Knowledge in Chains: The Fate of Expertise in a Market Society

What do these things have in common?

1. Scientists discover that a gigantic corporation has consistently violated environmental regulations, and is introducing certain chemicals into the water supply at dangerous levels.  The corporation commissions an in-house study saying that we must lower our environmental standards.  A regulatory agency staffed by experts but placed under the command of a political appointee accepts this study, ignores the evidence against the corporation, and the chemicals continue to enter the water supply.

2. The girlfriend of a Russian oligarch decides to renovate an old building in Moscow, making it into the kind of fashionable art space one finds in London or New York.  She commissions a leading architect, to whom she gives guidelines about how the space should function and what its social role should be.

3. A well-respected, longtime university administrator is appointed president of a major university and guides the restructuring of that institution.  Two years later, a billionaire hedge fund manager who sits on the board of the university’s business school decides he wants the president removed.  He works with other wealthy members of the university’s board to have the president dismissed, and is successful.  The reason given for the removal of the president is the existence of “philosophical differences” with the board, though the nature of these differences is not specified.

What is the common thread?  Well, firstly, they’re all things that you’re likely to have stumbled across in the media recently. The first item is a partial summary of the J.R. Simplot Company’s history of releasing selenium into the rivers of Idaho at dangerous levels, and influencing politicians in efforts to reduce regulation of their emissions, a history recently covered with wit and brilliance by The Daily Show.  The second item refers to a Newsweek article on Dasha Zhukova, girlfriend of Roman Abramovich (a multi-billionaire former smuggler and convict whose fortune comes from having bribed politicians to acquire Russian public oil interests far below their value), who has hired architect Rem Koolhaus to implement her plans for a new cultural space in Moscow.  The third item is a brief précis of a Slate article on the ousting of Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, at the urging of former Goldman Sachs partner and hedge fund billionaire Peter Kiernan.  But these aren’t just stories in the news: they illustrate the increasing subordination of experts (in environmental safety, in the arts, in education) to property holders.  There are all kinds of elites in the world, including elites of knowledge and elites of property.  In our time, more than in any period in recent history, the elites of property have come to a position of overwhelming dominance.

But what, exactly, is this elite of knowledge?  What does it do, and does it matter that it has come under the thumb of property?  The most important thing to note is that it doesn’t contain all people who have knowledge (everyone knows something).  Rather, it consists of those people who serve knowledge first, rather than putting knowledge at the service of something else.  The distinction is as old as the ancient Greek distinction between the philosopher, who sought knowledge for its own sake, and the sophist, who deployed his specialized rhetorical knowledge as a kind of mercenary.  And the distinction is as new as the distinction between a research scientist who uses her knowledge to determine the safe level a chemical byproduct of industry in the water supply and a public relations professional who offers to use his special knowledge to convince the public that the research scientist is wrong.

Hegel was one of the earliest theorists of the elite of knowledge, who wrote of it as the “universal class” in his Jena lectures of 1805 and 1806.  There, Hegel describes a class consisting of “completely indifferent universal people” — indifferent, that is, to any claims beyond those of what they knew.  They were to be objective, disinterested people—and for Hegel, their natural habitat was the state sector.  It was right and proper, Hegel thought, for people in business to pursue their private interests, but someone had to mediate conflict, someone had to have “no vested interest in business” and these people would staff state regulatory agencies and the justice system, as well as the police and the military.  They would work not on behalf of their personal well-being or for the profit of their employers, but “for the existing whole” of society.

The notion of a “universal class” was one of the grand ideas of the nineteenth century, and we see variations on it everywhere.  If Hegel saw it in typically German statist terms (he lived in the shade of the first great bureaucracy, invented by Frederick the Great), others saw it in terms drawn from their own national traditions.  In France, the Comte de Saint-Simon took things to a revolutionary extreme and argued that “savants” in science and the arts should displace property owners as the rulers of society (for this he invented the word “technocracy”). Later in the century Matthew Arnold would follow the British tradition of moderation and argue, in Culture and Anarchy, that a cultivated class of people with no vested interest in any particular social class should serve as the umpires of society, mediating between existing interests.  These people could come from any class, but their education would make them “aliens” to their backgrounds, allowing them an impartiality they would not otherwise have.

Americans get hold of the idea in the twentieth century, and take a wide variety of positions.  Lionel Trilling was generally sympathetic to Arnold, but noted that there was something fishy about the idea of an umpire class, since a class was defined by its interests: no umpire, Trilling thought, could ever be truly disinterested and guided by pure knowledge.  This notion was elaborated and exaggerated by a host of neoconservative thinkers in the late 1970s, many of whom looked askance at the increasing role of the public sector in American life after 1945.  Unlike those who saw those decades as a period of unprecedented prosperity, increased social, class, racial, and gender equality, they looked at their times and saw mostly darkness.  B. Bruce Briggs of the conservative Hudson Institute, for example, argued that the rise of what he called “the new class” threatened to convert “a system of privilege via family property to one of privilege via formal education” — a very bad thing, from his perspective.  As far as he was concerned, the knowledge-based elite was no less self-interested than the property based elite.  This view has become tremendously powerful in certain American circles: indeed, it has been absorbed into the worldview of Fox News, where climate scientists are dismissed as figures who only purport to believe in global warming in order to get their hands on more research funding.

Other American thinkers see things differently.  Alvin Gouldner, for example, argued that intellectuals have a high degree of insulation from market forces, and, not having to sell their knowledge for their personal material self-interest, are able to offer a relatively disinterested and objective assessment of phenomena.  Thinking in particular about those involved in education, Gouldner says that such people “come to be defined, and to define themselves, as responsible for and ‘representative’ of society as a whole.”  That is: they look at things not with an eye to how they can use them for their own gain, but with an eye to whether these things are good for society in general.  Gouldner is aware that absolute objectivity or disinterest is impossible, but he doesn’t move from this awareness to a collapsing of all difference between the relatively disinterested person and the completely self-interested person.  For Briggs (and Fox) there’s no difference in objectivity between a climate scientist and, say, the CEO of a company that produces huge quantities of greenhouse gases; for Gouldner, one of these people is in a position to be relatively more objective.  The knowledge elite (which, like Briggs, he calls “the new class”) has an important social role for Gouldner, as it did for Hegel. The difference, though, is that Gouldner doesn’t see the state sector as the exclusive home of the knowledge elite.  It can find its home in many locales, including nonprofit foundations (which, one might add, were the initial source of environmental reports on the dangerous activities of the J.R. Simplot company).

People like Briggs felt, in the late 70s, that the knowledge elite had become too strong in America.  Indeed, it became an article of faith among right-wingers: Robert L. Bartley, who for 30 years edited the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal, followed the economist Joseph Schumpeter in believing “the inability to control the critical impulses of intellectuals would prove the ultimate undoing of the capitalist system.”  Few, I think, would share this fear of the knowledge class in 2012.  Although the financial crisis of 2008 was precipitated by the private sector, it is the public and nonprofit sectors that starve and weaken across the whole of the West.  And 2008 was only an intensification of trends that go back to the neoconservative resentment of the knowledge elites in the 1970s.  Indeed, there is much evidence that we are moving from a society with inherent checks and balances to a kind of social monoculture based on the rule of property elites.  Once, we had a rich combination of market values and other values.  But according to Harvard’s Michael Sandel, we’ve stopped being a market economy, and become a market society.  A market economy, according to Sandel, is a great thing—“a valuable and effective tool for organizing economic activity.”  But a market society is “a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life, and sometimes crowd out or corrode important… non-market values.”  In this brave new world, scientists who warn about pollution are overturned by agencies whose politically appointed leaders bow to the influence of moneyed corporations; great architects work not for their own visions, but at the whim of those who orbit kleptocratic billionaires; and professional administrators with strong academic backgrounds can be cast out of the universities at the whim of hedge fund managers, whose donations to universities have become vital due to the gutting of public funding.

It is not that the knowledge elite has no privileges and no influence.  The world we live in is complex and integrated and requires such people to function.  But the knowledge elite has become what Pierre Bourdieu called “the dominated part of the dominant class.”  They (or should I say “we,” since anyone likely to be reading this is either part of a knowledge elite, or aspires to be) work in foundations and universities and research centers and state agencies, and offer what, to the best of our (fallible, human) knowledge, is the disinterested truth.  And then the elite of property either takes these attempts at disinterested truth into account or doesn’t, depending on whether they feel such truths represent a threat to their material wellbeing or not.

Of course what this means is that a small, hyper-privileged class increasingly does as it wishes, without constraint or remorse.  Sometimes what it wants to do is to offer a sop to the knowledge elite (the museum in Moscow is such a gesture) to keep them happy and docile.  Sometimes it is mysterious why it wants what it wants (the expulsion of the university president is an incident of this kind).  And sometimes—too often— what it wants is to enrich the few at the expense of the rest of us.  They don’t call this class war.  Except when we fight back.

Poetic Pluralism on Trial

Back in 1998, it still seemed marginally plausible to believe that much of the grand expanse of American poetry could be divided into two fields, one centered in Iowa City lyricism, the other in Buffalo language writing.   It was then that a much younger and more naive version of the present humble blogger wrote in praise of Chicago, in the first editorial for Samizdat.  "Chicago has fostered poets," I claimed, "without pressuring them to conform too closely to the establishment or the counter-establishment.  It is in the interstices between orthodoxies that poetry finds innovation and life, and this is why Chicago has become one of the good places for poetry."  It was the first in a series of essays in which I tried to go to bat for pluralism.  I wanted to say that confessional lyricism and language writing were both important, and that good work could be produced in both of those idioms, and in a whole range of other modes.  In the years that followed I like to think my understanding of the contours of the American poetic field has become subtler and more detailed, but I also like to think that my pluralism has remained intact.


On the face of it pluralism is among the least exciting and provocative of positions.  Who, after all, could really get worked up at someone who advocates letting a thousand flowers bloom, who wishes for nothing more than that we live, let live, and try to find things of value in works that come from traditions other than our own?  Who indeed? Well, as it turns out, just about anyone who strongly believes in what they've committed to.  I was reminded of this recently when reading Keith Tuma's On Leave, in which Tuma, whose criticism both explains and advocates experimental poetics, writes of the difficulty he had in maintaining his friendship with the immensely charming formalist poet Michael Donaghy, whom he knew when they both studied at the University of Chicago.  Differences in poetics mattered between those two guys (both of whom, I should add in a pluralistic aside, I admire).  And I've had people take me on for my pluralism, too, sometimes quite effectively: if you bother to root around in some of the comments on old posts of this blog, for example, you'll find Keston Sutherland letting me have it for a lot of things, including, if I remember correctly, my pluralism.  If you're seriously committed to a particular program, pluralistic poetics can look like a cop-out.


Rather than revisiting any old arguments, I'd like to put my own pluralism on trial today.  For that purpose I've put myself in the defendant's chair, called Judge Lance Ito out from whatever room they send you to after your fifteen minutes of fame have expired, and summoned two imaginary lawyers to do the talking.


THE CASE FOR THE  PROSECUTION will be made by a thin man in black, his turtleneck unwrinkled, his great bald dome gleaming above his expensive glasses, his elegant, pencil-skirted assistant whispering in his ear intermittently.


THE CASE FOR THE DEFENSE will be made by a puffy, sweaty man in a worn brown corduroy blazer.  I am unnerved to see that his shirt is only partly tucked in, and that his briefcase contains a tuna sandwich, Doritos, and what looks like a pair of extra socks.


After a shuffling of papers, the prosecutor speaks, pronouncing the word "professor" with just a touch of icy contempt.


THE PROSECUTION: Let me begin by reminding the court that we are here to determine whether Professor Archambeau's longstanding poetic pluralism is a defensible position, or an affront to all those who truly care about poetry.  It is, as I shall demonstrate, the latter.  I call to the witness stand an academic whose standing, it will be agreed, exceeds that of Professor Archambeau: G.W.F. Hegel, late of the University of Berlin.  I thank you, Mr. Hegel, for taking the trouble to appear here from beyond the grave.


MR. HEGEL: Ja, ja, gut.  Indeed.  Though why you couldn't simply cite my books is beyond me.  It's quite a long commute from the circle of hell reserved for bad writers, you know.


THE PROSECUTION: Would you speak, please, to the issue of pluralism in the matter of aesthetics.


MR. HEGEL:  There was a time, you know, when poetry, and all art, mattered to people, and mattered as something powerful, not merely as something interesting.  Plato, of course, cast the poets out of the Republic, even though he admired them: they were too important for him to tolerate, because they were too important to the people.  They could move the masses, they could change the beliefs of the populace,  they could sway not just a few aesthetes, but the entire polis, and they couldn't be tolerated.  I didn't live in an age when art mattered like that, still less do you.  I, and you, live in an age when science prevails as a way of knowing and of making things happen, not art.  Art does not disappear under such conditions, but it affects people differently.  "However splendid the effigies of the Greek gods may look," I have written, "and whatever dignity we may find in the images of God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, it is of no use: we do not bend our knees before them."  Art, since the triumph of science, is at the periphery of our society, and no one goes to war over whether images should or shouldn't adorn a church.  Art has worked itself out, and the reason people like this Archambeau can say they admire poems in all sorts of different styles and idioms is that art simply doesn't matter to such people.  Poetry is interesting to people like him, not vital.  He is symptomatic of an age in which art has become marginal.  


THE PROSECUTION: Thank you, Mr. Hegel.  No further questions.


THE DEFENSE: If I may, Mr. Hegel: what are we to make of the partisans of one or another sort of poetry?  If we live in an age when poetry is merely interesting, and not vital, how do we account for those who would say "Jeremy Prynne is good, or right, and therefore Glyn Maxwell is bad, or wrong"?


MR. HEGEL: Those who truly care, those for whom different kinds of art aren't simply different but worse or somehow (politically, ethically, morally) wrong are throwbacks, of course, to an earlier age, survivals within our age in the way that Greek civilization survived inside Rome.  But we can say this: at least poetry matters to them, as it surely does not to the defendant, a modern-era dilettante if ever there was one.


THE DEFENSE: I see.  Well, I'd like to call on another witness now, whom we've fetched in with some difficulty from the cycle of eternal return.  Mr. Nietzsche will now take the stand... ah.  Thank you.  Mr. Nietzsche, what do you make of the most extreme partisans of particular kinds of poetry, those who condemn the works of other schools of poetry?


[A great shriek of feedback comes from the microphone on the witness stand as it becomes entangled in Nietzsche's mustache]


MR. NIETZSCHE: What kind of untermensch wired this place for sound? Hah? Bah!  Well.  Of course we must look at the partisans of various schools of poetry — when these schools are not the dominant one — as people compelled by ressentiment, by a sense of injustice and injury.  They look at the prizes and accolades awarded to those who write in the dominant poetic styles, and they grind their teeth in frustration and outrage.  They feel that such poetry isn't just different, it is evil, because its prominence deprives them of what they crave.  They wish to see it cast down, and yearn for a great redemption in which they and their kind of poetry are redeemed into the light.  This, of course, is slave morality.  "It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey," I have said, and we shouldn't be surprised when the lambs talk to each other, saying "these birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb—should he not be good?"


THE DEFENSE: So you'd say, then, that those who condemn pluralism are just envious?


THE PROSECUTION: Objection!


[Lance Ito nods slightly, though it is unclear whether he sustains the objection, or is simply nodding off in a stupor.  The prosecutor pounces on the opportunity, while the defense attorney seems absorbed in trying to unwrap his sandwich].


THE PROSECUTION: Mr. Nietzsche, does this not imply that Mr. Archambeau's pluralism, in contradistinction to the alleged slave morality of his critics, is an aristocratic ethos?


MR. NIETZSCHE: Yes! Or close enough.  If he actually has some preferences, but is willing to tolerate the things he doesn't really care for, that would be true.  The birds of prey look on the lambs without any real hatred or sense that the lambs are evil.  Rather, they say of the lambs "we bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb."


THE DEFENSE: [with a mouth full of tuna sandwich] Surely you don't mean that Archambeau would eat poets he doesn't like!


MR. NIETZSCHE: Him?  No, he'd hardly have the will to overcome his own hesitation.  He'd just write a lukewarm review, with mild condescension hidden behind seemingly neutral language.  I've seen him do it.  But in a general sense, his pluralism implies a kind of privilege—just as the resentfulness of the partisans of particular styles masks a slavish ressentiment.


THE PROSECUTION: Just so.  Partisans seek justice for their excluded and despised poetry, while Professor Archambeau, ensconced in the ivory tower, looks down on them.


THE DEFENSE: I must object.  This line of argument implies that Mr. Archambeau advocates for a particular style, and merely tolerates others.  I assure you: my client has never had a clear aesthetic conviction in his life!


[Archambeau looks distinctly uncomfortable, shifts in his chair, and, brow furrowed, seems about to speak, when the attorney for the defense speaks again]. 


THE DEFENSE: I must now call my final witness, the late Mr. Leszek Kolakowski, whom some of you will know for his devastating critique of Marx in three volumes, Main Currents of Marxism.  I know this may seem strange, but I assure you his comments will be most relevant to proving the defense.  Welcome, Mr. Kolakowski.


MR. KOLAKOWSKI: Make it quick.  We're poking Stalin with sharp sticks in the afterlife, and it'll be my turn as soon as Orwell tires out.


THE DEFENSE: Very well.  Could I prevail upon you to read a passage from your study Modernity on Endless Trial—the part I texted you about?


MR. KOLAKOWSKI: Yes, yes.  Here it is: "A few years ago I visited the pre-Columbian monuments in Mexico and was lucky enough, while there, to find myself in the company of a well known Mexican writer, thoroughly versed in the history of the Indian peoples of the region.  Often in the course of explaining to me the significance of many things I would not have understood without him, he stressed the barbarity of the Spanish soldiers who had ground the Aztec statues into dust and melted down the exquisite gold figurines to strike with the image of the Emperor.  I said to him, “you think these people were barbarians; but were they not, perhaps, true Europeans, indeed the last true Europeans? They took their Christian and Latin civilization seriously; and it is because they took it seriously that they saw no reason to safeguard pagan idols; or to bring the curiosity and aesthetic detachment of archeologists into their consideration of things imbued with a different, and therefore hostile religious significance. If we are outraged at their behavior it is because we are indifferent, both to their civilization, and to our own.”  There it is.  But what relevance this passage on the fate of civilizations could have to these picayune proceedings is beyond me.


THE DEFENSE: Ah! Yes.  Well, the point is this: isn't my client, by virtue of his pluralism, free from any charges of insensitivity and cultural arrogance?  He's no conquistador — I mean, just look at his paunch and soft hands!  He couldn't destroy an Aztec temple if he wanted to, and I assure you he wouldn't — no more than he'd write a negative review of a book just because it came from some poetic movement with which he had no affiliation.  He's a man of peace and tolerance!  The defense rests.


THE PROSECUTION: I confess I must shake my head in disbelief.  Can my colleague on the defense really misunderstand Mr. Kolakowski's passage so profoundly?  Can't he see that Kolakowski defends western civilization against its critics?  Can't he see that what Mr. Kolakowski says only affirms Mr. Hegel's charge that people like the defendant don't really care enough about anything in particular to have beliefs?  Indifference, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is my charge against the defendant.  If he truly cared about something, he'd be less ready to tolerate anything.  The prosecution rests, as well.


JUDGE LANCE ITO: ...What? What?  We're done then?  I leave it to the jury.  If the charge won't fit, you must acquit.  Who wants to go for a smoothie?  My boss at Orange Julius says I'm getting good at making them.

Being, Becoming, and Fatherhood

[Warning: this post is much more about me and my life than my usual posts are. I don't blame you if you want to go read something else.]

Back when I was in grad school, I used to carpool from Chicago to my teaching gig at Notre Dame with a lanky guy who got his news from Fox, his opinions from Rush, and his general outlook from a hybrid of Nietzsche and Pentecostalism. It made for some interesting rides, as we argued our way through the post-industrial wasteland of northern Indiana, especially since he had little patience for the commute and an uncanny ability to talk his way out of speeding tickets, drawling long, slow explanations to the cops from behind his aviator shades. He was in his thirties, about a decade older than I was, and, when we would reach a particularly impassible point of fundamental disagreement, he'd sigh, lower those shades, look over at me from behind a speedometer that hovered up near the triple digits, and say "Well, Archambeau, you're young. You'll see it my way when that women is fool enough to marry you and you have kids." I've had to wait a long time to see for myself whether his dire prediction would come to pass, but nine months into this fatherhood gig I'm willing to crawl out on a limb and say he was just fucking wrong.

Generally, I've found the predictions about fatherhood to be kind of off-base. It hasn't been as hard as some people told me it would be. One colleague — a man predisposed by my bitching and moaning visits to his office to see of me as rather thin-skinned, or as something of a delicate orchid — was particularly stern in his warnings about the implications of having a child. "Look," he said, "right now you live in a pleasure dome, a palace of pleasant breezes, but when the little one comes, all that will change," here he would sigh, and look out the window in the general direction of his dilapidated Victorian house, his three kids, and a wife best described as "difficult." "When the little one comes," he'd continue, "the pleasure dome will be forever destroyed, and life becomes a desperate holding action, carried on against superior force." He wrote a lot about the literature of the Vietnam war, and I think it crept into his metaphors. Anyway, fatherhood hasn't felt that way for me, maybe because I'm now at a point when Valerie and I can afford to have some help raising the kid, and maybe because we got very, very lucky in the nanny-hiring lottery.

Other predictions have proven false, too. Apparently you can still go out to the movies, and you can still discover new music while doing the parent thing. Again, this may have something to do with not being a penniless twenty-something itinerant poetry teacher at this point in my life.

But there is one significant way that fatherhood has changed things for me. It's not just that I've had different experiences (a closer acquaintance with baby feces than had heretofore been the case, say, or a different relation to sleep, or a constant astonishment at the stream of firsts — waves, smiles, rollings-across-the-floor, etc.). I think there's a different orientation to experience. I don't mean that this is better or worse than my non-kid-having orientation to experience —I hate the smugness of some parents I've met, who seem to think that the only path to complete humanity lies through the raising of urchins. I thought that was wrong during my long childless period, and I think it's wrong now. But I do think that, at least for me, there's a different relation to the world now.

Maybe I've spent too much time reading Hegel (in fact, scratch the "maybe" there) but I think the best way to get at the nature of this different way of experiencing the world is through the contrast between the idea of being and the idea of becoming. Here's the deal: by the time my daughter was born this past February, I'd pretty much reached a point of stability in my life. I mean, I'd finished grad school, landed a teaching job, made tenure, and been promoted to full professor. I'd found the one woman on earth capable of dealing with my bullshit in a loving and affirming way, married her, and we'd been together in wedded bliss for sixteen years. We were settled into a house, into our sets of friends, and our careers (she's the one with the Big Deal job, by the way). I'd had a book or two published, and felt about as professionally established as I'd care to feel. All that was done, and didn't loom before me with the kind of urgency I feel when I get emails from former students hungering for the dream job, the back yard, the right guy, or whatever. It didn't feel like a rut — it felt a lot like fulfillment. And there was always something new happening in terms of whatever I was intellectually engaged with. But I was more or less who I was going to become, and the texture of life from one season to the next, one year to the next, was sort of the same. It was easy, too, which is both good and bad, I suppose.

All this was a matter of being, not becoming. Think about it: the protagonists of folklore or mythology don't change: they are what they are, they have the traits they're going to have. They have new adventures, but they don't experience fundamental changes. It's true for modern folklore, too: whenever I try to explain this stuff to students, I say that James Bond is the a creature of pure being, rather than becoming. Sure, we often see him doing some training exercise at the beginning of the movies, but he's not striving to become something he's not: he's maintaining his general awesomeness. He is what he is: a hyper-resourceful adventurer and ladies' man. He couldn't be more different from, say, the protagonist of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. The lead characters in those books are all about change and growth. The reason so many of those novels are named after the protagonist (Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) is that the protagonist is where the action is: he or she will grow, evolve, and learn. By contrast, Bond movies are often named after villains (Dr. No) or love interests (Octopussy) or whatever. In the world of becoming, you don't have a stable, ordinary world that you venture out from to have your adventures (the way 007 had headquarters with M and Moneypenny, or the way pre-kid-havin' Archambeau had the comfortable little bubble from which he'd make forays into weird books of poetry and obscure works of theory). In the world of becoming, you don't have a stable place or a stable identity: you're on the road, in motion, and evolving all the time.

The thing about having a kid (and I imagine many of you know this better than I do) is that it throws you straight into the whirlwind of becoming. I mean, a kid is all change, all becoming, all the time: it seems Little Lila has a new paradigm of behavior and a new set of skills every week, a new emotional climate every two weeks, and a new wardrobe every month. And she's plugged directly into my life, so I'm always adapting to this, and becoming different along with her. I mean, take something as simple and straightforward as the way the house is arranged. Before Lila came along, the only real changes in the house came about for aesthetic purposes ("let's re-arrange the ceramics on the mantlepiece, or find a place for the new thingy we scored while antiquing, or let's figure a way to get that pile of books off the floor," that sort of thing). Now, the house is in a constant flux: bassinets and baby swings came and went, followed by bouncy-chairs and play-pens, which were followed in turn by a wholesale revamping of the sunroom into a colorful, rubber-tiled, toy-strewn Zone du Kid. It's not a house in a state of being, it's a house in a state of becoming. And that's just the surface: the three-character dynamic of mom, dad, and kid is in constant flux to accommodate Lila's ongoing miraculous transformations. It's different from the old two-character act, which we had down, people, down. Now it's more like improv comedy. All becoming, all the time.

But that doesn't catch everything about the nature of the change in how one relates to experience. There's something different, which we might be able to get at with Nietzsche rather than Hegel. Remember Wim Wenders' wonderful movie Wings of Desire? I always thought it had a lot to do with Nietzche's ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian experience. In the beginning, we follow some angels through Berlin: they look like regular people, but drift unseen through the city, standing near people and hearing their thoughts. There's a great scene where the angels do this in a library, walking past readers and hearing their reflections on what they're reading. The angels feel deeply, and understand, but have no other connection to the world or the people they see. They're distant, understanding and appreciating the world but not really being engaged with it. They have nothing at stake in the struggles of the world, no self-interest or group-interest to protect. This is Apollonian stuff, all self-possession and aesthetic distance. I think of my pre-Lila life like this. But when she was born, I felt like the angel in the Wenders film who chooses to become human, to enter the world of time and change and to lose the distance of the Apollonian, angelic perspective. Suddenly, the angel finds himself a part of what he had observed, with something at stake, with things to protect and with the urgent need to shelter those for whom he cared most. The collapse of Apollonian distance was complete, and he'd been absorbed into the world — a good portion of the Dionysian experience, really.

I don't mean to place one mode of experience above the other (Wenders doesn't, nor does Nietzsche, though Nietzsche did seem to think that the fusion of the two modes of experience in Greek tragedy was a higher form of experience). But I do think there's a sense of engagement that comes with having a kid that's different from the generally aesthetic, semi-disinterested way of experiencing things I had going on before. Maybe it was an awareness of this that made my old carpool partner think I'd change my politics when I became a father. Though how you could get from the world of becoming and the anti-Apollonian stance to Rush Limbaugh is as much beyond me as is the secret of making cops back off when they nab you for speeding.

The Michael Jordans of Philosophy

"John Stuart Mill," Karl Marx is said to have opined, "owes his prominence in English philosophy entirely to the flatness of the surrounding terrain." I've been reading Mill's essays on Coleridge and Bentham, and am inclined to think that Marx was being a little unfair. But only a little, and it's understandable: to someone who rose from the churning depths of nineteenth-century German thought, the little pool of English philosophy must certainly have seemed like a backwater.

I mean, German philosophers, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, were the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls of philosophy: dominant, confident, and effortlessly superior to the competition. I imagine a sense of this proud tradition informed Heidegger's infamous fulminations about how Frenchmen could only think seriously if they switched languages, true philosophy only being possible in Ancient Greek and in German (there is, said Heidegger in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, a "special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language." He says more about the alleged special philosophical nature of Greek and German in Introduction to Metaphysics, and in his Rector's address — sorry to belabor the bibliography, but a gentleman in a little newsgroup discussion of this post has alleged that this claim about Heidegger's views is "crap," and I wish to prove otherwise). Anyway, it's an odd, and kind of bigoted way of explaining the very real phenomenon of the comparative German excellence in philosophy. It's kind of like explaining the dominance of the Jordan-era Bulls as product of Chicago's superior hot dogs and deep dish pizza. But if we discard this kind of chauvinism, in which a rich tradition is explained with reference to some kind of bullshitty essential local superiority, how can we explain the tremendous power and depth of the German philosophical tradition? Why did the German-speaking parts of Europe give us Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Schiller, Schelling, Schleirmacher, Schopenhauer, Herder, Fichte, Lessing, Feuerbach, Frege, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Jaspers, Popper, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas, etc., while England gave us Bentham, Mill, Bertrand Russell, and, uh... Alfred North Whitehead? I mean, you have to go to the B-list pretty quickly when naming English philosophers. And it goes for the whole continent: while there are individual stars (Kierkegaard, say), no national tradition racks up the points like the Germans. Why?

I think I've got this.

I mean, when we consider the different historical origins and institutional contexts of the French, English, and German Enlightenments, the differences in the character of the different national philosophical traditions becomes clear.

The French Enlightenment was famously anti-clerical. "Écrasez l'infâme!" shouted Voltaire, and the infamy he wished to see crushed was that of the Catholic church. Voltaire's slogan is not, I think, unconnected with another remark of his, about how he found himself spending his time traveling from one chateau to another. That is: I don't think it's coincidental that Voltaire, who spoke against the church, was sponsored by aristocratic patrons (most notably the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet). Sure, Voltaire had his run-ins with aristos (especially that odious knucklehead, the Chevalier de Rohan), but by and large it was they who buttered his toast, and one understands why: the French aristocratic and clerical powers were constantly at one another's throats. And this held true for the French Enlightenment in general: it was a culture sponsored by aristocrats, and it took place in their salons. It owed little or nothing to the church, and directed much of its energy into anti-clericism. (I'm sure the style of French philosophy, so prone to the cutting remark and startling observation, owes much to its origin in the witty salons — I mean, a guy like Roland Barthes is all glitter and quick-jab, whereas a guy like Habermas is all earnest thoroughness — this has got to be connected to the aristocratic salon origins of French philosophy and the earnest, bourgeois scholarly origins of the German tradition).

Then there's the Enlightenment in England. Which is really as Scottish as it is English, since so many of the big-league players hailed from Scotland (David Hume being the real marquee name). The Enlightenment here was notably less anti-clerical than the movement in France, and one understands why: church and state, like bourgeois and aristocrat, had found ways to get along in England, largely by not talking about the things they disagreed on (it's true! Addison's imaginary Spectator Club, for example, served as a model for how members of different kinds of elites could work together by leaving one another alone much of the time, and sticking to topics of common interest, or to what were seen as disinterested matters like taste. Don't get me started on this, or I'll cut-and-paste fifteen pages from the manuscript of the book I'm working on into this blog post and we'll never get to the Germans...). The English system had, and maybe still has, a tremendous capacity for getting along and letting-things-be. A big part of it seems to involve not talking about anything more interesting or controversial than terriers and the weather.

And then there's Germany, or, more accurately (since we're talking for the most part about the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries), the German-speaking lands. There were plenty of courts, but they were small compared to the French court, and historically the church had provided a high proportion of the administrative brain-power (and, along the way, accumulated much wealth, autonomy, and political power). The university system had developed in no small measure as a system for generating all this ecclesiastical administrative human capital, and it was here, rather than in the little courts, that the German Enlightenment's most important developments took place (eventually the university in Jena alone ended up contributing more to philosophy in the nineteenth century than, say, Spain) (please don't send me hate mail from Spain — I mean, I like Miguel de Unamuno, too, but that guy was totally channelling the Germans). So while philosophy in England during the period we're discussing often developed without too much of an orientation toward the church (positive or negative), and the French were generally anti-clerical, the Germans found themselves in an interesting position. They took up enlightenment philosophy in an overtly religious institutional context, and had a strong incentive to find some way of reconciling the old traditions of religious thought with the emerging forms of knowledge.

The challenge proved fruitful. For one thing, it led the Germans to develop historicism and hermeneutics and all the other things you need when you want to take a set of texts and understand them as true, but not literally true, or at any rate as having had a kind of truth in their time but not the kind of truth we have today. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most obvious case in point. But it's not just that the Germans had a particularly difficult task, and built up their muscles to handle it: they had the university-bred culture of thoroughness and systematic thought behind them (and this makes all the difference: Hume is much, much more readable than Kant, but Kant's systematic method gives his work a power that Hume, every bit Kant's mental equal, can't match). Also, the Germans were able to draw on two traditions: secular Enlightenment thought and the long tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking. This is probably why a guy like Bertrand Russell is constantly dismissing the German philosophers as "mystics." I suppose many people will think Russell's got a point, but I always feel this lack of sympathy for half of what the Germans are up to is one of Russell's main limitations.

Anyway. If you want to get pseudo-Hegelian here, you could say that it was in Germany that the synthesis of Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment secular thought came about. And this had everything to do with the institutional context in which the modern German philosophical tradition emerged.

As to how the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls came to be such a dominant force — well, that much simpler: Jordan was a basketball-optimized android, Scotty Pippin was a robot, and Dennis Rodman was clearly from another planet.