other than economics – Page 2

The Wheels of Justice Do Grind Slow

I’ve had only had one job that paid minimum wage (or minimum plus 50 cents, as I recall.) That was as a bookstore clerk at Shakespeare & Company on the Upper West Side in the mid-90s.

The 85th St. bookstore was the flagship of the Shakespeare operation, which at that time included four Shakespeare and Co stores, two or three Murder Inks, and I think one or two other literary bookstores. It was generously, maybe from a strict business standpoint, overgenerously, staffed. We did spend a lot of time reshelving.

What’s memorable about the place is how everybody there was a book person. Some of us wanted to write fiction, some essays, some plays (that was kind of the store’s thing). Some wanted to work at publishers, some — for serious — were into the printing and bookbinding side of things. Most of of us wanted to write book reviews; some — well me, at least — left to edit the book review section of a marginal left-wing magazine. The book culture of the place was smoothly continuous from those of us behind the registers to the buyers to the mysterious owners upstairs. When publishers’ representatives came by we all met them, as a matter of course: they were selling to the store. I remember one of them spinning out this mystery novel she was going to write about a serial killer knocking off Granta‘s best young American novelists one by one; it seemed like a pretty good joke.

They used to have contests, beginning of the week, pick a book, whoever sells the most of it wins, well, I don’t remember what the prize was. Anyway I took it seriously; books I thought people ought to read. Oh hey, you’re interested in history, do you know Eric Hobsbawm? Oh, Jared Diamond, sure, but you know Plagues and Peoples covered a lot of that same ground? It was a point of pride.

And we hated shoplifters. There was one fellow who was a regular — he was obviously getting instructions on what specific resaleable books to steal. One time we’d had enough — it so depressing when two hours before closing there’s no one in the store except the professional shoplifters — and when he made his run for it we didn’t just accept the alarm-went-off;-oh-well as always. We took off after him. Why? it wasn’t our money. But we did: we caught him: or rather, like a lizard’s tail, we caught his bag, full of stolen books and hypodermics.

I first encountered the word “snarky” working at that bookstore. It was in a New York Magazine article about what was wrong with us, what was wrong with independent bookstores in general, why chains were the future. People wanted an antiseptic book purchasing environment, not all those book people telling them what to read. Whatever, we thought, all separately wondering how to incorporate “snark” into our new novel. But we should have seen the writing on the wall.

When the Barnes & Noble opened at 66th St., that was bad. When the next one opened at 82nd and Broadway, that was the end. This was not long after I started; surrendering, they had a going-out-of-business sale. And that was even worse. There was a brief false summer as the locals — our former customers! — picked over the stock that was suddenly attractive at 40% off; but as soon as the owners unwisely tried to reopen at full price those same customers tripped over each other rushing back to the lattes at Barnes & Nobles.

For the record, I suspect that if the Shakespeare & Co. guys could have competed with Barnes and Nobles at their scale, they would happily have done so. They weren’t doing it for the sake of small. Still, what matters is that you can get the books you want, and there it’s all progress, right? From your point of view as a consumer, probably, sure. I’m prepared to argue that you lose something when there are no more bookstore clerks like me, trying to sell you on William H. McNeill. On the scale of things it’s a small loss, but it’s a retreat from the world as it should be.

I don’t know if Shakespeare hired us because no one but book people would work for what they would pay, or because they had some vague idea that their clerks would rise to manage their little empire or simply because they were book people themselves. But hire book people they did. Within their world, you could imagine that it was a natural progression from clerking at a bookstore, to buying for a bookstore, to editing novels, to writing novels. As in a civilized world it will be.

Which is all to say: Fuck you, Barnes & Noble. I hope all of your stores close.

Kline

I know nothing about visual art. So all I can do, when I find myself in a museum, is to walk briskly from room to room — ah, Miro! ah, Johns! ah, Giacometti, the world’s most expensive sculpture! — until I find something that speaks to me. As today in LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, walking briskly, until-

What spoke to me today, was half a dozen large canvasses by Franz Kline, who I don’t believe I’d heard of before. I walked through the whole gallery three or four times, each time more convinced that these were the only things there really worth looking at. Black and white abstract geometric paintings. The whole style inspired by the guy’s visit to de Kooning’s studio with some representational pencil drawings, which the master encouraged him to blow up to extreme magnification. An ah ha moment for Kline apparently. From then on these black and white paintings that could be a zeroed-in-on detail from a pencil drawing.

What you learn, when you are beginning to paint or draw, is that you have to stop seeing the thing in front of you as a familiar abstraction — a chair, a woman, an elephant — and learn instead to see what you see: the contour, the shadow, the volume, the tone. This is what Kline’s paintings do. Without representing, necessarily, any particular object, they use the language of representation. You see the process of looking without ever seeing the thing being looked at.

What I mean is there’s a visual vocabulary we use to depict three dimensional objects and spaces on a flat surface. And Kline — not uniquely, but more than most abstract expressionists — knows how to use that vocabulary even without any specific referent. So you have the sense of looking at a thing — an object, a building, a place — without the image ever resolving into anything in particular. (Like a constellation.) It challenges you, is there something in this farmhouse in the snow, in this knife or bridge or flower, that affects you visually directly, without some sentimental association? If there is, whatever there is, that’s what these paintings contain.

Nonoverlapping Magisteria

This looks like an interesting book.

She’s arguing, as I understand it, that science cannot be ontologically complete, that it always coexists with other kinds of truth:

There is always ‘room left’ for alternative ontologies in cognitive-intellectual space, a realm that is neither cramped nor finite but, on the contrary, appears – both historically and for humans individually – exceedingly and perhaps infinitely elastic. … For many people … accepting, applying, and/or producing scientific knowledge and being religiously observant are no more in conflict than would be, for any of us, both playing the violin and practising law.

Interesting, maybe, as a bare assertion; more for the particular argument. Let’s say, on the one hand, that we accept a scientific view of religion. It’s a pattern of human behavior created by the interaction of our biological brains and our social environment; the potential for it was favored by its usefulness to our savannah ancestors and its actual existence by its usefulness for some social-political purpose today. Group cohesion then, the ploys of the Jesuits now, something like that.

The problem with this isn’t that it isn’t true; it is true, within some limits. The problem is that it explains too much. Every human belief system is the product of our Darwinianly-evolved brains and our social environment. You can fully explain religion, in principle, by a combination of genetic predisposition and practical advantage, but you can just as fully explain science, or anything else that people do. After all, we’re natural beings in the natural world; everything we do has a natural explanation. The most you can say in this framework is that science has displaced religion from many areas of life because of its greater utility; but by the same token you have to concede that religion has held on in other areas thanks to its greater utility. A purely naturalistic account of human beliefs has no place for them being true or false. People adopt them all for the same kind of reasons.

(Sraffa to Wittgenstein: “If the rules of language can be constructed only by observation, there can never be any nonsense said. This identifies the cause and the meaning of a word. The language of birds, as well as the language of metaphysicians can be interpreted consistently in this way. It is only a matter of finding the occasion on which they say a thing, just as one finds the occasion on which they sneeze.”)

On the other hand, almost anyone who cares about science prefers to believe it corresponds to some external truth about the world. One can’t object to this (Thomas Nagel, in this review, accuses Smith of objecting, but I suspect he’s got her wrong), but it’s not consistent with science being ontologically complete. A scientific account of scientific beliefs can offer various reasons for why people happen to hold them, but it has nothing to say about whether they are true. You may believe, if you like, that Betelgeuse would be 630 light years from the Earth whether anyone had measured the distance or not; but in a naturalistic account of why people do believe that, it all comes down to the measurements; independent of those the “objective” distance has no effect on anyone.

Put it another way: science offers heuristics for sorting beliefs into relatively confirmed and relatively falsified piles; but it doesn’t, and can’t, tell you why should prefer to hold the beliefs in the confirmed pile. Oh, say the new atheists, because they’re more useful. But right there they’ve conceded that if someone finds some social or psychological advantage in being religious, that’s as justified as anyone’s belief in science. To get along with your neighbors, to be free of angst about The Point of It All: aren’t those useful too?

Galileo is a hero of science and of civilization for eppur si muove. But what’s he saying? With respect to the heavens, he’s asserting that the demands of reality take precedence over what we think is right. But with respect to the earth, it’s just the opposite: He’s insisting on the priority of abstract right over concrete reality. After all, if he applied the same unromantic empiricism to his life as he did to his astronomy, he’d take one look at the instruments and conclude that practical experimentation revealed that the Earth goes around the Sun. (As did Brecht’s Galileo.) A belief that’s liable to get you tortured to death is pretty clearly less practically useful than a belief that leaves you torture-free. Galileo’s insistence that one should believe in science, come what may, is entirely unscientific, and — Brecht struggled with this — so much the better for Galileo.

The thing about the contradiction between the scientific method and belief in science is that it can be resolved either way. Nagel thinks that Smith is trying to apply the naturalistic, constructivist view of human beliefs “all the way down”. Me, I prefer to think she’s showing that’s exactly what you cannot do.

Keyes Is Right

Alan Keyes says, “If citizenship is not a birthright then it must be a grant of the government. And if it is a grant of the government, it could curtail that grant in all the ways that fascists and totalitarians always want to.”

In other words, the rights vis-a-vis the state we call citizenship, are prior to the legal acts that formalize them.

Joshua Micah Marshall thinks that’s “dramatically crazier than any of the opinions on offer,” since Keyes attributes the priority of citizenship, in part, to God.

But as a historical matter, Keyes is certainly right. The founding documents of political liberalism — the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the Declaration of Independence — explicitly state that the rights of the citizen are prior to their recognition by governments. If a government fails to recognize them, it’s that government’s legitimacy that is diminished, not the rights of the citizen.

In the specific 14th Amendment context, the point is that the right of the freedmen to citizenship wasn’t created by the 14th Amendment, but already existed by virtue of their living in this country and being subject to its laws. Did Congress have the power or the authority to deny them citizenship? Seems to me the Civil War answered that question clearly in the negative. The law binds most of the time, but ultimately it derives its authority from a set of norms that are prior to it.

This is certainly how the founders of liberal political orders, here and elsewhere, understood the relationship between the rights of the citizen and the law. That’s why they were ready to overthrow existing governments by force. Of course today it’s the Constitution and the law that regulate citizenship. But it’s important to remember that the fact that we — or almost anyone else — are citizens at all is not the result of legal or constitutional acts.

EDIT: It’s funny that reference to the founding documents of political liberalism is these days almost a monopoly of conservatives. Of course it’s not so strange, since conservatism is backward-looking by nature, while progressives naturally believe in progress. But the DNA of liberalism hasn’t changed that much, and Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, Lafayette and Saint-Just, and other Enlightenment political figures expressed it pretty robustly.

Unlike their forebears, modern liberals tend to insist on the absolute autonomy of the law in general, and the Constitution in particular. They’re unwilling, for obvious reasons, to accept a political order grounded on divine revelation, but they don’t have any alternative ground to put it on, so it ends up floating in the air. (Carl Schmitt is very good on this.) There’s what’s useful, and there’s what’s legal, under the law as it exists; but there’s no category of political legitimacy behind the law. Given the remarkable political stability of the United States since the Civil War, and just as important, as Herbert Croly emphasized, the continuously rising standard of living here, we’ve mostly gotten along fine without one. But one suspects that it wouldn’t take that much political strain for “government by lawyers” (Croly’s phrase) to experience its Wile E. Coyote moment, when it turns out that the authority of the law wasn’t underpinned by anything but a lack of good reasons to question it. Not unlike, perhaps, what happened in the financial crisis of 2008, when it turned out that not only did the traditional tools of monetary policy not work, they’d stopped working some time before.

The Golden Age Is In Us

Walking through Central Park a week or so ago, a perfect summer afternoon. Here are the trees, the birds, people playing frisbee, reading, walking dogs, picnicking, the rollerbladers performing by the bandshell, a woman working on an oil painting of Turtle Pond, a pickup soccer game. And look: nothing is for sale, no one is giving orders. But this isn’t passive, private leisure: All around is activity, often intense, focused; all around people are cooperating, being together, in a thousand different ways.

Like here, just past Sheep Meadow, where two middle-aged men are performing intricate classical and baroque pieces arranged as saxophone duets. They’re playing just for themselves, they don’t even have a tip basket. But they’re good, they’re tight; they must have been playing together for years. I’m walking somewhere but not in a hurry. I stop and join the two or three other people leaning against the fence and listening.

Is there any music recording, any music performance, that compares to the music that emerges, unexpectedly in the middle of something else? Is there ever a better performance than the one that’s not for any audience?

In The Ring of Time, E. B. White describes watching a young circus rider practicing some “elementary postures and tricks” in a back lot of the Ringling Brothers’ winter home in Florida:

The ten minute ride the girl took achieved — as far as I was concerned, who wasn’t looking for it, and unbeknownst to her, who wasn’t even striving for it — the thing that is sought by performers everywhere, on whatever stage, whether struggling in the tidal currents of Shakespeare or bucking the difficult motion of a horse. …

Long before the circus comes to town, its most notable performances have already been given. Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources — from the internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.

This saxophone duo was the combustion of stars. The ten or fifteen minutes I spent listening to them I felt so purely happy, I almost cried.

We don’t need to build socialism, or not from scratch. It’s here all around us. We just have to scrape away the other crap.