Level Playing Field

unlevel playing field

            A friend in Britain clipped and sent on to us a couple of related “American” pieces from The Economist of 1/24/15 (“An Hereditary Meritocracy” and the editorial “America’s New Aristocracy.) It is easy to satisfy his curiosity about our assessment of them.  They are excellent, and even more spot-on than most of that excellent journal’s coverage of the American scene.  The theme of “Aristocracy” is one that surely has troubled any sentient American who has at all meditated upon the degradation of the democratic dogma.  It is quite plausible that in the next presidential election of this country of three hundred and fifteen million, teeming with intelligence and talent, the contenders will be (1) the wife of a former president, and (2) the son of a former president and the brother of another.  But this pathetic evidence of our national imagination gap must await another occasion.  The “Hereditary Meritocracy” essay addresses inequality in terms I have rarely seen clarified in this country.

            Our empirical experience of human inequality is so overwhelming that we seek some tool of transcendental redress.  The old theology, which held that every human being was created in the image and likeness of God, bestowed upon human beings a radical equality that in theory trumped the actual social hierarchy.  But that was in theory.   The old favorite hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful” includes a stanza frequently omitted from modern hymnals:

                        The rich man in his castle,
                        The poor man at his gate,
                        He made them, high or lowly,
                        And ordered their estate.

The theory probably always sounded more plausible to castle- than to gate-dwellers, as is suggested by the distich popular among John Ball’s revolutionaries in the fourteenth century: “When Adam delved, and Eva span—who was then the gentle-man?”  By the eighteenth century American and French revolutionaries chucked the theory entirely.  They did not, of course, chuck equality itself--“All men are created equal”, liberté, egalité, and all that—but equality’s basis (human law and politics) was now only semi-transcendent. 

            Such is the context of the current discussions of economic “equality.”   So great are the disparities in income and wealth accumulation among American citizens that the question now arises as to whether in terms of practical effect the newer political theory of equality is any better than the older theological one.  I will not use the term middle class in this essay, because I no longer have much idea what it means, but I can nonetheless put the matter in personal and anecdotal terms.  If my only income were gained from working at a minimum-wage job, eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, I would earn just not quite enough to pay my property taxes on a house valued a little below the Zillow median for the town in which I live.  That is if I didn’t spend a penny of my earnings on anything else.

            Surely there are some issues here—beyond the exorbitance of my local taxes or the attractions of moving back to Arkansas.   One is the “level playing field”.  Conservatives like to say that our aim should be to maintain equality of opportunity rather than jigger about in the quixotic pursuit of equality of outcomes.  We should aim for a “level playing field”.  I have always found the idea of the “level playing field” a curious one, since if a football field is full of snags and furrows it is full of snags and furrows for both teams.  However I can use it, at least in a variant form: that of a finely planed and finished chessboard.  

 level playing field

            I prefer the chessboard to the football field.  In the future, it seems probable, jobs with sufficient remuneration to allow one to pay one’s taxes are more likely to require a supple intelligence than supple abs.  Nothing could be more level, regular, standard, uniform or—if you like—“equal opportunity” than a chessboard.  When two players face off against each other across it, they do so in “equality”.   There is no lobbyist on K Street who can arrange a special “economic incentive” or “targeted tax break” that will advantage white with three preliminary moves or black with a couple of extra rooks.

            But does this fact make any two players equal in terms of the outcome of their match?  To ask the question is to expose its absurdity.  The Economist’s cleverly entitled essay on “An hereditary meritocracy” has the following summary heading: “The children of the [American] rich and powerful are increasingly well suited to earning wealth and power themselves.  That’s a problem.” 

            With the aid of a few nifty charts and graphs of the kind at which it excels The Economist lays out some of the tautologies of social capital linking economic success with quality of education, especially early education, and the effectiveness and stability of family structures.   We may want to laugh out loud at the spectacle of the Upper West Side MBA couple sweating their toddler’s application to the “right” playgroup, but when it comes to chess, twenty years hence, that kid is likely to have the edge on her contemporary raised by an unmarried high-school dropout and a television set.   

           

Body and Blood

            We had a great family weekend.  On Saturday evening we joined in celebrating the twelfth birthday of Granddaughter Number Two, Lulu Fleming-Benite, at the Bareburger eatery near the NYU library.  Thence we were whisked by Rich to his house in Red Hook.

Church of the Visitation of the BVM, Brooklyn

          The main event for Sunday was to be theatrical, but that would be after being taken out by Ruby (Granddaughter Number Four) for coffee and pastry.   There were still morning hours left.  There was an Episcopal church within walking distance (for a serious walker) in Carroll Gardens, but its service time was not until eleven.  I thought that might be a little tight, since our theater tickets were for two o’clock in Dumbo.  So I did what I sometimes do in such circumstances--sought out the nearest Christian congregation of whatever flavor I could find.  A few blocks away was huge, old Visitation R. C.--of near cathedral proportions.  It has a mass at ten, and thither I repaired.  Oh, and—relevant fact—the ten o’clock Eucharist is conducted in Spanish.

           

            There were probably two hundred people in the congregation, though scattered through the vast nave in a way that made it seem thin.  There might have been six or eight adult males in addition to me, but lots of children.  Things didn’t happen very fast.  What looked (and sounded) like a band of subway musicians tuned up languidly in the south transept.   Women, including one minimally ecclesiastical nun, wandered about the sanctuary, and in and out of a door beyond it.  At some point a priest in a chasuble, mic in hand, joined the peripatetics.  Eventually the service began—rhythmic chants of guitar-backed alleloo, with lots of clapping, hand-raising, arm-lifting, and the simulation of doves on the wing.

            Of the words of the liturgy I got about eighty percent—way more (I reasoned) than most Catholics in most places at most times would have—and virtually all the sermon.  The priest preached for over an hour.  (The norm in my own church is now eleven minutes.)  A certain amount of this was ceremonial and dialogic.  Every emphatic homiletic point was followed by the priest’s alleloo, to which the congregation supplied the wanting ya.  There were brief intermittent interrogations, as for example,

            (Preacher) Where do you send a demon?                        

            (Congregation) Away! [with arm gesture of throwing something away].

But the main line was very substantial and very clear.  The gospel on which he preached (Mark, chapter 1) includes an account of Jesus’s teaching in a synagogue, where he “taught with authority” and exorcised a demon from a man possessed.  Explaining that a synagogue is a Jewish house of worship, like a church, he then asked whether it was possible that evil could come into the Church.  Surprisingly loud shouts of ¡Claro que sí!  Yes, indeed, said the priest, and it has--which is why Pope Francis is having to cast out the demonios from the Vatican itself! 

            That didn’t sound to me much like opium for the masses, which had to be supplied by a charming ceremony for Candlemas (it was February 2^nd) presumably brought from Estremadura to Jalisco five hundred years ago—in which several young women presented elaborate Jesus-dolls, some in baby-buggies, at the steps of the altar.  Most of these people probably lived in the nearby public housing projects. Among them were four mothers with real infants.   I had small doubt that the unseen Christ was really there too.

            I received.  It took a while, but the Roman Church has now caught up with the Reformers.  First, a vernacular liturgy; next Communion “in two kinds.”  There was theoretically a cup of wine for the laity as well as a wafer—theoretically because the cup was empty by the time I and most others got to it.  The young woman administering it showed us its emptiness with an ecclesiastical version of that slightly apologetic hand gesture usually translated as “Whatcha gonna do?”  What I am going to do is make another Visitation the next chance I get.

            The insufficiency of symbolic blood in the morning was more than compensated for in the afternoon, which found us at the theater of St. Anne’s Warehouse in Dumbo.  So many good things in my life have come my way by virtue of advantageous marital connections.  Jessica Richards, Joan’s first cousin once removed, is the Stage Manager of the National Theatre of Scotland.  Many months ago, in Edinburgh, she alerted us to a production of Let the Right One In that the NTS would be bringing to Brooklyn.  My wonderful Brooklyn daughter-in-law, Katie Dixon, organized tickets for us.

St. Anne's Theater brochure from the Internet

            I had not before heard of Let the Right One In and am still nonplussed as to the meaning of the title.  But Katie knew all about it having seen the movie made from the Swedish novel (by John Lindqvist, 2004) in which it originated.  It is no easy task to characterize Let the Right One In succinctly.  It is a Harlequin romance for deviants.  As social drama, it proposes a promising cure for schoolyard bullying.  Here is a vampire story in comparison with which Bram Stoker’s Dracula merely sucks.  Above all, it is probably the bloodiest piece of dramaturgy I have ever seen, and I have seen Titus Andronicus at the London Globe!  We had brief words with Jessica before the performance, and she said that she thought our seats in Row G ought to be “far enough back to avoid the splatter”.

            The themes of the play are actually serious ones, but the cleverness of its plot is of a sort that should not be spoiled by a reviewer.  If you should have a chance to see it—and the run will be extended, I think—by all means seize it.  It wouldn’t hurt to do a preliminary brush-up on your vampirology, though.  A couple of crucial points on which I was rusty caused me some initial confusion.  Vampires are potentially eternal.  They hunger, or rather thirst for nourishment, but do not suffer our ordinary mortal aging process.  The old stake through the heart will do them in, though, and so will a blaze of sunlight.  This means that they must be creatures of night and of the gloom, and avoid the light of day.  A vampire’s life is no bed of roses, and she needs a little help from her friends.

 Rebecca Benson in the role of Eli

             In this play she gets that help in a somewhat disturbing fashion that left me pensive.  But of course what I found myself most deeply pondering on the clackety train-ride home was the extraordinary conceit of the ingestion of blood.  How can it at once be at the center of the highest spiritual aspiration and the most hideous carnal terror?

           

Capital Headlines

A couple of times a month when I have evening events in New York City I choose to cadge a bed at my daughter’s apartment rather than trying to return home late at night.  I can still get back to Princeton in the morning in time to be at the gym at its 6:30 opening if I catch a seriously early train out of Penn Station.  It departs at 4:51 and seems to have a pretty regular clientele well known to the conductors, judging from the level of somnolent bonhomie displayed on all sides.  The already sparse population of the cars as we leave New York is halved again by the time we are pulling out of Newark Airport.

            I cannot sleep on trains.  I have to be reading—but there is reading and then there is reading.  The book I had with me for the trip up was the Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa—a patristic text of considerable importance to my current project on the literary origins of Christian asceticism, but perhaps not exactly light fare.  The chances of engaging with it profitably in my pre-dawn daze were not good.  I long ago learned that the proper literary level for this milk train was one of the New York tabloids.  As the Post is a quarter cheaper than the Daily News, I went for the Post. 

            The best part of the Post, as also of some of the English tabloids of decades past, is the headlines, which often exhibit a power of poetic concision to rival that of an Emily Dickinson.  Nowadays at the cashier’s post in mercantile establishments the various Hollywood and television fan tabloids tend to monopolize the rack with a somewhat limited and long since hackneyed vocabulary of scandal—“Cheatin’ Hearts”, “Love Child,” “Pants Down,” etc.  Post headlines often still have crackle.

            There are certain headlines one encounters in one’s daily rounds—such as “Avis Important,” “Terms and Conditions,” “Statement of Limited Liability,” or “How to Get the Most Out of Your New Suk-o-Vac”—apparently designed to quench any desire to read any further.  The tabloid headline, when properly done, removes any need to read further.   In the good old days in the grocery stores any number of The News of the World alone could be counted on for two or three typographical outrages.  Two from my youth have stuck in my memory.  The first—“Dead Mom Gives Birth to Child in Coffin” practically made me gag right there in the check-out line, and for several years I thought it must surely be the gold standard of the journalistic grotesque.  A second actually induced me to buy a copy: “The Filth You Eat in Your Bread!” in at least forty-eight point type.  The suggestive powers of a sentence fragment are often irresistible.

            But these days the New York Post seems nearly alone in its noble mission.  Certainly I was richly reward by Wednesday’s edition.  There was a squib headed “Spouses, you post, you’re toast” devoted to the interesting sociological fact that in England Facebook postings are now cited “in a third of all divorce cases”.  More interesting still was the following meta-headline: “We’re ‘head’line news!”  On the off chance that you are not familiar with my curious use of the Greek prefix meta, I should explain that I take it from the gobbledygook of current literary critical theory.  The meta maximizes self-involvement.  Indeed the meta is to ideas what the “selfie” is to photography.  You have perhaps read a novel about a novelist who is writing a novel about a novelist who…etc. 

               Such is the genre of the Post story.  Its headline “We’re ‘head’line news!” actually introduces a celebration of another headline.  It’s a story from Down Under.  A young Australian journalist, whose name is Nick Buttery and whose physiognomy and attitude remind one slightly of Alfred E. Neuman, was forbidden by a security guard from entering the Parliament House in Canberra—roughly the equivalent of the American Capitol—on sartorial grounds.  According to the Post reporter, “The Department of Parliamentary Services said Parliament forbids offensive messages on clothing in the House.”

            What offensive message?  Mr. Buttery was at the time wearing a tee-shirt adorned with the classic Post headline:  “Headless Body in Topless Bar”—a headline that, according to several eminent scholars expert in the genre, may be the greatest tabloid headline known to man.  “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” nearly perfect in its syntactic balance and grotesque juxtaposition, displays the peculiar elegance of wit demonstrated in the titles of two memorable mid-nineteenth-century novels by Emily Eden: The Semi-Detached House and The Semi-Attached Couple.  These too are worthy underground classics, though incapable of generating a potential international incident.

            According to journalistic theory reporters are supposed to cover the story, not be the story.  Mr. Buttery’s own cover defeated that sound principle, however, and his story, if not quite viral, has proved to be at least amusingly contagious.

           

           

Egghead Linguistics

 Averroës

Before there was political correctness there was theological correctness.  Galileo, who thought that the earth orbited the sun was required by the Roman Inquisition to say that it didn’t.  So he said it didn’t, but muttered a second opinion under his breath,  Eppur si muove.   Perhaps he followed the famous Muslim philosopher, Averroës, who, trying to reconcile the Koranic tradition with Aristotle, sought mental wiggle room in the notion of the “double truth”.  Truths arrived at from theology and truths arrived at from philosophy, though apparently incompatible, could both be “true”.  For example, the world could be both eternal (Aristotle) and created in time (Scriptural tradition).  Christian Averroists got into big trouble in the thirteenth century.

            I was surprised to see in the Times on Monday an essay by Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front party in France.  This was rather like discovering a previously unnoticed “Gospel of Moloch” tucked away among the unread apocryphal books.  The essay was arresting, and the numerous readers’ comments even more so.  My memory, once a steel trap, is now more like a broken, rusty hinge, so you must take my word for the footnote when I say that there is a polemical passage in Jerome, debating the opinion of the mighty Augustine, in which he boasts somewhat as follows: “I judge an opinion not by whose it is but by what it says.”  Readers’ comments on Ms. Le Pen’s essay were sharply and fairly evenly divided.  What struck me about them, however, was this.  Those who approved the essay tended to do so in terms of its specific ideas and the quality of its argumentation.  Those who disapproved rarely even mentioned its ideas, declaring instead its a priori illegitimacy on the basis of the identity of its author.  Some of the “antis” accused her of bad faith for not clearly displaying in the essay the “fascist”, “xenophobic”, and “far right” pathologies said to define her and her political party.  Some others criticized the Times for “legitimating” her hateful views.

            The title of Ms. Le Pen’s piece was “To Call This Threat by its Name” (“Bien nommer la menace”).  Following the generally sound rule that the first step in addressing a problem is correctly identifying what the problem is, she wants to call the slaughter at the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo and the anti-semitic attack at the kosher grocery Islamist terrorism.  She thinks the French government has been perversely reluctant to utter the words “Islamic” or “Islamist” in this context, though in fact many French officials have been models of plain-spokenness compared with President Obama, various “spokespersons” of our State Department, and indeed numerous other thought-leaders here and abroad.  Our enemy, according to them, is not Islamic terrorism but “extremism”.

            The essential evil of extremism in American politics was definitively established as long ago as 1964 when Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for the presidency committed one of the century’s great oratorical gaffes.  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” he said to raucous applause as he accepted the nomination. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”  How this sentiment differed from that of Kennedy’s inaugural speech of 1961 would be difficult to say (“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the success of liberty”) except of course that it was expressed three years later.

            Were we not dealing with a clear and present danger horrible in its nature, the linguistic convolutions of a Howard Dean—as an example chosen among dozens--might be comical.  The self-proclaimed caliphate ISIS (i.e., “Islamic State”) necessarily claims Sharia law as its constitutional basis.  That is one feature of its intentionally Islamic character. According to Howard Dean, however, Islam has nothing to do with ISIS, and should not be mentioned in the same breath. Yet most countries are allowed to name themselves.  It is now rather gauche to call Zimbabwe “Rhodesia”.  The United States is currently conducting obscure and perhaps endless negotiations with “the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the name confirmed by 92% of Iranian voters in 1992.  Perhaps Mr. Dean will convey the news to Supreme Leader Khamenei that despite what the ayatollah may think, his governance has nothing to do with Islam!

            I grasp the good intentions behind this linguistic tomfoolery.  But one can avoid the “broad brush” without recourse to the airbrush.   Surely we should seek irenic and courteous relations with all peoples of the earth.  But if you cannot distinguish between the statements Some X is Y and All X is Y, you should probably not be a practicing dialectician.  What is the happy mean of which slaughtering cartoonists is the extreme?  I do not know, but I doubt that we are well served by Egghead Linguistics as found in Alice in Wonderland: “'When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less'.” 

Egghead Linguists

Sacred and Profane Murder

The famous allegorical painting at the head of this essay, one of the great treasures of the Borghese gallery in Rome, was made by Titian around 1514.  For at least the last three centuries it has been called “Sacred and Profane Love”.  That is probably an accurate title.  Titian is probably making an emblematic contrast between the two conceptions of love (amor) known in the old Christian ethical vocabulary as caritas and cupiditas.  According to the vastly influential opinion of Augustine in his City of God, these are the “two loves that build two cities,” the metaphorical versions of Jerusalem and Babylon, the City of God and the City of Man.  The ambiguities in the word “love”, when operating within the more limited and intimate sphere of individual human psychology, provide about half of the materials of Western literature.

            Getting back to Titian and his much-admired painting, I would make two points.  The first is that we are only pretty sure--not absolutely certain--that the subject is “Sacred and Profane Love.”  The second is that among the learned art historians who have written about “Sacred and Profane Love” there has been no general agreement as to which of Titian’s beautiful babes is which!  I want to stress that point.  Important scholars—men and women who have spent years and decades studying Renaissance art and iconography—dispute the most essential feature of this painting’s “meaning”.  Of course I know the answer, but if you think I am going to tell you for free, think again.  Such point as I would claim to make has to do with the uncertainty—or as the fancy critics call it, “indeterminacy”—of iconographic representation.           

            I would not idly contribute to the cataract of photons that have been poured out in the last week over the fanatical murders recently perpetrated at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris—were it not for one salient fact.  Unlike the large majority of American commentators I have read, I actually knew a little something about Charlie Hebdo before all this happened.  I have lived in Paris for periods of time.  Most weeks (“Hebdo” being short for hebdomadaire, “weekly”) I used to try to take a look at it.  Its sophomoric humor appealed to me—insofar as I could grasp it.  For in engaging a foreign language, satire is one of the very last cultural forms to float into comprehensibility.  This paper is full of slang, dirty talk, and above all obscure political and cultural allusions that must challenge many native speakers.  Its point of view is post-modern, urban, utterly secular, and flagrantly irreverent.  Notice that is calls itself a journal irresponsable!

            Since it scorns all pieties, it was scornful of the most hallowed ones, religious pieties.  But in my experience its principal targets were cultural and above all political pretension.  Oversimplifying wildly, I would say that the most glaring weakness of American politicians is limited intelligence.  In France they tend to be smarter, but also more pompous.  The pomposity of French politicians, indeed, seems almost to have been invented for the delectation of satirists of the sort who worked for Charlie Hebdo.  And of course both in history and in current radical Islamic thought the distinction between religion and politics is hardly a bright line.  Some of the implications may bemuse infidels.  Just today I learned of the fatwa of a Saudi cleric declaring the building of a snowman haram!  (It has been snowing of late along the Saudi-Jordanian frontier.)

            In an important passage in my own Scriptures (I Corinthians, cap. 10) Paul has some advice for the Christian minority living in a pagan culture.  All things are lawful, he says, but not all things are expedient.  Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it.  How about Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons? 

            It’s a judgment call, but there are times when making a point is the point.  The street on which I live, Hartley Avenue, is a relatively new extension of the older Faculty Road, which runs through the campus along the northwestern most banks of Lake Carnegie, linking at right angles two well traveled county roads.  Faculty Road, though now serving as a fairly major traffic artery, is technically private property, owned by the University.  For one day a year campus security officers close it off with barricades.  This action, which on that day is annoying and inconvenient for large numbers of motorists, cements the University’s point, its legal property rights, which for three hundred and sixty-four days of the year are effectively waived.

            In a pluralistic society cultural difference is inescapable, and if the difference is so great that there are some people willing to kill you for what you say, draw, or doodle, it may need a little thoughtful negotiation.  Expression incapable of inviting offense or contestation needs no legal protection.  On the other hand rights never exercised are utterly meaningless.  Take a look at the so-called “Stalin Constitution” of 1936 some time.  Charlie Hebdo thought the exercise of a fundamental civil right more important than the sensibilities of some fundamentalists.

            What remains of their editorial board apparently still does, to judge from the cover on today’s edition.  Titian’s example can teach us that the artist’s intention cannot always conquer the inherent ambiguity of pictorial forms, but in a preemptive exegetical interview the cartoonist himself said that his subject is the Prophet shedding a tear over the wicked folly of some self-proclaimed followers.  There may, alas, turn out to be other interpretations.

                                                                                                 Source: Libération

Proving Grounds

   

         Most people agree that the invention of printing in fifteenth-century Europe marked an astonishing advance in the history of culture and the advancement of learning.  Rabelais, who was born about thirty years after the death of Gutenberg includes in his marvelous novels an imaginary letter from Gargantua to his son Pantagruel praising the cultural miracle effected by the printing press.  “I see the robbers, hangmen, freebooters and stable-boys of today more learned than the theologians and preachers of my time.”*

            A bit of poetic license, perhaps, but is hardly necessary to point out the advantages of the machine-made as opposed to the hand-made book.  They included quantity and price, both of which favored the wide distribution of texts.  But the printers themselves particularly boasted of another feature: that the books they produced claimed a new accuracy, since before being sent into the world the text could be read and corrected in proof.  The reader could be confident that the correct reading was Lead us not into temptation, as printed, and that when their manuscript read Lead us not into Penn Station, that was probably a mistake born of human error.

            My most recent essay had been exposed to the eyes of the world for the better part of a week when I received an email from a reader named Ian Jackson.  Its brief subject line immediately caught my attention: “Pubic”.  Mr. Jackson pointed out that in a passage in which I spoke of the American system of public education, my text quite clearly read pubic education.  This would have been a cause for embarrassment even had the context not been, as it unfortunately was, a high-and-mighty excoriation of our national educational inadequacies.

            There really was no way of redeeming this blooper, though my mind did its best.  I recalled a masterpiece of toilet stall graffiti that I encountered in England fifty years ago.  Among the sad, crude monuments to unsatisfied longing scrawled upon the wall was the following masterpiece of postmodern dialogue, written out in vertical form, as though in a Shakespeare text:

            [Hand A]: God bless little grils.

            [Hand B]: Don’t you mean GIRLS???

            [Hand C]: What about us grils?

Good question, that!  And surely a similar point could be made about American pubic education.  Was it fair to neglect it entirely?

            But the real lesson of my experience, and the reason I am so sincerely grateful to Mr. Jackson, is that it is surprisingly rare even for friends to try to save you from self-incurred embarrassment.  They seem to think that it is better for you not to know that your beard is clotted with drool and the spume of your Starbucks latte.  This leads me to invoke a second English anecdote of the same era as the last—the period of my undergraduate years at Oxford.

            I was a member of Jesus College, an institution at which in those days the athletic culture somewhat outpaced the plumbing capacity.  There were some showers, but there wasn’t much hot water in them at the best of times.  When you needed them most—when you were returning with large numbers of your fellow footballers, oarsmen, or runners after some exhausting, sweaty ordeal—there was usually no hot water at all.  Remember this, as in the story I must now relate it is what literary critics call a relevant detail.

            One day I was scheduled to go to an elegant sherry party sponsored by the English Speaking Union.  I believe the venue was the upscale Randolph hotel or perhaps somewhere else in the block opposite the Ashmolean Museum.  Bear in mind that the English Speaking Union is an organization that celebrates the glories of international communication made possible by our shared world language.  The schedule was tight.  If I moved at a brisk pace from our boathouse to college—a fair distance—I would have about fifteen minutes to shower, shave, put on my brand new Harris Tweed jacket, and hustle over to the ESU sherry party.  The hot water was already exhausted, but I faced it like a man.  I took a chilly shower, and shaved quickly—too quickly--in cold water.   Then off I went.  The sherry-swigging had already begun when I got there, but I was not the last to arrive, and I joined right in.

            The ESU has both male and female members, though on this occasion there were several hostesses and no visible hosts.  I moved about among the English Speaking ladies, speaking English the whole while, and pretty competently too, if I do say so myself.  Some of them seemed to be regarding me in a somewhat alarmed fashion, but years of experience had inured me to that sort of thing.  I have never shared Byron’s experience of having women faint from excitement when I walk into a room.  About twenty minutes into the circular chatter, when I had engaged a least a dozen English Speakers, I felt a slight tickle or itch roughly below my left ear.  Adroitly passing my sherry glass to my left hand, I reached around with my right hand to give a surreptitious scratch to the itch.

            I detected something wet and sticky, and when my hand reappeared in sight it was pretty well covered in blood.  Hasty shaving, especially hasty shaving in cold water, is not to be recommended.  All unknowing I had given myself a fairly good nick below the left ear.  The flow, which had been surprisingly copious, had found its course, invisible to me but certainly not to anybody with whom I was conversing, down the back of my neck, over the shirt collar and onto the upper shoulder of my new Harris Tweed.  The adjective “blood-soaked” is almost always hyperbolic, but a patch of the jacket was actually soggy.  For all I know I was in need of a blood transfusion.  However, not a single one of the good ladies of the ESU had thought it proper to mention to me that I was hemorrhaging: an instance of “death before dishonor,” perhaps?  Hence my gratitude to Ian Jackson.  Just like it says in the subway cars: if you see something, say something!

           

*Book 2, chapter 8.

Not So Common Core

 

             McGuffey's Eclectic Reader: Back to the future

              Social scientists warn us to beware of “anecdotal evidence.” They prefer “data”—that is, a more or less sizable accumulation of anecdotes laid out in graphs and statistical charts.  Despite my often serious discontents with various contemporary cultural trends, fundamental pessimism seems almost willfully perverse if you are surrounded on a daily basis with phalanxes of smart, energetic, capable, purposeful and optimistic young people.

            Any college campus is bound to be a “bubble”.  The campus of a “highly selective” institution, such as the one on which I spent my active career, can often seem an exotic preserve for Golden Youth and a laboratory of social opportunity.  Of course an important part of that opportunity is the insistent invitation to look beyond the bubble and think about what you see there.

            If you accept that invitation the relationship between fiscal and cultural capital becomes obvious, even if the question of cause and effect may be murky.  Speaking in the most general terms, financially successful Americans are more likely than unsuccessful ones to know the distinction between its and it’s, there and their, and imply and infer.  (I have about given up on the distinction between the verbs lie and lay.)  Competence in one’s native language isn’t a finite resource that Smith will have less of if Jones has more.  It requires no “redistributionist” mentality to imagine a literate citizenry.  Why, then, are we incapable of imagining a school system that might create one?

            For a time the proposed new national public educational standards gathered beneath the shorthand phrase of the “Common Core” seemed to be gaining the “momentum” so prized in various aspects of our national life.  This momentum fell far short of a shared enthusiasm, but still appeared somewhat more powerful than mere grudging support.  Words are generally more prolific than deeds, however, and as the moment for implementation arrives the pseudo-consensus is fraying.

            I think this is a pity, but probably inevitable.  It is a pity because the new “Core” aims at sensible goals that if achieved even partially would enrich the lives of millions of our young people and measurably strengthen the national cultural fabric and our national economic prospects.  It is probably inevitable because we long ago surrendered our public education system to the untender mercies of the realm of the partisan political arena and to the dead hand of an intellectually moribund trade union mentality.  We have created the circumstances least favorable to broadly supported educational reform and most favorable for its plausible rejection on overtly political grounds.  In particular self-styled conservatives are framing it in such a way as to guarantee its unhelpful presence as an issue in the Republican Party presidential primary of 2016—which of course has already begun in late 2014.

            There is no partisan political content in the Common Core reforms.  This needs to be said because so many of its critics seem to think there is.  The Common Core is supposed to improve, in concrete and objective terms, American students’ mastery of the skills of reading and of mathematics.  Educational reform must therefore address two demonstrable problems with American public education.  The first of course is that judged in the world context, which is the proper context for any sensible evaluation, American schools are on the whole pretty mediocre.  There are places, lots of them, where things are worse.  But there are also quite a few places where things are better.   A second problem is that most American students think they—meaning both their individual selves and their own schools--are just fine.  That is, actual objective surveys of the mathematical attainments of American high school juniors, say, place them well below the level of achievement of their contemporaries in numerous other countries.  But if you ask an American high school student where American students rank in international surveys you are very likely to get the confident answer “Number one!” 

            It is probably not reasonable to hope that America, with its large pockets of social pathology unknown to many smaller and more culturally unified countries, is in fact going to be “number one”.  But on this issue default American optimism is an instance of “the man who knows not, and knows not he knows not”.  The proper response to the man who knows not, and knows not he knows not, as I recall, is—pity him.  The first two steps toward doing better are acknowledging that we must and realizing that we can.