…the creative writing program produces… a literature aptly suited to a programmatic society.
…Postwar American literature provides endless testimony, for starters, of the agonizing importance of the institution of the family in making us who we are—and the school picks up where the family leaves off.
…Conceived…in the firmament of early twentieth century progressive educational reform, creative writing is surely one of the purest expressions of that movement’s abiding concern for student enrichment through autonomous self-creation. What could be further from the dictates of rote learning, or studying for a standardized test, than using one’s imagination to invent a story or write a poem?
…once Nabokov had his lectures written, he delivered them year after year, never changing the syllabus and making no pretense of taking any interest in his students (Thomas Pynchon famously among them) as individuals.
…the modern university is predicated on the values of the Enlightenment, on the attempt … to trade our childish enchantments for valid knowledge, including knowledge
of the ways and means of enchantment.
…Although literary studies [are] built upon a foundation of awe…
…Nabokov was not much of an intellectual, if by that term we mean someone profoundly interested in the conflict of literary and cultural ideas. If it is easy to mistake him for one, it is because he was such a theatrical holder of opinions…vamping performances of judgment…
…the fantasy [in] the democratic United States, …”every man is a king.” [That] fits… into the progressive school’s commitment to enhancing students’ self-esteem. It’s good to be king (or queen); and to recover one’s throne in the enchanted realm of one’s own writing…
…the “reflexive accumulation” of corporations which pay more and more attention to their own management practices and organizational structures, down to the self-monitoring of individuals who understand themselves to be living, not lives simply, but life stories of which they are the protagonists. It would be absurd to deny the large payoff to individuals living in the inherently pluralistic conditions of reflexive modernity, who are vested with a thrilling panoply of choices about how they will live their lives.
…modern people “are condemned to individualization.” To be subject to reflexive modernity is to feel a “compulsion for the manufacture, self-design, and self-staging” of a biography and… for the obsessive “reading” of that biography even as it is being written.
…since the nineteenth century texts have been considered “literary” to the degree that their value does not seem reducible to the information they convey…
…Dean MacCannell long ago described the world of the experience economy as one of generalized tourism, a world in which the “value of such things as programs, trips, courses,
reports, articles, shows, conferences, parades, opinions, events, sights, spectacles, scenes and situations of modernity is not determined by the amount of labor required for their production. Their value is a function of the quality and quantity of experience they promise.”
…the tourist pays simply to be in a certain place but hedges the immateriality of his experience by taking pictures and purchasing durable souvenirs.
…Taking a vacation from the usual grind, the undergraduate writer becomes a kind of internal tourist voyaging on a sea of personal memories and trenchant observations of her social environment, converting them, via the detour of craft and imagination, into stories. By contrast, to read and analyze a novel in a regular literature class is
to turn around and head back toward the workplace—back, that is, toward the submissiveness of homework.
…In creative writing more than any other subject, it can seem that the teacher is grading a person, not a paper…
…the most reliable source of negativity in the graduate workshop is no doubt other students—the competition—not the teacher. The teacher knows that for the vast majority of her charges the M.F.A. will not in fact function as a professional degree leading to a job but rather as a costly extension of their liberal education. In this sense it is
a prolongation of the “college experience,” an all-too-brief period when the student is validated as a creative person and given temporary cover, by virtue of his student status, from the classic complaint of middle-class parents that their would-be artist children are being frivolous.
…the university has… become perhaps the most important patron of artistically ambitious literary practice in the United States, the sine qua non of countless careers.
…as of 2004 there were more than 350 creative writing programs in the United States, all of them staffed by practicing writers, most of whom, by now, are themselves holders of an advanced degree in creative writing. (If one includes undergraduate degree programs, that number soars to 720.)
…the rise of the creative writing program has been entirely ignored in interpretive studies of postwar literature. Discussion of the writer’s relation to the university has instead largely been confined to the domain of literary journalism, and to the question of whether the rise of the writing program has been good or bad for American writing… Published to considerable fanfare in Harper’s Magazine in 1989, Tom Wolfe’s “manifesto” for a new social realism, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” is perhaps the most notorious of these critiques, complaining of “writers in the university writing programs” who in “long, phenomenological discussions” have “decided that the act of writing
words on a page [is the] real thing and the so-called real world of America” is the fiction.42 In place of this effete and tedious navel-gazing, Wolfe would have writers return to the robust example of nineteenth-century literary naturalism, where the practices of novel writing partially converged with those of investigative journalism.
…Demonstrating the continuing appeal of the romantic conception of the artist as an original genius, “assembly-line” writing programs are blamed by [John W.] Aldridge for producing a standardized aesthetic, a corporate literary style that makes a writer identifiable as, say, an Iowa writer.
…how, why, and to what end has the writing program reorganized U.S. literary production in the postwar period? And… how might this fact be brought to bear on a reading of postwar literature itself?
…It’s hard to say when exactly the presence of writers on campus came to seem natural—assuming that it ever has. Certainly as late as the mid-1960s, by which time creative writing programs were beginning to multiply exponentially, the sense of strangeness hovering about this juxtaposition of scholars and writers had not yet diminished.
…At its best, the genre of the campus novel capitalizes on the resemblances between a college campus and a small village, deploying its relative social coherence and richly articulated social-professional hierarchies in a revivification of the gossipy comedy of manners.
,,,the implicit subject (or project) of every campus novel is the existential triumph, by satirical objectification…of the writer over the institution that would institutionalize him.
…Paul Engle, who did not found the Iowa Writers’ Workshop but who did more than anyone else to make it what it became and no doubt remains to this day: the most
influential linking of an educational institution with literary production ever… Stranded in the fields like a rusty farm implement, his own poetic project was increasingly ignored, and the modern institution became his true medium. Artist turned administrator, he was also the administrator as artist, and in this role Engle became lastingly famous, a legend, much written about though all but entirely unread.
…what is for students a transcendental ceremony of departure toward a “limitless” future—graduation—is for the more permanent inmates just another appointment on the calendar.
Posted inAmerica, Literature|Comments Off on The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
According to Larry McEnerney, the former Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program, “There are conversations moving through time and there’s a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is.” I assume that the same type of people who decide knowledge also decide narrative.
But that’s the supply side view. There’s also a human demand for narrative. How well a narrative meets the demand will affect its success. For example, most people under duress respond well to narratives that blame out-groups for their problems.
Another thought – perhaps narratives are primarily determined by those groups with the most incentive and power to shape the narrative. For example, many Jewish leaders since WWII have determined that the survival of the Jewish state depends upon American patronage, and hence the Israel Lobby has been strongly incentivized to make its case because its leaders feel that the survival of Jews depends upon its efforts.
When I think about major news stories, I’m often struck by the uniform narratives we receive from the elite: the rise of Barack Obama (messianic black guy whose election redeems America from racism), Donald Trump (unruly outsider who threatens our democracy), Supreme Court (taking away our rights), Ukraine war (caused by Putin’s megalomania in the Western view, caused by NATO expansion in the Russian, China and realist view), Russiagate (Russia is messing with our domestic affairs), threats to our democracy (threats to the institutions that the ruling elite dominate), Putin (threat to democracy), China (for years its rise threatened democracy and now its decline threatens democracy), and the rise of Christian nationalism (scary).
International humanitarian law and human rights law have become increasingly popular over the past 25 years and one result of this increased supply of experts is intense jockeying for status and this creates attention-grabbing pronouncements on Israel v Gaza as experts strive to stand out. One reason that Israel’s fight in Gaza is called genocide is that as the number of genocide scholars increase, the number of “genocides” must increase to meet the demand, and the newer the genocide, the better as immediacy is more compelling. Genocide scholars need jobs too, and to increase demand for their services, they need hot new “genocides.” Much of the talk about a new cold war with China comes from International Relations scholars who need jobs. They must manufacture demand for their services, just like psychiatrists who are incentivized to widen definitions of mental illness so that their group has more income, power and prestige. The more mental health professionals you have, the more effective they will be promoting awareness of the need for their skills — the diagnosing and treatment mental illness. This leads to more people getting diagnosed as mentally ill even when they only suffer from normal adaptive amounts of sadness. Professions just like individuals are primarily out for their own good, not the public good.
The more professional moralists your society produces, the keener they will be to promote a sense of sin among the people so that their services receive more demand, income, power and prestige.
After survival, the number one human drive is for status.
A Ph.D. friend says: “Seems simple but it really cracks the code on…maybe everything. I became a …. expert and then suddenly I see it everywhere. Sometimes it’s about being able to spot things more easily. But perhaps more often it’s about manufacturing what I need to imagine myself relevant. Good thing I left academia!”
When I look at a garden, the first thing I look at is its drainage due to my three years working in landscaping from 1985-1988.
…a big part of the appeal of the Nudge phenomenon is not just the lab studies of cognitive biases, not just the real-world studies of big effects (ok, some of these were p-hacked and others were flat-out faked, but people didn’t know that at the time), not just “nudge” as a cool unifying slogan that connected academic research to policy, not just potential dollars that flow toward a business- and government-friendly idea, but also the idea of Nudge as an academic success. The idea is that we should be rooting for Thaler and Sunstein because they’re local boys made good. The success is part of the story, in the same way that in the 1990s, Michael Jordan’s success was part of his story: people were rooting for Michael to break more records because it was all so exciting, the same way people liked to talk about how world-historically rich Bill Gates was, or about the incredible Tiger Woods phenomenon.
Sometimes when something gets big enough, its success becomes part of the story, and I think that’s what happened with Nudge and related intellectual products among much of social-science academia. One of their own had made it big.
Another example comes up in political campaigns and social movements. Brexit, Black Lives Matter, Barack Obama, Donald Trump: sometimes the story becomes the story. Part of the appeal of these movements is the story, that something big is happening.
Another friend says: “Hayden White was a “historiographer” of the 1980s. He was influential, wrote a dozen books or so. He popularized the idea/term “metahistory,” and in general he leads his readers to a skeptical position.”
Although White may, at first, appear to give the historian choices in how to employ and, therefore, give meaning to, the events of history, White attributes these choices of plot to precognitive ways of seeing the world — ways which are often shaped by the historian’s own historical milieu. This precognitive commitment will affect all the other narrative choices the historian makes. Moreover, the whole process of creating narrative history is described by White as a subconscious desire to turn a meaningless reality into an imaginary order of coherence and integrity.
In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe uses the concept of a discreet, hypocritical Victorian gentleman to symbolize the press in the late 1950s and ’60s. Instead of giving its readers the whole story, the press, acting as one giant entity, decides what the public must know then delivers it, edited and retouched to perfection.
It was as if the press in America, for all its vaunted independence, were a great colonial animal, an animal made up of countless clustered organisms responding to a central nervous system. In the late 1950’s (as in the late 1970’s) the animal seemed determined that in all matters of national importance the proper emotion, the seemly sentiment, the fitting moral tone, should be established and should prevail; and all information that muddied the tone and weakened the feeling should simply be thrown down the memory hole. In a later period this impulse of the animal would take the form of blazing indignation about corruption, abuses of power, and even minor ethical lapses, among public officials; here, in April of 1959, it took the form of a blazing patriotic passion for the seven test pilots who had volunteered to go into space. In either case, the animal’s fundamental concern remained the same: the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings! One might regard this animal as the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent. Sentiments that one scarcely gives a second thought to in one’s private life are nevertheless insisted upon in all public utterances.
[Tom Wolfe:] “I went to Little Italy and everybody thought that their natural enemies had done it. You know, the Italians didn’t like the Jews so they blamed it on the Jews. The Jews blamed it on the Chinese. The Chinese blamed it on the Italians. And I thought these stories were hilarious. But when I got back to the newspaper… I’m sitting there looking for my piece and it’s not there. All they wanted was little old ladies collapsing in front of St Patrick’s Cathedral. That was it. They didn’t want any turmoil in the population over who did it, and that kind of thing. Newspapers are the last redoubt of people who want to observe the niceties. It’s strange. Something big happens, and whatever the proper reaction should be, that’s what you get.”
…Wolfe sees – has always seen – individuals as representatives of their group. The Italians blamed the Jews who blamed the Chinese. People are first and foremost a member of a race, or a class, or a certain stratum of society. In this regard, he’s a sociologist.
Wolfe explained as much to me when we talked about his novels. “You need psychology. But you don’t have a choice: that vertical line [of psychology] is going to intersect with this broad plane which is the society. And nobody can be a true individual because whatever you want to be is going to be pushed around and changed. We are all tremendously affected by the society that we’re in.”
[Gay Talese recalled:] “We spent a few hours together – going from downtown Manhattan (Wall Street, Chinatown, Little Italy); then came uptown, walking around the theatre district in the West Forties, uptown toward Columbus Circle… And I personally did not see much reaction at all from New Yorkers. I didn’t see anybody crying in the streets, didn’t overhear anybody lamenting aloud about the fatal shooting in Dallas etc. Yes, people had heard the news over the radio, or people were talking about the event among themselves as they stood waiting for a traffic light on a street corner; but there was no sign of the mournful masses that would later be the signature image on television.
“After I reported what I’d seen in New York, the editor didn’t want me to write anything. What I’d seen, or had not seen, did not conform to the ‘expected’ or ‘ideal’ response the situation seemed to call for, at least in the editor’s eyes. So there was no story in the Times by me that day. Nor, as I recall, was there anything by Tom Wolfe in the Trib that day. Here, on the same assignment, were two young men who would be identified as ‘New Journalists’ covering the same story and [on this great, headline-making day] getting nothing about it in print. We could not write what we saw, because we didn’t see what the editors and TV directors ‘saw’.”
Who determined that Dallas was the city of right-wing hate and that was the prism through which to understand the Kennedy assassination carried out by a communist?
Video description: “Larry McEnerney…led this session in an effort to communicate helpful rules, skills, and resources that are available to graduate students interested in further developing their writing style.”
Here are some excerpts from this talk:
In a positivistic world, knowledge is just built up over time, and anytime you find out something that people didn’t know, you get to just add up to this model, and knowledge just keeps on growing and everybody’s happy. And that is dead.
There are conversations moving through time and there’s a bunch of people and they get to say what knowledge is.
Why on earth would these people get to say what knowledge is?
But the point is that’s the way it works. You may not like it, but that’s the way it works.
The good news is this thing does move through time. The other good news is this boundary is permeable. Stuff comes in and stuff goes out. Academic conversations excrete as they go.
They go along for a while and they say, whoa, we were doing that! Don’t do that anymore.
It’s not this buildup model. This buildup model assumed that everything was right. We don’t think that. We think a lot of what we think right now is wrong.
We just dunno what the wrong is and we don’t know what better is. We wanna know, we do, we wanna get better at it, but in order for us to do that, you have to be dealing with the stuff we say is knowledge.
The communities you’re entering have their own codes, a set of words that communicates value.
You must know the codes of the communities you’re working in and they are particular to communities.
Some codes are shared among a bunch of communities, some aren’t. You’ve got to know.
The code is, wow, are you smart!
You are so smart and you’ve contributed and you’ve advanced this, you’ve advanced this community through in fabulous ways, but there’s this little thing you got here that’s wrong. And now they say, oh yeah, well thank you for appreciating that. What do you think we have wrong? And then you better have an argument, not an explanation.
The University of Chicago writing program is not real popular in the world of writing programs and you can see why. A lot of people think we’re fascists.
Here’s what we teach people to do. We say, identify the people with power in your community and give them what they want. Lots of people have said to us in some version or another, you’re supposed to teach people to challenge the existing community. Well, actually, I just did, right? But notice that I did it inside the terms of the community.
You want me to go to this really important person, the editors of this journal and tell ’em they’re wrong? Yeah, I do. I need you to do it under the code. You wanna do it under the code. There’s polite ways to do it. There’s insulting ways to do it.
We inhabit a nomos – a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void.2 The student of law may come to identify the normative world with the professional paraphernalia of social control. The rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention. No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.3 For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. 4 Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. In this normative world, law and narrative are inseparably related. Every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse to be supplied with history and destiny, beginning and end, explanation and purpose.5 And every narrative is insistent in its demand for its prescriptive point, its moral. History and literature cannot escape their location in a normative universe, 6 nor can prescription, even when embodied in a legal text, escape its origin and its end in experience, in the narratives that are the trajectories plotted upon material reality by our imaginations.
…The normative universe is held together by the force of interpretive commitments – some small and private, others immense and public. These commitments – of officials and of others – do determine what law means and what law shall be.13 If there existed two legal orders with identical legal precepts and identical, predictable patterns of public force, they would nonetheless differ essentially in meaning if, in one of the orders, the precepts were universally venerated while in the other they were regarded by many as fundamentally unjust.
…A legal tradition is hence part and parcel of a complex normative world. The tradition includes not only a corpus juris, but also a language and a mythos – narratives in which the corpus juris is located by those whose wills act upon it. These myths establish the paradigms for behavior. They build relations between the normative and the material universe, between the constraints of reality and the demands of an ethic. These myths establish a repertoire of moves a lexicon of normative action – that may be combined into meaningful patterns culled from the meaningful patterns of the past.
…The very imposition of a normative force upon a state of affairs, real or imagined, is the act of creating narrative. The various genres of narrative – history, fiction, tragedy, comedy – are alike in their being the account of states of affairs affected by a normative force field.
…Narratives are models through which we study and experience transformations that result when a given simplified state of affairs is made to pass through the force field of a similarly simplified set of norms. The intelligibility of normative behavior inheres in the communal character of the narratives that provide the context of that behavior. Any person who lived an entirely idiosyncratic normative life would be quite mad.
* …liberalism as now viewed by conservatives is an overarching cultural narrative of which the policy prescriptions are only symptoms. Liberalism is not just a political orientation, but a totalistic worldview and way of being that has crept into the American psyche itself and can always be discovered at work in the seeming trifles of social life and pop culture—suffocating conservatives from all sides. Liberalism is not sustained by reason and argument, but by the mores and pieties that liberals have quietly entrenched as the unquestioned, taken-for-granted background of things—a parochial ethos into which the populace has become progressively indoctrinated by small, often imperceptible increments. In issuing their claims of cultural oppression, conservatives seek to awaken their fellow Americans to this hidden reality.
* These disciplines and repressions have been culturally exalted as the achievement of a historically unprecedented self-possession, self-control, and self-transparency, the liberation of essential human faculties from the teleological illusions in which a benighted past once shackled them. But this self-congratulatory Enlightenment narrative conceals a darker and more complicated story that reveals molding and coercion where liberalism sees only liberation and “awareness.” What liberalism upholds as autonomous self-possession is in fact the internalization of the new restraints and inhibitions of the disciplinary society. The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount. These narratives trace our modern “innerness” to a certain psychic liberation from blind convention. But they overlook that this innerness is a kind of blind convention in its own right, the outcome of the disciplinary molding that quietly undergirds liberal ideals.
* …liberals believe in their heart of hearts that they enjoy a more self-regulating and self-transparent form of human agency than has been attained by conservatives, the “bitter clingers” lost in a hallucinatory world of imaginary cultural villains. But the Counter-Enlightenment narrative I defend reveals that what liberals celebrate as their higher-order rationality is in its subterranean structure a system of collective meaning-production, a hero-system that as such is on a par with the hero-systems of conservatism.
* Conservative claims of cultural oppression are right-wing populism turned post-modern. They protest liberalism, not as a public philosophy but as a meta-narrative—a way of thinking that, being no longer recognizable as such, has as Kimball says seeped into “the realm of habit, taste, and feeling.” Conservatives will frame the precise nature of liberals’ duplicity in a variety of ways. But they are united by the conviction that liberalism is sustained in existence by some all-pervasive social distortion, and that this distortion must be exposed if rhetorical parity between Left and Right is to be restored. Goldberg condemns the liberal denial of ideology as “offensive to logic, culturally pernicious, and, yes, infuriating.” And his exasperation is that of all conservatives, who find themselves perennially accused of moral and intellectual failure by those who lack any standing to condemn them. With acrobatic dexterity, liberals have eluded every attempt to hold them accountable, and have now been taken in by their own performances as dispassionate rationalists and pragmatists. With conservatives being the only remaining threat to those performances, to the liberal identity, they cannot but become another. The conservaphobia that oppresses them is neither a gratuitous free-floating vice nor a calculated political strategy, but thelogical corollary of liberalism’s basic self-understanding as somehow above the fray of sect and ideology.
* Conservative claimants of cultural oppression understand liberalism in much the same way that feminists understand patriarchy or post-colonial multiculturalists understand Eurocentrism: It is not just a just a set of political aims but an overarching ethos and narrative of which the explicitly political aims are only one expression, and not always the most important one. Liberalism inheres, not only in its principles and policies, but in the pre-reflective mores of the ambient culture, which are what prepare the population for those principles and policies.
* Goldberg urges conservatives to guard against being seduced by “the narrative of victimization.” That narrative is correct on the merits—conservatives “are called racists, bigots, fools, fascist, etc. every day by those who control the commanding heights of the culture.” But Goldberg believes that complaining about this can be counterproductive when it “concedes the authority of the liberal establishment to make such claims” and “encourages conservatives to internalize two unhealthy responses.” The first is “the burning desire to offend liberals just for kicks.” Though acceptable in moderation, this impulse can make conservatives come off as obnoxious, thus discrediting them. The other, antipodal but equally unhelpful, response is “self-hating conservatism,” which causes conservatives “to apologize for being ‘old-fashioned’” or to seek “to prove they ‘care’ too.” Hence the “abomination” of “compassionate conservatism.”
* The liberal narrative refuses to recognize this [1960s] chaos and its consequences. In occluding this, that narrative serves the twin ideological functions of 1) absolving liberalism of responsibility for the decay of traditional values and 2) portraying the ordinary American as still mired in unatoned racism, and so as requiring liberal interventions.
* The liberal narrative celebrates birth control as a crucial step in women’s liberation. But in like fashion, Goldberg observes that Margaret Sanger first promoted birth control by hitching a “racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation.” In persuading women that birth control was a “necessary tool for their own personal gratification,” Sanger “brilliantly used the language of liberation to convince women they weren’t going along with a collectivist scheme but were in fact ‘speaking truth to power.’”53Here as elsewhere, the problem with liberal individualism is not its excesses but its fraudulence, the hidden tribalistic impulses operating underneath the façade of that individualism, in which liberals do not truly believe.
* Moral relativism and subjectivism are not the transcendence of ideology—as the liberal narrative would have it—but, on the contrary, ideological weapons through which to disguise the injuries which the people of fashion would inflict on the common people. The latter’s moral degradation augments the political and cultural capital of the Left no less than vast armies of low-wage workers augment the profits of industrialists. This degradation is simply the currency of liberal ambition, merely another way for the anointed to set themselves against the benighted and their moral traditionalism.
* Our political attitudes emerge out of synaptically encoded moral narratives, which possess a dramatic structure comprised of heroes, villains, victims, helpers, and so forth. And this is in turn undergirded by an emotional structure which binds the dramatic structure to positive and negative emotional circuitry. Feelings like anger, fear, and relief are responses to developments within the dramatic structure—such as villainy, battle, and victory. This is why we feel elated when our political candidate wins and depressed when he loses. The candidate’s fate has been neurally integrated with our dopamine circuitry, which is activated by his victory and suppressed by his defeat. We aren’t born with these narratives, but their foundations become physically encoded in our brains quickly enough and constitute the lenses through which we see others and ourselves. Our choice of political candidate can sometimes change. But the “deep narratives” that ultimately drive our choices are strongly resistant to change. These have been synaptically encrypted into our physiology and cannot be altered absent a transformation in our broader brain structure.78To the extent change is possible, this will be, not because arguments have changed our minds, but because language has changed our brains, because the right words and images have strengthened some synaptic connections while weakening others to the point that political reorientation becomes possible.
* What liberals would dismiss as conservatives’ “vague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of some ethereal social fiber is, translated into non-anthropocentric terms, the gradual unraveling of a neurologically encoded heroic narrative, the erosion of its synaptic strength at the hands of a hostile cultural environment that fails to activate, and indeed works to de-activate, the synaptic connections that underpin conservatives’ identities and hero-system. These connections are as much a part of us as are our limbs, organs, and bank accounts.
* The feminist narrative tells us that women’s liberation is a struggle against the forces of patriarchy, against the various legal norms, social practices, and cultural prejudices that continue to confine women to a subordinate social station. But for conservatives, this is history as written by the victors, and so a history that silences the voices of the losers, non-feminist women, whose trials and tribulations never enter the liberal moral equation. Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.
* Liberals adopt their moral stances in furtherance of a heroic narrative that places them at center stage and conscripts other groups as props…
* Though liberals seek to uplift the downtrodden, they do so as part and parcel of a heroic narrative that assigns them a privileged role for which others bear the cost. This cost was paid by Justice Thomas, who like all designated victims can enjoy the beneficence of the anointed and their victim/villain/rescuer narrative only inasmuch as he acknowledges that narrative and the anointed’s status within it as rescuers. In opposing affirmative action, Thomas denied that narrative and status, and so he became exposed to the racial prejudice from which liberal blacks are shielded.
* [Robert] Bork writes that the Supreme Court’s “pronouncements are significantly guided not by the historical meaning of the Constitution but by the values of the class that is dominant in the culture.” Having become colonized by the “parochial morality of an arrogant intellectual class,” the courts surreptitiously elevate a particularistic cultural ethos into a hegemonic narrative about the meaning of American ideals, all under the guise of thoughtfulness, enlightenment, progress, and so forth.
Posted inNarrative|Comments Off on Who Determines The Winning Narrative?
Every organism acts on its environment, often for its own benefit and often against the benefit of other organisms.
Why would Christians not act like other organisms? Why would they be more passive than earthworms, lemon ants, beavers and the cuckoo?
I suspect most Christians want to reproduce with other Christians. In a more Christian America, they would have more chances to reproduce with another Christian. When elite Christians look out at the large swathes of America that are hostile to Christianity, why would they not want to subjugate these pagans and convert their women? Men know that women side with winners and loathe losers. If you beat the enemy’s men, the loser’s women will follow you. Christian men are incentivized to win in this world, conquer their enemies, and increase their odds of finding an attractive and compatible long-term partner.
Mate success is simply defined here as the probability that one can find a romantic long-term partner. The main claim is that if a niche is composed of individuals mostly of the out-party, and one holds negative affect toward the out-party, an individual’s perception of their probability of mate success will be hindered in that niche. As a result, highly partisan clustered areas repel out-partisan individuals the most, and negative affect magnifies this effect. Individuals are then incentivized to seek out niches with improved prospects or choose such niches when an opportunity arises. Additionally, such a mechanism could create a positive feedback loop between geographic and affective polarization.
When Christians move through a polarized America, why would they not want to end the polarization to create a state of affairs more to their liking?
* Tolerance “is touted as the highest virtue in our popular culture.” But that tolerance is not extended to Christians, who are denied “equal dignity, respect, and treatment.” If blacks were once maligned as the natural inferiors of whites, it is now, says [Angelo] Codevilla, the “Ruling Class” of liberal elites who “can no more believe that a Christian might be their intellectual and moral equal than white Southerners of the Jim Crow era could think the same of Negroes.” In the same vein, Cal Thomas charges that in their refusal to recognize Christian writing as “serious literature or scholarship,” many publishers are “treating the Christian market as a kind of ‘Negro league’ of publishing.” Liberalism “hides its bigotry behind the mask of reason” because it merely redirects without actually reducing the sum total of bigotry in the world, concealing its bigotry in what purports to be a fair-minded assessment of Christian intellectual limitations.
* Disney World decided to discontinue its “twenty-eight-year tradition of making on-site religious services available to Christian guests” at the same time as it “went out of its way to solicit the homosexual community, even having an annual ‘Gay Day’ event every year.” Where liberals see the arbitrary juxtaposition of two unrelated developments each of which can be assessed independently of the other, conservatives see varied manifestations of the same basic phenomenon, the supplanting of their moral traditionalism by ultra-liberalism, whose support for gays is inextricably bound up with its antipathy toward traditional Christians.
* Opposition to Christianity is just as intrinsic to homosexuality as opposition to homosexuality is intrinsic to Christianity.
* If the number of black scientists and inventors acknowledged in high school history textbooks is of sufficient importance to the self-esteem, and therefore the long-term life-prospects, of black students as to qualify as substantive rather than symbolic, then why should the question of whether America was at its inception a “Christian nation” be dismissed as a “distraction” from the bona fide “substantive” interests of religious conservatives? Is there not a double-standard here?
Niche construction is the process by which an organism alters its own (or another species’) local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism’s environment or encompass when an organism actively moves from one habitat to another to experience a different environment. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests and burrows by animals, and the creation of shade, influencing of wind speed, and alternation of nutrient cycling by plants. Although these alterations are often beneficial to the constructor, they are not always (for example, when organisms dump detritus, they can degrade their own environments).
For niche construction to affect evolution it must satisfy three criteria: 1) the organism must significantly modify environmental conditions, 2) these modifications must influence one or more selection pressures on a recipient organism, and 3) there must be an evolutionary response in at least one recipient population caused by the environmental modification. The first two criteria alone provide evidence of niche construction.
Recently, some biologists have argued that niche construction is an evolutionary process that works in conjunction with natural selection. Evolution entails networks of feedbacks in which previously selected organisms drive environmental changes, and organism-modified environments subsequently select for changes in organisms. The complementary match between an organism and its environment results from the two processes of natural selection and niche construction. The effect of niche construction is especially pronounced in situations where environmental alterations persist for several generations, introducing the evolutionary role of ecological inheritance. This theory emphasizes that organisms inherit two legacies from their ancestors: genes and a modified environment.
The following are some examples of niche construction:
Earthworms physically and chemically modify the soil in which they live. Only by changing the soil can these primarily aquatic organisms live on land. Earthworm soil processing benefits plant species and other biota present in the soil, as originally pointed out by Darwin in his book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms.
Lemon ants (Myrmelachista schumanni) employ a specialized method of suppression that regulates the growth of certain trees. They live in the trunks of Duroia hirsuta trees found in the Amazonian rain forest of Peru. Lemon ants use formic acid (a chemical fairly common among species of ants) as a herbicide. By eliminating trees unsuitable for lemon ant colonies, these ants produce distinctive habitats known as Devil’s gardens.
Beavers build dams and thereby create lakes that drastically shape and alter riparian ecosystems. These activities modify nutrient cycling and decomposition dynamics, influence the water and materials transported downstream, and ultimately influence plant and community composition and diversity.
As creatures construct new niches, they can have a significant effect on the world around them.
An important consequence of niche construction is that it can affect the natural selection experienced by the species doing the constructing. The common cuckoo illustrates such a consequence. It parasitizes other birds by laying its eggs in their nests. This had led to several adaptations among the cuckoos, including a short incubation time for their eggs. The eggs need to hatch first so that the chick can push the host’s eggs out of the nest, ensuring it has no competition for the parents’ attention. Another adaptation it has acquired is that the chick mimics the calls of multiple young chicks, so that the parents are bringing in food not just for one offspring, but a whole brood.
Niche construction can also generate co-evolutionary interactions, as illustrated by the above earthworm, beaver and yeast examples.
The development of many organisms, and the recurrence of traits across generations, has been found to depend critically on the construction of developmental environments such as nests by ancestral organisms.
Niche construction is now recognized to have played important roles in human evolution, including the evolution of cognitive capabilities. Its impact is probably because it is immediately apparent that humans possess an unusually potent capability to regulate, construct and destroy their environments, and that this is generating some pressing current problems (e.g. climate change, deforestation, urbanization). However, human scientists have been attracted to the niche construction perspective because it recognizes human activities as a directing process, rather than merely the consequence of natural selection. Cultural niche construction can also feed back to affect other cultural processes, even affecting genetics.
Niche construction theory emphasizes how acquired characters play an evolutionary role, through transforming selective environments. This is particularly relevant to human evolution, where our species appears to have engaged in extensive environmental modification through cultural practices.[29] Such cultural practices are typically not themselves biological adaptations (rather, they are the adaptive product of those much more general adaptations, such as the ability to learn, particularly from others, to teach, to use language, and so forth, that underlie human culture).
Mathematical models have established that cultural niche construction can modify natural selection on human genes and drive evolutionary events. This interaction is known as gene-culture coevolution. There is now little doubt that human cultural niche construction has co-directed human evolution.[29] Humans have modified selection, for instance, by dispersing into new environments with different climatic regimes, devising agricultural practices or domesticating livestock. A well-researched example is the finding that dairy farming created the selection pressure that led to the spread of alleles for adult lactase persistence.[30] Analyses of the human genome have identified many hundreds of genes subject to recent selection, and human cultural activities are thought to be a major source of selection in many cases. The lactose persistence example may be representative of a very general pattern of gene-culture coevolution.
Niche construction is also now central to several accounts of how language evolved. For instance, Derek Bickerton describes how our ancestors constructed scavenging niches that required them to communicate in order to recruit sufficient individuals to drive off predators away from megafauna corpses. He maintains that our use of language, in turn, created a new niche in which sophisticated cognition was beneficial.
Ecological consequences of human niche construction: Examining long-term anthropogenic shaping of global species distributions
The reshaping of global biodiversity is one of the most significant impacts humans have had on Earth’s ecosystems. As our planet experiences its sixth “mass extinction event” (1), the effect of anthropogenic landscape modification, habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, and species invasions could not be more apparent (2, 3). These transformations are linked largely to the industrial economies, burgeoning populations, and dense transport networks of contemporary human societies.
Given that most forms of life go extinct, why would Christians not fight for their survival and thriving?
Lenin at Nuremberg: Anti-Imperialism and the Juridification of Crimes against Humanity
The Nuremberg trials stand as a pivotal moment in any history of international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and international human rights.1 As Teitel writes, ‘the trials at Nuremberg represented a unique historical crossroads for the three legal orders that form the humanity law framework’.2 By introducing crimes
against humanity into international law, the trials are said to have contributed to the creation of a new normative order, aimed at protecting vulnerable humanity.3 For prosecuting individuals for these and other war crimes, they are presented as an example of the rationality and calm procedure of international law overcoming violence, power and the baser instincts of revenge.
These accounts of international criminal or international humanitarian law relate what could be described as a liberal or Enlightenment narrative of international law. International law, in these narratives, embodies the enlightened values of rationality, legality and humanity – and the Nuremberg trials represent an important moment in the (slow) movement towards the advancement and realisation of these values….
This approach to the Nuremberg trials not only places the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in an Enlightenment narrative about international law, it also looks to the trials to tell this narrative. The pedagogical role of the Nuremberg trials, and other war crimes trials, has been noted by a number of observers.6 Such trials are expected to relate an accurate, impartial history while demonstrating enlightened values through the ‘civilised institutional drama of a trial at law’.7 Mark Osiel termed such trials ‘liberal show trials’.8
…The Nuremberg trials therefore have an important place in any account of the advancement of humanitarian, liberal values in international law. Yet, when held up against these expectations, the Nuremberg trials often seem to fall short – both as a legal institution and as an historical account. The Nuremberg trials bear the stain of victors’ justice and they stir doubts about retrospective law.9 The trials were uninspiring;10 they relied too much on documentary evidence and listened too little to the voices of victims.11 Most importantly, crimes against humanity, observers note, were oddly limited.12 Under the Charter, they had to be linked to crimes against peace or war crimes.13 As a result, the IMT told a distorted history.14
In this chapter, I suggest that the IMT falls short when assessed according to these measures because it did not just tell the expected Enlightenment narrative and it did not intend to prosecute crimes against humanity in the way we understand them now. Rather, I will argue that the way the crimes were codified and then described at the
trials shows that another narrative was also at work. This was an antiimperial narrative that drew on Marxist theory and was given a practical impetus by the Bolshevik Revolution. It spread, in a diluted form, to ‘advanced opinion’ throughout the West.15 The Marxist approach described war, even European wars, as the result and expression of
imperialism. Imperialism was an economic institution, and its depredations were depicted primarily in economic terms. Aggressive, imperialist war was, in this narrative, the worst crime – the crime that led to all the other horrors of war. An international legal regime that condoned imperialist war was, therefore, so ethically misguided that it should be changed.
…There are lingering doubts about the legality of the new crimes that the IMT introduced – crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.25 Both lacked a clear pedigree in
international law…
…The exclusion of Allied crimes meant a partial historical account.31 The ‘peculiarity’32 of the decision to link crimes against humanity to crimes against peace, and the odd focus on aggressive war,33 meant that the prosecution had to distort the history of the persecution of the German Jews before the war, making it appear as part of the preparations for aggressive war.34 Indeed, as scholars have pointed out, the IMT did not relate the history of crimes that we now associate with the Second World War.35 It was not, in the main, a history of the Jewish Holocaust nor a record of the victims of the war. Victims’ voices were seldom heard in a trial that prioritised the probative value of
documentary evidence.36 These choices undermined the ability of the IMT to write a history that emphasised the value of humanity. They also made for a ‘boring’ trial37 that failed to produce the ‘compelling’ liberal narrative that Osiel expects war crimes trials to strive for.
…”crimes against humanity, has, from the very beginning, caught the imagination of international lawyers as laying down, prima facie, a set of novel principles of law. The
provisions relating to crimes against humanity have been acclaimed as ‘a revolution in international criminal law’. Others have described it as an innovation inconsistent with international law…”
…Crimes against peace were equally problematic. The UK90 and French91 delegations at the London Conference stated clearly that they did not consider aggression or crimes against peace to be part of international law.
…the initiation of a war was not deemed an international crime at the time…
…Sir David Maxwell Fyfe: “I have been approached by various Jewish organizations and should like to satisfy them if possible. I have in mind only such general treatment of the Jews as showed itself as a part of the general plan of aggression…”
…Robert Jackson: “The reason that this program of extermination of Jews and destruction of the rights of minorities becomes an international concern is this: it was a part of a plan for making an illegal war. Unless we have a war connection as a basis for reaching them, I would think we have no basis for dealing with atrocities.”
…that aggressive war was criminal, that there could be unjust, unlawful wars, did entail a significant change to international law. It was, however, a justified change; it meant leaving behind an imperial era where colonisation was acceptable and acknowledging the injustice of colonial wars. This would change the international order from an unethical order to a better one. The similarity of these sentiments in US thought and Soviet literature shows that the idea of a crime against peace was not just a bizarre obsession urged by Robert Jackson. Rather it was a widespread sensibility, found in Marxist and Western anti-imperial literature, that informed the way war could be described, understood and condemned.
…This was the story, the story of aggressive, imperialist war, that was presented at the Nuremberg trials. Once the trial began, the Soviet, English and US prosecution stifled any of their doubts about crimes against peace. Together, they agreed on the legal provenance of aggression.
…Aggressive war was, the Soviets, British and Americans insisted, the central and principal crime from which the other crimes stemmed.
…it was unwavering in its efforts to fit the events of the Nazi period into an overarching story of aggressive war. Nor was this just any aggressive war that the court described – it was an aggressive colonial war, and the crimes it produced were shown to be the consequences of imperialism…
Clausewitz begins with violence, hatred, and enmity, which he believes “mainly concerns the people,” for here he labels what is clearly the most novel and pressing matter of the day. 89 The French Revolution changed war from an affair of kings to an affair of peoples and transformed men in the ranks from hirelings to citizen soldiers. Clausewitz recognized this as the most critical watershed in the warfare of his day. The German reformers, Clausewitz among them, pressed the Prussian monarchy to enlist its people in the struggle against Napoleon. They identified popular commitment as the missing, and consequently the most urgently sought, element in the Prussian capacity for war. Therefore, Fichte’s attempt to rally patriotic feelings worked hand in hand with Scharnhorst’s concrete reforms. Art and politics mutually reinforced each other. Not long after Clausewitz returned to Berlin in 1807, he pleaded for the program of Romanticism: “A genuine need of our time [is] to return from the tendency to rationalize to the neglected riches of the emotions and of the imagination.” 90
In On War, Clausewitz’s concern for human psychology comes out repeatedly in his overriding emphasis on the human will. War is ultimately a “contest of wills” and the bloody cost of battle is simply a means to break the enemy’s will: “rather a killing of the enemy’s spirit than of his men.” 91 While will can mean political will, a rational choice, it also involves the passions of enemy peoples. After defining “the power of resistance,” as resulting from two factors, means and will, he made it clear that “subtleties of logic do not motivate the human will.” 92
Clausewitz linked chance and genius in a striking manner. The Military Enlightenment recognized the role chance could play, but sought to reduce it to a minimum, particularly by eschewing battle. Clausewitz found chance unavoidable and advocated battle, a theater where chance could dominate the stage.
…The critical Clausewitzian concept of “friction” constitutes a special role for chance. As early as 1812, in a piece written for his charge, the crown prince, Clausewitz turned to a mechanical metaphor, so appropriate in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution: “The conduct of war resembles the working of an intricate machine with tremendous friction, so that combinations which are easily planned on paper can be executed only with great effort.” 94 In On War, he defined friction as “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” 95 This is essential, because, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.” (This is surprisingly similar to Napoleon’s statement that “The art of war is a simple art and everything depends upon execution.” 96 ) All things that complicate action in war, that go wrong or come up unexpectedly, constitute friction. “[T]his tremendous friction, which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured, just because they are largely due to chance.” In another striking metaphor, Clausewitz compares “action in war” to “movement in a resistant element”: “Just as the simplest and most natural of movements, walking, cannot easily be performed in water, so in war it is difficult for normal efforts to achieve even moderate results.” If general friction arises from the multitude of practical problems involved in military operations and from chance, it also results from lack of knowledge of the enemy, of the battlefield, etc., and generally from war’s unavoidable uncertainty and confusion, the fog of war. “War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty.”
…[Peter] Paret would have us accept that Clausewitz did not impose himself and his own intellectual construct on reality but simply penetrated and portrayed the truth of it all. But this contention seems at odds with the character of his work; in fact, it runs counter to the very nature of intellectual endeavor. If Clausewitz must be seen as a product of his time and circumstance, his current popularity is worth pondering.
…In a violent response to the 1923 earthquake, Japanese police and mobs tortured and slew 6,000 Koreans resident in Japan — a display of vicious, mindless racism.
…the Japanese believed Americans to be soft, self – indulgent, and incapable of serious sacrifice; therefore, Americans would tire and withdraw from a contest with the far tougher and committed Japanese. 87 In what ranks as a monumental misperception, just before the battle of Midway, Mitsuo Fuchida, the air commander of the raid on Pearl Harbor and again to command at Midway, wrote a report dismissing the Americans as lacking the will to fight. 88 Without this prejudiced and fatally incorrect conviction, Japanese war plans did not make sense, since Tokyo always realized that the advantages of numbers in manpower and materiel always rested with the United States.
This certainty of spiritual superiority also led to doctrinal miscalculations.
…ask if racism played a role in defining American strategy and doctrine. Should we find evidence there, we might conclude that the conflict was, indeed, a race war. But the evidence does not exist. When war broke out, the United States applied a strategic blueprint that it had been drafting for over three decades. These plans were not dictated by racial bigotry but by geographical and technological imperatives. The same can be said for crucial elements of doctrine.
…From the start, the United States planned to take on Japan in a naval campaign rather than committing to a great and costly land war in Asia.
…the Marine Corps had guessed right and prepared for the kind of fighting that awaited it on Pacific islands. The preparation of the peacetime Corps is one of the great success stories of prewar planning and training, but it had little to do with defining the enemy as specifically Japanese. No derogatory assumptions about the Japanese influenced these plans. It is true that Americans made some mistakes that can be ascribed to racial stereotyping, such as dismissing the quality of Japanese aircraft before the rude awakening, but these were peripheral to the prosecution of the war.
…most Americans in combat fought for and with their comrades rather than against their enemies. In fact, there is little evidence to demonstrate that combat effectiveness under fire improves with strong hatred.
…This chapter closely follows the work of Kenneth M. Pollack. In his Arabs at War (2002), Pollack identifies the general ineffectiveness of Arab armies, seeks explanations in a number of possible failings, and concludes that the primary weaknesses have historically been in tactical leadership, information management, technical skills and weapons handling, and maintenance. He claims that these failings have been typical of “every single Arab army and air force between 1948 and 1991.” 3 It will be enough for this chapter if these generalizations fit the case study of Egypt — and they do. Above all, Egyptian shortcomings in Pollack’s categories of tactical leadership and information management proved most damaging. Pollack’s argument is all the more convincing because the high command of the Egyptian army itself reached similar conclusions.
…campaign plans ought to build upon the particular character of the army for which they are intended.
…Attrition warfare depends on superiority in manpower and materiel to batter an enemy into submission, and is usually costly. In contrast, maneuver warfare maximizes effect by movement, with the goal of achieving greater results at far less sacrifice of blood. Maneuver warfare probes, discovers, and exploits; it seeks advantage and strikes, ideally by attacking an enemy’s vulnerability with one’s own hardest and sharpest edge.
…Maneuver requires tactical flexibility and improvisation guided by accurate and timely intelligence, and Arab military culture, Pollack insists, repeatedly found these abilities to be elusive.
… The special character of Egyptian military culture, and the value of harmonizing technology and tactics with it, argues for the absolute necessity to appreciate the uniqueness of the different militaries. Concepts of a universal soldier and ideas of weaponry as dictating a single best way to fight seem naïve.
…”Arab armies and air forces did not suffer in combat because they lacked ammunition, food, water, fuel, lubricants, medical supplies, repair tools, spare parts, or other combat necessities.”
…Arab artillery pieces were often the best available, but they were poorly coordinated and commanded. Even successes, as in 1973, reveal core weaknesses in artillery usage, as we shall see. Arab tank crews usually were poor marksmen and maneuvered ineptly. Fighter pilots could not defeat technologically inferior enemy aircraft.
…Many critics of U.S. foreign policy charge that specific American actions, such as a virtual blank check for Israel, have alienated much of the Moslem world, and there is a great deal of truth to this accusation. However, these critics go on to argue that the U.S. could end the threat of extreme Islamic terrorism simply by reversing such policies. However, no matter what the origins of Moslem resentment, once it was transformed from political/rational to cultural/religious, the adoption of more enlightened policies by the United States, although valuable in the long run, would probably not diminish the terrorist threat soon.
Posted inEgypt, War|Comments Off on Battle: A History Of Combat And Culture by John A. Lynn
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
