There are three active possibilities for Go Set a Watchman. In order of likelihood:

1. Everyone forgets about it in a few years. By all accounts, it is not a good novel, and what makes it notable is only the fact that it differs in tone and characterization from To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is properly considered either as juvenilia or as something close to a last novel/posthumous novel/unfinished novel. If the former, people will recognize that it is not particularly interesting on its own: Trimalchio to The Great Gatsby, or "The Waste Land" before Ezra Pound edited it. If the latter, it will go into the same camp as The Last Tycoon or Hemingway's last novels: for completists only. I mean, Jane Austen has juvenilia and posthumous fiction, and no one pretends like either is part of her mature work.

2. It kills off To Kill a Mockingbird in high school curricula, and thus kills the novel altogether. The complications to "Atticus" as a character deprive him of his moral force in Mockingbird, and it's an awkward thing to try and explain to cynical teenagers. The novel can't serve as a simple (not to say simplistic) morality tale, and it becomes a historical curio of a particular time and approach to racial issues, a mid-20th century Uncle Tom's Cabin, to speak of once-influential works on race in America that are no longer widely read.

[A wide distance of probability]

3. The attractions of a novel wherein the narrator is a thinly disguised version of the author who moves to New York City and discovers that even the nice-seeming southerners are terrible racists and her father's not the hero she once thought he was, is a perfectly fine sentiment of the moment, no matter how cliché it is in all details. It feels more real, which is to say dirtier and more degrading of the human spirit, and thus will be taken for the 'adult' version of the children's story. Assuming she is of sound mind (a big assumption, where all people with opinions have vested interests in those opinions being true), then it seems to indicate that Lee didn't understand the value, importance and meaning of her own book. This would hardly be the first time such a thing were true, but it'd be sad all the same.

A Brief Word on Invisible Man

For MLK Day, I usually recommend Letter from a Birmingham Jail and something else. This year, I recommend to myself that I reread Strength to Love, since I read it almost 15 years ago with considerably less life experience and considerably less settled theological views.

The 'something else' is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Though not the work of a day of reading, it is, very possibly, the Great American Novel. It takes the very American theme* that people, on the whole and individually, are squalid, or crass, or manipulative, or ignorant, or mob-like, or unwilling to stand up for themselves, or unwilling to stand up for anyone else, and somehow concludes that these people might be worth loving, caring about, fighting for and alongside anyway.

I think we tend to want as allies only those people who are purer than pure, and look askance at people with obvious agendas or personal problems. The tendency to run down MLK because of his treatment of his wife, or his doctoral dissertation, or to think of him as in some way 'less smart' than Malcolm X, is a perfect example of this. It is somehow not enough that he be charismatic, visionary, a good speaker and a man who knew how to get important results. We would do well to remember the point that my old dissertation subject, Hugo Grotius, made. Human motivations are multifarious and almost never pure, but this is no discredit to them, since to count it so would be to discredit every last political and social cause. Instead, we ask people to --and judge them by their willingness to--uphold the moral principles they espouse even as we all disagree. And their are worse moral principles to uphold than "I will treat you like a human being even if you don't always treat me like one."

It seems to be the lot of reflections on race in America that they remain ever relevant, and in some ways Ellison's is the most important note to strike.


*see also: Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, It's a Wonderful Life

One little thing to add to the discussion around Bill Cosby, who has taken some heat about a number of long-standing allegations of sexual assault. The new swarm of attention started when the comedian Hannibal Buress decided to do a little attention-grabbing shout-out on stage. Though a lot of the subsequent attention has focused on why a man completely unrelated to any of the incidents has credibility when the original accusers were ignored, and many have underestimated how career-boosting this move might be for Buress,* it remains a remarkable thing to do. It's the very rare example of someone with a public platform--a man with a public platform--using the sensationalist tastes of the internet-media complex to bring attention to an issue that is actually important.

See also Chris Kluwe on that troubling internet phenomenon: he will say a number of things that need to be said about the way women get treated because he has the unimpeachable confidence that, as a man, no one is going to attempt to hurt him as they have hurt the women who have done the same.

When you're in a position of power, or relative power, there are a lot of options: a problem can be ignored, or it can be subjected to an analysis that makes it partially the fault of all involved, it can be understood as a call to dignified suffering on the part of those who are hurt, it can be made the fault of those who provoked a response, or one can look with incredulity on the behavior of people who are like you to people who are not. The thing about being an educated white male heterosexual Christian in America is that while there are both many people who are like me and many who aren't, my thoughts, opinions and perspectives are going to be more respected on average than those people who are 'other' in some relevant respect. For people like me, Buress and Kluwe have to be the model: when a situation is intolerable, you have to use your position, no matter that you've done nothing to deserve it and it's not quite fair that you have it, in order to do something. For a few years now, the central question I ask myself about an issue is: "would any consequences flow to me if I chose to ignore this?" When the answer is 'no,' that's a sign that I should be concerned, that this is a place for moral inquiry to begin.


* "Fearlessly dedicated to the truth no matter the consequences" is a good look for a comedian, see also Chris Rock, Louis CK, Jon Stewart, and the long run of Lewis Black.

Co-sign on the underlying question here, a leftover of last year's teaching. The lack of interest in justice is only partly explanatory of the reasons feminism and racism tend to get short shrift compared to LGBT questions. Let me suggest another possibility: if the relevant category is 'fairness,' there was something patently unfair in the treatment of that group of people which cannot (in the minds of students) be attributed to anything but animus. However, students tend also to be of the belief that the ultimate explanations for things lay in 'science.' No one will dispute the biological differences between men and women, and so there's a reluctance to believe that social roles are entirely determined by society. Feminism, in other words, is nice and all, but since only women can have babies, we can never dismiss the possibility that womens' difficulty in achieving social and political equality has something to do with biology.

The interest in evolutionary biology doesn't help: here it's apposite to note that the most susceptible audience for big, poorly sourced 'explain it all' non-fiction books are high schoolers who like the air of sophistication and can't notice the problems with the argument. Steven Pinker knows very little about the social sciences, but you'd never know it to talk to them.

The same also with race: students tend to think that all people should be treated equally, but seem fuzzy on whether all people are actually equal. (If you were so inclined and wanted to look for a place where the dearth of religious education negatively affects the young, the inability to recognize that the equality of people is a moral facet independent of any physical or mental characteristics would be it. Judaism and Christianity are quite clear that the equal status of persons has little to do with anything tangible about those persons.)

On Reading James Baldwin

At the end of the academic year, as a final reading for Classics of Social and Political Thought, I gave my students James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. There were a number of reasons for this: one of the climactic scenes takes place in Hyde Park, at a house they could easily walk to; it updates the conversation on race through the mid-60s, and gives them something newer than W.E.B. DuBois to think about; it allows them an option on racial questions that avoids lionizing Malcolm X or martyring Martin Luther King, both of which flatten the contradictions that make them interesting and admirable. Baldwin ends by conjuring up visions of black America on the south side of Chicago, and everywhere. His repeated line is "what happens to all that beauty?"--all those lives that are lost or forgotten.

I also assign it because I read it shortly after the end of my freshman year of college, and it had a profound effect on me. Baldwin came to me from Cornel West, who directed me to DuBois, and Malcolm X, and many of the other highlights of black American culture. I assigned it because I wanted it to have the effect on someone else that it had on me: a life-shaking realization of what the world was like for people who were not me. One might be inclined to view this as an example of thinking literature can change people: it certainly changed me. But, I have come to realize, it changed me because I was prepared to be changed.

Some relevant facts about me not otherwise known to the internet:
*From approximately 7th grade to approximately 10th grade, I was bullied. I've had a very slight sibilant S since childhood, which sounds not unlike a lisp, on occasion. I was tall and skinny and not particularly interested in sports or cars; I liked to read. This made me a target, and the epithets of choice implied homosexuality. These threats were mostly that--threats--except for a few brief incidents. But the threat of violence is psychologically damaging in its own way. Sure, the kids in the pickup truck who stopped as I was walking down the street to yell "fag!" at me were probably not going to get out of said truck and make good on their threats, but probabilistic knowledge is cold comfort. I had some small consolation in the fact that the basis of their threats was untrue and, lo and behold, the threats dried up not soon after I started dating my first girlfriend, but there's something about knowing you might be subject to violence for no reason under your control that's hard to shake.
*From 10th grade or so until my sophomore year of college, I had long hair. I have been stopped and frisked by the police for the crime of sitting on a friend's car (and been singled out from the people I was with for that honor), and been frustrated by the indifference that attached to attempting to report someone's official misbehavior--city and state police shuttled me back and forth so many times, each denying responsibility, that I eventually gave up. I've had the experience of store owners send employees around to follow me and make sure I don't shoplift or otherwise cause trouble (and make sure I saw them so I knew it was intentional). When I took introductory philosophy as a freshman, the instructor asked if any of us had this particular experience--the only other one to raise her hand was the one person of color.

My experience was not the universe of experiences: I was only subject to force, never viewed as a threat. It was limited: only a few minutes or hours or random days through a small number of years. It also no longer applies: I look like the sort of person who gets called 'sir' when I wear a suit, and I do. (I additionally had the defiant-teen's ultimate defense, that the various charges stated or implied against me weren't true)

But I think about that radical element that's always been present in my political views, the way in which it was obvious to me that Baldwin was right, that the experience Malcolm X described actually happened, that Ralph Ellison had correctly apprehended both the white and black experience of racial interaction, and it becomes apparent that I responded to all that work because I was primed to recognize the truth in it. The victory it gives is minor: I'm not sure I'm a better person for having read it, though it does make one more aware of the ways in which one falls short, not an insignificant addition. You pick Baldwin because he recognizes all of it, including the continual struggle to be slightly better. It's hard to think of a more fitting task to direct people towards when they're young.

A Further Note on 'Going Slow'

In re: this, Ta-Nehisi Coates:

This paragraph is the American approach to racism in brief. Cohen can name the root causes. He is not blind to history. But he can not countenance the import of his own words. So he retreats to cynicism, pronouncing the American state too bankrupt to clean up a problem which it created, and, by an act of magic, lays it at the feet of something called "culture."

My rule of thumb is this: if ignoring a situation produces no adverse affect for me, it's a sure indication that I need to be concerned about it.

I used to know people--a lot of them--who were very much into the southern agrarians in general and Allen Tate in particular, which I could never understand. As someone who has southern ancestry and has voluntarily chosen to live in the south, it is crucial to get this point right:

Tate’s argument is that “antebellum man” lived in a “traditional society” that was morally superior to our own, which is dominated by “finance-capitalist economics.” The traditional society of the antebellum South had this as its “distinguishing feature”: “In order to make a livelihood men do not have to put aside their moral natures.” In that society, as opposed to our own, “The whole economic basis of life is closely bound up with moral behavior, and it is possible to behave morally all the time.”

Not once does Tate mention that the entire economic basis of this admirable traditional society was chattel slavery, and that therefore he does not consider the ownership of other human beings as in any way impeding a person who would “behave morally all the time.” I believe, rather, that the system Tate praises so highly was abominably wicked and unworthy to be called a “traditional society” at all: it wore a mask of genteel tradition to hide its horribly disfigured face. And as the late, great Eugene Genovese demonstrated, this was understood by many Southern Christians even during the antebellum period — I am not here simply imposing contemporary standards on ancestors who could not have known better. People who wanted to know better knew better in 1850, and there’s no excuse for Tate’s late romanticizing of the corruption.

The Confederacy was vile, and antebellum south built on a morally abhorrent foundation. That others were also implicated in that foundation is no mitigation. That other reasons were involved in the Civil War is no excuse. Supporting that society is no different than supporting Mussolini for making the trains run on time, or Franco for preserving the Catholic Church: the best one can say is that the entire society was not a cesspool, that there was some tiny seed which could be redeemed in a version of that world which had finally extirpated its reason for being in the first place. One can love the south, and love it even in spite of its terrible history, but only after having accepted and understood the depths to which it had sunk. There is no easy way around that process, no getting to claim only the good elements of the tradition and ignore the bad ones, no using one's own ignorance to obfuscate the clarity of the situation.

The Problem With "On the Killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman"

It passes so quickly it might go unnoticed:

4.) I think Andrew Cohen is right -- trials don't work as strict "moral surrogates." Not everything that is immoral is illegal -- nor should it be. I want to live in a society that presumes innocence. I want to live in that society even when I feel that a person should be punished.

Trials are nothing but moral surrogates, and have been for a long time. The two big components of trials have always been in tension, and that tension has been more precarious in the US than is commonly admitted: there are procedural rules that are to be followed--presumption of innocence et al--and whether the outcomes are just. As it turns out, people have very little patience for procedurally legitimate but unjust outcomes.

Justice is the tail that wags the dog: if the outcome of the trial is deemed just, then procedural questions are minimized or overlooked; if the outcome is 'wrong,' then there must have been a procedural error somewhere. (Trial procedures being what they are, there's frequently such an error to latch onto.) To see how this works out, one needs only look back as far as the DOMA and Prop 8 rulings: what matters to the vast majority of people is that the outcome is 'right.' The legal nitty-gritty and the further consequences of the ruling are immaterial.

That America has a commitment to the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, and all the rest, is one of those stereotypes that we tend to believe without much reflection on whether these enter into the actual reaction to cases as they arise. Assuming that people will react to trials as moral surrogates explains pretty much everything we see.

"Go Slow"

The oddest thing about teaching Classics of Social and Political Thought this past year was the students' attitude towards racism and sexism. To their minds, both were deeply-seated problems and would take a long time to resolve. One student thought Emma Goldman's "The Tragedy of Women's Emancipation" was a 21st century piece, rather than one written at the turn of the 20th century; they noted the similarities between Tocqueville or DuBois' observations on the treatment of black people. They took to heart Tocqueville's idea that society doesn't change until mores change, and mores take a long time to change, but they did so in the oddest of ways: by assuming this gets everyone in history, and themselves, off the hook. Changing attitudes is complex, and people can't do it overnight.

Raising the issue of justice rarely helped, as their tendency was to think in terms of efficiency and ease. Justice being neither efficient nor easy, they looked on this as a needless muddying of the waters. I offered the comparison with homophobia, which they all think untenable, and pointed out that American society has reversed itself on the question within the last 20 years. No effect. Even pointing out that racism or sexism is just a choice--one that can be undone with so little effort as 'now I'm going to treat this person like a person, as I do every day with lots of human beings I encounter'--did not dissuade them from the idea that these problems would take hundreds of years to solve. I found their position disturbing because of the quietism it seems to imply--that political and social conditions are a given, that individual effort matters very little, that the resolution of problems is largely out of their hands and is somewhere far off in the future. And I am not quite sure how to address it in the future.

There was a mistake that used to be made quite frequently in evangelical circles in the 90s (they have since learned better) in the assessment of pop culture: an author can only be speaking his own thoughts in his own voice. It's a mistake because it's too simplistic: sometimes an author is speaking in his own voice, but sometimes it's the voice of a character, or--most complicated--sometimes it's a number of voices all happening at the same time.

Most songwriters rarely do the first, for the same reason so few novelists do: reality just isn't that interesting. One has to invent, combine and embellish to get the best possible results. The second is a common technique of high-brow and attempted high-brow alike: the singer could be the point-of-view character who is not necessarily the person singing (as Patti Smith did, and does, all the time), or the singer could be the narrator of a story or series of images who has no relation to the story itself (Jim Morrison, or Thom Yorke). For polyvocality, there's someone like Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian, who has started to resolve the question of identity in his lyrics by having different people sing each part.

This is also what Kanye does, and it is the single most controversial thing about his music now. When he samples vocals, they're no longer to provide a hook--they're to give another voice to throw into the mix, often three or four in the same song. As a result, critics go about making basic mistakes in their criticism, indeed, the same "if Kanye raps it it must be an exact representation of what he thinks" that evangelical audiences used to make. To wit: "Devil in a New Dress" is not a happy song. If your interpretation relies on him approving of the decision-making of the characters in said song, you've missed the point.

Which leads me to the intriguing possibility that the reason no one can make sense of "Blood on the Leaves" is because it is that rarest of things, a pop-culture song that is anti-abortion. "Strange Fruit" is the sample because black bodies are now being destroyed by people who want to spend their money on watches, or cocaine, or a big ol' pile of money rather than accept the consequences of their actions. Now, this might not be what Kanye meant, and the song might be a mess, but it's a coherent interpretation that makes more sense of the material and the sampling choices, and it relies on being able to accept that the voice of the rapper in the song may not be Kanye West. Hopefully the rest of music criticism will join us in the 21st century, rather than assuming rap to be an unsophisticated lyrical form.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption, The Jew As Other Edition:

Homocide: My students are required, a few times throughout the semester, to produce reflections on class discussion. It's usually a helpful way of getting them to continue to think about the reading after class, and it occasionally shakes out questions they had but which went unasked. The assignment for yesterday was Marx's "On the Jewish Question." Class discussion was limited, as it was their first exposure to Marx and a lot of terminology had to be introduced; we touched on Marx's use of anti-semitic tropes, mostly to emphasize that he really meant them, and they are not some accident of the text.

The responses had a lot of questions, most of them about the anti-semitism. They did not understand it. Not that they were confused why Marx would subscribe to such poorly formulated theories of The Jew, but rather that they lacked the conceptual apparatus to understand why The Jew must be Other in the first place. In part, this makes sense: they don't know a lot about Christianity, and one must understand something about that to understand the fraught history of Jewish-Christian relations, and one has to understand quite a bit about that to understand why anti-semitic tropes could be so widespread when they were all based on shoddy and inadequate understandings of Judaism.

But this is also notably different from the discussion of, for example, the chapter on the three races in Democracy in America, or the discussions we have had of race in the context of Mill's On Liberty. The students know the stereotypes of those who are black, or Hispanic, or Asian, know the mythos and origin of those stereotypes, if only to be able to identify them when deployed so as to properly distance themselves from them. (There is no tension like the tension of a classroom discussion that veers towards race.) Jewishness, so far as I can tell, and perhaps only in the eyes of these particular students, is a slightly differentiable form of being white, and so therefore not particularly interesting.

It just so happens that the movie Netflix sent me was Homocide, which is at least in part about questions of what it means to be Jewish, and is premised on the existence of a world where to be Jewish is to be singled out as Other. The movie was made in 1991 but its existential concerns are of a piece with (to display the extent to which my familiarity with the relevant literature is limited) The Chosen, or perhaps The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which despite its future-oriented setting takes its view of Jewish-American relations from the 1940s. I can remember a world in which these concerns were omnipresent enough to make it to Real America, as isolated as we were from actual contact with people who were different. I am not entirely sure that's the world my students live in.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it is certainly better to live in a world where some previous form of intolerance is considered literally incomprehensible. On the other, this leads those pockets that remain to be regarded as a curio rather than a serious threat, and I think they miss something of the problem by regarding it as odd or amusing rather than, say, vile. It's a view that deserves to be taken seriously enough to be forcefully rejected rather than set aside. I think there's no better highlight in the work of the midcentury theologian Karl Barth than his lecture on anti-semitism in Dogmatics in Outline. Barth is in Germany in 1946 and speaking to an audience of German theology students; to the best of my knowledge, it's the first time he was back after having been kicked out in 1933 for organizing Protestant churches against the Nazi Party. Let us feel and try to understand the weight of the theological argument for eliminating the Jew, he says: let's lay down the premises which make them responsible for killing God, and consider what the anti-semite thinks should flow from that. The presentation of the argument is taken quite seriously. What follows: when, so the story goes, the Jews abandon God, God does not abandon them: he fulfills his promise and gives to them the thing promised: he, in other words, completes the act of salvation promised to Abraham, and gives it to Abraham's children. That is to say, Barth argues, the anti-semite looks at the same facts as God and comes to the opposite conclusion: where God saves, the anti-semite condemns, and would persecute, oppress, and kill. Therefore anti-semitism in whatever form is directly and identifiably opposed to the will of God expressed in the actions of God. The anti-semite cannot be a Christian, he is barred from it; he can only be a rebel. From a Christian theological perspective, I cannot imagine a stronger response. The response is strong because it takes the objection seriously, and demolishes it on its own terms; it shames and defeats its opponent through argument, not the power of the state, or the ability of social convention to make people learn to not express their 'bad' opinions.

I worry, in other words, that not knowing the argument well enough makes the response to it harder to produce when needed.

That ending.

In honor of MLK Day (which, irony of ironies, was almost spent in Arizona), Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Alternatively, you can hang with the cool kids, in which case I recommend something by James Baldwin, either "Everybody's Protest Novel" or my personal favorite, "Equal in Paris". From the former:

But that battered word, truth, having made its appearance here, confronts one immediately with a series of riddles and has, moreover, since so many gospels are preached, the unfortunate tendency to make one belligerent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is meant to imply a devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment which cannot be charted. This is the prime concern, the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devotion to Humanity which is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notoriously bloodthirsty. We have, it seems to me, attempted to lop this creature down to the status of a time-saving invention. He is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science. He is– and how old-fashioned the words sound!– something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity– which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves– we are diminished and we perished; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' piece on Obama was interesting, in that it recognizes the central features of Obama's appeal--the desire to be 'twice as good,' the fact that being biracial gives him an 'acceptable' kind of blackness--but I do wish it had come down more decisively on one side or the other. On the one hand, yes, the picture of Obama with the little boy who wants to touch his hair is touching and powerful and affecting for all the reasons the interaction of children with adults they admire always are, and it contains a powerful message about that hair which has itself been the source of much anguish (one might add: as a symbol of racism writ small. But if cursory familiarity with the literature of race, as well as the literature of feminism, might indicate, the fact that hair style or appearance comes across as a trivial concern to a white male such as myself does not mean it does not exert a powerful influence on others, as a disqualification against which someone else has to struggle constantly before we even notice their larger concerns). On the other hand, Obama succeeds as a black man precisely because he is exceptional and therefore not stereotypically 'black.' Coates is a writer with much insight on these topics (his memoir is excellent), and it's a shame that he doesn't push farther: is the symbolism worth the compromise?

This puts me in mind of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, discussing the (not inaccurate) 60s prediction that a slow-and-steady course of rising consciousness meant a black man might be president in 40 years. Baldwin seems to have little interest in that kind of lack of imagination, in part because he sees the crucial question involved as this: would the hypothetical election of a black president mean that black people have finally achieved parity with whites? Or would it mean that white Americans had finally accepted and understood that they had been the ones imposing restrictions on black men in the first place? I.e. is the black man raised up, or are the white people? If it's the former, then it implicitly embraces the idea that, for whatever reason, the black man was inferior to begin with, and that the sign of his having 'made it' is being embraced by white America--once again, the people who caused the problem hold all the cards. It seems like this is the central question on which Coates' analysis rests and, to be honest, in thinking back to the rhetoric of 2008, I'm not sure which one is the better explanation. But the fact that the question must even be asked is troubling enough.

I've been pondering the following set of issues for the last few months: after reading Walzer on Judaism and politics, and following up with some additional research on Jewish ways of reading sacred texts, I've noticed the following trend, which repeats itself across religious and non-religious readings of texts of all kinds: a tendency to declare a text to be fundamentally broken, and use its broken-ness as permission to 'fix' it. A few examples:

• In the period following the canonization of texts and the return from exile, the discovery that the text of the Torah does not comprehensively address every aspect of personal life. Because it fails to do so, the text is 'broken' and requires supplementation in the form of priestly or rabbinic instruction, and thus the distinctive forms of the Mishnah and Talmud, as well as the wide variety of regulation of behavior.

• The tendency of Protestant Christians to assume the Bible is a comprehensive text that starts at the beginning and ends at the end, and also covers every useful piece of information one might need for life. Thus reading Daniel to find dieting advice. (This piggybacks on the need to find Christian-friendly versions of all pop culture phenomena.) (Other forms of Christianity begin with the assumption that the text is insufficient on its own, but this hardly gets around the problem: the text must now be read as unable to answer those questions Tradition or Authority has claimed to definitively interpret.)

• A number of books that are traditionally read against the express intentions of their authors: reading Descartes' Meditations as a skeptical work; reading The Brothers Karamazov as though Ivan is the dramatic center. These are failures of imaginative identification: because I, modern secular liberal, find skepticism to be more persuasive than the existence of God, Descartes must have known and intended to make the skeptical case more persuasive.

What these all have in common is, I think, the belief that a text one finds compelling or interesting or provocative can only ever possibly support the beliefs one has in the first place. If you like Bob Dylan and are a conservative, Dylan's work must have secret conservative themes; if you like Shakespeare and are Catholic, Shakespeare must have been a Catholic. The failure in all these cases is to treat the work in question as something that exists autonomously and permanently apart from the person who reads it: it gets to make a claim in its own voice. And this has to be the pleasure of reading: listening to another voice, taking it on its own terms, and only then deciding whether to agree or disagree, not as a final definitive judgment but as a way-station.

All of which is to say: I'm fairly certain the Spring Quarter will involve giving my students James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, since they will have to read W.E.B. DuBois and I would like to talk about something more interesting than the DuBois-Washington debate (or Malcolm X versus MLK); Baldwin says some things I think are completely correct, some that I think are wrong, and some about which I am not certain, most especially when he talks about the theoretical future when America elects a black president. Being confused, productively, is one of the most valuable things there is.

I happened to be reading James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son over the weekend, and came across this passage which put me immediately in mind of the Baldwin-William F. Buckley debate I posted some months ago. Baldwin, on his experience of being wrongfully imprisoned in France:

The story of the drop de lit, finally told, caused great merriment in the courtroom, whereupon my friend decided that the French were "great." I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I resolved to find a place where I would never hear it anymore. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and can never be stilled.

The passage was striking because it captures Buckley perfectly: he is a man incapable of taking the actual situation of the black person in America seriously, as a felt and lived experience and not a totum of resentment or some claim against him. Because he cannot take it seriously, he laughs and makes jokes about it; the resolution of any particular matter is only a concern inasmuch as it allows him to score points against his opponents, or allows his opponents to score points against him. The laughter reveals that he is, on some unfortunate level, not serious--it reveals not a failure to grasp the essence of this issue but the lack of something of considerably greater importance: it touches his credibility not only on this topic but on all topics he discusses.

And I think it's worse than this because this tendency toward humor--irony, wit, the best and most dismissive put-downs of undesirable people and tendencies of thought--corrupts much in conservative thought. It makes meager spiritual development acceptable, and it diminishes the realm in which conservative thought can actively flourish.

Via TNC on twitter, you too can watch James Baldwin absolutely destroy William F. Buckley in debate.

One interesting thing that I noticed: Buckley's defense is, basically, "we can't legislate away the problem of racism." As in, once equality of opportunity has been formally established, there is nothing left to do, because the hearts and minds of men are what they are. It struck me as weirdly liberal, or, more precisely, as the opposite of what Buckley imagines the liberal point to be: he seems to think Baldwin and others who are harping on racism in the mid-1960s (that enlightened era!) want the government to solve the problem; he thinks the government can't solve it, and so there's nothing left to discuss.

It's oddly blind to what I would take to be the proper province of conservatism: the idea that change happens, if it happens at all, through beliefs and attitudes, and that changes that do not begin at this level are doomed to fail (e.g. the French Revolution). But Buckley seems uninterested in changing beliefs and attitudes. Nor does it seem Buckley grasps the essence of Baldwin's point, which is that the problem is and remains domination and not coercion: it's precisely the unwillingness to change attitudes that fires the entire problem, north and south.

Also, it allows me to mention one of my major pet peeves: the tendency of conservatives to introduce certain voices into a debate by mentioning their religion, race, ethnicity, etc (cf. Buckley's mention of the Jewish professor). It's creepy in its implication that the religion, race, etc is somehow a relevant factor in judging their viewpoint, and misbegotten in its belief that knowing this can mitigate against certain complaints.