UniBrow

In February the actor Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) will tread the boards in the altogether in a West End production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus.

If you can stand it, here’s three-and-a-half minutes of Dick Cheney with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. When the subject turns from Iraq to the pregnancy of Cheney’s gay daughter–and especially when Cheney bristles at the question–Blitzer becomes a quivering, sniveling lickspittle. For a second, so toe-curling is Blitzer’s reaction to Cheney’s blowback, you nearly forget that Cheney has just been talking about America’s “enormous successes” in Iraq.

Rule No. 40:

Strive not with your superiors in argument, but always submit your judgment to others with modesty.

A hungover Peter O’Toole in an interview with CNN:

“I quite like being old. I’ve said this before and I’ll repeat it: Yes, I’m 74 years old, but in here,” he says, pointing to his temple, “quite a lot of the time and in many instances, I’m 21. Nothing has changed, nothing has changed. And then I realize it’s not too wise to climb that tree. And I can’t play my beloved cricket anymore. I’m getting more and more used to my limitations, and enjoying them. … I quite enjoyed the hangover this morning. Do you know the feeling?”

They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

I recently found, at National Review Online (via Andrew Sullivan), an exchange of letters on the ethics of embryonic stem-cell research that I would like to pass along. Lee Silver, a Princeton molecular biologist, has it out with two opponents of embryonic stem-cell research: Patrick Lee, professor of bioethics at Franciscan University, and Robert P. George, a Princeton law professor. The exchange started with Silver’s letter to NRO in response to the review Lee and George wrote of Silver’s recent book, Challenging Nature. Lee and George are evidently among the opponents of embryonic stem-cell research called out specifically by Silver in Challenging Nature, where he writes off their arguments as ”hidden theology.” 

And that–at least on the evidence of this exchange of letters–is lame. Whatever their religious convictions (apparently they’re both Roman Catholic), Lee and George offer reasons for opposing what they call “embryo-destructive” stem-cell research, reasons that one need not be religious to accept (though I don’t). Silver, on the other hand, offers little more than sophistry, evasion, and name-calling. The low point of the exchange comes at the beginning of Silver’s last letter. He includes two micrograph scans–one of a normal embryo, the other of a cluster of embryonic stem cells–and challenges his interlocutors to tell them apart by sight alone. Brilliant. If there’s one thing science has taught us it’s that appearances are never deceiving.

Silver’s failing is his inability or unwillingness to grant the possibility that opposition to embryonic stem-cell research can have any but a religious (thus a dogmatic and unreasoning) basis. He nowhere attempts to refute his antagonists’ contention–and thereby implicitly concedes that this is the point on which the issue turns–that a blastocyst’s right to be left alone stems from its possession, even at this immature stage, of the “internal active disposition for self-directed development toward the mature stage of a human.” To continue developing, Lee and George write, the blastocyst needs only (mutatis mutandis) what you and I need to continue living–”a suitable environment, adequate nutrition, and freedom from grave disease.” Thus blastocysts ”are what the standard embryology texts say they are, namely, distinct and whole (though immature) individuals of the human species.” Lee and George certainly seem to have the biological facts on their side; otherwise I assume Silver would have offered some sort of rebuttal. Instead he plays into their hands and opts for bigotry, dogmatism, and even (as Lee and George justifiably charge at one point) a kind of religious McCarthyism. 

If self-generated momentum toward maturity is to be the sole or primary criterion for deciding whether an embryo deserves the same rights and protections enjoyed by you or me, then Lee and George win, and you would have to consider the destruction of a blastocyst for the purpose of harvesting stem cells the moral equivalent of killing a fully developed human being in pursuit of that or some other putative greater good. Instead of conceding that ground to Lee and George, Silver might have reframed the issue to focus on what a blastocyst is–a three- to five-day-old cluster of 50 to 150 entirely undifferentiated cells, an organism that has not yet taken any sort of distinctive form–rather than what it might become. Why does the possession of “internal active disposition for self-directed development” by itself endow a blastocyst with the rights and protections of a fully developed human being, when it hasn’t a single specialized cell to call its own? Who says we’ve crossed the Rubicon the moment the egg is fertilized? (And apart from questions of principle, as a practical matter most stem cells are harvested from unwanted embryos left over from in vitro fertilization therapy that would eventually be disposed of anyway.)

Of course there are many, many people opposed to embryonic stem-cell research who do not reason as Lee and George do. What you run into most of the time is a person who says his religious convictions tell him a blastocyst is a human being with a soul, and that to destroy it for any reason is murder. His “reasons” consist of nothing more than the bald assertion of this doctrine, and its dogged repetition under challenge. But clearly not all opponents of this research fall into this camp, and Silver’s attempt to lump Lee and George into it, while ignoring their substative arguments, is crude and demagogic. That a secularist might take the side of Lee and George against Silver is entirely thinkable.

So–saith UniBrow–cess and poxes upon Lee Silver. But hit the link (and all the others embedded therein) and see for yourself.

Freshman U.S. Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.), a focus of interest here at UniBrow during the fall election, gets all over Dubya’s junk after the State of the Union. (Many thanks to Nick for the hookup.)

Rule No. 39:

In writing or speaking, give every person his due title according to his degree & the custom of the place.

To take up from Saturday’s post about Heather MacDonald and deconstruction: 

MacDonald says she discovered her conservatism at more or less the same time she ”realized that I had wasted my college education on the literary theory known as deconstruction, being as I was then too stupid to grasp that nearly everything deconstruction had to say about language was lunatic and fictional.”

I don’t know which assertions or theories from deconstruction relating to language specifically–as opposed to metaphysics or ontology or epistemology–that MacDonald has in mind, but it has always seemed to me a category error to think of or to practice deconstruction as a technique of literary criticism. Deconstruction, as it was devised and voluminously deployed by Jacques Derrida, is a method of philosophical inquiry, not of literary criticism–and that’s true even when Derrida takes a literary figure or text as his point of departure. Any number of extra-literary disciplines may fruitfully be drawn upon in literary scholarship, of course–not only philosophy but also linguistics, anthropology, psychology, historiography, political theory, and even economics, to name only a handful–but the influence of deconstruction on literary studies has frequently been an unhappy one, it seems to me. I don’t know how many pieces of deconstructionist literary scholarship I’ve read that have been just embarrassingly shallow, irrelevant, and tone-deaf, reductive both of deconstruction itself and of the literary work under discussion. To that extent I’m in sympathy with MacDonald. The point is, however, that to appreciate and judge deconstruction you have to go to Derrida, and it seems to me we should know better than to hold him responsible for all of his many wayward epigones in the English departments.

MacDonald’s comment was a brief aside and only incidental to the subject under discussion, so it’s possible I’m being a little unfair to her. On the other hand, the critiques of deconstruction, or of so-called postmodern theory generally, that you hear from our self-appointed scourges of relativism and nihilism on the right (and sometimes on the left) are seldom any more cogent or detailed than this. One example of a more extended (though uninformed) broadside against postmodern theory is found in the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson’s otherwise completely fascinating Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. To Wilson, postmodern theory–which appears to mean any form of philosophical or aesthetic thought that may be categorized as poststructuralist (Wilson is more ambivalent about the structuralists)–stands for the idea that all knowledge is unstable, that even the observable regularities of the physical world upon which science is based are just so many interpretations admitting of countless other competing interpretations. That’s the rap on deconstruction. (To the extent that the general public thinks anything about it or about postmodern theory as a whole, it thinks this.) But if only Wilson’s lordly and dismissive pages on postmodern theory did not so conspicuously lack the depth and authoritative detail of his treatment of scientific matters elsewhere in the book. Imagine an extended op-ed piece on the evils of relativism by Newt Gingrich–one of the eminences consulted by Wilson, according to the Acknowledgements–and you’ve got Wilson on postmodern theory. 

What’s unappealing to most people, to the conservative-minded especially but even to many left-of-center devotees of Englightenment rationalism, about Derrida and all so-called postmodern theorists–whether structuralists, deconstructionists, new historicists, or Frankfurt School critical theorists–is simply the conviction common to all of these post-Nietzschean thinkers that affirmative knowledge of objective truth is inaccessible to the human mind–that truth can’t be known or defined, or that it can be defined only negatively or in some kind of fluid, dialectical, non-unitary way. (Surely what Derrida or any of the others say about language itself offends only to the extent that it fits into this more general denial of stable meaning, or of what Derrida calls “presence”). They all incorporate the thesis–and this far, by the way, they would find an ally in the author of Paradise Lost (no relativist he)–that knowledge is mediated by the structures of consciousness, perception, and language, and that our sense of the world is necessarily perspectival, a reductive approximation of an objective reality whose complexity and strangeness are too much for us. An early formulation of this idea is found in Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”:

The “thing in itself” (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is … something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors. To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred to an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. … [W]e believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things–metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. … Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is at least not derived from the essence of things.

When Wilson himself, in Consilience, observes that “[c]olor does not exist in nature” but is rather ”imposed” on intrinsically colorless visible wavelengths ”by the photosensitive cone cells of the retina and the connecting nerve cells of the brain,” he does not seem so very far from Nietzsche. Nor is he so far afield when he writes:

Outside our heads there is freestanding reality. Only madmen and a scattering of constructivist philosophers doubt its existence. … The alignment of outer existence with its inner representation has been distorted by the idiosyncracies of human evolution … . That is, natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive.

Wilson goes on to assert that it’s the scientist’s job “to diagnose and correct the misalignment” and that we err grossly if we allow certain philosophers to convince us that ”objective truth is impossible to attain.” But again, if “objective truth” is understood to mean knowledge of the thing-in-itself as Nietzsche defines it above rather than as the capacity of science to unlock further mysteries about the planet and the universe, then objective truth is indeed impossible. Our senses and the structures of consciousness, even as they transmit to us information about the external world, at the same time bar us from true knowledge of it as it is in and for itself. We are equipped, that is, to know it only as it is for us, which is not at all the same thing. Knowing a tree as it is in itself would require one to in some way become the tree, in which case one would no longer be oneself–an impossible and surely undesirable state of affairs, hence (as Nietzsche says) “not in the least worth striving for.” Scientific techniques or technological contrivances that extend, however far, our perception and inspection of external reality do not make that reality any the less external, do not get us over the constitutive barrier separating subject from object. Thus Nietzsche is delineating an ontological and epistemological impasse that is almost certainly permanent. (What would human existence–the human subject–be without that barrier?) 

Derrida’s angle of vision into this deadlock is oriented in language. He attempts to show that the limitations of language are not confined to verbal expression only, but that all thought and perception are organized around binary oppositions that are essentially linguistic. Thus the distinction between signifier (written or spoken language) and signified (the concepts to which language refers) is only apparent: our concepts no less than our language are conventional, provisional, and unstable. When one disposed to this way of thinking turns to a literary text, he finds that deconstruction gives him a method for describing the signifying energies of these complex verbal structures–energies which include their susceptibility to a multiplicity of interpretations, each of them, like the original text itself, enfranchised and also constrained by the time and place of its enunciation. “The guiding insight of deconstruction,” wrote Mark C. Taylor in The New York Times shortly after Derrida’s death in 2004, “is that every structure–be it literary, psychological, social, economic, political or religious–that organizes our experience is constituted and maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something, something else inevitably gets left out. These exclusive structures can become repressive–and that repression comes with consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction, no matter how secure it seems.” The Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek, a penetrating critic of deconstruction, does not for all of his problems with Derrida dispute this idea of the unstable text. Where Derrida would perhaps say the “truth” of the text can’t be defined owing to its unceasing susceptibility to new and conflicting interpretations, Zizek would say this interpretive antagonism is its truth (scarcely a more satisfying conclusion for the Heather MacDonalds out there). But for both Derrida and Zizek, this is a philosophical point, not a literary one.  

Many people see moral relativism, if not outright nihilism, as the natural and inevitable consequence of such a position. Derrida did not. Ethically–at least as I read him–Derrida is similar to Sartre in believing that human meaning and purpose are for human beings alone to define and pursue. And on this last point at least, I can’t see what an atheist like MacDonald could have to disagree with. Beyond that, it shouldn’t even need saying that expressions of distaste for what one considers the disturbing implications of a body of thought are not the same thing as a substantive critique of that body of thought. One can certainly differ with the tenets of deconstruction, but showing where it errs, let alone why it should be regarded as “lunatic and fictional,” requires something more than a roll of the eyes.

Rule No. 38:

In visiting the sick, do not presently play the physician if you be not knowing therein.

Here’s a very welcome article from The American Conservative by Heather MacDonald, a politically right-of-center atheist who’s fed up with the exclusionary religiosity of most of her fellow conservatives. A fragment:

It is often said, in defense of religion, that we all live parasitically off of its moral legacy, that we can only dismiss religion because we are protected by the work it has already done on our behalf. This claim has been debated ad nauseam since at least the middle of the 19th century. Suffice it to say that, to many of us, Western society has become more compassionate, humane, and respectful of rights as it has become more secular. Just compare the treatment of prisoners in the 14th century to today, an advance due to Enlightenment reformers. A secularist could as easily chide today’s religious conservatives for wrongly ignoring the heritage of the Enlightenment.

And here’s a weblog Q&A that MacDonald engaged in after the original article appeared. In the Q&A MacDonald makes a pejorative crack about deconstruction (“lunatic and fictional”) that I intend to address in a separate post today or tomorrow.