tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22289320950829612352023-08-28T01:58:01.649-07:00Notes from a CrackpotA recovering liberal watches, abuses, and guiltily enjoys The West Wing.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-23852791423742759182012-11-25T00:09:00.001-08:002012-11-25T00:09:14.333-08:00Exactly Who You Think They Are: "The State Dinner"1:30 in the morning on a Sunday, and here I am, wide awake thanks to having worked a midnight-to-8:30 shift on Black Friday. But the (possibly) good news is that the Internet is so dead at this hour that I'm writing about "The State Dinner" sooner than I otherwise might have. And it's a less objectionable episode than any of the first six. I don't mean as drama; on those terms it may be the weakest to date. Its subplots fail to cohere into a satisfying overall story, and what character work there is Sorkin's typical facile approach-real-drama-then-scurry-away stuff. But politically, this episode isn't quite as inane as it might be, and it actually grants a radical critique of the U.S. government some legitimacy, though it does so in underwhelming fashion.<br />
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First, however, we'll talk about vermeil. What's worse here, C.J. whining about how the reporters only discuss clothing and then dismissing protesters interested in an actual issue as "six pathetic people protesting on a Friday," or the weakness of Abbey Bartlet's answer on the problem of vermeil itself? Trick question, really, because they're the same failing: a nominal willingness to criticize the unnecessary opulence of national political life coupled with an indifference to doing anything about it. C.J. acts as though Abbey has brilliantly resolved the dilemma, but that's only true if you assume that the sole available options are to use the vermeil or to lock it away somewhere. Instead of either, they might, oh, I don't know, sell it and use the proceeds to feed poor people, or put it in a museum whose proceeds would feed poor people, or something like that. Likewise, there's no law that says the First Lady <i>has </i>to be wearing "a Badgley Mischka silk Shantung gown with a beaded bodice;" that's a choice, one that encourages a worshipful focus on the ceremonial presidency rather than a realistic consideration of the office as a political function.<i> </i>But Sorkin wants you to worship the president, at least if he's cosmopolitan enough to be worth the worship. At least this episode presents Danny Concannon in the best light he'll ever get, as an actual adversarial journalist, rather than the shameless colluder of "Take Out the Trash Day" and the Shareef assassination storyline.<br />
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The standoff in Idaho. This is one of the better strands of the episode, allowing Mandy to make a forceful argument about the possibility of government overreaction and the dangers of "the unbridled power of the state over its citizens," which is pretty strong stuff for the cheerfully authoritarian Sorkin. Her suggestion that the government sting against the extremists constitutes entrapment is especially relevant in light of the contemporary government habit of <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/09/29/fbi_terror/">creating and arresting terrorists in the name of freedom</a>. But there are issues with this presentation too. For one thing, even Mandy feels the need to describe the extremists as "exactly who you think they are." This neatly avoids discussing any concrete issues that might generate or expand this brand of right-wing extremism (one of which might be the liberal habit of reducing such extremists to a cultural stereotype), anything at all beyond the mournful suggestion that such people are "the inevitable and unavoidable byproduct of democracy." They hate us for our freedoms. Also, the shooting of the negotiator tends to suggest that peaceful engagement with extremism is doomed to failure, and that going in with guns blazing is always the best approach. I don't think that's the intention-- to the extent that the shooting means anything to Sorkin, it's probably in terms of character work for Mandy and Bartlet-- but the reading is there nonetheless.<br />
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Speaking of character stuff for Mandy, it's been interesting to note that in the first season to date, she is the voice of (what passes for) the far left in the world of <i>The West Wing</i>. Later this position will be held by Toby, but so far he's more pro-authority (consider his waxing indignant over the "threat" from Bertram Coles) and anti-union (like Josh, he sides with management over the truckers in the labor subplot), and Mandy is the actual liberal. It's telling that when Sorkin considered reintroducing her in season two, it was as an adviser to the left-wing Democrat played by Ed Begley, Jr. The only trouble with making Mandy the voice of the left is that she's a political consultant, an image-based job, and is easily dismissed as such, as happens in this very episode, even though there's not much substantive difference between the way she balances image and issues and the way everyone else in the West Wing does it. The resolution, where she appears literally not to have the stomach for this sort of thing, is tricky again in this respect. There's a larger issue involving the fact that Mandy and C.J., the two women in key positions, hold jobs that are more about presentation than substance, but I'll hold off discussing that until a future episode where it's a bit more relevant.<br />
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The storm. The ending is sweet; if you consider it in isolation from the rest of his personality, Bartlet is pretty likable. The only other thing worth noting is that it's not remotely appropriate for Josh to be using his and Leo's authority to divert FEMA's operations, however briefly, for the sake of a single family, even if that family happens to be related to a White House staffer. I'm honestly surprised that the episode presents Josh's behavior as entirely a matter of heartwarming loyalty, with not even a whiff of awareness that this is a privileged abuse of power.<br />
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The truckers. It's significant that even the liberal <i>West Wing</i> feels the need to maintain parity of insults, following the centrist narrative that the unions are just as bad as management. The high point of this nonsense is when Leo smacks down one of the union guys for telling an opponent he's "full of crap," because "this is the White House, Bobby, it's not the Jersey turnpike." First of all, I think that if he were actually on the Jersey turnpike, Bobby might use a slightly more offensive word than "crap." Second, I doubt that Vile Bobby was the first person to utter said word within the confines of the White House, or that by doing so he lowered the tone of presidential discourse forevermore. As a matter of fact, Leo's Boss used the word in the White House himself, in the pilot. But Leo had to distance himself from the truckers somehow, and if it could include a classist implication that truckers don't know how to conduct themselves among Serious People, well, so much the better.<br />
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Meanwhile, despite the occasional mention of specific issues, all of which continue to be relevant to worker/management relations, the ultimate verdict on the trucking debate is that it's a bunch of squabbling kids who need Papa Bartlet to tell them to act their age or <i>nobody</i> gets to use the Super Nintendo. (Having him pull out his Nobel Prize to declare that they're all wrong without ever saying how is an especially fine case of an empty appeal to authority.) The episode is at least vaguely aware that this may be an overreaction on his part due to ego, but there's no meaningful consideration of how this interaction between personal quirks and political problems might influence the fate of nations in ways both good and bad. That would be some real, complex drama, after all, and Sorkin is more interested in writing about lovable, mildly-flawed heroes than about profoundly compromised human beings.<br />
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Finally, the state dinner itself. The episode <a href="http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2001/07/28/039the-west-wing039-looks-puzzle-indonesia.html">manages to get several things about Indonesia wrong</a>, and there's something unpleasant about the various "aren't these foreigners wacky" gags being aimed at a real nation; stick to made-up countries, huh, Aaron? The multiple translation shtick is pretty threadbare even as slapstick; <i>I Love Lucy</i> did it in 1955, and it wasn't exactly cutting-edge comedy then. And I could certainly live without Toby lecturing the cook on not knowing English even though he lives here; why is a liberal Democrat reciting right-wing bumper stickers? But I'll put up with a lot to have U.S. hypocrisy called out as powerfully as it is here, leaving Josh and Toby speechless for once in their lives. Of course, I have to say that there are slightly more recent U.S. failures in the human rights department than the Native American genocide. The sort, for example, that come from rigging foreign elections and taking other repressive action in favor of preferred dictators, which this episode mentions in passing twice, once as a joke, because if there's anything that's funny, it's a century of often brutal American hegemony. But given that Sorkin will eventually pretend, in "Posse Comitatus," that the U.S. has never before compromised itself for the sake of its interests, I'm not sure he really gets the awfulness of U.S. foreign policy. If he did, he wouldn't, for half a hundred reasons, have been able to have a show about the White House airing on NBC.<br />
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<b>Next episode</b>: "Enemies," one of three episodes in the Sorkin era for which he was not credited with writing or co-writing the teleplay, though I'll continue my reductive habit of ascribing every aspect of the production to him anyway.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-36113190084225772792012-11-19T11:15:00.002-08:002012-11-19T11:15:57.862-08:00Dummies: "Mr. Willis of Ohio"So here we are, more than a year after I last wrote about <i>The West Wing</i>. At five episodes annually, I should finish abusing the Sorkin era in a mere 18 years. Just think: babies born while I was discussing the pilot will be able to celebrate my post on "Twenty Five" by smoking a cigarette or casting a meaningless vote in the latest Most Important Election Ever. I'm getting a little misty at the very thought. Anyway.<br />
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"Mr. Willis of Ohio" is a tough episode from the perspective of this blog, because its political issue (apart from the cutesy Josh/Donna discussion of taxes, which is notable only insofar as it suggests Sorkin thinks the liberal argument for high taxation should be made in the most paternalistic way possible) is the census, which cannot possibly be said to matter. Sorkin tries his level best to convince us otherwise, not least in Joe Willis' final speech about its being "the right place to start," which is evidently meant to be stirring but contains, so far as I can see, no meaningful content. Yes, to the extent that one accepts the illusion of representative government it matters how many people there are in the country, and yes, to the extent that one fetishizes the constitution it matters whether sampling is consistent with it. But even so, this is thin stuff on which to hang an episode. (I note in passing that one benefit of the traditional census from a liberal perspective, that it provides temporary employment for hundreds of thousands of people who need it, goes unmentioned, though I suppose the acuteness of that need is somewhat more visible now that it was in 1999.)<br />
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But of course this episode isn't really about the census. It's about Joe Willis, about praising him in terms so condescending that the praise falls flat. Last episode (<a href="http://notesfromacrackpot.blogspot.com/2011/10/big-block-of-something-crackpots-and.html">"The Crackpots and These Women,"</a> if you'll cast your minds back thirteen months), we were told that Mrs. Landingham was amazing because she had a perfect attendance award; now Joe Willis is amazing because, er. Because he's a teacher? Because he went to night school? Or because he's bereaved, good-natured, self-deprecating and black? Stop and imagine this same script with a white Joe Willis. Not only does Toby's ploy no longer work; the worshipful attitude the episode takes toward him becomes hard to comprehend. I don't think, though, that Willis' race is actually the point; it's just a cheap grab for liberal sympathy. Willis' true "appeal" lies elsewhere, and reveals a deep cynicism that clashes with <i>The West Wing</i>'s superficial optimism.<br />
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What Toby says about Willis, what makes him "unusual," is that he "didn't walk into the room with a political agenda. He didn't walk in with his mind up. He genuinely wanted to do what he thought was best. He didn't mind saying the words 'I don't know.'" Unless you're a misanthrope, these are not in fact regarded as unusual characteristics for an average human being. They may, however, be unusual for a politician. What we have here, then, is the political class genuflecting to ordinary people by declaring their inherent superiority. This is most easily regarded as pandering, but it's also possible that politicians wholeheartedly believe it, that they do see themselves as driven purely by agendas, fixed opinions, selfishness, and arrogance. Consider Toby's confession to Willis, in which he acknowledges that he was engaged in manipulative, dishonest race-baiting. Doesn't that make him a pretty terrible human being, regardless of whether Willis knew he was doing it? The episode moves rather lightly past the partisan gains sampling will offer Democrats, but isn't that likely to be the point of the exercise? What <i>about</i> the precedent it sets? Instead of answers we get a joke about the Nielsens, a reminder that <i>The West Wing</i> is best regarded not as a drama, but as a sitcom suffering from a serious excess of Very Special Episodes.<br />
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One last thing about Mr. Willis: the character appears not to be very well thought-out. The first thing we hear about him is that "presumably he's gonna do what he's told." But if that's the case, how is he a swing vote, and why is he at a meeting designed to convince those hostile to what the White House wants? Unless they mean "do what he's told by the other committee members at the meeting." Which raises the questions: what party is Willis in? The other two are Republicans, but it's hard to imagine that Janice Willis, possibly black and definitely admired by Toby, was with the GOP. (Fun fact: in the real world there has never been a black Republican congresswoman, although <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mia_Love">Mia Love</a>, black, female, Mormon, Republican, and therefore fascinating to those who enjoy identity politics, is hoping a recount will change that.) But if he's a Democrat, why is he being courted simultaneously with Republicans (or at all), and why do Gladman and Skinner act as though the Republican committee chair's advice would mean something to him? Is he supposed to be that much of a naif? Or is this just a script that makes no earthly sense?<br />
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Speaking of making no earthly sense, in this episode Josh points out the inanity of Sam telling Mallory that he had slept with Laurie, but only for the sake of another line of repetitive Sorkin banter, not because it is, you know, a gaping flaw in the plot logic of a major first season storyline. Also, Sam again makes the distinction that Laurie is not a hooker but a call girl. Why is he so hung up on this? Because he's a privileged asshat more offended by the idea that he would solicit a cheap prostitute than by the thought he would solicit one at all? You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.<br />
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Then there's Zoey's close encounter with the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad frat boys. What's grating about this scene is not that I don't think such frat boys exist, or that they might be found in a D.C. area bar. It's not even the implausibility of the set-up. (On that note, though: where is Zoey's Secret Service protection? Leo's Boss mentions upping her protection, but why is nobody in the room with her to begin with? Did they somehow imagine that being surrounded by several high-profile members of the administration made her <i>safer</i>? No wonder kidnapping her turns out to be so easy. And would the bartender just hand her C.J.'s drink anyway? "It's for my non-underage friend!" Yeah, right.) What's grating is the reason the frat boys are so comically over the top: so that we won't stop to wonder whether throwing the Secret Service at them might be a slight overreaction to some macho posturing, posturing in which the grownup White House staffers also engage, though without the racism and homophobia. Are we meant to cheer that the Eric Balfour character might go to federal prison because he was carrying cocaine while attempting to flirt with a receptive girl who happened to be the president's daughter? I guess so, especially because it helped Charlie get over his inferiority complex. And what's a ruined life next to that?<br />
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That's all for now. Coming up: "The State Dinner," in which Abby Bartlet is introduced. I may watch it later today, but I doubt I'll have time to write about it until after Thanksgiving, which I plan to celebrate, in best <i>West Wing</i> tradition, by pretending to care about Indians and making a prank call to the Butterball hotline. Good times.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-89445938627798699242012-07-25T09:27:00.002-07:002012-07-25T09:27:42.899-07:00One last Pinker followup<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Although I joked about the endlessness of my response to Steven Pinker's <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, the truth is that for a book so (physically) substantial and wide-ranging in its claims, a long reply is warranted. Which is why I was pleased to read Edward S. Herman and David Peterson's </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"></span><em><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence</span></span></em><span style="color: #990000;"><span style="color: black;">, a 39,000-word critique that points out many of the faulty assumptions, biases, and distortions underlying Pinker's absurd thesis. There's a particular focus on his treatment of the 20th and 21st centuries, but later sections also deal with the wider historical issues, and the science (such as it is) behind his claims. Herman and Peterson's blunt, meticulous overview brings home especially well just how unpleasantly smug Pinker is about the naive illusions that undergird not just his thesis, but his general worldview. Their book is available as a <a href="http://coldtype.net/Assets.12/PDFs/0812.PinkerCrit.pdf">printable PDF</a>, or a <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/reality-denial-steven-pinkers-apologetics-for-western-imperial-volence-by-edward-s-herman-and-david-peterson-1">hyperlinked online version</a>. I highly recommend it.</span></span></span></div>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-18785076929884899682012-02-01T17:13:00.000-08:002012-02-01T17:13:31.553-08:00Goodbye to All ThatThe laptop on which my notes on the Pinker book were kept was finally repaired and picked up last week, and I was thinking about writing part whatever-the-hell-we're-up-to-now this week. But yesterday my computer developed another problem, one it occasionally has that makes it run too slowly to use and can only be fixed by a recovery to factory default settings. Usually the problem starts gradually and I can copy off whatever data I need, but this time it was so abrupt that all my files were lost. The Pinker notes are gone, and without them I can't be specific enough to make future installments worth doing. In short: we're done.<br />
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It's probably just as well: the more I thought and read about the book, the more I felt it was so ridiculous, so intellectually sloppy, that it wasn't worth responding to in such detail. As I've said before, Pinker, like virtually every popular intellectual, is popular precisely because his beliefs reinforce old ideas while providing them with a modern, academic gloss. Anti-intellectualism has become the standard pose of conservatives, but most liberals, although their ideas are no less fixed and circumscribed, prefer to think of themselves as broad-minded. That this book is in reality a one-sided polemic that dismisses historical complexity and contingency in favor of nineteenth-century caricatures about reason and enlightenment is the point: it encourages readers to accept the status quo because they can tell themselves there's serious brainpower justifying it. I mean, it's 800 pages, with footnotes, and Pinker's a Harvard professor! What more could you expect? I used to want to debunk that kind of non-critical response; now I can't see the point. The David Bentley Hart <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/the-precious-steven-pinker">review</a> I linked to earlier says all that's worth saying.<br />
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The good news is that, with Pinker out of the way, I no longer have an excuse not to get back to <i>The West Wing</i>, which is easier to write about and (I would imagine) more enjoyable to read about, for the occasional poor soul who stumbles across this blog. Next episode, this week, I promise. Or hope. Or something.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-91366300813050527732012-01-03T13:47:00.000-08:002012-01-03T13:47:41.038-08:00A Long History of Something or Other (Interlude 2): More LinksAll evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, I still intend to finish this series on the Pinker book, and then get back to the <i>West Wing</i> reviews. There's been a long series of distractions, the latest of which is damage to the laptop on which my notes are stored, but at some point the stars will align and part five (or whatever number we're up to) will appear. Until then, a few more links.<br />
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<a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/"><i>Quodlibeta</i></a>: I linked to a specific Pinker-related post on this blog before, but there have been several others since, subjecting his historical claims to a rigorous analysis I lack the resources and inclination to undertake. Spoiler: it turns out he's out of his depth. Shocking. Note particularly the post on medieval murder rates, which undermines the one piece of Pinker's factual argument I had been willing to accept.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1642595826"><br />
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<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/12/the-precious-steven-pinker">"The Precious Steven Pinker"</a>: an entertaining review that's also more concise than anything I've written.<br />
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<a href="http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2012/01/fandi-fictor-optimus-prime.html">"Fandi Fictor Optimus Prime"</a>: IOZ weighs in.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-80175963628353048202011-12-06T11:59:00.000-08:002011-12-06T11:59:46.535-08:00Triangular TradesThe back cover of Ron Suskind's <i>Confidence Men</i> carries a set of blurbs that, intended to praise the author, instead suggest the defects of his approach. There are only four of them, but a dominant theme quickly emerges. "Suskind is at heart a storyteller." "Mr. Suskind is a prodigiously talented craftsman." "Suskind is the rare writer who combines excellent reporting with a knack for novelistic writing about real people." Those last five words are key to the failure, not only of Suskind's book, but of modern national journalism. As <a href="http://dailyhowler.com/">Bob</a> <a href="http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/">Somerby</a> has spent more than a decade pointing out, novelistic writing has been the press's default position for a long time, and when the facts complicate or disprove the group's preferred novel, they can be corrected, or made to disappear altogether. While <i>Confidence Men</i> isn't quite as egregious as the average press novel, its attempt to paint Barack Obama as a sincere proponent of change who was sidetracked by bad management and an intransigent staff most certainly values pleasing narrative over observable reality.<br />
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The press coverage of <i>Confidence Men</i> at the time of its release treated the book as a negative portrait of Obama's first two years in office, but really it's attuned not to Obama's critics but to those who are disappointed in him but still want to believe. The chapters that deal with the campaign are so fawningly impressed by his rhetoric ("brilliant speech... his particular brand of magic... precise and lyrical, heartfelt and gently clipped... extraordinary speech") that it's like being made to read a DailyKos diary from 2008. Forced to confront the distance between that rhetoric and the reality of 2009-2010, Suskind goes for the style rather than the substance, deciding against the elementary logic of human behavior that the "real" Obama is present in the speeches, and that the story of his presidency must explain how that desire for change was sidetracked.<br />
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He's supported in that narrative by several Obama-era White House functionaries who weave an account of how Obama's lack of managerial skills, coupled with the aggressive status quo-maintaining arguments of Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Rahm Emanuel, stifled the earnest intention to produce genuine cost-cutting healthcare reform and potent new financial regulation. Without disputing that Obama was a poor manager who was intellectually dominated by his advisers, I have to point out that Suskind's major sources, the heroes of his book, all wanted substantial reform themselves, which would naturally color their recollection of Obama's actions and beliefs. At one point Suskind quotes Tom Daschle on the impression Barack Obama creates: "I saw a man who listened. Sometimes people misunderstood that listening as an acquiescence to their point of view." What neither Suskind nor Daschle can say is that Obama might well have encouraged that misunderstanding.<br />
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The common cynic's version of electoral politics has it that candidates say whatever they have to before the election and do whatever they want to after it. But of course political theater extends into the administration as well, and targets not only the general public but certain appointees as well, so that they remain in their positions creating the impression that the president really cares about perspective X on issue Y. Although the reformist domestic policymakers Suskind quotes are placed in secondary positions while those who would change as little as possible got the top spots, this is never read as a reflection of Obama's real political preferences. Here, in fact, is Suskind's entire explanation:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">Sure, the other [reforming] team brought to the table honesty and passion, but those bold visions of the campaign season had meanwhile resolved into the serious, often risk-averse business of actually governing. In the midst of a battering economic storm, it no longer seemed like the right time to be making waves.</blockquote>But if Barack Obama was capable of even mild cerebral activity (and though I think his intelligence has been overstated, I believe he was and is), he knew that that battering storm was the product of policies championed by those "serious, often risk-averse" people he was putting in top positions, and that allowing them to define another administration would make more waves that would gradually build the next storm. Such a decision is not simply about judgment as a leader; it's about political as well as managerial philosophy.<br />
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But, like so much modern journalism, Suskind places enormous emphasis on presidential personality, leaving unasked and unanswered why such diverse individuals produce results that consistently benefit one segment of the population over another. Much is made of Obama's having his advisers debate issues in front of him so he could lead them toward a consensus position, a preference that Larry Summers' (apparent) intellectual force and preparedness allowed him to manipulate. But that push for consensus is more than a leadership strategy. It's an act of triangulation, taking the liberal and conservative (as those terms are defined by the political class) positions and twisting them into something that, whoever it actually serves, seems like a compromise. Those not bewitched by Obama's rhetoric recognized <a href="http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed0508">well before the election</a> that he was a master of such vacuous opportunism, and his fruitless attempts to shape legislation that would win large bipartisan majorities only drove the point home. <br />
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A narrative that ignores the ideological implications of Obama's approach encourages continued liberal adulation of his "vision," but more importantly it shifts the focus away from major structural forces that prevent serious reform. The power of the financial and health care lobbies is mentioned, but Suskind seems simply to assume that Obama could have used the power of popular sentiment and skillful politicking to overcome them. He also mentions, but doesn't really explore, the important fact that many of the people responsible for regulating and overseeing Wall Street come to those positions having worked on Wall Street, having made the risky deals and giant paychecks they're now supposed to police. This journey involving Washington and Wall Street also includes a third stop, on major college campuses, where as professors and guest speakers they inculcate their values in the next generation. Such a triangular trade guarantees that the system as it stands will always have more, and more powerful, supporters than detractors, and that calls for reform will often be couched in the language of safer profit rather than that of an increasingly insignificant public good.<br />
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There's a lot wrong with <i>Confidence Men</i>: the weakness for lame metaphor and love of a heart-warming biography that constitute Suskind's "knack for novelistic writing" (believe me, Harlequin romance novelists have more of a knack); the mistake, common to modern reporters, of using perceived quirks of body language to justify a invented reading of someone's mood; a habit of praising, and allowing self-serving presentations by, anyone who offers criticisms of the contemporary system (there's a paragraph about the awesomeness of mid-century captains of industry that's positively nauseating); an inability to make the shady economic methods he discusses more than vaguely understandable; the failure to examine foreign policy even cursorily; a simple lack of focus in a long, digressive, repetitive, and ill-structured book. But the crowning annoyance, at least for me, is the conclusion, in which Suskind claims that after the 2010 midterms Obama modified his managerial style and took control of his presidency.<br />
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In the wake of the debt ceiling nonsense, that isn't a terribly convincing proposition, and it's unsurprising that Suskind doesn't have much evidence for it. The only policy matter he can dredge up is the compromise that extended the Bush tax cuts in exchange for extended unemployment benefits and a payroll tax cut. What makes this compromise better than any other Obama was involved in, apart from the fact that it falls after Suskind's chosen turning point, is that apparently he "had simply taken control of the matter" and "was sitting in the space his presidency had created." But any decision could be presented on those terms, depending on which facts one chose to emphasize. Another point of praise is Obama's speech in the aftermath of the Arizona shootings. But that tragedy was ideal for Obama's existing rhetorical strength: it involved no policy proposals, required only banalities about divisive politics, opposition to murder, and support for not being murdered. That given such a situation he could deliver an inspiring but intellectually empty speech is evidence of the "old" Obama, not a new one.<br />
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The final piece of evidence for this rebirth of an Obama worth supporting is the shakeup of his staff in which Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers left. To the extent that there was a managerial problem in the White House, those departures might fix it. But from an ideological standpoint, the full spectrum of changes is less than comforting. Setting aside questions about quitting versus being fired, which amount to office gossip, also gone in this new Obama era are financial reformer and Council of Economic Advisers head Christina Romer, healthcare reformer and OMB director Peter Orszag, inspirational-Obama architect David Axelrod, and outspoken financial reformer Paul Volcker. Tim Geithner is still in place as Secretary of the Treasury. This is a clearing of the decks, but it's not one that's particularly friendly to the ideology of the Obama certain liberals imagined themselves to be electing.<br />
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The replacements for both Volcker and Rahm Emanuel were <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/economy/22obama.html?_r=1&hpw">widely understood</a> as signals that the Obama administration would now be friendlier to big business. Such "moving to the center" is, as any observer of the political class knows, the ordained response to a Democratic electoral defeat. It's not a sign that Obama is returning to his transformational message, but that he's responding to the shifting elite consensus. And that is nothing new for him: he responded to the desires of liberals by playing one in the Democratic primary, and to those of the political class during his first two years as president by playing a cautious moderate. Now he's playing a cautious conservative, but the deeper political values remain the same. Suskind's happy ending, which includes a claim of post-midterm rising confidence in Obama that <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/obama_approval_index_history">poll</a> <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/gallup-daily-obama-job-approval.aspx">numbers</a> don't support, is capped by a Valentine's Day 2011 interview with him that, even given Suskind's careful arrangement and glossing, communicates not the certainty of a new era but the same old rambling, waffling self-justifications of a career politician who wants to assuage critics and sound certain of his future without precisely admitting that anything went wrong in the past. Political narratives are powerful, versatile things, but they can only be sustained so far, and despite the author's best efforts, <i>Confidence Men</i>'s resurrected liberal myth of Obama dies, like the original did, at the hands of merciless, unlovely fact.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-12928399088211702152011-11-25T01:25:00.000-08:002011-11-25T01:25:58.805-08:00A Long History of Something or Other (Part 4): Read a Book, Save a LifeI had been about to forget <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, to disappoint absolutely no one by letting this series end with Part 3. But then I came across <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/opinion/kristof-are-we-getting-nicer.html">this <i>New York Times</i> column</a>, in which Nick Kristof takes a break from shaping his personal impressions of world travel into U.S. policy imperatives to describe Pinker's book as "astonishingly good." That's certainly not the word I would follow "astonishingly" with in describing it. Several possibilities present themselves-- "sloppy," "facile," "self-congratulatory"-- but "good"? Nah. So I was irritated, and here we are again.<br />
<br />
<b>Chapter 4</b> <br />
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This chapter is about "the Humanitarian Revolution," in which humanity, spurred on by great thinkers in an emerging marketplace of ideas, abandons wanton cruelty in favor of a recognition of human dignity. As before, the horrors of the past are thoroughly explored, with descriptions of instruments of torture, the nasty spectacle of public execution, and the viciousness of slavery. What's missing is an examination of how enthusiastic the great mass of people was about these trends. At one point, Pinker writes, "“Most people today have no desire to watch a cat burn to death, let alone a man or a woman. In that regard we are different from our ancestors of a few centuries ago." But what does "desire" mean in this context? Are we to believe that the Joe Six-Pack of 1700 woke up of a morning and thought, <i>Goodness, I have a hankering to see someone broken on the wheel</i>? Or did he respond to something that was part of the world as he knew it?<br />
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Pinker, who as a supporter of the state as theoretical model can only intermittently bring himself to acknowledge its failings as a force in the real world, slides too easily past the origin of torture and public execution in government policy to argue that it reveals something about what "people" are like. But the number of people who participated in torture or attended public executions is, as a proportion of the population, unlikely to be large, and Pinker, whose interest in facts continues to wax and wane with their usefulness for his preferred conclusions, doesn't investigate the question, preferring the implication that the entire past had a constant high appreciation for cruelty. This vagueness, which also occurs in a discussion of the occurrence of human sacrifice, prevents him from looking at variations in these practices within violent societies, which might allow for correlation with various explanatory measures. How enthusiastic was the average citizen of Western Europe about auto-da-fes and iron maidens? It would be hard to find out, especially since the expression of reservations about these methods might well have ended in firsthand experience of them, a prospect that would tend to encourage circumspection. But if there's any evidence that might shed light on the topic, it's not examined here.<br />
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Let's put the issue another way: is the percentage of people who cheerfully attended public executions in medieval Europe radically different from the percentage who in the modern era gawk at traffic accidents, pore over autopsy photos, and download videos of terrorist beheadings? Yes, those who do such things are condemned now in a way they wouldn't have been in the past, a fact on which Pinker places great emphasis. But is the movement of these behaviors underground worth much celebration in and of itself, regardless of whether they're actually less common? We don't allow people to publicly take pleasure in torturing heretics anymore, but if they get their kicks by kidnapping, raping, and murdering college girls instead, I'm not sure we've gained much.<br />
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But let's grant for the moment that people are less bloodthirsty than they used to be. Pinker's explanation for this is something he calls "Enlightenment humanism." This worldview allegedly coalesced from "the ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill." Not surprisingly given the laundry list of philosophers involved, Enlightenment humanism turns out to be a vague phenomenon, a wishy-washy belief in human rights that's meaningless precisely because it's so unobjectionable. It has less to do with the complexities of the eighteenth century philosophical trend now known as the Enlightenment, and more to do with contemporary principles that have been Whiggishly projected onto the past. Pinker writes, <span class="st">"If all this sounds banal and obvious, then you are a child of the Enlightenment, and have absorbed its humanist philosophy," but a more pertinent reason it sounds banal is that Pinker has drained all specificity from it.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="st">Part of what's drained away is the violence and anti-humanism of which Enlightenment states are capable. Pinker is very good at waving away the failures of states and thinkers he admires to apply their high-minded principles to all peoples, instead of those they already like. The Declaration of Independence's airy statement that "all men are created equal" is, "however hypocritical" in light of slavery, "a built-in rights widener." (Sounds like something you'd buy at the hardware store.) Obviously it's true that a broad declaration of principle leaves the door open for practice to catch up with it, but that only invites us to ask why such catching-up happens or fails to happen in the way that it does. Pinker, however, has no interest in dwelling on such failures. Colonialism, for instance, doesn't warrant an entry in the book's index, and is mentioned only to proclaim (shortsightedly, but we'll get there) that its end removed a major cause of war.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="st">Not content to paint the Enlightenment as the source of everything good about modern ideas, Pinker also spins a yarn about the counter-Enlightenment, a real boogeyman responsible for militant nationalism, romantic militarism, Marxist socialism, and the Nazi Party. Surely there's some truth to this notion, but intellectual history isn't a sporting event where</span><span class="st"> everyone has a jersey indicating an unshakable loyalty. And indeed Pinker is capable of acknowledging, at least tangentially, that Enlightenment ideas can have bad outcomes. In one of his more impressive feats of reductionism, Pinker tells us that "the engine of Enlightenment humanism" is rationality, and that rationality "can never be refuted by some flaw or error in the reasoning of the people in a given era. Reason can always stand back, take note of the flaw, and revise its rules so as not to succumb to it the next time." Well, of course it <i>can</i>, just as communism <i>can</i> justly distribute resources for the good of the people. But will it? </span><br />
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<span class="st">Does rationality allow people to learn from their mistakes, or merely to recapitulate them with a new intellectual gloss? The answer is obviously "Yes"-- depending on the circumstances, either outcome is possible. The point here is not that reason is bad, merely (as Pinker would surely agree, at least in the abstract) that it's always in conflict with the human capacity for self-delusion. Develop a society in which reasoned argument is required to support a proposition, and people will put together reasonable-sounding nonsense to back up preexisting beliefs. Deemphasize religion to the point where traditional Christian anti-Semitism no longer passes intellectual muster, and lo and behold, racial, "scientific" anti-Semitism arrives to take its place. Ironically, Pinker, a critic of extremism in left- and right-wing political ideologies, holds with regard to Enlightenment humanism the core belief of the extremist: that the movement can never fail, and can only <i>be</i> failed. Debating the accuracy of that claim is beside the point: either way, there are failures, and sometimes catastrophic ones. Despite Pinker's habit of presenting his run-of-the-mill beliefs as under constant attack (“Today the Enlightenment is often mentioned with a sneer”), no one today would call for an abandonment of reason, but to lay too much emphasis on it as the source of positive values causes problems both for interpreting the past and for shaping the future.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="st">In any case, Pinker is typically vague about causation when it comes to Enlightenment humanism and (putative) declines in cruelty. He cherry-picks a few nice-sounding quotes from major thinkers, as if general statements of humanism can't be found throughout history. He throws out some data about the explosive growth in book publishing, on the theory that a wider marketplace of ideas leads to better ideas, a notion that would seem to be called into question by the intellectual poverty of contemporary society, a phenomenon his own book could stand as evidence of. And he tells us that, based on a rising capacity to sign their own names, people were more literate, a mundane fact he spins into a fanciful theory about greater exposure to Enlightenment ideas and empathy-enhancing novels humanizing the brutish masses. This is, for those who accept the faintly self-congratulatory idea that the mere act of reading connotes greater intellectual or moral worth, an appealing theory. But to show that people knew how to sign their names doesn't mean they could read books, that they did read books, that they read the sort of "elevating" material Pinker has in mind, or that they took the "right" lessons from it if they did read it.</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="st">That last point provides a useful transition into alternate theories of the Humanitarian Revolution, if such a revolution exists. Books, through the forcefulness of point-of-view, may enable us to sympathize with those who are different. But by the same token they can also allow us to feel the disturbing pleasure of witnessing violence without any actual violence occurring. One often hears that violence in contemporary film and television is proof we live in a violent society, but might it really mean the opposite? Is the human appetite for cruelty so callous that it can be sated as easily by fiction as by reality? Did people stop going to beheadings because they could get them in books with less effort, and without the twinge of guilt genuine human death brings? Beyond all this there's the issue I've raised before with Pinker's blase dismissal of quality of life, which he reduces to economic status when he bothers with at all. Are people less accepting of or enthusiastic about public cruelty when their own lives seem less guided by a similar, natural capriciousness? I'm throwing out questions to which I can't provide answers, unless someone out there wants to pay me to do the research for a 700-page book on the topic, but unlike Steven Pinker, I've at least thought to ask them.</span><br />
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<span class="st"><b>Brief Notes</b> </span><br />
<span class="st"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="st">-In discussing contemporary U. S. capital punishment, Pinker informs us that "a 'death sentence' is a bit of a fiction," a piece of news that will surely come as a surprise to the ghost of Troy Davis, and as a relief to the thousands of people currently on death row. Engaging in his usual simultaneous deflation of contemporary barbarity and inflation of sentiment against it, he emphasizes that the death penalty is used in relatively few cases and that the review process is lengthy. I don't know what the latter point has to do with anything; being executed after twenty years of appeals is still being executed. The former point has (I think unintentionally) an air of justification about it, as though "We only kill the people who really deserve it" wasn't the rationale of brutes throughout history. The decline in executions is commendable, but their continued existence also says something about our society's relationship with violence, and in casually dismissing present-day death row inmates, treating them as something equivalent to a rounding error, Pinker suggests one of the ways in which intellectual rationalism can diverge from humanism.</span><br />
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<span class="st">-Shakespeare is quoted twice, once for Falstaff's speech on honor and once for Shylock's "Hath not a Jew" eyes speech. In each case, Pinker manages to ignore the ambiguities of the text and misconstrue it as an uncomplicated example of Enlightenment humanist values. He fails to note that Falstaff, however valid his points about honor, is hardly a moral paragon, and that Shylock is, one rousing speech aside, a nasty caricature of greed who is roundly punished for his dastardly Jewishness. Neither of these errors really matters in a larger sense, but they do provide yet more evidence of Pinker's poor command of evidence outside his field. In the same vein, he mentions in passing “American accident victims who trip on a crack or spill hot coffee on themselves and sue everyone in sight.” Do you think Pinker has even a basic familiarity with the much-mocked Liebeck case? Or is he lazily repeating a popular misconception that helps shield corporations that put the trivialities of customer service above the safety of all employees and customers?</span><br />
<span class="st"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="st">-As elsewhere, Pinker ignores historical contingency in favor of explanations that fit his imagined overall trends. We're actually asked to believe that the difference between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the bloodlessness (exaggerated, by the way) of the overthrow of James II in 1688 is a meaningful data point, as though English values had undergone a sea change in 39 years. Trying to explain the bloodiness of the French Revolution, a tricky subject for an Enlightenment admirer, Pinker compares it to the American Revolution, announcing that while the French "drew their inspiration [from] intellectual lightweights" the Americans "stuck more closely to the Enlightenment script." Imagine the stage directions on that document. <i>Exit pursued by a humanist</i>. That the American Revolution was so profoundly different in material ways from the French as to render comparison ridiculous doesn't seem to occur to Pinker, who further suggests the American "Founders" did better because they had also experienced the English Civilizing Process. Apparently there was no French Civilizing Process, which I guess means they never learned to bathe or avoid moving food onto their forks with their knives. Poor bastards. Nice as it might be to imagine that our wars will go well if we wish upon the right philosophers, I don't think history works that way.</span><br />
<span class="st"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="st">-I've largely ignored Pinker's treatment of slavery, which is relevant to his subject because“violence is inherent to the definition of slavery.” That's basically true, but a better description of what's inherent to the definition of slavery is <i>coercion</i>. While almost nobody likes/admits to liking violence, most people don't have a problem with coercion, provided somebody they approve of (their preferred political party, say) is doing the coercing. But much coercion rests on the implicit threat of violence, or of treatment sufficiently harsh that people will avoid it as carefully as they do violence. One can therefore argue that the "triumph" of contemporary Western society is devising a control system that works as well as violence and lacks its potential for breeding resentment and revolution. That's an improvement, I suppose, but it sets the bar awfully low. </span><br />
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<span class="st">At any rate, Pinker's failure to consider even cursorily the difference between violence and coercion and its implications for his argument is another example of his intellectual fuzziness. Elsewhere in the discussion of slavery he refers to its existence in "so-called democratic Athens." But slavery isn't incompatible with democracy, which means only the holding of power by citizens. In a society with slavery, slaves may be human beings, but they're not citizens. That's unfair, but not inherently undemocratic. In this book, though, "democracy" is like "Enlightenment humanism," less a meaningful term than one of the glowing labels to be applied to the pinnacle of human civilization that is the northern United States and western Europe in the 21st century. Adherence to the model of these states is what matters, and distance is from it is undemocratic, illiberal, and unenlightened, regardless of what those words might actually mean.</span>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-86842905543172822652011-11-10T11:01:00.000-08:002011-11-10T11:01:28.445-08:00Some Pinker linksThe next part of "A Long History of Something or Other" should be up on Sunday, but for now I wany to post a collection of critical links relating to <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> that I found illuminating, in contrast to the glowing reviews that suggested, against all available evidence, that Pinker is a great intellectual with a marvelous command of data. I don't necessarily agree with everything said at these links, of course, and in one or two cases the intellectual context of the criticism is, ah, not my own.<br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_977310442"><br />
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<a href="http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/">A review from the philosopher John Gray, at whom Pinker takes a swipe in the book</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/literature/2011/10/26/can_the_forces_of_reason_tame_the_devil">Thoughts on John Gray's review from an intelligent design blog</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-why-violence-has-declined-by-steven-pinker/2011/08/17/gIQA0VNmTL_story_1.html">One of the better reviews, positive or negative, from the popular press: the <i>Washington Post</i> </a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_977310447"><br />
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<a href="http://attempter.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/corporate-tribalism-part-2-steven-pinker-and-sublimated-violence/">An essay on the political implications of Pinker's argument (read the comments too)</a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_977310450"><br />
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<a href="http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2011/11/steven-pinker-and-an-lushan-revolt.html">Research into the evidence by which Pinker treats the An Lushan revolt as proportionally the most violent event in history</a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_977310453"><br />
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<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/11/25/021125crbo_books?currentPage=all">Louis Menand's <i>New Yorker</i> review of <i>The Blank Slate</i>, which captures some of the same quirks found in the new book</a><br />
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_977310458"><br />
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<a href="http://libcom.org/blog/steven-pinker-his-obsessive-misues-anarchy-07112011">A brief piece on Pinker's misuse of the label "anarchy," with more good comments</a><br />
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Feel free to mention more interesting links in comments.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-51992710946772585542011-11-09T15:36:00.000-08:002011-11-25T01:35:01.957-08:00A Long History of Something or Other (Part 3): Rednecks and Urbans and Hippies, Oh My!<b>Chapter 3 (continued)</b><br />
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One of the bleakly amusing things about <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is that it faithfully takes government at face value. In chapter 2 Pinker lays out his version of Hobbes' theory of the Leviathan, in which states reduce violence because they're disinterested parties with more to gain from the enforcement of peace than from violent conflict. He also credits the emergence of "gentle commerce" and the free market for that decline, because "a free market puts a premium on empathy." One could of course put together a list of examples of what passes for a free market demonstrating a marked lack of empathy, but that's beside the point, since the sort of theoretical free market Pinker envisions has never existed, any more than those purely neutral and peaceful governments. Like a lot of people who defend government by arguing that it curbs the violent tendencies of the ungoverned, he never explains how those within the government escape those impulses, unless taking on power is, like baptism, a mystical cleansing of all that is bad.<br />
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This is part of what I mean when I describe Pinker as an ideal elite liberal. It's not that he shows no concern for injustices perpetrated by democratic governments. It's that his attitude toward such injustices is minimizing, faintly regretful, with the sort of faux-diligent on the one hand/on the other attitude that Serious People must always take toward such things. It helps that those most affected by such injustices are socially removed enough from Pinker that he can comfortably concoct a generalizing explanation of why they're in the mess they are. That explanation is part of a larger claim about the persistence of American violence, a claim that, by quite literally positioning elite liberals as the most civilized Americans, cements Pinker's ego-boosting appeal to the less thoughtful members of that class.<br />
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Having (at least to his own satisfaction) proved the existence of a civilizing process by reference to European history, Pinker uses it to explain the ups and downs of the American murder rate. It begins with a rapid decline among the early English colonists, which Pinker treats as evidence that the colonies were becoming civilized. Left unexplained is why the people of these colonies, who had presumably been civilized while growing up in England, should regress on arriving in new territory. Nor does Pinker consider that early colonists, not representative of the average Englishman, might thereby have been more violent, because in Pinker's argument there is no such thing as a more violent person, only a class of people that's generally more violent. One such class is "rootless young men," which might or might not explain the early colonists but is certainly used to explain violence in the territorial west. All those men who hadn't been properly civilized kept driving up the crime rate, but fortunately women began to show up because "nature abhors a lopsided sex ratio." You or I might imagine the arrival of women in the west to be the result of a more complex process than "nature," but Pinker's first impulse when confronted with any fact in need of explanation is to credit nature, or failing that the government. People without formal power, are, in his view of things, far more acted upon than acting, at least in the spread of peaceful values.<br />
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Looking at the contemporary United States, Pinker has two trends to explain. One is the greater homicide rate in the south and in major urban areas; the other is the upswing in homicide and other violence between the 1960s and the 1990s. The south, we learn, is less civilized than the north, because it has an honor culture that contributes to violence. Racial tension has nothing to do with it, because white-on-white and black-on-black violence are also higher in the south than in the north, and the notion that violence has sources in dissatisfaction with anything other than its specific victim, is as we've seen, too much for Pinker. Poverty is, for similar reasons, not even mentioned, although <a href="http://www.statehealthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=16&cat=1">the data</a> suggest interesting (though not perfect) correlations. Obviously the possibility that southerners are, on average, more likely to 'believe' in violence than northerners shouldn't be discounted, but the effect of focusing on it to the exclusion of all other explanations is to suggest (intentionally or not) that northerners are better than southerners, that-- and Pinker uses these categories explicitly-- blue states are better than red states. No wonder Pinker is so popular; liberals love a statistic that, regardless of its credibility, makes them seem superior to all those bible-thumping racist hillbillies.<br />
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And speaking of racism. The explanation for high urban violence is that the urban poor, especially people of color, are "effectively stateless." This is an odd way to describe a population that, as he'll shortly discuss, is disproportionately incarcerated, but what Pinker means is that people of color have no access to the "good" side of law enforcement, the sense that crimes against them will be taken seriously and justice provided. He manages to acknowledge that there are often good reasons for them to be suspicious. But the dangerous appeal of an argument that people of color are stateless, and therefore less civilized, is not difficult to see. A certain type of elite liberal wants to feel a vague regret about the plight of the urban poor without any sense of a responsibility to alleviate it, and arguments that situate the problem in "the black community" are just the thing. Although I don't know if he'd endorse it, Pinker's argument about POC statelessness dovetails nicely with the line about poor parenting and "social pathologies" being pursued by <a href="http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/where-obamaism-seems-be-going">mainstream Democrats</a> and by Bill Cosby. The notion that systemic racial inequalities that have only very recently begun to be corrected might have lingering effects is not at all helpful to liberals for whom racism exists only in the actions and beliefs of Republicans.<br />
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When explaining the 1960s upswing in violence, Pinker blames it all on the counterculture, whose rejection of Eisenhower-era norms must naturally have turned them all into murderers and racists. Or, to put it in the academic language by which Pinker disguises the banality of his ideas, “one of the side effects was to undermine the prestige of aristocratic and bourgeois lifestyles that had, over the course of several centuries, become less violent than those of the working class and underclass.” He acknowledges, in what is evidently meant to pass for a treatment of possible flaws in his argument, that “correlation is not causation” and “the overwhelming majority of baby boomers committed no crimes whatsoever.” But he's quite happy to generalize about their behavior all the same. I've previously quoted Pinker's cavalier mention of such "hit[s]... to [elite] legitimacy" as Vietnam and the civil rights movement; by failing to treat the 1960s as a time of social change on a greater level than some people not washing enough, he extends his habit of giving government a free pass and unnaturally isolates one type of violence at a given moment in history from another. I feel like I shouldn't need to say this, but all the same: my goal here is not to justify violence of any kind, merely to note that a full historical explanation requires discussion of all factors, not just those matching the model that has caught your fancy.<br />
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The 1990s saw a decline in violence because they were a time of "recivilization." This was not because of changes in quality of life, which Pinker one again simplistically dismisses by examining a couple of general variables, nor because of the rise of abortion, in refutation of which Pinker assembles an argument that proves he can be quite thorough, when digging into the data is necessary to make his beliefs sound correct. No, it's because more people are in prison and more police are on the streets, thanks in part to Bill Clinton's "stroke of political genius" in adopting right-wing positions on crime prevention. Pinker does find the time to say that "the pendulum has swung too far" and too many people are now incarcerated, but whatever qualms he states, the obvious tendency of his argument is in favor of policies that have "reduced" violence by containing it within the prison system, among people about whom good liberals need not concern themselves.<br />
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In Chapter 3, Pinker's love of earthy anecdotes mostly manifests as descriptions of how unsanitary the people of the past were by modern standards. This isn't just a popularizer's diversion from boring old data; by emphasizing that modern audiences would find the medievals disgusting, he heightens the sense of distance that makes it easier to dismiss them as barbaric. It's not for nothing that one of the complaints by which societies distinguish themselves from the Other is the claim that he smells funny. In a later chapter Pinker announces that “humans have a revulsion to filth and bodily secretions.” But if that's a universal truth, why were people dirty for so much of history? The unintended implication of all this is that people were somehow, vaguely, content to be repulsive. And that, more than any actual evidence, is the reason for this notion of the civilizing process: by associating violence with aspects of personal behavior rather than with historical forces, you make it easy to divide the problem into us and them: present and past, north and south, rich and poor, white and black. By the end of the chapter, Pinker is blithely admitting that contemporary "informalization," the insufficient politeness that was responsible for 1960s violence, has not had an effect on contemporary patterns. This might seem to be a large hole in his theory, but it's waved away with a statement that the previously meaningful correlation no longer applies. Of course it doesn't: there's no longer anything for it to "explain."<br />
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<i>Next up: Chapter 4, in which something called "Enlightenment humanism" reduces people's appetite for violence... except in a little unmentioned enterprise called "colonialism."</i>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-26222611460318738172011-11-03T13:18:00.000-07:002011-11-09T13:22:37.531-08:00A Long History of Something or Other (Interlude)I've finished reading and taking notes on <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, and have written an Amazon review that summarizes the criticisms that are and will be part of these blog posts. It's less overtly political, less mocking, and more formal than the blogging, so if you want Cliffs Notes that are, in some ways, preferable to the full experience, just click <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2YIQV4PGZRA8G?_encoding=UTF8&tag=thest042-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957">here</a>.<br />
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In celebration of being done I'm taking a few days off from thinking about Pinker and violence, but by the beginning of next week I hope to resume the series, which will include a number of large and small WTF moments that I couldn't work into the Amazon review and haven't mentioned on Twitter.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-9353184084708141502011-10-27T07:35:00.000-07:002011-10-27T07:35:10.037-07:00The state of the crackpotI'm still reading Pinker's <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, and still finding it frustrating; in fact, the number of things I want to comment on is so high, and reading and evaluating his claims is taking so long, that I can't hope to finish the book before it's due back at the library unless I delay the blog posts on earlier chapters for a while. Also, I've found Pinker dealing in later chapters with things I've accused him of not mentioning earlier on. (He deals with them brief and unsatisfactorily, but he does deal with them.) Therefore there won't be any more of the Pinker series until I'm done reading, which will be sometime in the first week of November. There also won't be any more <i>West Wing</i> posts until then, because after picking apart Pinker I can't find the mental energy to turn my crackpottery against Aaron Sorkin. So a couple weeks of dead time around here. Try to contain your disappointment.<br />
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<i>[silence]</i> <br />
<br />
Well, you can show a little.<br />
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<i>[silence]</i><br />
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I'll get my coat.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-21682814505201805892011-10-23T16:04:00.000-07:002011-10-23T16:04:38.034-07:00A Long History of Something or Other (Part 2): The Very Model of a Modern Elite Liberal<i>Part 1 is <a href="http://notesfromacrackpot.blogspot.com/2011/10/long-history-of-something-or-other-part.html">here</a>.</i><br />
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This may sound like a joke, but one of the serious problems with <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is that it's too short. A truly diligent scholar could write an entire book of this length on topics that Pinker rushes through in thirty-page chapters or sections of chapters. The desire to write a comprehensive book on violence has prevented him from writing a good one. The consequence of this compressed approach is that Pinker can seem to weigh opposing ideas diligently while actually examining them in a lopsided manner that I'd call polemical if I was more confident Pinker was aware of what he was doing.<br />
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If I describe his argument as reductive, defenders can point out scattered admissions of complexity, but it's the easiest thing in the world to list ambiguities in the abstract without applying them to your concrete conclusions. Lazy undergraduates (reader, I was one) know all about this, and professors who mean to be thorough aren't immune to it either. <br />
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A related problem is that, despite Pinker's occasionally slipping into colloquialism, this is fundamentally an academic book, dense with facts and arguments whose implications are described rather than explained. In a book aimed at a professorial audience, with the time, resources, and training to evaluate Pinker's claims, this approach would be fine. But <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is explicitly a book for ordinary readers, who are more likely to accept its overwhelming barrage of information without tracking the precise logic. A good book on popular science or other popular academics details its arguments clearly in accessible language. But very few such books exist, and this isn't one of them. <br />
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<b>Chapter 2 (again)</b><br />
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While reading chapter 3, I came across a claim so unscientifically reductive that I felt compelled to check the sources Pinker cited for it. Unsurprisingly, I found some problems, but the important point right now is that one of them was to Lawrence Keeley's book 1996 <i>War Before Civilization</i>. That book, which made a splash in the popular non-fiction market on release, is Pinker's principal source for the claim in chapter 2 that nonstate civilizations were more violent than the states that evolved later, and for the data that back up that claim. I decided it would be worthwhile to dig around a little for responses to that book. I didn't find much, which according to preference you can interpret as a sign that the book was so brilliant it was hard to reply, a sign it was so ridiculous there was point in replying, or a sign that I'm not good at finding evidence of academic articles on Google. But I did come across the work of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, whose <a href="http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/%7Esocant/ferguson.html">website</a> includes PDFs of a number of articles on war in the pre-state world, some of which respond directly to Keeley (who had himself criticized Ferguson's approach). Even if you're not directly interested in this topic, I recommend taking a quick look at some of Ferguson's work, to get a sense of how complicated is the historical record that Pinker reduces to an incredibly violent past, and how distorted is his characterization of scholars who question that reduction as a "Peace and Harmony Mafia" pushing the image of the noble savage. Again, I'm not endorsing either side in the anthropological debate; I'd have to do a lot more reading to come to a decision on that. I'm only saying that Pinker fails to fulfill the responsibility of a popularizer to accurately reflect the state of the scholarly literature, even the parts that don't agree with him.<br />
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Because Pinker throws so much information and argument at the reader, even someone who's trying to read slowly and carefully can overlook odd or misleading assertions, including those with large consequences. Here's a quote from page 52: "During the 20th century the United States acquired a reputation as a warmonger, fighting in two world wars and in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. But the annual cost in American lives was even smaller than those of the other great powers of the century, about 3.7 per 100,000." This is equivalent to making the following statement about a father: "He has acquired a reputation as a child abuser, beating all of his children bloody several times a year. But he has never been injured himself." Two facts that are at best unrelated, and at worse in a mutual causal relationship, are presented as though they contradict each other.<br />
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Pinker's emphasis on the U.S. and Europe for statistics on contemporary wartime deaths (though to his credit he does include worldwide figures, which are also comparatively low) is part of a general habit of overemphasizing declines in violence and death in "major" and "developed" nations, which he attributes to, among other things, a civilizing process that will be the subject of chapter 3, which other nations haven't been privileged to experience. An alternate possibility, that rates of violent death remain higher in "developing" nations because Western technology has allowed the prosecution of wars that rain death on the citizens of those nations while leaving Western soldiers comparatively safe, has yet to come up.<br />
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<b>Chapter 3</b><br />
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Having argued in chapter 2 that violence declined after the rise of states, Pinker now elaborates that it declined further across the second millennium of the common era. Although he's once again blithely combining different types of data of varying reliability, they're more safely comparable than those from the previous chapter, and I'm willing to concede that violence did indeed decline over the given period, if not in the easily measurable way that Pinker's charts imply. Where Pinker falls flat is in his explanation for the decline, which, if I may be forgiven a little reductiveness of my own, is that people stopped murdering each other because they developed table manners.<br />
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He begins on a personal note, explaining how he never understood "the rule of table manners that says that you may not guide food onto your fork with your knife." But the scales fell from his eyes when he read "the most important thinker you have never heard of," one Norbert Elias. As with previous chapters, Pinker builds the rest of his argument around uncritical quotation of a particular thinker: Hobbes, Keeley, and now Elias. The gist of Elias' argument is that a civilizing process occurred, symbolized by the rise of medieval etiquette manuals. Pinker, never one to pass up the chance to describe the past as disgusting, quotes many colorful rules from these manuals, and links learning not to spit or piss in public with learning not to stab people to death, because both involve the inhibition of impulses. "The childishness of the medievals," which Pinker thinks has sometimes been exaggerated but with which he basically agrees, gave way to the maturity of moderns, which descended from the upper classes to the lower, but not always evenly.<br />
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This is one of those cases where Pinker will admit the weaknesses of his argument without really confronting them. Toward the end of the chapter he acknowledges that in a contemporary setting, informalization, the opposite of this civilizing process, is not consistently linked with changes in the level of violence. I've never even heard of this rule about moving food onto a fork with a knife, and if someone attempted to introduce me to it my inclination would be to tell them (softly and non-threatingly) to fuck off, but I don't think I'm any more likely than Pinker to behave violently. Pinker tries to close this gap by claiming it's only the entrenchment of nonviolent values that has allowed the dissociation of violence and politeness, but a more rigorous intellect would give serious consideration to the possibility that the correlation of rising politeness and declining violence in the middle ages was not causative, at least not in the precise way he interprets it.<br />
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Before getting into alternate interpretations of that decline in violence, I'd like to turn briefly to another couple instances of Pinker being cavalier with data. While reading reviews of <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i>, I came across an Internet comment questioning whether improvements in medical science over time might have had an impact on rates of violent death. That struck me as an interesting angle, and I was waiting for Pinker to get around to discussing it. Imagine my delight on discovering the following, his sole comment on medical care and violence prior to the 20th century: “doctors before the nineteenth century were quacks who killed as many patients as they saved." I don't think there's better evidence of Pinker's reductive tendencies when dealing with problems of his thesis. I hope it isn't necessary to explain that the undeniable badness of pre-19th century medicine when compared to the modern variety is not proof that pre-19th century medicine was equally bad in all places across centuries, or that its evolution had no effect at any point on rates of violent death. Comically enough, Pinker provides a footnote for this broad assertion, and though chasing down particular passages from Pinker's sources is not something I intend to do a lot of unless someone offers me access to an academic library and payment for my time, in this case I was interested enough to do some Googling.<br />
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The first source Pinker cites here is Lawrence Keeley's book, the relevant pages of which are long on anecdotal descriptions of bad medical practices and short on actual evidence that medieval medicine was consistently bad. But it's unfair to blame Keeley for this, since his argument in that passage is not about modern vs. medieval medicine, but about medieval vs. prehistoric. He's arguing that in some ways ancient tribes had better medicine than medieval states. Whether or not that's true (again, I'd have to do more reading), it goes against the incredible breadth of the Pinker statement it's cited as supporting.<br />
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Pinker's second source for that citation is an <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/postgraduate/taughtma/mamodules/hi971/topics/interpersonal/long-term-historical-trends-of-violent-crime.pdf">article</a> that informs us that "most authors agree" on the insignificance of medicine for changing levels of violent death, and endorses another scholar's model for using information about time lapse between injury and death to estimate how many deaths might have been prevented by medical technology. The <a href="http://chs.revues.org/index733.html">original article</a> from which that model is derived presents it "with huge qualifications," bases it in part on personal judgments of "doctors familiar with violent assaults," and uses it only in the context of comparing the present day with nineteenth-century New York City. Used this way, such a model is defensible, even if it smacks of speculation in the pursuit of a definitive conclusion. But by a scholarly game of telephone, it becomes part of Pinker's reason to dismiss the evolution of medicine utterly.<br />
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Also discussed in the article with that model is an issue that one might expect Pinker to mention, since it counterbalances and might arguably negate the possible effect of modern medicine: the increased efficacy of modern weapons. But Pinker can't really bring that up, because one of the ways in which he has countered the general impression of contemporary violence is by emphasizing the goriness of ancient weapons. One of his anecdotes in chapter 1 is a prolonged description of the damage ancient Greek spears could do. Injuries that are unpleasant to read about and injuries that are more reliably fatal are, of course, not the same thing, but Pinker has so thoroughly blurred this distinction that he can't rescue it now.<br />
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Pinker's dismissal of non-modern medicine is of a piece with the general tone of his book, which emphasizes at every chance it gets how miserable various aspects of pre-modern life were. I'm broadly sympathetic with that: I'm gay, I'm an atheist, and I have a degenerative hip condition that has required and will require multiple surgical interventions to keep me out of a wheelchair. I have very little nostalgia for the past. But Pinker's views go beyond sensible jaundice toward a (here's that word again) reductive Whiggism that colors his interpretation of evidence.<br />
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One last point about presentation of data. On page 64 we have Figure 3-4, title "Homicide rates in Western Europe, 1300-2000, and in nonstate societies." The chart above places those nonstate societies on the left as a vertical series of data points, to the right of which is a roughly horizontal curve showing the homicide rates over time. The obvious implication of this presentation is that the nonstate data chronologically precedes the Western European numbers, but as anyone who has looked closely at these particular nonstate data will know, they're actually from roughly contemporary nonstate societies. The progression indicated by the chart is not objectively historical, but based on Pinker's subjective notions of social evolution. It's a consistent problem of his treatment of nonstate societies that, while making the theoretical claim that their historical "location" shouldn't matter, he doesn't state openly enough that these societies are contemporary, and have been affected by various aspects of the civilized modernity he presents as diminishing violence.<br />
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To turn from the concrete to the theoretical, my principal complaint with Pinker's notion of civilizing processes in the decline of violence is that he attributes too much causation to the social and cultural aspects of that process, ignoring their effect on more fundamental aspects of ordinary life. This has, I think, to do with his failure to consider in this context certain possible broader causes of violence. I don't have the patience or the psychological and historical grounding to do justice to the question of why people are violent, but one possible aspect of an explanation has been on my mind as I read Pinker's book. Might people be more likely to be violent, even if they regard violence as unfair, if they also regard the society in which they live as unfair? This may sound like the stereotypical liberal habit of blaming violence in poverty, and that's a question I'll get to in a minute, but the applications of this notion are much broader.<br />
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Hobbes talks about life in the war of all against all as being "nasty, brutish, and short," but even if we set aside violence the life of the distant past was, as Pinker so enjoys pointing out, unpleasant in many other ways. It wasn't just violence that ended medieval lives on a scale moderns regard as horrific. If apparently healthy people can drop dead of a mild wound, a toothache, or no visible cause at all, is it less obviously wrong to end their lives by violence? If life is a hard, cruel, geographically limited and socially proscribed experience, does destroying it seem a less significant act? I don't know, but I imagine it's worth debating, whether those limitations to fairness exist in medieval London or 21st-century New York City. Pinker is good at pointing out how life-denying ideologies, whether religious or honor-driven, can encourage violence, but what about less formalized intellectual processes? He's so caught up by the (comparative) benevolence of particular elite institutions that he can't recognize possible influences from the thoughts of "common" people.<br />
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When Pinker does occasionally discuss such motives, he's as brief and glib as he always is when treating topics he regards as distractions. On page 84, for example, we have this: "A third dubious belief about violence is that that lower-class people engage in it because they are financially needy (for example, stealing food to feed their children) or because they are expressing rage against society. The violence of a lower-class man may indeed express rage, but it is aimed not at society but at the asshole who scraped his car and dissed him in front of a crowd."<br />
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The first half of that is an absurd straw-man version of arguments about violence and poverty. I can't speak for everyone who's suggested such connections, but most of the time literal theft to feed starving children is a thought experiment in ethical complexity, not something anyone thinks happens very often. The second half confuses the aim of violence and its source. As anyone who has ever lashed out at the wrong person in a moment of frustration can attest, we don't always target the things that make us mad; we aren't even always fully aware what those things are. Unless he's cannily trying to generate sympathy, a lower-class man won't claim he was motivated by social rage, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a contributing factor in his behavior.<br />
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Apt to acknowledge injustice in the abstract but rarely granting it any importance (when addressing the nature of the 1960s counterculture, he gives such "hit[s]... to [elite] legitimacy" as pervasive racism and the "illiberal" war in Vietnam one paragraph, and loud music, poor hygiene, and rejection of self-control ten paragraphs), Pinker is the model of an elite liberal. In my commentary on the rest of chapter three, which deals more fully with American history, I'll explain further how that's so, but for now it's worth noting that, whatever Pinker's own political positions and intentions, his work has obvious implications for policies on and attitudes toward violence.<br />
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Books like Pinker's, presented as groundbreaking but actually the rejuvenation of old unscientific ideas with a new (but false) intellectual gloss, marketed to mass audiences but not written in a style accessible to them, exist not to be read and analyzed but to be pointed to in justification of particular policies and beliefs. In this sense <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is comparable to titles like <i>The Bell Curve</i> and <i>Hitler's Willing Executioners</i>. And that, unless you're thinking solely in terms of sales figures, is not distinguished company to be in.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-8784091373389366132011-10-22T16:47:00.000-07:002011-10-23T16:08:15.836-07:00A Long History of Something or Other (Part 1): Anecdotes and AnthropologySo scientific popularizer Steven Pinker has written a book on violence. <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> claims that violence has declined consistently over the course of human history. and that we can isolate the various causes of that decline. At 700 pages with wide margins, small type, and many footnotes and graphs, it's the kind of book that some commentators take seriously based only on appearance. "Look at all the evidence," they'll declare, as if the mere assembly of information in an academic format constitutes meaningful argument. In fact <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is, on the basis of what I've read so far, a very strange book, lacking the rigor of serious intellectual inquiry and inclined to throw selective data at the reader with insufficient attention to its context and drawbacks. As is often the case with books of this type, a traditional review can't capture the scope of the problem, can't communicate to the reader just how consistently sloppy and simplistic its thinking is. So I've decided to put together an in-depth, multi-part analysis of the book, looking at each major section of Pinker's argument and explaining how, for all the detail he puts forth, he fails to be as comprehensive and conclusive as his tone suggests. This first part will deal with the book's first two chapters.<br />
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Perhaps the most salient problem of <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is that it never attempts to define its central concept. What, in Pinker's view, <i>is</i> violence? This may sound like a stupid question; we all have a pretty good idea of what violence is. But when it comes to serious analysis, the things that we all have a pretty good idea of turn out to be the biggest problems. By failing to define violence clearly and comprehensively, Pinker lets himself have it both ways. He can pull together a lot of data that aren't obviously connected and use them to argue that the abstraction he calls violence is on the way down, but when it comes to arguing that specific forces cause "violence" to decline, he can present correlations based on whichever measures of violence give the best result. Eventually I'll get into some specific problems caused by this methodological slipperiness.<br />
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<b>Chapter 1</b> <br />
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Before Pinker offers any hard evidence, though, he devotes his entire first chapter to anecdotal accounts of violence throughout history. He justifies this as follows:<br />
<blockquote>Scientists often probe their conclusions with a sanity check, a sampling of real-world phenomena to reassure themselves they haven't overlooked some flaw in their methods and wandered into a preposterous conclusion. The vignettes in this chapter are a sanity check on the data to come.</blockquote>But the point of a sanity check is that it comes <i>after</i> the data, not before it, as a quick justification of scientifically-reached conclusions rather than an attempt to plant those conclusions in the reader's mind before any evidence has been presented. Pinker's anecdotes, long on extreme and sadistic violence and in no way representative or statistically controlled, have an obvious prejudicial effect on the reader's mindset. Throughout the book's opening chapters, in fact, he revels in elaborate descriptions of particular cruelties, as though given societies should be thought of as more violent because they are sadistically violent. One could make an argument to that effect, but it would depend on a particular theoretical definition of violence, with which Pinker hasn't bothered. I also doubt he'll be regaling us with such elaborate descriptions of the effects of nuclear weapons, mustard gas, or anthrax.<br />
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He begins with carefully-selected descriptions of prehistoric corpses that suffered violence, then tendentiously asks “What is it about the ancients that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?” Of course there are plenty of archaeological corpses that show no evidence of foul play; it's just that they aren't "interesting" because they don't tend to support Pinker's argument. In fact, one of the corpses he <i>does</i> discuss raises another question about definitions. Lindow Man, a two-millenia old bog body, was possibly a religious ritual sacrifice, in which case it is further possible that he went to his death willingly. Is this sort of consensual behavior violence? If so, what theory of violence can explain at once the motivations behind it and those behind coercive violence? What I'm getting at here is that, by failing to define violence, Pinker fails to come to terms with the complexity of its causes, his discussion of which, as we shall shortly see, is incredibly reductive.<br />
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But back to his morbid anecdotes. The next two sections are based not on historical records of any kind, but on Greek and Israelite myth: that is, on the the Homeric epics and the Hebrew Bible. Pinker acknowledges that these are fictions, but slips them in on the claim they reflect the cultures of their times and places. Which, up to a point, they obviously do, but it's also obvious that that process of reflection is not an easily comprehended one. There are a great many more depictions of violence in our media than there are acts of violence, after all. One could actually suggest that fictional accounts of violence <i>resolve</i> violent impulses in actual people, meaning violent art would imply a less violent society. I don't really think that's the case; it's a facile theory. But even considering such things would require Pinker to engage more deeply with the meaning of violence than he evidently cares to.<br />
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Part of the reason <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature</i> is so long is not that Pinker provides a great deal of substance, but that he loves a good digression. He spends 4 pages lovingly laying out the depravities of the Hebrew Bible. Among the highlights of this account are a calculation of the homicide rate at the time of Cain and Abel, a garbled version of the Samson story (it omits the actual reason Samson kills the men at his wedding feast, not that that's much better than Pinker's misreading), and the treatment of odd, unexplained stories like the death of Aaron's sons and David's census as if they proved something about human violence rather than about obscure religious tradition. Precisely because it's not a serious argument, none of this exactly matters; I dwell on it because I think it reflects Pinker's cavalier treatment of facts, which doesn't stop when he approaches substantive matters.<br />
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He goes on to reveal that Christian martyrdom, medieval knighthood, and the English monarchy were violent, shocking those readers who have never taken an introductory history course. Pinker really seems to believe that most Americans don't think of the distant past as having been at all violent. He fails to grasp that nostalgia about a non-violent past is almost always personal, reaching back to the innocence of childhood, not to the days of the Visigoths. He does get around to discussing violence in those days, the "wholesome" 1950s, but here, with an overview of advertisements and TV shows, we return to the notion that representations of violence are equivalent to actual violence. Pinker treats anecdotes about war, religious strife, violent crime, and media representation as equivalent, as all proving something about a monolithic entity called "violence." The notion that these forms of violence might conflict as much as they cohere, might fulfill different human needs, continues to go unmentioned.<br />
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Another small point with larger implications: at one point Pinker writes, without a hint of irony, that where our society once glorified soldiers, nowadays "military men are inconspicuous in public life, with drab uniforms and little prestige among the hoi polloi." I can only assume he's never attended a Fourth of July or Veterans' Day parade, or even seen a soldier in a dress uniform. (They look hot.) What's happening here, and elsewhere in the book, is that Pinker is projecting his own upper-middle-class liberal values onto the rest of American society. This cuts right to the heart of Pinker's explanation of the decline of violence: those values, he claims, are responsible, and in places where violence persists, it's only because those values are insufficiently appreciated. That it's the presence of violence in those places that enables its absence here, that the lack of recent war among "major" and "developed" nations (which he sickeningly praises at the end of this chapter) is exactly because it's now occurring elsewhere in the world, is another thought of which Pinker is apparently incapable.<br />
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<b>Chapter 2</b><br />
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The second chapter begins to lay out Pinker's theory of the decline of violence. This theory, taking in "Six Trends," "Five Inner Demons," "Four Better Angels," and "Five Historical Forces," is so loaded with simplistic numbered lists that one might imagine one had accidentally picked up a self-help title, or worse, a book by Newt Gingrich. Potshots aside, the first trend, something Pinker calls the pacification process, involves the transition from stateless prehistoric societies to early states, which were, he suggests, much less violent, because the state, as in Hobbes' theory of Leviathan, naturally curbs violence.<br />
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Before he begins to lay out such evidence as he has for this claim, Pinker gives an account of the origins of and motivations for violence. Devoted as he is to gene-driven evolutionary psychology theories --not that he mentions that these topics remain contested and there are other views on them-- Pinker treats violence as a basically rational process, something people do (or ancient societies did-- again, it's not quite clear whether he's discussing specific aspects of violence or the whole shebang) for coherent reasons related to survival, not because of irrational individual or communal impulses. Revenge is purely undertaken for deterrent effect, not from emotional causes. This may or may not be a useful model for explaining why violence was common rather than rare in the earliest, least psychologically complex humans, but like all models it needs to be understood as a construct: useful for isolating and discussing variables but not something that exists in that precise form in nature. Having become common for sensible evolutionary reasons, violence has manifestly developed in senseless culturally-specific ways. (It's because of this that one of the sidelines here, a discussion of violence in chimpanzees, is thoroughly irrelevant, though as anecdote it probably primes certain readers' expectations.) In this chapter, however, Pinker is willing to ignore all that to focus on the variable he has decided matters: the presence or absence of a state structure.<br />
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The difficulty in comparing violence in state and nonstate societies is that all of our reliable statistics come from the former. To get around this, Pinker pulls in whatever fragmentary data are available on violence in nonstate societies, even if it's not remotely parallel to what we know about states. His charts lay out all these numbers neatly as though they're comparable, but in the text we get some hint of how rough these numbers are: "even if we tripled or quadrupled the estimate to include"... "What if we added"... "Even if we throw in"... "even if we generously multiplied it by twenty." If Pinker were dealing with solid data, these vague attempts at adjustment would be horrifying, but because his numbers measure different things, it barely matters that he's willing to maul them.<br />
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His first set of data on violence in nonstate societies comes from archaeological efforts to identify cause of death in corpses from ancient cemeteries. Quite aside from the ambiguities of this process (depending on the methodologies involved, it may or may not take into account non-fatal injury, accident, and animal attack), we are forced to rely on data from the cemeteries that happen to have survived, which are not necessarily representative of all deaths in given societies. It's all important to recognize that Pinker, again crushing difference in pursuit of the state/nonstate dichotomy, treats as equivalent cemeteries spread across the entire world and over at least 12,000 years of history, as if none of those locations might have atypical rates of violence unrelated to the presence or absence of a state. He does average these numbers, but an average of non-representative figures does not somehow become representative itself.<br />
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The second nonstate data comes from reasonably contemporary societies where tribal structures happen to have endured. Pinker has been using this data for a while, and his approach to it has come in for some <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201103/steven-pinkers-stinker-the-origins-war">criticism</a>. The gist of it is that at least some of the societies he mentions in <i>The Better Angels of Our Nature </i>(there are a few more mentioned in the book than in the presentation discussed at that link), while they may be nonstate, are not representative of the ancient nonstate hunter-gatherer societies, and therefore don't prove anything about the distant past. In the book Pinker seems vaguely aware of this critique-- he moves some societies into a separate category of "hunter-horticulturists and other tribal groups"-- but, as I've been emphasizing, there's still a basic failure to acknowledge that nonstate societies are not interchangeable, and that high rates of violence in the specific communities for which we have data may not represent a larger trend of all nonstate societies.<br />
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Pinker is, of course, not an anthropologist, and a lot of his data and ideas seem to derive from a particular group of anthropologists, whom he treats as the only "scholars with no political ax to grind," as opposed to the "anthropologists of peace," or the "Peace and Harmony Mafia," who believe in less-violent ancient societies for what Pinker chooses to present as purely modern political motives. I have no idea what the facts on ancient violence are, but believing that only one side in a given debate has non-substantive reasons for its interpretations is naive, and the very ferocity with which Pinker dismisses his opponents' political motives becomes, whether he realizes it or not, a political motive of its own. But I don't see much value in open speculation on sources of bad faith, either in Pinker or in his opponents. Instead, I think it's important to return to the observation above that theoretical models can mislead us into projecting them too confidently onto reality. This is especially true in academic communities, where discussion of the nuances of these models can have the unintended effect of making one take their basic assumptions as fact. Pinker is clearly convinced that his numbers reveal a wide-ranging historical truth, but looked at unto themselves, without the ancient historian's or anthropologist's habit of speculating and generalizing, as one must to produce substantive arguments, they're just a set of discrete facts that don't intersect. They may be, in a loose sense, suggestive, but they can't prove anything.<br />
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It might be objected that I, having anarchist political leanings, have special reason to find fault with Pinker's theory of the rise of the state as a reducer of violence, and it would be disingenuous not to admit that I'm reading this book in the first place because I came across a review of it and found his notions about the state, as the review presented them, risible. Having read this part of the book, though, I don't think that even were I to grant Pinker's argument about ancient nonstate violence, I would thereby do damage to contemporary anarchism. Despite Pinker's uncritical treatment of it, as though it expressed a universal truth, Hobbes' <i>Leviathan</i> is the product of a particular intellectual, political, and social context. Precisely because all nonstate societies are not identical across time, the specific pacification process Pinker theorizes in prehistory doesn't require the belief that eventual nonstate (or rather poststate) societies would see an increase in violence. An anarchist future need not be a reprise of the tribal past, although if it's Pinker opponents who are in the right about that past, certain aspects of it might be worth a second look.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-45675237932446822232011-10-20T12:23:00.000-07:002011-10-20T12:23:50.304-07:00Only Bad Witches Are Ugly: Good and Evil Over the Rainbow<i>I haven't watched "Mr. Willis of Ohio" yet, so my next real post is still a few days away, but in the meantime here's an odd little meditation on the politics of a very different entertainment.</i><br />
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While scrolling past ecstatic media coverage of the death of Qaddafi, who now truly <a href="http://notesfromacrackpot.blogspot.com/2011/09/i-am-lord-your-god-pilot.html">isn't a seven-letter word for anything</a>, I had the far-from-original thought that the mood of jubilation accompanying the death of any enemy of the United States (real or perceived) is like the big Munchkin musical number from <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>: a hearty chorus of "Ding dong, the witch is dead." I find this unattractive, because no death, not even one that can be morally justified given its circumstances (and there's no guarantee that this one was, though as with bin Laden's death corporate media are sure to ignore the questions that are already emerging, smothering any and all ambiguities with fog-of-war piety), is a cause for celebration. Even monstrous human beings are human beings, and when empathy limits itself only to good people, it's not empathy at all. The citizens of Libya, who spent decades living with Qaddafi's cruelty, can perhaps be excused for enjoying the certainty that he personally will never return to power; Americans have less excuse.<br />
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But what caught my attention was that the more I thought about <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, the more I saw how its plot reflects some of the lies and illusions that drive American foreign policy, and is susceptible to an amusing alternate interpretation. Dorothy's landing in Oz instantly kills its tyrant, for which which she's greeted as a liberator, albeit one showered with lollipops rather than flowers. But, in fantasy films as is the fantasy world that US politicians craft to achieve their ends, ya gotta have a villain, so the Wicked Witch of the West conveniently pops in. As Glinda tells us, "she's worse than the other one." One more wicked witch, and they'd have an Axis of Evil.<br />
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Anyway, Dorothy, having destroyed the political structure of Munchkinland, departs posthaste. The Munchkins, of course, are completely ready to resume their lives in a free and orderly nation, though in a realistic scenario the mayor of Munchkin City would immediately work to consolidate his power, while Glinda (and wasn't her arrival a little <i>too</i> timely?) would be making plans to annex the east, and the Lollipop Guild would go berserk, looting those pretty little houses and raping the Lullaby League.<br />
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At any rate, Dorothy ends up killing <i>another</i> foreign leader, again by an implausible accident that allows her to remain morally pure (no questions about summary execution here!), and is once more greeted as a liberator. Then she "convinces" the Wizard to step down and go into exile, bringing about a bloodless regime change. At this point Glinda returns and, having used Dorothy to dispose of three of her four competitors for power, lets her know that she's actually been able to go home all along. I doubt very much that the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion will be allowed to rule the Emerald City for very long, and I can only imagine what Glinda has in store for the Good Witch of the South. MEK oughta take lessons from her.<br />
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When Dorothy gets home, she shows some remorse for her experiments in regime change, as so many politicians do when opinion has turned against their latest experiment in endless war. Back on the other side of the rainbow, Oz is probably in chaos, but Dorothy, for whom all that unpleasantness remains a distant memory, can chirp about how "There's no place like home!"... at least until the next time she gets itchy feet. The Nome King better watch his back. And so should Khomeini.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-13463794508621412682011-10-11T12:06:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:56:40.512-07:00A Big Block of... Something: The Crackpots and These WomenThe title of this episode (apart from being, as Dave Barry would observe, a good name for a rock band) captures its rather broad focus. The linking narrative is what Toby aptly, if with a usage error embarrassing in a show under the impression it's intelligent, calls "Throw Open Our Office Doors to People Who Want to Discuss Things that We Could Care Less About Day." But woven around that are a fight between Leo's Pal and Toby, some banal psychodrama for Josh, the introduction of Zoe, and an attempt at an appreciation of the show's female characters. It's actually a fairly deft screenplay, if you overlook the fact that it does several of those things poorly.<br />
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Let's start with what Josh calls "Total Crackpot Day," earning him a whack on the head from Leo that's a little too forceful to be amusing. (Maybe <i>that's</i> why Jenny dumped him.) I've remarked in the past that the staff's disgust at having to talk to ordinary Americans reflects the contempt of the political class for people who care about issues in a more than nominal way. (Look at the early liberal reaction to Occupy Wall Street, before co-opting that movement came to be seen as the better angle, or for that matter the liberal reaction to the Tea Party.) But, to be fair, this episode at least nominally agrees with Leo that "listening to the voices of passionate Americans is beneath no one." Both of the characters who are shown having these meetings with crackpots end up sharing their concerns on some level. It's all vaguely heartwarming. But what the hell is it good for?<br />
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So Sam spends a couple hours worrying about a UFO, and CJ can spout some trivia about wolves. Does that mean they'll encourage the White House to further address these "issues?" Of course not. The substantive effect is the same as if the staffers had remained unconvinced, or (and here's the rub) if they'd never had the meetings in the first place. It would seem that Margaret is right: this is definitely a waste of time. Except, that is, insofar as it generates the illusion of access to pacify those who don't matter. (The rise of the Internet has made this process <a href="https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#%21/petitions/popular/0/2/0/">even easier</a>.) Last week we learned that the staff can't be mean to congressmen because they're people too, but judging by the open contempt both Sam and CJ demonstrate for their guests, the crackpots aren't people at all.<br />
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One last point before we leave the topic behind, at least until next year's Big Block of Cheese episode: Leo refers to the crackpots as "people representing organizations who have a difficult time getting our attention." It's important to note the types of organization we're never shown. Apparently there was no time for the staff to speak to drug reform advocates, gay rights activists (recall that this episode is set in 1999), anti-corporate groups, or members of any peace movement, even though these are all indeed organizations that have a difficult time getting the White House's attention. One is left with the impression that people who aren't adept at acting within the system are all weirdos whose pet issues no one could possibly be expected to care about. And that, of course, is exactly what insider Washington thinks.<br />
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Since the main plot is essentially comic relief, the dramatic weight comes from the subplots with Josh, Toby, and Bartlet. I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, as little of it is directly political, but I will point out that Josh's angst is extraordinarily cheap drama on a number of levels, and shows some of the ways in which psychotherapy can become a writerly crutch, as will happen a couple more times during the show's run. It's obvious that therapy can be the basis for excellent character work; <i>The Sopranos</i> is a case in point. But that was a show with some sense of subtlety, and with a deeper awareness of what therapy can and can't do for a person. This, on the other hand, is like that old cartoon labelled "One-Session Therapy," where the therapist simply says, "Get over it." Josh goes to see his therapist for the first time in months, and immediately brings up both the problem he's having and a seemingly-unrelated quirk that the therapist quickly reduces to a buried trauma, with which the patient immediately deals. It's practically a parody of classical Freudian analysis. Apparently Josh is now over his lingering guilt at his sister's death, just as he'll recover from PTSD over the course of an episode next year. This is a pat, thoroughly episodic approach to complex ongoing issues, and it would be embarrassing in a soap opera.<br />
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Although Toby's problem with the president is personal, foreshadowing the eventual "revelation" that the president has daddy issues, they discuss it in terms of a couple political topics that caught my attention. On the basis of previous viewings, I had remembered Toby as the closest thing the series had to an admirable politician, in terms of his views on the issues, but so far I'm not seeing much evidence of it. There was his desire a couple episodes ago to cause trouble for the southern Democrat who made an empty remark that could be construed as a threat against Bartlet, which clashes badly with his later image as the civil liberties guy in the administration. And now he sincerely wants to kick Hollywood around for glorifying violence? Give me a break, dude: have you heard of a little thing called the US military? Even as Sorkin's script acknowledges that complaints about violence in TV and movies are just easy politicking, it pretends that principled belief about such violence ought to be taken seriously. (On the other hand, Toby is at least allowed to argue for an honest admission that the gun control bill was weak, which everyone else dismisses on opportunistic political grounds.)<br />
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Finally, we have the "These Women" portion of the title, the scene at the end where Bartlet, Leo, and Josh wax rhapsodic about the female cast. I'm not one to use academic jargon in discussing social issues-- most of the time it isn't necessary-- but in this case, it's worth mentioning the gaze of this scene. The characters and the camera, and implicitly the series and its world, are male; no matter how successful they are, women remain the Other, and their success is somehow more remarkable than that of men in equal positions. A charitable interpretation would tie this to Leo's description of "a world that tells women to sit down and shut up," but fortunately I'm not inclined to be charitable, and anyway the problem of sex and gender attitudes in contemporary society is subtler than that, as the rest of the dialogue in the scene suggests.<br />
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Bartlet says that C.J. is "like a fifties movie star." Is that really the best appreciation he can come up with? It sounds more like praise for glamor and image (traditional feminine attributes) than anything else, especially since he adds that she's "capable and energetic and loving." Of those three adjectives, only "energetic" would ever be applied to a male politician, and even then it would sound like damning with faint praise. His comments on Mrs. Landingham are even worse. Would he assume a man would be less likely to "serve [his] country" after losing sons in Vietnam, or is this an echo of the idea that women are naturally more nurturing and child-oriented than men? The only thing he can say about her job performance, meanwhile, is that she's never missed a day of work. The Perfect Attendance Award? Really? That's what you give someone who has no real accomplishments. This scene, which is clearly meant to be in praise of women, ends up having the opposite effect because the qualities it ascribes to them are thoroughly cosmetic. This points to a larger problem with the series' treatment of female characters, but I think I've gone on long enough for one day, and there's an upcoming episode to which it's more relevant, so for now I'll let the subject go.<br />
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Quick takes:<br />
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*Bartlet telling everyone to look down at the seal so that they'll have heartier praise for his chili. This is a sitcom moment, but taken seriously, what does it say about his authoritarian hunger for deference?<br />
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*There are a couple jokes about the first lady's Ouija board. Obviously that's a reference to Nancy Reagan's astrologer and Hillary Clinton's seances (N.B. I don't know the details of either story, and I'm quite happy with that), but does Abby Bartlet really seem like the kind of person who would use a Ouija board? And are these stories themselves, about the frivolous, irrational hobbies of women, sexist in and of themselves?<br />
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*Sam: "there are levels and an order to our air defense command." Because maintaining the hierarchy is much more important than, oh, identifying something mysterious that's flying over the country.<br />
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*Bartlet talks about space travel and "touch[ing] the face of God." This is an obvious reference to Avuncular-Actor-in-Chief Reagan's post-<i>Challenger</i> performance, but at least that was about dead astronauts, not a paean to the days of the arms race.<br />
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*C.J. suggests they could spend the $900 million cost of the wolves-only road on building "the nine best schools in America." That's touching and all, but the more likely use of that much money would be on the nine best Predator drones. The scientists point this out, with an eerily relevant reference to "another war plane, another S&L bailout," but the episode is too busy portraying them as overzealous wackos to admit they have a point.<br />
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Next time: "Mr. Willis of Ohio," in which the series decides to wax sentimental about an ordinary American, possibly because he lacks the audacity to have deeply-held opinions.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-19440609552181123402011-10-03T10:37:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:56:40.512-07:00Laws and Sausages: "Five Votes Down"Once upon a time I entered an essay contest sponsored by the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, on the topic "Is patriotism difficult to embrace in the world today, and why is it important?" Time has induced a blissful vagueness as to the details of my answer, but I do recall that it was in favor of patriotism, and calculated to appeal to the judges, that is to say, the sort of women who would glory in styling themselves members of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America. What can I say? I was in high school, I was impressed by authority, and I wanted to win. Which I did.<br />
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The prize was a trip to Washington D.C. for what amounted to a politics summer camp. I'd act coy about what it was, except that anyone who cares is surely able to work out that it was the <a href="http://www.workshops.org/New%20Congressional/index3.html">Washington Workshops Congressional Seminar</a>. I had a miserable time, for a lot of reasons, only one of which is relevant to this post. During the days we seminar members visited landmarks and attended speeches by politicians and lobbyists unimportant enough that they had nothing better to do than talk to teenagers. But by night we participated in the Model Congress, for which we divided into subcommittees and wrote bills. My subcommittee addressed subjecting women to the military draft; again, the memory fails, but I think we were in favor.<br />
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You might well ask how, at a time when the draft was and obviously would continue to be a dead letter, this could be a relevant topic. But why shouldn't a fake bill be about a fake issue? Anyway, I was too miserable, insecure, and indifferent to play any part in the creation of the bill, but there was no avoiding the Model Congress proper, which took place on the final evening. Clad in formal attire, we were bussed to what the schedule breathlessly informed us was an actual Congressional office building. There we held debates on each of the four bills, leading up to the voting. In the course of the debate, some of the others went out in the hall to wheel and deal, persuading and promising as though the outcome could possibly be said to matter. I, on the other hand, was so bored that I voted to end debate on our own bill at the earliest opportunity, earning the ire of a girl sitting next to me, who was honestly baffled that I could want such a thing.<br />
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The experience wasn't a total loss; I was able to use it in one of my college application essays, where I delicately cast it as my recognition that participating in "the political process" wasn't for me. Today, I'll be more blunt: "the political process" is stupid, soulless, and ugly. In "Five Votes Down," even <i>The West Wing</i> comes, from a liberal perspective, perilously close to admitting it. Leo quotes the old saw about how you don't want people to know how laws and sausages are made. Like a lot of conventional wisdom about politics, this is something people would find profoundly depressing if they took it seriously. Very few admirable human beings believe that their jobs are too upsetting to be in public view.<br />
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The law that Leo's Pal wants to pass is gun control. I'll say up front that I'm very much in favor of gun control, provided that the first people it's applied to are the members of the US military. But in any case this law is already so whittled down by compromise that it's meaningless, as a congressman points out in an impassioned speech that would be moving if it weren't implicitly in favor of trying to solve social problems by authoritarian bans on inherently harmless behavior. So what we have here is 45 minutes of obnoxious maneuvering in favor of a pointless law. God bless America. The episode halfheartedly pushes the gradual change meme, but there's no force behind it, as if even the script can't bring itself to believe legislation matters.<br />
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At the end of the episode, when Leo says "It was hubris and we got what we deserved," that might seem like a criticism of the entire political process, but (part from being a reflection on the collapse of Leo's marriage, I think it's actually a criticism of their specific behavior in this episode, most notably Josh's pleasure in being the president's enforcer. Which apparently was wrong, not because the legislature ought to be independent of the executive under separation of powers, but because, as the slimy politician with whom Hoynes intercedes says, "These are grown men, with pride and dignity. They can't be manhandled." The ones whose interests matter, in other words, are the politicians, not the citizens.<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"> The final scenes are melancholy, not because the law that has been passed will contribute nothing to society, but because Leo's Pal didn't get enough credit for it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">(I would add that this episode gives the lie to the notion, popular among liberals otherwise at a loss to explain why Obama hasn't done all the hopey-changey things they convinced themselves he would, that the president has no power over Congress. He has leverage; the question is where and to what degree he opts to use it.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The scenes in which Leo's marriage falls apart, although a little hard to swallow as drama-- why, after a long political career, are they just confronting this issue now?-- are wonderfully performed by John Spencer, particularly the beats in which, guilt-stricken and uncertain, he offers to carry her bags to the cab and asks her to call him before she goes to sleep. The discussion between Leo and Hoynes, in which the latter, who was a cartoon in his first appearance, proves to be a human being after all, is effective too. The fact that Hoynes is simultaneously presented as a kindly man and a savvy political manipulator is, for <i>The West Wing</i>, verging on morally complex, a reflection of the fact that Hoynes won't officially join The Good Guys until the third season episode "Stirred."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The comic relief of "Five Votes Down" comes in two forms: (1) the subplot with Toby's stock windfall, which is another example of <i>The West Wing</i> creating the appearance of a scandal but expecting us to believe that the politician involved is really as virtuous as he claims, and again asks us to sympathize with the (literally) poor White House staff, who only make six-figure salaries and therefore might as well not have jobs at all; and (2) the scene where Bartlet is whacked out on pain pills. This is more goofy-but-lovable-sitcom-dad stuff, and Martin Sheen has a lot of fun with it, but what would happen if there was a national crisis while the president was high on Vicodin and Percocet? The same thing that would happen if his MS was acting up, I suppose, but that's a topic for another time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Up next: the episode from which this blog's title is drawn, in which the White House staff are forced, possibly at gunpoint, to talk to people who, despite not being members of the political class, have the audacity to concern themselves with various issues. Also, some subtle but pernicious sexism.</span>Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-13553748534163012932011-09-16T11:50:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:56:40.512-07:00Fifty Buck Crimes: "A Proportional Response"The trouble with critiquing <i>The West Wing</i>'s foreign policy is that the series occurs in a fantasy world where the actual motivations of politicians match the nice things they say in their speeches. The godawful inauguration two-parter in season four, for example, is based around the idea that humanitarian intervention is a serious concern, rather than a pretext by which self-interested power brokers justify themselves. The myth that drives "A Proportional Response" is that the deepest concern of Our Leaders is for Our Safety. Bartlet's impassioned speech about the grandeur that was Rome and Leo's remarkably histrionic reply about raising an army against him both depend on the notion that saving lives, first American, then foreign, is the White House's first priority. That would be nice, but I think Jonathan Schwarz said it best:<br />
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<blockquote> Second, making Americans safer is not a serious goal of the people who run the United States.<br />
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Now, I'm not saying Dick Cheney doesn't care about us at <i>all</i>. If he made a list of his top 100 priorities, whether we live or die might be as high as #96. It's just that other things are far more important to him. And if us staying alive conflicts with priorities 1 through 95, well, we've got to go.</blockquote>A position entirely consistent with Fitzwallace's callous description of the attack on the airplane as "a fifty-buck crime," and the fact that he criticizes the large-scale response scenario because it'd generate bad press, not because it'd be morally horrific. <br />
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As Schwarz also points out in the <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/homeland-security/118187-blogger-face-off-are-we-safer-now">essay</a> I've quoted, which is well worth reading, "the sad reality of life on Earth is that horrible things happen all the time." Even if presidents wanted to protect people, they couldn't, any more than being a Roman citizen was actually a perfect guarantee of safety. The widespread failure to recognize that the only way to be <i>absolutely</i> safe from other people is to kill every last one of them, is one reason political demagoguery about military action guaranteeing safety works so well. Another benefit of this approach, from the perspective of the powerful, is that it distracts Americans from investigating the causes of violence against them. Consider that at no point in this episode does anyone inquire <i>why</i> Syria blew up an Air Force transport. Are we to believe that Hafez al-Assad woke up one morning and decided, just for shits and giggles, to kill some Americans? It's telling that the first military crisis in which Bartlet is embroiled involves no issue larger than how much force to use.<br />
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Meanwhile, the continuing saga of Sam and Laurie reaches new heights of self-righteousness this week, as Sam declares that his creepy manipulative friendship with this high-priced call girl may result in her "living her life in bounds, ensuring for herself a greater future," and compares her to someone who has a problem with "alcohol or drugs." Come on, dude; she's sleeping with rich men to make money, not because of an addiction. That her version of selling herself is more literal than yours is not a sign of psychological dysfunction. Then we have C. J. convincing Danny to bury this story, which apparently makes him "a good guy." Because nothing says morality like ignoring a top staffer's relationship with a prostitute! Not that I care particularly where politicians put their genitals-- I'm more concerned with where they put their armies-- but let's not pretend there's no potential in Sam's conduct (as Danny understands it) for misconduct that would be in the public interest. That C. J. then gives him a head start on the Syria story is at least more in the line with the amoral quid pro quo of politics, but it hardly reflects better on either character as a responsible professional.<br />
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The last major thread in the episode is the introduction of Charlie Young, who is, like Morris Tolliver, saddled with an elaborate family backstory in an attempt to make him instantly likable. He has a dead mother, but of course she's the convenient type of dead mother who never, during the run of the series, causes him a second's worth of noticeable grief. At the end of the episode, when Bartlet offers him the job, it's clearly supposed to be the president's redemption, not only for being rude to Charlie earlier but for his general dickish behavior. What's odd about this is that, instead of actually apologizing for his snappishness, Bartlet makes an entirely political appeal that demonstrates his ability to obtain personal information. It's insensitive (does he really have to mention that they're called "cop killer" bullets?), it's calculated, and it relies on the assumption that Charlie sees insufficient gun control as the cause of his mother's death, as opposed to any number of other things a smart young man might blame, like, oh, the guy who pulled the trigger. If the writing were slightly more self-aware, this would be a chilling demonstration of Jed Bartlet's inability to relate to other human beings, a la <i>The Social Network</i>. Instead, it's the heartwarming conclusion. And that's pretty sad.<br />
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Random notes:<br />
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*Sexism watch: this time the offender is Josh, calling C. J. a "paranoid Berkeley shiksa feminista." Is he supposed to be a liberal, or what? Then, when trying to make nice with her, he tells her she looks like a million bucks. I know we're not intended to sympathize with this behavior, but it's not quite as funny as the script thinks it is, either.<br />
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*Last week, when Laurie told Sam she made more money than he did, he replied "You and any kid with a decent paper route." This week, when Donna says she needs a raise, Josh says "So do I!" In the 2011 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff, the two Deputy Chiefs of Staff made $172,200 annually (the maximum possible salary), and the Deputy Director of Communications made $150,000. I know the cost of living in Washington D.C. is high, but I'm still not feeling much sympathy for either character.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-17617472498844060612011-09-11T09:22:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:56:40.513-07:00The Way It Goes: "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc"One of Aaron Sorkin's less admirable comic tactics is to make a character say something unbelievably stupid, so that another character can point out that what has just been said is, in fact, unbelievably stupid. This episode offers the first clear-cut example, when one of Lloyd Russell's staffers describes "Nessun Dorma" as an Italian aria by Wagner, allowing Mandy to punctuate her outburst with "It's Puccini, Wagner's German, and you're a moron." (By the by, is Mandy's penchant for manic outbursts supposed to be funny? It seems more like someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown.) Anyway, this type of unbelievable stupidity shouldn't be confused with the expository variety, in which characters don't know things they should know so that those things can be explained to the audience. Like the scene from which the episode's title is drawn, in which we learn that no one in the main cast except Bartlet and possibly Leo has ever heard of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy.<br />
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Speaking of stupidity, let's talk about Sam. In my post on the pilot I suggested that his circumspect conduct here meant he understood the political seriousness of his actions. I hadn't recalled that he informs Josh and Toby only so that he can feel good about talking to Laurie <i>again</i>. Is this naivete supposed to suggest that he's pure and idealistic and wonderful? Because instead it makes him look like a dunce. The real problem, though, is what happens when he goes back to see Laurie. Threatening her and her "date" with prosecution is bad politics-- the grand jury will enjoy hearing about how he tried to keep his prostitute all to himself-- but more importantly, it's the behavior of a domineering asshole.<br />
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When Laurie points out that he humiliated and scared her, he blithely responds "I guess that's just the way it goes." The follow-up is "Cause I've decided to become a good friend of yours." And instead of running away to report this stalker to the police, she starts to banter with him. And we have a cute little quasi-romantic scene as they walk away from the camera... before he hacks her head off and buries her in the crawlspace. This is creepy behavior on a personal level, but it's also the ethos of authoritarian government, both left and right: "I've decided to change you whether you like it or not, and I'm doing it for your own good, so you should love me." He might as well just have her arrested and demand that she retire or he'll have them press charges; what happens here is no less calculated an abuse of power.<br />
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The big drama this week is the vice-president being mean to C. J. Seriously. The underlying issue is Hoynes having the audacity to pursue his own political agenda at Bartlet's expense, but the way it's played, his more serious offense is being slightly curt with the press secretary. Tim Matheson does a fine job of making Hoynes as unpleasant as the script requires, but really his behavior is the kind of thing only the characters of a teen drama would agonize over. It's telling that the political topic on which Hoynes was commenting, the A3-C3, is never explained, actual legislation being less important than gossip. In the big confrontation between Hoynes and Leo, the former's point about constitutional authority is treated as irrelevant, and what really gets the White House chief of staff pissed off is the vice-president's failure to use the appropriate term of reference for the president. Never forget to bow before the king! You know, I think I'm going to refer to Bartlet as "Leo's Pal" whenever the opportunity arises. Sycophantic respect for political office regardless of merit is one of this show's core values. Which is, of course, an accurate reflection of establishment politics. <br />
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In contrast to this, we have the president's friendship with Morris Tolliver, in which he gets to exchange lame jokes and talk about his nervousness around the Joint Chiefs of Staff. See, he's just a regular guy with worries like everybody else. And Mrs. Landingham won't let him have his steaks! He's not the leader of the free world, he's a very naughty boy. I gather the early Bartlet years are based to some extent on Bill Clinton; you can't expect me to believe he wouldn't have grabbed those steaks, and probably showed Mrs. Landingham his dick as well. But back to Morris Tolliver. The episode really bends over backwards to make us like him, so his death will have some meaning. A new baby <i>and</i> a proud racial past, just to guarantee that the liberal guilt will kick in. There's obviously a lot to say about how Leo's Pal reacts to the Syrian attack, but I'll hold off on that until the next episode.<br />
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Random notes:<br />
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*Leo distracts Margaret from bothering him with a picture of Morris' wife and daughter, which she naturally coos over. He might as well have given her pretty flowers to smell. And then when informing Hoynes that C. J. didn't tattle on him, Leo says "She's a good girl." Well, I hope she got some table scraps for it. No wonder this guy's wife is about to leave him. Meanwhile, Leo's Pal tells Morris that his job is to "do what these ladies tell you to do." Contemporary TV writers have some very strange gender attitudes.<br />
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*So the president's joke about golf is a big deal. But when C. J. calls the Ryder Cup team "twelve guys named Clippy" and makes a crack about their outfits, that doesn't compound the offense? And the press didn't make noise about Leo's Pal telling the Christian leaders to get their fat asses out of his White House? This is, remember, a show where actions do or don't have political consequences based on writer fiat.<br />
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*In this Hilton Head draft Sam is working, he claims to use "pretty tough" language, and the examples he gives are "political cover" and "counterproductive." What a stirring call to arns. We have here a reminder that American political language is so neutered, so vacuous, that people have come to treat its flatulence as serious discourse. IOZ was dead right to point out that <a href="http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2011/08/bay-of-wormolds-or-hike-of-pigs.html">"our greatest, infinitely variable native poetic form is sanctimony."</a><br />
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*To end on a positive note, this episode did remind me how strong some of the show's performers are. The comic timing between Bradley Whitford and Janel Moloney is amazing, for instance. And I liked Merrin Dungey as a foil for Moira Kelly; Daisy undercuts Mandy's shrill quality in a way that makes me regret they didn't keep her around.<br />
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I think that's everything. Don't forget to come back for the next episode, in which Bartlet learns how to stop worrying and love the cruise missiles.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-40067191357573528772011-09-09T13:57:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:56:40.513-07:00I Am the Lord Your God: "Pilot"[People who have not watched the show and plan to should not that I discuss details from later episodes in this commentary.] <br />
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While watching the pilot of <i>The West Wing</i> for the first time in over a year, and perhaps the fifth or sixth time overall, I kept a Blogger tab open on my laptop so I could take notes on things I might want to discuss. At first I was more focused on the notes than on actually watching the show, but after a while I did get caught up in it and had to remind myself to think about what was happening onscreen. Which means that, although I anticipate lots of snark on this blog, I do enjoy the show on some level, or I wouldn't be watching it. Whatever my other sins, I'm not one of those fans who sticks with a show he hates just to tell people how much he hates it.<br />
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On that note, I should say that one of the remarkable things about the pilot is how fully the show's style is already established. Obviously the walk-and-talk had featured in some of Sorkin's other work, including <i>Sports Night</i> (which was, as <i>Family Guy</i> put it, "a comedy that's too good to be funny"), but it works so much better now, as does much of the show's visual approach, even little things like the tautness of the teaser leading up to the smash cut into the opening credits, which never fails to thrill me even now that I'm a bitter, cynical crackpot.<br />
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I also continue to laugh at the show's jokes, because whatever else you want to say about <i>The West Wing</i>, it's one of the better goofy sitcoms of the past decade or so. A lot of the humor, in fact, makes sense on a sitcom level but not as actual human behavior. It's funny enough when CJ slips on the treadmill while trying to impress a man (if you can look past the mild patronizing sexism of it), but that's a 1930's level pratfall. And the run where Sam spills his guts to a woman he doesn't realize is Leo's daughter is crisp and perfectly delivered by Rob Lowe, but why in the hell would he confess to <i>any</i> total stranger that he accidentally slept with a prostitute? Later episodes will show that he knows full well this could be a serious story, and while Leo's daughter could make his life hell with the information, she's less likely than a random schoolteacher to call the <i>National Enquirer</i>.<br />
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Let's pause to examine the Sam/Laurie thing, actually, because I think it says a lot about how <i>The West Wing</i> treats political scandals. He slept with a prostitute, but he didn't <i>know</i> she was a prostitute. It's the kind of absurd story politicians spout when under scrutiny (<a href="http://www.indystar.com/article/20110824/LOCAL1804/108240311/">"Sure, I paid the hustler for a good time, but I <i>didn't </i>expose myself to him"</a>), but in Sorkin's idealistic political fantasyland it's actually true. And, as will be pointed out in a later episode, the truth of it doesn't matter, because in this milieu, any development exists only as a story, how it might be spun, what effect it will have on the polls. That may be realistic as a portrayal of Washington, but to a great extent the show's moral universe functions in a similar manner-- when Leo's addiction becomes news, when Bartlet is forced to come clean about the MS, the central issue on a dramatic level is not "Did they do wrong by the American people?" but "Will they lose their jobs, become slightly less powerful and influential, and feel bad for themselves?" Some people will call me naive for emphasizing this-- of course politicians only look out for themselves-- but I think the true naivete is acknowledging such a truth in the abstract and convincing yourself that in a given situation it nonetheless matters who you vote for. As you might imagine, I'll have a lot more to say about this kind of thing during future episodes.<br />
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Then there's the main plot of the episode, in which Josh fears he might lose his job. In light of later developments, this is pretty ridiculous: the interpersonal ideology of the show is so <a href="http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2006/12/once-and-future-president.html">feudally loyal</a> that Josh would have to drown the president in the bathtub before he'd be fired. But it adds drama to a series opener, I suppose. The more interesting thing to me is the way the episode demonstrates that, from a mainstream liberal perspective, religious conservatives are about as evil as you can possibly get. There's some middle ground, triangulating talk in earlier scenes about how Al Caldwell is a nice enough guy, but when Jed Bartlet shows up, Caldwell is included in the ensuing humiliation. As an atheist homosexual with what I suppose are anarchist leanings, I hope it's obvious that I hold no brief for the religious right, but I do think their portrayal here is hard to take seriously.<br />
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I'm sure some religious conservatives are nasty manipulators like Mary Marsh (played with a brilliant slimy chilliness by Annie Corley). I imagine some of them are even secretly anti-Semitic, although to me that development smacks of the tiresome liberal inclination to treat any hard-core Republicanism as a manifestation of unexpressed bigotry. But the bit where John van Dyke doesn't know what the first commandment is? No, not buying it. (Adding to the irony is the fact that Toby is also wrong; "Honor thy father and thy mother" is not the third commandment in any tradition, Christian or Jewish. It's either the fourth or the fifth.)<br />
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Of course, that part is mostly a set-up for Bartlet's entrance, his very first line in the program, in which he informs us that he is God. Oh, Aaron Sorkin: to quote <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i>, "I think your subtext is rapidly becoming text." Jed Bartlet may not be an inerrant God, but he's certainly regal enough, and obviously expects deference; the scene where he grumps that no one is paying attention to him and asking about his trip provides a perfect example of the extent to which the character is a cross between a sitcom Dad and a self-centered autocrat.<br />
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Having announced his divinity, Jed proceeds to bat around some of his followers. I guess we're supposed to be impressed by his demand that Caldwell denounce some wacko nobodies who threatened the president's granddaughter (if only Ed Muskie had threatened the people who attacked his wife instead of allegedly crying), but I can't say I see the relevance. Yes, it's nasty to send a doll with a knife through its throat to a child, but why should Al Caldwell be held accountable for it? This reminds me of the current-day vogue for demands that Muslims denounce terrorism, as though every single member of a religion must disavow violence before any can be trusted. I think also of a quote from Adolph Reed Jr. on black anti-Semitism:<br />
<blockquote>"Black anti-Semitism's specific resonance stems from its man-bites-dog quality. Black Americans are associated in the public realm with opposition to racial prejudice, so the appearance of bigotry among them seems newsworthy. But that newsworthiness also depends on a particular kind of racial stereotyping, the notion that, on some level, all black people think with one mind. Ralph Ellison complained most eloquently about white Americans' general refusal to recognize black individuality. Charles Rangel put the problem succinctly: When approached to declare himself on Khalid Muhammad, he complained that he was tired of being called on to denounce people he'd never even heard of. Any black anti-Semite is seen not as an individual but as a barometer of the black collective mind; belief in Blackantisemitism [Reed's label for the notion of a unique and particularly virulent black form of anti-Semitism], therefore, is itself a form of racialist thinking."</blockquote>But even granting that Bartlet has some justification for his demand, it doesn't address either the pragmatics or the ethics of the original issue. Josh still mouthed off about Christianity on national television. The existence of Christian terrorists doesn't have anything to do with that, any more than Dan Rydell's dead brother had anything to do with the apology in the sickeningly heavy-handed second episode of <i>Sports Night</i>. A day earlier, the president was going to fire Josh over this; has that decision been neutralized by subsequent events? At one point, Leo says, "I've known him 40 years, C.J. And all I can promise you is, on any given day there's really no predicting what he's gonna choose to care about." Hot-tempered <i>and </i>capricious; just what you want in a guy with his finger on the button. Besides, how well are ordinary Americans going to respond to the fact that an already unpopular president just told three major religious leaders to get their "fat asses" out of his White House? This is another hallmark of Sorkin's style: bad decisions are guaranteed to have major political consequences, until the writer gets tired of dealing with them.<br />
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A few more random takes that I couldn't be bothered to integrate into the main commentary:<br />
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*The thing with Leo complaining about a misspelling in the <i>Times </i>crossword. I get that this is supposed to establish him as a lovable old crank, but of course Gaddafi's name is Arabic, and therefore <i>has</i> no correct English spelling. Possibly this is supposed to be Leo's error; if so it doesn't reflect well on the character's intelligence. Given the difficulty American politicians seem to have with major topics like the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite, though, it may be true to life. I although think it's pretty ironic to see Gaddafi, recent made over into the latest model of the Worst Dictator Ever action figure, used in a running gag.<br />
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*I love that the scene where Sam can't see the girl he's slept with once anymore because she turns out to be a call girl is scored with wistful romantic music, as if it were a 40s melodrama. I know we're supposed to understand that this was more than just casual sex for the impossibly noble Sam Seaborn, but come on.<br />
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*For socially-enlightened liberals, some of Sorkin's characters make pretty sketchy comments. Josh implying that Lloyd Russell is gay and effeminate doesn't exactly warm the cockles of my heart, nor does Leo's description of Mary Marsh's fury at being called "Lady" and having her religion mocked as "a petulant woman being angry about getting her hair a little messed up on TV."<br />
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*And finally, there's the bit at the end where Bartlet waxes sentimental about the Cuban refugees. Now, I do sympathize with and admire people like that-- they're suffering in a way that I, as a middle-class white guy in the US, never will, and they're actually doing something about a political system they think is horrifying. But is it necessary to bring their struggles down to the trite level of "wanting a better life?" <i>Everybody</i> wants a better life. These Cubans want a variety of specific, individual things, some of which may not be entirely admirable. They deserve something more substantive than "They love us for our freedoms."<br />
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Well, that's probably enough from me. Disagreement, mockery, and other commentary welcome, even if it's just to tell me I use parentheses too often.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2228932095082961235.post-85565055677050358232011-09-08T13:30:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:56:40.513-07:00Why I'm a CrackpotFor a long time, I was a big fan of <i>The West Wing</i>, both as drama and for its political values. Then, during the 2008 presidential election, as I watched in amazement while millions of liberals were impressed by the patently unimpressive Barack Obama, I started to drift away from the family history and faithful lesser-evilism that had tied me to the Democratic Party. I read blogs (you can find some of them on the blogroll at the right) that offered various critiques of the entire American political system, not just one particular party, and after a period of resistance accepted their arguments as convincing, and indeed far more morally defensible than the casuistic reasoning required to make Democratic Party liberalism seem meaningful.<br />
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With this new perspective in place, I could see that <i>The West Wing</i> was full of things I'd come to despise-- dishonesty about American intentions, emphasis on process over content, and most particularly a sickening deference to power. I was also having doubts about Aaron Sorkin as a dramatist, noticing that his writing tiptoed in the direction of addressing actual issues, both political and personal, only to back away when it truly mattered. On the other hand, I continued to find Sorkin's dialogue style engaging, even though I'd certainly entertain the argument that it's hardly as intellectual as the show's reputation would suggest. And I retained a shallow fondness for the characters, two-dimensional though they often were.<br />
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I've wanted for a while to do some writing about politics, but I never feel like I have much to say compared to the bloggers I read regularly (again, check the blogroll). I <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/BrendanNMoody">tweet</a> about politics occasionally, but that's a form that not only doesn't require substance, it pretty well rules it out, so I mostly make jokes or reiterate things other have said. What I do feel confident about discussing is (to use the term loosely) art. I review horror and fantasy books at <a href="http://noondaystars.blogspot.com/">another blog</a>, and I while I don't pretend to any great insight, I think I do all right. The point of overlap here is obvious. So I decided that, after a hiatus of a couple years, I would watch <i>The West Wing</i> again. This time, though, I'm going to approach it with a critical eye, examine its many shortcomings, and just generally suck the fun out of everything. Politics will be the primary frame of reference, but aesthetics are also bound to pop up, particularly with regard to Sorkin's stylistic tics and use of sitcom tropes.<br />
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(You'll note that I talk about Aaron Sorkin, who left <i>The West Wing</i> four years into its seven year run. That's because I was, and suppose am, the sort of puritanical viewer for whom the show basically ceased to exist once he left. I tried to watch the fifth season, but even when I was an unabashed fan of the show I found it deathly dull, and although I own the full series on DVD, I've never watched more than a couple episodes from later in the run. So, for the purposes of this blog, <i>The West Wing</i> ended with the fourth season finale "Twenty Five." If I get there and feel compelled to continue, I <i>might</i> extend the analysis into the Sorkinless seasons. But before that, let's see if I can manage the first four years.)<br />
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Why is the blog called "Notes from a Crackpot?" Devoted viewers of the series will recall the two episodes of the series in which the White House staff were, horror of horrors, forced to interact with actual citizens who held passionate beliefs about various issues. The first of those episodes was titled "The Crackpots and These Women." In light of my own angle on the show, and the likely view many readers will take of my comments, I thought that was an appropriate label.<br />
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I think that's enough for preliminaries This afternoon I plan to rewatch the first episode of the first season, aptly titled "Pilot." If all goes to plan, and I'm not browbeaten back into party loyalty by the SHEER AWESOMENESS of Jed Bartlet, my analysis will appear sometime tomorrow.Brendan Moodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18029384135423483043noreply@blogger.com1