that I was in fine physical condition without a lot of fuss, independent, and pretty good at entertaining myself. I got what seemed to me like plenty of attention and it never occurred to me to doubt that I was loved and valued.

Every discipline calls forth its characteristic rebellion.

Every parenting system involves trade-offs. Independence is nice for low-density social settings but can involve some inwardness, a kind of cultural autism, that makes higher-density sociability awkward and energy-intensive. In contrast the helicoptered kids tend to be trusting, open and easily sociable. And because they’ve never had to make do and are used to their needs being met on demand, they drive a consumer economy much better than the frugal self-reliance I grew up with. From that latter perspective, it’s a good thing that their personal boundaries are rudimentary and their expectations unlimited. It will be interesting to see how they translate being the recipients of their parents’ infinity standards into their own parenting practices.

Bells and whistles

In the comments on the last post Owen suggests, and Kevin seconds, using student blogs leading into writing assignments to intercept plagiarism, while presumably adding the value of recursive drafting. I think this is a great idea, but as I said there I’m not sure that in my situation and for my purposes it isn’t a solution looking for a problem. But I could be wrong. I’m going to say some stuff I think about various pedagogical techniques and technologies, ‘bells and whistles’ as I sometimes call them when I’m feeling generous, ‘magic bullets’ when I’m not, but ultimately my aim is to participate in a discussion about which strategies and media might be good for what.

I don’t think Powerpoint or Blackboard or blogs or Ning sites are automatically good or bad things; they are tools that may or may not fit the job at hand. In general I agree with Diana Laurillard in her excellent Rethinking University Teaching: A Framework for the Effective Use of Educational Technology (1993) that “[e]very medium has its strengths, so they can help, but each needs to be complemented by a teacher-student dialogue, and that is ultimately labour-intensive” (178). I’ll admit to being a little on the extreme in thinking, as this sentence implies (and as Laurillard shows throughout), that the one essential feature of good, effective teaching is dialogue. And insofar as the bells and whistles are used to save or displace the intensive labor of dialogue, I think they are actively pernicious.

Because I think this, my classes are set up with the maximum of dialogue and the minimum of inculcation. I lecture very little and mostly just to show the students how to figure things out for themselves, after which they set to it. I do a lot of modeling, guiding and prompting; I elicit, mediate and referee. The basic process is a recursive spiral, much like meditative or martial arts training, in which we start with the basic skills of critical reading, analysis and synthesis and work through them over and over with new material and projects at increasing levels of facility. I consciously save my energy for the intensive reading and reacting that this process requires from me, and beyond the assigned course materials I expect the baby birds to go find their own worms, so I do very little or no ’supplementing’. Here’s Laurillard again, from an interview:

And over the last century there were ideas from Piaget and Vygotsky and Bruner and Pask, and so on, and all the way through, no matter who your guru is, you can find somebody who’s saying something similar to that, that what it takes to learn is more than just being told. You’ve got to engage with it, you’ve got to have feedback, you’ve got to be trying to make it your own, you’ve got to be working with it, practising it, applying it in real life, getting feedback on what you do, arguing about it with others, negotiating ideas in all of those things; and I don’t think that changes, and no matter how good the technology is, what it takes to learn a difficult idea is much the same kind of thing, of grappling with it, reflecting on it, arguing about it, trying to apply it, trying again to do it better. That’s what learning means. So what we use the technology for is to find ways of making that better and easier. But it doesn’t change the cognitive task of what you have to do, not that much.

I have the privilege of not needing to use bells and whistles because my classes are small enough (the largest are capped at 25) to enable substantive dialogic process in facetime. There’s no need to lecture, old-school or with the Powerpoint magic bullet, because I’m not stuck with mooing cattle for students packed into the intellectual slaughterhouse of a large hall with seats bolted in rows facing the wisdom gun up front. And although I’ve found Michael Wesch’s work interesting and impressive, unlike him I’m not driven to the internet to compensate for the sociological monstrosity of overloaded classes in barbaric spaces. I can and do get my students in a circle, looking at each other.

There are some pretty spiffy ways the bells and whistles can save labor in the drudgeries of teaching and learning, however; this is where I find them the most promising. If I had a net-enabled projector in my classrooms (you may see here that my campus is so tech-disabled that part of what I’m doing is making virtue of necessity) I’d certainly use it to enlarge images for discussion, maps for orientation, and web resources for assessment. I assign an ethnographic field journal in most of my classes as a reflective record of the teaching/learning experience, and I’m pretty close to suggesting a blog as a way to do that (in fact, one student who was already a blogger did it that way recently on her own initiative). I really liked Wesch’s experiment with having students post executive summaries of divided reading assignments as a way to enable more well-informed and wide-ranging class discussions; I’ve done that sort of thing with handouts and/or oral reports, but depending on how much you want the process or the outcome of research to be the focus his way may gain in efficiency and elegance.

And of course software and web technologies can be fantastic tools for enabling access to practices, materials and conversations for students who would otherwise be excluded; to take notes and organize thoughts; or even just to find answers to questions that come up in class on the fly.

I guess this has turned out to look a bit like a luddite manifesto, but my mind really is not made up on this stuff. In what ways can the bells and whistles be more than bells and whistles? Where do they go from workarounds to enhancements? What’s really new about the new systems, as opposed to flashy new ways to do the same old crap? Is teaching to use these technologies effectively an end in itself, even part of schools’ core responsibility? If we can do these cool things, how stupid would it be not to? Thoughts?

A gramscian?

Every once in awhile friends are kind enough to describe me as a gramscian, as when Levi wondered in relation to the commentary on the grey vampires post how a “Gramscian would participate in such ugly exchanges, much less make his blog a venue for such remarks.”

In response to this particular query I would say that I am never more gramscian than when I supply a venue for the free exchange of objectionable ideas. Of all the marxists Gramsci was perhaps the most open to the messy diversity of what I called in my dissertation ’sociological consciousness’ and he called ‘common sense’, that is, all the junk that actual people actually think (as opposed to what they’re supposed to think for theoretical convenience). He thought you’ve got to work with what’s out there, not what you wish was out there, which is pretty much the main thing I like about him. For more on this you could start here (pdf).

Even so, I would not say that I consider myself a gramscian exactly. He was a revolutionary and I’m not. And although I’m on the listserv I’m not part of that dedicated cadre of aficionados who labor assiduously to keep Gramsci’s work and memory alive. I’ve read just about every word he ever wrote and back when I was writing my dissertation I probably knew as much about him and his thought as anyone in the world. I think he was wicked smart, I learned a lot from him and he’s part of my conceptual toolbox. But when there’s something I want to understand or talk about I don’t go to Gramsci as my default source, or try to shoehorn every issue into something he said. It is possible to do that of course, but I’d rather go to someone who got at the issue directly than try to reconstruct what Gramsci might have thought about it. In short, I am not religious about Gramsci in the way that earns a disciple label.

Still, when it comes time to pony up some piece of ephemeral scholarship Gramsci is indeed my go-to guy, so when Mikhail suggested that the always-interesting Rethinking Marxism conference might be a good occasion to meet for some beverage and chat I shot out a proposal for a paper on Gramsci, ANT and the practice of bloggery. I think it might possibly be interesting (and very helpful to me) if I rero (release early, release often) stuff from that paper here as I work through it. So after this post has had a chance to settle I’ll start by sketching out what I think Gramsci, ANT and blogging might have to do with each other. Hint: it has something to do with the ‘journalistic’ mode of conceptual micropractice discussed in the comments on the Latour/Bloom post.

Latour/Bloom

I just read Bruno Latour’s short essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” It is a critical defense of facts against critique, motivated by Latour’s observation that the waste-laying weaponry of deconstruction has fallen into the hands of its enemies, who use it to cast doubt on global warming and to construct elaborate conspiracy theories about the CIA and Mossad’s connivance in the bombing of the World Trade Towers. “There is no sure ground even for criticism. Is this not what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anyway? But what does it mean, when this lack of sure ground is taken out from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against things we cherished?”

Latour worries that critical intellectuals are fighting the last war, that their aim is bad. Exposing the enemy misses the target when everyone is already busy running around pulling masks off and pants down. If the bad guys’ certainties are unwarranted, what about ours?

In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past–but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices?

This is of a piece with Latour’s more extensive (and acerbic) dismissal of postmodernism in We Have Never Been Modern, but somehow this one triggered a different association for me. It’s been a long time since I read it, but isn’t this some part of Allan Bloom’s argument in The Closing of the American Mind? As I recall, it’s not that Bloom didn’t see the value of the marxian and nietzschean critical ordnance that enables the demolition of the eternal verities, but that he thought they were too powerful. In unskilled or inimical hands they leave nothing but scorched and salted earth, or at least fool kids trampling his lawn and having sex in his bushes.

I’m no more comfortable now with philosopher kings locking away the most powerful engines of human intellection than I was in grad school when I read Bloom. But from Dostoevsky to Bloom to Latour smart people keep making good points about what happens when you let everyone play with dynamite. All else being equal I certainly do prefer good sense to scorched earth. But what exactly is at stake? Wouldn’t it be just typical for intellectuals to overestimate the importance of ideas in the world?

Meme vaccine

Over at the really excellent Neuroanthropology, where I always learn something, Daniel has been kind enough to include some of my posts in his Wednesday roundups. (Dude, time to get me on the blogroll!) I’d been meaning to reciprocate and the occasion comes with this week’s links to my and Larval Subjects’ posts on memes.

If this is a topic that interests you, please go and also read Daniel’s post Engaging & Dispatching Memetics, which reviews and links Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s discussion of the topic in his book Engaging Anthropology. The short version of the critique is that memetics is pop anthropology and it’s more complicated than that; but saying so must then invite a more comprehensive and holistic anthropological practice that is also sensitive to getting the word out publicly. That is, the meme meme needs to be shouldered aside in popular appropriations of anthropology by something better. Daniel thinks that with some tweaking of the brand neuroanthropology can fill that bill, and I’m all for it.

Strategic misunderstanding

At Edge of the West commenter Michael complains that poster Dana has not read his remarks carefully before responding. At Perverse Egalitarianism, Frames/Sing, and Larval Subjects the battle over correlationism, ontology, naturalism and so on rage amid pervasive assertions of mutual incomprehension.

See a characteristic new installment at Now Times. Alexei, Mikhail and Shahar bond over the common hijackings of Kant and Husserl, who are so often criticized based on shortcut readings and caricatures of various kinds. Alexei hypothesizes an origin to this problem in the daunting scope of these thinkers:

But precisely because [Kant] covered all the bases he’s really — but really — hard to teach, and we always end up foreshortening lines of argument for our students, and then they get stuck with a really skewed understanding of him.

I’m inclined to agree with Alexei, but notice what happens when we take thinkers who have all the bases covered and require exhaustive, cross-referenced understanding of their entire projects as a condition of adequacy in claims about what they’re saying. In practice this is likely to produce little insular priesthoods attached to this or that master thinker, feverishly defending their prophets’ legacies against the heathen barbarian hordes, carrying their colors into each new battle with the glamour of righteousness upon them.

Another example that may resonate is Lenin’s claim that Marx’s Capital can’t be understood without reading Hegel’s Logic (which presumably itself requires prior reading to be understood). Again this is no doubt strictly true, but it would (and did) tend to cut most members of the working class out of any effective participation in the construction and adaptation of marxism as a theory of their liberation. I’m not saying that’s automatically a bad thing; it’s a dynamic to notice with consequences we may or may not like.

Thinkers who have all the bases covered are wonderful and terrible monsters. They require an enormous investment and don’t leave much space for you to think your own thoughts once you’ve made it. It may be strategically necessary to cut them down to size and stomp them out, by any means necessary, to get on with what you want to do. Of course for those of us who are not recognized master synthesists the stomping thresholds are going to come up that much more quickly with most readers.

Freedom squish

I was recently involved (as a bit of a thread-jacker) in a conversation over at Edge of the West about drug policy. Dana’s original post expressed a sensible doubt about the value of anecdotal evidence in disproving the destructive effects of pot smoking, and noted that the success of the anecdoter in question “has less to do with the fact that pot isn’t dangerous and more to do with the fact that if one is well-educated and well-off one has to really screw up before anything affects one’s expected life outcomes. They have a safety net made of money.”

It seemed to me this good thought got pretty well covered in short order, so I went meta by suggesting that moving transgression thresholds here and there was more likely to squish unfreedom around than to actually make anyone more free (although I’ll accept ‘more choice’ in a supermarket sense as marginally preferable to ‘less choice’). Pot itself is not much of a point, nor are its specific properties and effects more than a distraction; it’s just where the line happens to be drawn in a disciplinary regime that works by drawing lines somewhere. I made this argument in some detail there and won’t reproduce it here – click through.

So if it’s not squishing unfreedom around, what would it mean to be more free? I don’t have a satisfying answer for that, but here’s my answer, in a couple of parts. Like Voltaire’s Brahmin I wouldn’t want to exchange paralyzing awareness for busy ignorance. And like Camus’ Sisyphus I think there are all sorts of things worth doing anyway (like teaching) not because they’ll actually work in some larger transformative sense but because this absurd fate belongs to us.

Would it be different if it was cheese?

Freedom is the recognition of necessity, as Hegel said. When I was driving down to school this morning I chanced to be behind a couple of cars in a row that were pretty much ignoring the lines painted on the road. Their flirtation with those transgression thresholds may have seemed like freedom to them, but acceptable transgression is part of how the system’s built. Around here beat up old guys in beat up old pickup trucks drive real slow, right down the center of the lane. Freedom is in coming to grips with the lines, accepting their power to limit and compel, and releasing the desire for somewhere, something else they simultaneously create and frustrate. If there’s room to move and to play within the lines, so much the better.

Death

John Hope Franklin died the other day. He was a towering figure for whom all praise is too faint.

Professor Susurro has ably covered his inspirational legacy. Then, in a second rich post, Susurro links a discussion we’ve been having about James Baldwin’s iconic status as a marker of team membership to reflections on her disappointment that amid the general outpouring, the historians’ team has not so far stepped up to memorialize Franklin as he deserves. “As I surfed across the historian specific internet highway, I was waiting for the ‘Yay team!’ moment. I expected it. I needed it. And 2 days later… it still has not come.”

I’m sorry for that. But I must live up to my billing as a ‘cranky prof’ in Susurro’s blogroll. And in this as in so many other ways, I am a bad historian. I just don’t do memorials. In fact, I’m not big on special celebratory occasions of any kind – anniversaries, birthdays, holidays. Although I understand their ritual significance as occasions for community-affirming collective effervescence, I think we could choose better ways to do that, starting with mindfulness in all of our beings-together.

I’m especially disturbed by what special occasions tend to say about the intervening time. Relationships we value could be appreciated and affirmed more regularly. There needn’t be anything left over to say to and about each other on some particular occasion. If you like your mom, don’t let Hallmark tell you when to treat her accordingly, right? High-intensity occasions do not make up for routine neglect or worse, and because they’re asked to carry so much of the weight of what could be continuous solidarity they’re almost inevitably disappointing. As a rule of thumb, the more grandiose the occasion, the more weight of relationship it’s being asked to carry and the more prone to collapse under that weight it is. The biggest weddings are never the happiest ones. If you feel unappreciated, one party isn’t going to fix that for long.

Waiting until folks are dead seems to me like an especially perverse way to handle appreciation. They’re dead now, it’s doing them no good; and the good it’s doing us just distracts from any lesson about treating people better in life we might have learned. Fortunately, John Hope Franklin got loads and loads of appreciation while he was alive, including a lovely building at Duke named after him at which I’ve been honored to attend several conferences. Monumental architecture aside, I imagine he found some satisfaction in the work itself. And his legacy going forward will be people doing work he would have admired; but those people deserve to be appreciated for that work in their own right, not as mere means to the end of his fame.

I’m also dubious about using death and other special occasions for team affirmation or team building. I’m pretty well in touch with my feelings and they’re generally mixed. Individuals and communities are complex things, each with its admirable and deplorable qualities. For both those reasons I’m not a joiner, and in general I think we’d all be better off with a little less joining. Again, mindful being-together is my standard. Therefore, being drafted into performances of unqualified affirmation feels like emotional blackmail to me, the ‘dead vole‘ situation par excellence. Making others feel your emotions along with you or for you is a form of tyranny, as feminists like Arlie Hochschild have shown.

An unusual example from around here may illustrate. From time to time mortuary signs show up by the side of the road asking all who pass to “slow down – death in family.” I imagine grief-stricken aunts and cousins stumbling around in a stupor, wandering into the road in transports of woe. For this I would slow down – no sense compounding the family’s loss by waffling poor old Uncle Chester. But realistically this is not what’s meant. The idea, I think, is that for a moment we are meant to share the family’s distress, join their team and express our solidarity by a brief sacrifice of our convenience.

What’s the problem? Even if one is not clear on whether the deceased or the bereaved in question are people one might have personally liked, playing along for a second is an ordinary kindness. Not even much of a sacrifice all in all, even if one believes sacrifice is a regressive, destructive model of sociability. And although we have no trouble seeing how badly teams/clans/gangs distort ordinary kindness when they are activities, faiths, genders, races, classes, nations not our own, surely these more contingent enlistments do not threaten such systematic troubles. It might even be healthy to extend our concern to unknowns in these meaningful little ways.

I’m on board with the importance of each life and the integrity of each feeling. It’s on precisely this ground that I think it’s rude at best to enlist others in these situations. As an outsider to the immediate circle of concern, I can’t figure out why I’m supposed to care more about this dead guy right here than that one over there. Why is the local woe more deserving of my solidarity than that of similarly bereaved worldwide? What makes John Hope Franklin’s life more fundamentally worthy of celebration than an Ethiopian peasant who died at the same moment? That he was a historian? It’s really just an accident of proximity, or of selective attention. Each and every instance of life and loss is just as special, and just as not special, from the very perspective that asks us to take the pain of others seriously. That’s all others, not just the ones we have affinities for or who did stuff we think is cool, let alone the ones with aggressive recruiting strategies.

Well, pragmatically a state of permanent woe for all the world’s losses is a non-starter, although Johnnie Cash made a nice career out of it. In practice there’s got to be a threshold of active concern where you say, my sympathies but life is going to go on over here. And each of us has to decide where that is, otherwise our sympathies can be leveraged against us, in each instance with equal moral force, to pull us into the vortex.

I’m not willing to withdraw my moral imagination from the fundamental equivalence of human life and feeling, and therefore I’m not willing to have my emotions dragooned into armies bent on colonizing the sympathetic commons. I acknowledge our duty of mutual kindness, and note that it is kind not to make demands on the kindness of others. For each dead person there will be a circle of immediately concerned others for whom that death will hold special meaning, for whatever reason, and we must let that be enough for us.

When someone’s grieving is not the best time to say these things. But someone’s always grieving. So maybe these things should just go unsaid. For better or worse that’s not my style, so I’m going to click ‘publish’ now and take my lumps.