UniBrow

Here’s an article by Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press on the need for a “revolution” in reading that emphasizes the importance of taking it slow. (It seems interesting anyway–I kind of rushed through it. It reminds me in some ways of that big Time magazine article from a few years ago on Attention Deficit Disorder that I never finished.)

No but really. I couldn’t agree more with Waters. Here are a few extracts:

Report after report testifies to declining literacy in America. Some of the decline is due to the neglect of our least-advantaged children, but some of it is due to the willful embrace of methods for teaching reading that are inimical to reading in depth. …

Over the last 50 years, certain ideas have become dominant that make learning to read different than it once was, none more insidious, I think, than the ideas that children are neurologically “wired” to use language “competently” in certain ways. Noam Chomsky has promoted the idea that there are certain “syntactic structures” hard-wired in the human brain. That view, I believe, based on my conversations with education scholars, led to the “whole language” movement–or fad–that let children find their own “meaning” in words, rather than teaching them the skills to read. Whole language, in turn, became an article of faith among schoolteachers, held on to with fundamentalist conviction that, in turn again, became a political position enforced by a number of states, thus taking it out of the realm of study and into that of political power and rendering it no longer subject to criticism without fear of reprisal. …

There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines. If there is any truth to the analogy, it provides grounds for concern.

And here, as an example of what Waters is talking about, is an article from last Sunday’s New York Times about Pierre Bayard, an apparently respected French scholar who will help you talk about books you haven’t read so as to seem that you have. Just what we need. 

In a story today at CNN.com about Britney Spears’s recent difficulties (and peace be upon her), a friend of Kevin Federline reminds us what’s really at stake here. The story loiters through 11 or 12 paragraphs about impulsive head-shaving and tattooing and rehab-facility pop-ins before dropping this bomb:

“He [Federline] has put his career on hold right now to focus on his kids and his family–to try and get Britney better,” the pal said.

A news story is supposed to be an inverted pyramid, dudes.

Rule No. 44:

When a man does all he can though it succeeds not well blame not him that did it.

Here’s an infuriating story about Matthew LeClair, a junior in a New Jersey public high school, who tape recorded a history teacher telling his students that they’re going to hell if they don’t believe that Jesus died for their sins, that there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark, and that there’s no scientific basis for evolution or the Big Bang theory. The school board has up to this point kept mum about what, if any, disciplinary action it has taken or will take against the teacher. So far it has only removed him from LeClair’s class, and it’s the student who seems to be catching the flak:

Since Matthew turned over the tapes to school officials, his family and supporters said, he has been the target of harassment and a death threat from fellow students and “retaliation” by school officials who have treated him, not the teacher, as the problem. The retaliation, they say, includes the district’s policy banning students from recording what is said in class without a teacher’s permission and officials’ refusal to punish students who have harassed Matthew.

Steven Pinker has been flickering for years somewhere out beyond the circle of my intended reading, roughly since he published The Language Instinct in the late ’90s. (His most recent book is, I believe, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.) Here’s an article he wrote recently for Time on developments in cognitive neuroscience suggesting that consciousness is reducible to the structure and functions of the brain (as opposed, say, to conceiving it as transcending cognitive function and constituting evidence of an eternal soul). Most scientists, Pinker says, now believe

that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices–not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died,” Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, “the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase ‘the total eclipse of all values’ seem tame.” …

My own view is that this is backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It’s not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings–the core of morality.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew–or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog–a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

Perhaps someone somewhere has published a conscientious and detailed refutation of deconstruction, but I don’t know of one. What you get most of the time (and I’m just grabbing what’s within arm’s reach of me here) is little more than an airy turning up of the nose–such as this, found in Reflections on a Ravaged Century by the historian and poet Robert Conquest:

[T]o the degree that such things as the theses of deconstructionists and their heirs are not absurd, they are banal. The distinguished Anglo-Australian critic Clive James some years ago publicly described “deconstructionism” as nonsense without advancing any detailed arguments against it. When its proponents protested that he couldn’t, he replied that, yes, he could. Such as position, on the face of it, is unfair. But that is to be formal. Clearly there are theories, even complex ones, so absurd as not to merit more than an abrupt dismissal.

I admire Conquest–here is a nice appreciation by Christopher Hitchens–and Reflections on a Ravaged Century is a terrific book. But he, like most detractors of deconstruction (poststructuralism, postmodernism, etc.), nails his colors to the mast of Enlightenment rationalism–which, unless I’ve missed a very important recent memo, prizes evidence and reason-giving over pissy visceral antipathy. The grand tradition (and it is grand) of which Conquest counts himself a partisan would be better served by evidence that he has carefully read something–anything–by Derrida himself.

And then I find this, in the late Allan Bloom’s Love & Friendship:

[S]ince I was a young man and a student in Europe, I have paid serious and sustained attention to the sources of [poststructuralist] views: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Levinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, and others whose names it is now so fashionable to throw around. I am persuaded that all their theories, in the form that they have come to the United States, are nothing but a fad that will pass, one can only hope before they have done too much damage to the study of literature. … I cannot help thinking of Groucho Marx at the racetrack being gulled by Chico, who tells him that he can’t place his two-dollar bet until he has purchased a breeder’s guide, and then a whole series of other guides. By the time Groucho has looked into all of them and been utterly confused, the race is over. With the new critics, it is life that will be over.

As I’ve said before, I believe that many of the literary scholars who have applied deconstruction to works of literature have badly misappropriated it, often deploying a superficial understanding of its modes of inquiry to make works that are imperishable and inexhaustible appear retrograde or vicious under some narrow political test. I agree without qualification that this is an altogether terrible thing. Derrida himself never does this, however. He is always dealing with canonical texts, whether of philosophy or of literature, and has even confessed to confusion and distress over such uses of deconstruction. (He makes a number of remarks to this effect, for example, in a 1994 roundtable discussion at Villanova University–the transcript of which, along with a lengthy commentary by the scholar who organized the event, was published in 1997 under the hilariously un-Derridean title Deconstruction in a Nutshell.) But of course political philosopher Bloom doesn’t object to deconstruction solely on the basis of its effect on the study of literature. One could take the thought of any philosopher, even those admired by Bloom, and find a way to do silly things to literature with it. Even conceding that, in the hands of certain literature scholars, deconstruction is peculiarly vulnerable to such abuses does nothing to invalidate it as a mode of philosophical inquiry. But again, going back to the substance of these critiques, I would rather not have had to take Bloom’s word that he had plumbed the thought of the philosophers and theorists who he believed were sending higher education off the rails. If poststructuralist thought is as pernicious as he said it is, then what the world needed from him–much more acutely than it needed Love & Friendship–was a book telling us, in detail, why.

Rule No. 43:

Do not express joy before one sick or in pain, for that contrary passion will aggravate his misery.

At one point in Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Žižek quotes from one of Brecht’s ”Herr Keuner” stories, as follows:

Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behaviour would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God.

Žižek goes on to argue that the choice between theism and atheism is an illusion, since the decision itself is “located within the field of belief.” The question of belief is irrelevant for a true atheist, he says, and puts his finger on a frustration I’ve had with all the recent popular attention that atheism has been getting thanks to best-selling books by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, among others, and even with the internet dialogue on belief v. unbelief that has been under way for some weeks now between Harris and Andrew Sullivan. As a practical matter atheism is constrained to define itself against theism, and seems in consequence often to be merely pitching its tent on the vast estate of belief. Harris seems to share that frustration when he says, in Letter to a Christian Nation, that the term atheism shouldn’t even exist–that atheism is “not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world. … No one ever needs to identify himself as a ‘non-astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist.’ … Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.” One would like to have no relation to belief, not even a negative one.

Philosophy professor Robert C. Solomon, who died just last month, writes in defense of existentialism in the Jan. 26 Observer. Solomon was ”disturbed by the continued reference to existentialism as a pessimistic, negative philosophy,” a concern he also voiced in Richard Linklater’s film Waking Life.