Notes From Punderground

Yesterday Yale College announced that they will not rename a residential college currently named for slaveholder, white supremacist, and Easily One of the Top Three Monsters of US History John C. Calhoun. I find this decision not only repugnant but totally baffling.

The university also announced they would name a new residential college for a black woman, Anna Pauline Murray, a civil rights activist and Yale law doctorate as well as, presumably, neither a slaveholder, nor an unapologetic racist, nor Easily One of the Top Three Monsters of US History. The idea that (praiseworthy black person) = –1 x (monstrous white supremacist), that the former makes up for the latter, is appalling for so many reasons. It would suggest that in the study of history, black people are not permitted nuance – they are either totally impeccable heroes, martyrs and saints, or else they are mentioned as little as possible; whereas white people can have been utterly vile, but they can still be honored with buildings in their name.

If Yale were really interested in “making up for” naming a college for a white supremacist slaveholder, if they really feel it is important to have a Calhoun College, they should instead name the new college after a black supremacist, or at the very least a person of color whose views or record on race would make white people uncomfortable. (I’ve heard that someone on Harvard’s Black Students Association email list proposed renaming Mather Hall, also named for a slaveholder, “The Huey P. Newton Center For Black Excellence” which is an idea that gets better and better every time I think about it.)

But also, why does Yale want to have a Calhoun College at all? What is good or honorable about John C. Calhoun? Nothing, that’s what. It’s one thing to honor Thomas Jefferson or Woodrow Wilson, gross racists who still had profoundly positive influences on the country and the world. If John C. Calhoun had a positive influence on anything, it surely pales in comparison to his villainy. If Yale desperately wants to honor an alumnus who rose to the top of US politics and did a tremendous disservice to the country, they should rename the college George W. Bush College. At least Bush wasn’t a slaveholder, unapologetic racist, or Easily One of the Top Three Monsters of US History.

There’s a strange argument running around that naming a building after someone isn’t actually honoring them, or, you know, not honoring honoring them. This strikes me as patently absurd. If naming a building after someone weren’t an honor, philanthropists wouldn’t pay millions of dollars to get it.

I’ve also seen the feeble argument that keeping the honors bestowed upon monsters is necessary for people to learn their history, or “wrestle with it” as it is often put. If that is the case, then there are thousands of historical figures who are in urgent need of buildings named after them. This also ignores that “wrestling with history” does not involve the same emotional dynamic for everyone. It’s one thing for me to know that Mather was a slaveholder and genocide enthusiast; my instinct is to go, “yikes, ugh, wow”. But for a black or Native student at Harvard, the feeling is more visceral; a feeling of wondering what this institution is that was not sufficiently appalled by Mather’s slaveholding record to deny him an honorific building, wondering whom Harvard was built for and whether it remains an institution for those people alone. And anyway, there are libraries! There are history classes! People can learn history in any number of places, almost always more reliably than just having to regularly walk past a bunch of buildings named for people who make some students feel unwelcome (and always the same groups of students; you don’t see Chief Joseph Hall).

Another argument I’ve heard for keeping buildings named after repulsive wastes of oxygen stuffed into cheap human suits is the argument from long-term historical uncertainty. Hey, maybe people in the future will think we were all repulsive wastes of oxygen stuffed into cheap human suits! And, well, maybe. But to my mind, there are two ways historical morality could progress: it will either progress in broadly the same direction, wherein an ethic of harm and benefit is paramount and people who fought to continue hurting sentient beings on the basis of arbitrary distinctions will be vilified; or, it will reverse itself, stop caring about that kind of oppression, and develop some other system of taboos.

The second option is not worth planning for, I think, because, not to put too fine a point on it, our taboos are, like, better? If people of the future want to tear down every statue of anyone who wore green hats, that’s for the people of the future to litigate. The idea that this future should be permitted to affect our decisions on whom to honor now, though, is off base. The argument here is “well, what if someone thinks you were an asshole long after you die and starts a #youmustfall movement – how would you feel about that?” Poorly, no doubt, but there is no comparison, because I am not John C. Calhoun: I am, again, neither a slaveholder, nor an unapologetic white supremacist, nor Easily One of the Top Three Monsters of US History*. And John C. Calhoun’s right to have a say in public morality long after he is dead is a) not a thing; b) if it were a thing, it would be equalled by the right of each of the people he brutalized and immiserated to have a say long after their death (and where are their residential colleges – there must be one per individual, if there is one for John C. Calhoun); and c) clearly far inferior to the rights of the people alive now to decide who is worth honoring. They say tradition is the democracy of the dead, and dead people voting is electoral fraud.

            In the case of the first possible future – where morality is like that of today but more so – people will certainly not stop regarding John C. Calhoun as an unmitigated scoundrel, villain, and evildoer, so we might as well stop honoring him now. They might deplore our conduct, our failure to solve major problems and undo major forms of inequality, but that’s an inevitable side effect of the fight for justice: we fight so that future generations grow up in a better world, and have to be taught how difficult it was to build that world. Even if, as I think is likely, the scars of today’s injustices have healed enough in the future to relax some of our taboos, John C. Calhoun will never again be regarded as an okay dude. Nor should he be.

Anyway, if people really want to have buildings with consistent names that will never be subject to the vicissitudes of praise and opprobrium, they should name residential colleges after letters of the alphabet. The letter A never owned slaves. The letter B was never an unapologetic racist. The letter C was not Easily One of the Top Three Monsters of US History. I really fail to see what the social utility of “honoring” any historical figure is, rather than just teaching people abstract moral principles that can guide their actions.

* The other two are Andrew Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest, in case you were wondering.

I’ve been having a crisis of faith in the arts. For a while I thought this was because I’ve stopped believing that “art can change the world”, or that art is necessary for life, but that’s not really true. I think you can point to examples where a work of art really did change the way people talked about something, for good or for ill. And as for the necessity of art, I still believe that art makes life bearable, that it makes it easier to get through the day, that it lends people perspective and inspiration in vital ways.

I’ve been telling people, by way of introducing how I’ve been feeling about art, that I keep thinking about Bruce Springsteen, widely regarded as a very good artist. Bruce Springsteen is a liberal Democrat who refuses to let Republicans use his songs in their campaigns; and yet, Republicans (in New Jersey, at least) keep wanting to use his songs in their campaigns. Republicans, such as Chris Christie, love him. If you listen to “Born in the USA” even literally just I mean my God literally actually once, you can tell it’s not a patriotic song. Let’s say Springsteen is as good, as successful, as an artist can be – you would think you would not be able to come away from his songs a conservative, and in fact seeing the activism in his songs is dramatically undifficult, but he is beloved by legions of Republicans who listen to his music and remain Republicans. What hope is there then for the rest of us to make art that is good for the world? In fact, if Springsteen’s music is helping Chris Christie get up in the morning and do damage to the state of New Jersey, then Springsteen is having the opposite effect of what he intends as an artist. And if he has to release statements outside of his artistic works clarifying their meaning, clarifying that he does not want his music to be used to help Chris Christie get up in the morning and do damage to the state of New Jersey, then his art does not stand alone, which is damning, since plenty of would-be revolutionary artists whose work is much less eloquent hope to have some effect on the world just by virtue of their art, without needing a political side discussion about it.

Art is a challenge to the idea of a rational political discourse based on moral suasion. For reasons fundamental to the human psyche, if you show a person the image of a weeping, bleeding refugee, that person will be more moved than if you simply assert that refugees exist and that they need our help. Art – at least in its political forms – exists in that space of irrationality, complementing political discourse by exploring what kinds of images, motions, sounds, juxtapositions, and narratives cause us to cry, to laugh, to be revolted; to feel pity, anger, fear, or catharsis. So if art is to improve the world, you have to establish that it is better, all things being equal, than straightforward political or philosophical discourse, and I’m skeptical that it is, when it so often seems to require reams of attendant commentary.

Straightforward political or philosophical discourse seems to have room for more nuance and compassion these days, too. Art is subject to certain inherent biases: it’s easier to write an artistically compelling dystopia than an artistically compelling utopia; it’s hard to affirmatively propose policy positions in art, but it’s comparatively easy to make the bad side effects of a given policy, even a good policy, brutally vivid. Even though art is supposed to be the best field of human endeavor for demonstrating human complexity, I’ve come to feel that just talking to people lets you convey a two-pronged idea like “these people are doing evil and they must be stopped, but they are still human and stopping them needs to be limited by certain human rights considerations” better than art can, at least as I’ve been taught to analyze art. Since art makes you feel, it can make someone look good or bad, but it can’t exert control over the audience’s subsequent action plans in the way that straightforward political speech can.

Of course, even if art doesn’t improve the world, or rarely does, it makes life bearable. Sometimes it’s just pretty or thrilling or has a beat, and this is enough to make it an important – indeed, indispensable – part of everyone’s life. But it’s important for everyone to realize that this use of art is morally neutral. (This was actually one of the best parts of of Mad Max: Fury Road, the best movie of the millennium so far. By having the warboys drive to the strummings of an electric guitar, the film delivered an amazing rebuke to so much bullshit about the inherent goodness of art; art inspires everyone, including the evil.) You don’t have to invoke Leni Riefenstahl to recognize that the power of art can be used for good or for ill.

On the other hand, the power of empiricism and rational moral suasion has a slight bias towards the good, because good policy is necessarily based on correct assessment of the state of the world. Disciplines such as science, philosophy, and formal logic, to the extent they are used correctly (which, to be fair, it is hard to do: hence why I say a slight bias towards the good), rely on facts and put in place mechanisms to protect themselves from falsehood in ways that art does not. Art is above all concerned with what people feel – a fictional story can ring true; an absurdist poem can reflect how the author truly views the world – and it wouldn’t be art without that concern. Of course this doesn’t mean that fiction, or the suspension of disbelief, or the idea of self-expression, are enemies of progress or anything. I think they’re necessary for all sorts of reasons, and I’d hate to live in a world without them. Primarily I want to re-emphasize my earlier point: art, like rain, falleth on the just and the unjust.

None of this fully explains my crisis of faith in the arts. Good entertainment, even if it comes at the risk of inspiring a terrible governor, is still a worthwhile human pursuit, just as farming is still a worthwhile pursuit even if Donald Trump eats your corn. But what hit me today is that I’m less concerned with whether art is worthwhile and more concerned with whether it is worthwhile to insist that the art be good.

All our faves are problematic. I’ve had a few conversations about the your-fave-is-problematic Tumblr and things like it. In particular, I’ve pointed out that we don’t have a good word for the opposite of “problematic” – a word that asserts that while there might be moral problems with a given work, it adds enough positive value to the culture to outweigh those problems. (This is basically how I feel about Game of Thrones, and also pretty much everything I like.) But even without such a word, I think these conversations are starting to happen. I keep coming back to an issue of the webcomic Oh Joy Sex Toy by Erika Moen, in which 50 Shades of Grey is discussed. While Moen recognizes that the relationship depicted by E.L. James is wildly unhealthy, she also says she’s not into policing what people find sexy, and neither am I. Are we assuming that all or many of James’s readers are going to end up trapped in abusive relationships because a book they liked said it was okay? Even people who would never consider the plot of 50 Shades romantic or even tolerable are at risk of ending up in an abusive relationship. Are we going to tell kinky people that all their porn has to come with disclaimers about how consent works? That strikes me as paternalistic.

And once you commit to not judge people for their porn, you start having to not judge people for their other artistic preferences. If it helps them get through the day… I’ve been dating someone who’s a huge Miley Cyrus fan, which is relevant given that Miley Cyrus is poorly regarded in the kinds of your-fave-is-problematic circles I move in on the internet. He also isn’t a Beyoncé fan; Beyoncé, conversely, is admired to the point of adulation in my internet circles. He says that he doesn’t think there’s anyone else who’s doing what Miley is doing for sex-positivity. And two things: first, how does one even debate this question? Isn’t it entirely subjective? And second: what a stupid thing to get into a fight about. That’s what I keep coming back to. If good art were really better, really more morally uplifting, than bad art, wouldn’t it be worth getting into fights about? Wouldn’t it be worth choosing friends and lovers on the basis of shared taste?

And, like, is it? We’re well into a cultural discussion of the perils of internet negativity. Authors and creators are savaged online for the slightest missteps, or for just being who they are instead of something different, and this is not good. And the backlash against liking things “ironically” may be a decade old at this point. So yelling at people for loving the wrong things seems like encouraging them not to love anything, or to pretend not to love anything. Meanwhile, the creators themselves (including, noteably, the aforementioned Miley Cyrus) are telling us, as in”We Can’t Stop” to “forget the haters”. The idea of “haters” is basically a repudiation of criticism as a legitimate project at all; to call someone a hater is to assert that their criticism is not motivated by a love of the art form but rather by jealousy or by an inherently dyspeptic personality. Which is maybe ridiculous, but we should probably all examine the ways in which our attitudes towards works of art are shaped by countless things besides abstract investment in aesthetic brilliance.

People are different, yo. I happen to think Game of Thrones is contributing hugely to culture; I think its depiction of sexual violence is justified by what it’s trying to do, and fuck it, just fuck it, I think George R. R. Martin should win the Nobel Prize in Literature. There. I said it. It’s out. But that’s a topic for another post. So yes, I think it’s an important work, to the extent there are important works. But am I going to tell someone who may be a survivor of sexual violence that they “have to” watch or read the series or the books, which might be genuinely triggering to them? No. I’m not about that life. Any individual work is basically dispensable. Nothing is above criticism, or mandatory. Through all these examples, the basic thread is: if someone loves something, or can’t stand it, who am I, with my own biases and limited perspective, to judge?

And given the vast degree of subjectivity involved, if you can make a work of art that is as good as it can be and it still doesn’t attain or deserve immortality, and it still can’t reach everyone, and it’s still at risk of misinterpretation – then is it worth trying to make art good? How hard should you be willing to try?

I don’t think we can dispense with the idea of quality entirely, and the difficulty of working out this contradiction is, I think, where my crisis is coming from. I’ve argued in a previous post that you can actually measure works ethically against other works, and I stand by that argument. I can’t help feeling that representation matters, that truthfulness matters – that at the very least, I can’t feel comfortable being moved by a work if I think it’s telling lies about the universe. “Problematic” does exist. And in practical terms, there are certain artistic choices I do judge as reflecting on you as a person, like if your favorite movie is American Sniper. So you should be more judgmental than zero percent, but less judgmental than a hundred percent; that much is clear. I just don’t know if there’s an effect. I don’t know if any setting on your judge-o-meter prevents bad art from being made or makes art any better: Jurassic World was a complete trainwreck, and yet it made so much money that I doubt any power in the world short of a meteor strike could prevent a sequel.

I’ve tried to elaborate why I’m having a crisis, but I think the real reason is just that my belief that getting art right is worth yelling at people about has waned over the years. Anything within my own power, I continue to make as good as I can, because I wouldn’t be satisfied otherwise, but when other people and their priorities are involved things have changed. When I directed a play senior year of high school – a five-minute one-act comedy – I was a stickler for having the actors not wear any jewelry or un-play-related accessories; it struck me as important. It wouldn’t, now. Not worth escalating the level of conflict over. When I directed a play junior year of college, one of the actors said in the postmort meeting that I could have stood to be stricter with the cast, and I feel kind of guilty that my artistic project – which I did and continue to believe in – didn’t feel worth the trouble of interpersonal conflict. There are things in the world which do feel worth escalating a conflict, though. My open question is: under what circumstances is artistic quality one of them? And is it worth pursuing something I’m so ambivalent about?

Maybe this can be a stepping stone to a discussion not just about my own career choices, but about the value of aesthetics in general. If an artistic genius, indispensable to the quality of a work, is a personally repugnant human being, should that person’s career be protected and nurtured? When you phrase it that way, the value of art seems less unalloyedly noble. If we look at social life as a series of choices to either defuse conflict or escalate it, then art is not on a special pedestal beyond assessment: its value, too, has to be traded against that of other human needs. And I’d like to start thinking about that value in more frank and precise terms.

Maybe I’m just going to make all of my blogposts have deliberately provocative titles. (…it’s not like a million people have already had this idea or anything…)

It’s kind of become an article of faith among the political class (or at least the mainstream ones I read, as with this op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute) that the USA is too polarized politically: Democrats and Republicans can’t work together; they don’t respect each other; this is why no major legislation gets passed these days; political operatives are cynically scaring voters into believing that their political opponents are the scum of the earth; this is Bad For the Country.

It’s true that with a Democratic president and a GOP Congress, there is very little major legislation being passed. But this level of polarization and acrimony isn’t unprecedented – think of the Adams/Jefferson election, or hey, the Civil War. And let’s be honest with ourselves: there’s not going to be another civil war. The country will survive.

I’m not against recognizing that Republicans are people. Far from it! In the ideal world, we’d be magnanimous and open-minded towards everyone, and respect everyone’s basic humanity.

My issue is with the assumption that it’s important for everyone in the USA, specifically, to have this feeling of common purpose and unity with other citizens of the USA. Look, I think I’d get along better (and, in fact, have) with a cosmopolitan-liberal-leftist from France or South Africa or Poland than with a hard-core conservative from Texas – and I’m not ashamed of that. In fact I find the suggestion that I should be ashamed of that pretty repulsive. Why should sharing my nationality bump someone up several places in the line for my esteem and loyalty, ahead of sharing my worldview? It’s usually an accident of birth that makes two people Americans, but to a significantly larger (if not total) extent, ideology is something people choose.

I’d like to be as understanding and compassionate towards conservatives as possible. But the tragedy here is that it’s fundamentally human to operate under the principle that the friend of my enemy is my enemy. If Akshay and Benicia are friends, and Akshay has been let’s say punched in the face by Chaim, Akshay’s probably going to expect Benicia to take his side against Chaim, and if Benicia starts making excuses for Chaim and talking about how he was only doing what he thought was right, Akshay might get angry. Making peace with one’s rivals is easy when you’re the only one whose rivals they are. If you’re not, you run the risk of offending a lot of people who are even angrier at those rivals than you are.

It’s easy to dismiss such anger as irrational, or hyped up out of proportion by fearmongering, but if there’s one truth about the business of government, it’s that it involves real-life consequences. “Losing” in politics doesn’t just mean being disappointed in your country: it can mean being immiserated, jailed, killed. I was going to make a bigger deal of the issues of privilege and marginalization here – it’s relatively easy for me as a man to say that Republicans are fundamentally good people, for instance, given that they aren’t trying to take away my right to choose whether or not to give birth; and it would be even easier for a straight man to overlook Republicans’ belief that my sexual orientation is disgusting. But even if some people are more vulnerable than others, anyone can perceive themselves as being at the mercy of political change. My point is that people have very rational, or at least very human, reasons for distrust and rage towards others, and it’s forgivable that they should demand that their allies share that rage.

If this still shocks you, consider if someone decried the “polarization” between the USA and ISIS, and suggested that we should stop “vilifying” ISIS. You’d probably be pretty offended, right? I know I would: ISIS is doing objectively horrible things, and suggesting that they can be reasoned with as though they hadn’t committed atrocities attacks the conscience. I’m not trying to get into the question of how much worse is ISIS than Republicans: all I’m saying is that even you, dear moderate, centrist, open-minded reader, have enemies – people with whom the idea of reconciliation is offensive, people who, if a politician described them as “basically good people trying to get by, just like us”, you’d be outraged.

And since domestic politics have real, even fatal, consequences, is it so hard to believe that some people’s enemies might share their citizenship? The idea that it’s natural for a nation to “all get along” is the great centrist hubris of our era. I don’t see the point of working to ensure that everyone who happens to live in the same country should feel a sense of shared destiny. What is so special about nationhood? It’s just another division of the human race. If we are going to go all out for the principle that Americans should all get along, we should equally go all out for the principle that humans should all get along. And most centrists, even the most high-minded and noble, aren’t willing to go that far.

If humans really are in a tragic state of being unable to see everyone as Us – if there has to be a Them – I would argue that an ideological Them is actually the best Them to have. It beats the pants off having an ethnic, regional or national Them, because people can in principle change their minds, adopt a different ideology, or just hide their true convictions. They can’t so easily pass as a different race, lose their accent, emigrate. If it’s even true that I “hate Republicans”, that hatred is dependent on their holding Republican viewpoints; if they abandon them, so would I my alleged hatred.

(Religion is a special case – wars based on religion have been some of the bloodiest in history, and religion is at least to some extent an ideology, but the ideologies of the modern US political spectrum, unlike religions, have an empirical test in whether they work in this life: you can stay pretty aggressively loyal to the emperor if it takes you until after you die to realize he has no clothes. You can’t vote God out of office if He sends you to Hell.)

Ideology isn’t a zero-sum game: the reason I keep voting for Democrats is because I sincerely believe that everyone ends up better off on average if Democratic policies get implemented. I also believe that if Democratic policies get implemented and work and make people better off, more people will support them (the policies at least, if not necessarily the party). These are both testable claims that don’t require any group of people to surrender power forever, unlike dividing the world by nations or races.

A lot of Americans, though they wouldn’t own up to it, probably think there isn’t enough polarization in Washington. We want to vote for politicians who share our views and values, which means sharing our outrage, which means from time to time lobbing intemperate insults at powerful people who we believe are doing great harm. If all the politicians seemed to like each other, would we be happy about that? I doubt it.

This partisanship, contra Arthur Brooks, won’t break the country. He quotes Thomas Jefferson warning of “a political intolerance as despotic [as religious intolerance], as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.” In 1801, that might have panned out – politicide is a real phenomenon. But it’s almost unheard of in the USA now for Democrats or Republicans to be physically attacked or persecuted based on their party preferences. Having secret ballots helps. By contrast, our country’s most salient ‘bitter and and bloody persecutions’ – in which Jefferson himself was neck-deep! – are rooted in ethnicity, particularly white supremacy, anti-Black and anti-Native racism. I’m not as concerned about political polarization as I am about racism, maybe because the partisan divide in the USA isn’t killing anyone. So I feel pretty okay with, say, calling a conservative politician a monster for supporting policies I feel are egregiously anti-Black.

There’s a larger discussion to be had about how these days so much discussion and opinion-sharing is public: how should we accommodate our human need to be as polite as possible to whoever’s face we’re in front of right now, when more than ever everyone can access everything we say? But it’s just the truth that by ingratiating ourselves with some people we inevitably alienate some others. In a utopia, we would be understanding and benevolent towards even the most evil humans, but as long as we remain the tribal creatures we’re evolved to be, I think choosing our tribes based on shared moral values is the best option.