W. C. Fields as Wilkins Micawber, deficit-scold
I have become increasingly interested in recent years in the
verb deny and its nominative
offspring denial and denier. In a very funny and protracted exchange of insults between
Prince Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s First
Part of King Henry the Fourth, we get the following.
Prince: And thou a natural coward, without instinct.
Falstaff: I deny your major…
A lot of ink has been expended in the attempt to explicate
this passage. What Falstaff means
by major seems clear enough. It comes from the technical vocabulary
of the medieval logicians, and it refers to the major premise of a syllogism.
The schoolbook
example of a syllogism was this:
All
men are mortal.
Socrates
is a man.
Ergo, Socrates is mortal.
The major premise is that all men are mortal, a fact taken
to be undeniable. The minor premise, that Socrates is a
man, is likewise taken as undeniable. The problem is that the Prince has made
no syllogistic argument, except perhaps by implication: “Only cowards flee from
battle,” as Falstaff has just fled in ignominious fashion.
To
deny something, etymologically speaking, is to say no to it. Denial ought
to operate with regard to actual facts,
though factual denial may require yet further interrogation. You may absolutely deny that you
murdered Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick if (a) you were at
the time of the murder fully occupied with Lady Bellebosom in the bedroom, or
(b) you used a pistol. But more
and more denial is becoming a matter of opinion. This mode of denial is often signaled
by the proximity of the adverb surely. “Surely you will not deny that Bach is
a greater musician than Brahms.”
Well, you might in fact.
Maybe.
So
erratic have been the linguistic wanderings of deny-words that denial now means saying no to something that is
true as often as to something that is false.
We have Holocaust-denial and AIDS-denial, birth-certificate-denial,
9/11- denial, etc. Practically all
of us are “in denial” about something or other.
Among
the privileges of teaching at a major university is the opportunity to rub
shoulders with the kinds of celebrity professors and “public intellectuals” who tend to
be fairly thick on the ground in places like Oxford, Paris, Geneva, New Haven,
Chicago, Berkeley and other particularly lush groves of Academe. If my own experience at Princeton is a
safe guide, it is true, the shoulder-rubbing is mainly metaphorical, since
Professor Famous is much more likely to be on a book tour or testifying in
Washington than attending another dull meeting of the Library Committee, but we
are at least all listed on the same mastheads. My experience also suggests that it is safer to deny some
things than others.
One
of my eminent colleagues, the physicist Will Happer, has gained mainly local opprobrium
as a “global warming skeptic”. In
fact his skepticism had something to do with the silent substitution of the
phrase “climate change” for “global warming” in public discourse. A second eminence, the Nobel laureate
economist Paul Krugman has gained mainly local approbation as a “deficit
skeptic”, or a scold of what he calls “deficit-scolds,” folks who worry about
the fact that America is many trillions of dollars in debt.
Professor Paul Krugman, deficit-scold scold
I
am neither a physicist nor an economist but a student of literature. Hence my possibly eccentric subordination
of the theories of J. M. Keynes to those of Wilkins Micawber: "Annual
income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six,
result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds
ought and six, result misery."*
It
is pretty clear where President Obama’s selective denials prevail from two
passages in his much-praised Second Inaugural Address.
¶We
will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so
would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the
overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of
raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms…
¶We
must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of
our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between
caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the
generation that will build its future.
I
am among those who fret perhaps too much about the fate of future generations
of Americans, beginning with my own grandchildren. But like Falstaff I must deny the Prince’s major. Raging fires, droughts, and powerful
storms did not begin in the Industrial Revolution. Although the twentieth century witnessed new heights (or
depths) of incendiary warfare, the possibility of a “natural” disaster such as
the London Fire of 1666 or the Chicago Fire of 1871 is in fact now quite remote.
As
to “the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our
deficit”—well, call me skeptical.
Our politicians are not really into “hard choices,” since making them
might prove fatal to re-election.
In my opinion, “the generation that built this country” has long since
been in its collective grave.
Furthermore I find the President’s use of the word invest rather peculiar.
But there is no need to dabble in possible quibbles when there is a more obvious, simple matter of mathematical logic to be addressed.
Even
a President cannot spend the same dollar twice. You can either use up all the nation’s money paying for
Social Security and Medicare for us geezers or you can spend it on something else. Guns or butter. Cat scans on demand or high-speed
rail. If you want seriously to
reduce the deficit, let alone retire it, you need either to increase your tax
revenues significantly or to reduce
your expenditures, also significantly.
In fact it’s pretty likely that you have to do both. I want to believe our leaders when they
tell us that “America’s best days are still ahead”; but it’s a little rich to
claim that saddling our school children with yet more debt will usher in the
millennium. And I deny that I am in denial!
*Charles
Dickens, in David Copperfield
