This Is Not a Metaphor for Anything

25 years ago, let's say, you couldn't get good coffee in America: only Folger's, Maxwell House, or instant. Hipster college towns and European imports notwithstanding (International Coffees, anyone?), the average cup was bad; so bad, in fact, that people didn't really know what they were drinking was substandard.

Then came Starbucks, and the return of coffee culture (Cheers being replaced by Cafe Nervosa in Frasier and Central Perk in Friends would be representative), and it was possible to have good-to-great coffee almost anywhere.

In the early 00s, Starbucks switches over from barista-led espresso machines to automatic ones. The caramel machiatto is a runaway success.

Now: a divide between coffee snobs and everyone else. The rise in popularity of single-cup coffee makers, whose most notable feature is the willingness to pump increasing amounts of water through the same amount of grounds, and whose flavor profiles range from "bold" to "extra bold" because otherwise you can't taste the coffee,* concurrent with the rise in 'coffee' drinks as milk-and-sugar delivery vehicles. You can get a good cup of coffee, but you probably have to make it yourself, or seek out a niche coffee location.

Are we better off now than we were? By how much, exactly?


*The only exception I've found are the Starbucks k-cups, which taste exactly like Starbucks coffee. Whether this is a good thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

It seems fitting and appropriate that Norm Geras' last blog post was one in which he recommended books he'd loved. He was a reliably great presence on the internet, and an excellent recommender of worthwhile things (Art Blakey's "Moanin'" played at my wedding reception, an album I bought because Norm once recommended it).

What else to say, really, except that it was "The Contract of Mutual Indifference" that set the course for everything that interested me in grad school and since, and it remains engaging and provocative?

I am less inclined than most to be concerned about kids only watching what's on nexflix these days, despite a great amount of hand-wringing on the subject. The reason is simple: I used to be one of those people. Approximately ten years after I recognized this as a potential issue, I've seen 76 of AFI's top 100, and 53 of Sight & Sound's top 110. There are a few issues being conflated:

1. Access: part of the reason my film education was so poor prior to 2003 is that movie distribution was poor. The movies I had seen were for the usual reasons: a smattering of classics available at the local video store, a few VHS tapes my parents had bought or would rent from the library (the latter of which skewed towards Merchant-Ivory and Jane Austen adaptations for obvious reasons), and the requisite freshman year friend who was taking a film class and invited me along to the screenings that taught me the value of foreign films (The 400 Blows, Red Sorghum) and hate Robert Altman. It was hard to get a hold of very many movies at all, much less high-quality copies, so even if I'd had the money and the inclination, my options would have been sorely limited.

There's precious little appreciation that the introduction and acceptance of DVDs in the early 2000s had the same democratizing effect as the introduction of CDs in the late 80s: everyone converted their catalogues to the new format, which meant cheap, high(ish)-quality editions of almost all movies. My interest in music was sustained because I could go into, say, Best Buy in 1996 and get five cds for $25, because they were bands no one had ever heard of, and the store just wanted to get rid of the inventory. I bought Woody Allen movies and foreign films for the same reasons: I had no idea if it was good, but it was $10. This move is also what makes Netflix possible as a business.

It's worth circling back to this: if someone isn't interested in movies now, it's a question of will. But will can be changed, if it's not a question of berating people for their poor choices, worrying about the future, etc.

2. Canon: If there's a logic behind the AFI list, I've never been able to find it. "These are good movies that were made in America" is not going to ease anyone's transition into watching film. Nor Sight & Sound's "these are foreign films that usually have good cinematography." For their to be a "new Netflix canon" there must be an "old non-Netflix canon" it's replacing, except there isn't one. Film has lists, but no narrative: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Gone With the Wind, Annie Hall and, oh, Up are all quite good films, but good in different ways and different genres for quite disparate reasons. A generation of filmmakers might be working in sync with what came before (the Cahiers du Cinema people drawing from noir and westerns), or in opposition to it (the 70s Auteurs versus the studio system); careers are significantly longer and credit is given for doing the unexpected (Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success; Billy Wilder writing Stalag 17), so the fact that Fritz Lang directed it or Marlon Brando starred in it doesn't tell you much. College students looking for an exhaustive-if-limited selection of films they need to watch (something on the stature of Pitchfork's best of lists) have no real options.

3. Points of ingress: The most fortunate coincidence in my years of movie-watching was having Woody Allen be the first figure I was interested in: he constantly makes reference to other films and is not particularly shy about doing so. From him, I found Bergman and Fellini, and thus New Wave and Neorealism, the 70s movies to which his best works were a contrast, and on from there. It takes a lot of time: I watched many westerns until I figured out I didn't particularly like them, and spent a lot of time figuring out I will never care for Kurosawa (Dursu Uzala, maybe). Along the way, there were surprises: Powell/Pressburger, say, or Buñuel, who I didn't expect to like, but did.

4. Let me again state a general opinion that one of the problems with American culture is the idea that all one's tastes have to be set at age 18, if not sooner. I prefer different things at 31 than I did at 21, and would suggest that the process of aging itself has allowed me to like things I would have previously dismissed. That students arrive at college--or leave!--not having sampled widely from world cinema is not a problem. There's a whole life to make that happen.

As a firm believer that cooking is art and not science, this post on bad recipes is odd. I don't think I have ever substituted a recipe's judgment for my own, especially when it comes to meat: if it is not yet cooked in the time allotted (for whatever reason), the meat gets more time to cook; if it looks like the meat is about to burn, then it's done. This extends even to stir-frying: 30 seconds may be the ideal, but if you're adding mushrooms, the time it takes them to cook will make them release sufficient liquid to throw off the balance unless you cook everything for longer, so... adjustments have to be made.

But really: read a recipe all the way through, probably a few times. Figure out what its main stages are supposed to be, and why the author is doing them in the order proposed. Then it's possible to figure out which stages are essential and which are a matter of preference, and alter the recipe accordingly.

And, importantly: if I can't figure out how a recipe is supposed to work, I don't make it.


(Example: Marcella Hazan's tomato-and-anchovy sauce is a Troester household favorite. But I like adding garlic, and we like adding italian sausage. It's unbalanced when you first cook it because the sauce is thin and the fennel from the sausage does not play along with the anchovy flavor. After a day? The garlic absorbs the excess water in the sauce, and the anchovy flavor mutes the sausage, which otherwise tends to become spicier as the days go on. Basically perfect, but only if you can recognize which experiments will pay off.)

One of my fellow fellows from Princeton, Alan Petigny, has died. A link to his departmental memorial.

He was always exceptionally kind to me. The measure of humanity in academia is (sometimes unfortunately) when one extends graciousness to others who are in no position to be helpful in one's own advancement, and at this, there is no doubt he excelled; he took quite an interest in all of us postdocs and did what he could to give advice and support, even when our fields of study had little in common. He will be missed.

I have mostly avoided comment on Syria, one of those things in my wheelhouse, professionally, but as always, Mungowitz knows how to get me to break my silence. Distaste for A Man for All Seasons aside, the "cut down the law to get the devil" argument doesn't really work here.

Why? International criminal law has always had an element of that: states and leaders who are likely to violate particular potential laws try to avoid or shun legal obligations, everyone recognizes this, and so a certain amount of 'cutting down to size' is part of upholding the moral principles that are not usually in conflict with the rule of law in domestic legal systems (this is also part of Arendt's point in Eichmann in Jerusalem: the reason why we can default to the rule of law is because the laws are usually good, and comprehensive. When they are either not good or not comprehensive, there are problems). Thus Nuremberg, which is as clear an example of setting aside all the basic rule of law principles as you'd like, and which most ICL textbooks are quite forthright about.*

The truth of the matter is there are three unappealing options, none of which is going to satisfy all the things we'd want from a legal system:

1. We can accept the rule of law and its outcome here, which would be no action at all, but also pretty much never any action no matter what the problem is, because that's what the UN regime is designed to produce as an outcome.
2. Act extrajudicially--the viable alternative to Nuremberg, for example, was summary execution, which seems clearly worse on a rule of law level. The United States has the power to do whatever it wants, for any reason or no reason at all, and the recognition of this needs to be a feature of thinking through these problems.
3. Recognize that legal norms shift more quickly than laws and, in a common law-like way, leave some space for new norms to emerge, which can be law-like without themselves being laws. (I understand Kerry has been using some language to this effect.) We could get into jus cogens and customary international law, but these are standard legal arguments in international law.

Now, I'm opposed to doing anything in Syria, not because I think there's anything morally or legally wrong with doing so, but because I think the American public rarely has the stamina for working through the long aftermath of intervention. But it also seems to me that when law and morality are in conflict, #3 is the option most able to balance the two.


*Having read through and taught the deliberations of the panel that formed the Nuremberg IMT law, I am reasonably convinced that Germany did nothing, or close to nothing, that was illegal in the planning or performance of World War II, and probably had a reasonable belief they were engaging in standard practices, or at least practices within the limits of acceptable war-fighting--and that all parties involved in the IMT deliberations were aware of this. They certainly had no reason to suspect that the standard Superior Orders or Reason of State defenses would be disallowed, as the IMT decided, nor that wholly domestic acts engaged in prior to the beginning of the war could be subject to an international tribunal, that jurisdictional grab being more or less the purpose in bringing about the category of Crimes Against Humanity (ie a Crime Against Humanity, in the IMT, is a claim that could easily be adjudicated in a domestic court without requiring any changes to the rule of law). That being said, I'd be hard-pressed to argue the IMT was not close to the best possible outcome.

A few hiatus-breaking thoughts on whether moral realism is compatible with a strong belief in evolution and materialism. Briefly: moral realism is the idea that the moral status that attaches to certain actions is a feature of the universe ("real") and thus not open to interpretation--e.g. killing someone is always wrong, because that's just what killing is; evolutionary materialism is the idea that there exist only physical objects, some of which develop over time without any particular end in mind aside from continued survival. The tension, then, is that objective judgments of good and bad, which moral realism promises, have to actually exist somewhere, and the average materialist account can't specify exactly where. And this is most certainly true: most people's moral beliefs have a certain level of inflexibility (which is good), and most people can't give a coherent account of why they have those beliefs and not some others. But there are three potential issues with identifying this tension:

1. It always remains an option to bite the bullet--accept that unchangeable moral statuses are not compatible with materialism, and discard moral realism. This is the option of the philosopher Richard Rorty, who famously argued that there's not much of a difference, as a formal matter, between regular bourgeois western ethics and, say, genocidal ethics, just some slight differences in focus. Philosophical problems with this argument aside, it's not a bad position to take: you sacrifice the certainty of moral argument for a more passionate engagement in it: if our common, everyday moral language could easily be twisted into something we now find distasteful, we must be vigilant to ensure that doesn't happen.

2. There are forms of moral realism where it's less clear that this tension might be an issue. Utilitarianism, for example: moral judgments are real and objective measures of utility, but it requires no deep metaphysics to make them. There's always the issue that 'useful' or 'good' still requires some explaining, but if the argument is that in materialism it's difficult to make sense of abstract nouns, that seems to be a weaker position to hold. Nor is utilitarianism incompatible with rights-talk: all it requires is the belief that rights are not absolute trumps, which is a fairly widely held position in, say, contemporary human rights scholarship.

3. The third and quite likely possibility is just that the people advocating this combination of views are not moral philosophers and therefore don't have the argumentative dexterity necessary to see this problem. The issue, then, isn't one of deep incompatibility, but of listening to people who speak authoritatively far outside their area of expertise.