I found this link at wood s lot. Nussbaum is a prof at the law school at the University of Chicago. She just published a book, Upheavals of Emotion, that I'm currently reading. It's an extremely long defense of emotions as rational evaluative judgments about the relation of the self to things outside the self. I've only read a chapter and a half of her book, but I'm already impressed. She's an incredible writer, and her openness to insights from contemporary social science is very satisfying.
This article, however, is about something else entirely:
In Rabindranath Tagore's novel, The Home and the World, the young wife Bimala, entranced by the patriotic rhetoric of her husband's friend Sandip, becomes an eager devotee of the Swadeshi movement, which has organized a boycott of foreign goods. The slogan of the movement is Bande Mataram, "Hail Motherland." Bimala complains that her husband, the cosmopolitan Hindu landlord Nikhil, is cool in his devotion to the cause:
And yet it was not that my husband refused to support Swadeshi, or was in any way against the Cause. Only he had not been able whole-heartedly to accept the spirit of Bande Mataram.
'I am willing,' he said, to serve my country; but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it.'
Americans have frequently supported the principle of Bande Mataram, giving the fact of being American a special salience in moral and political deliberation, and pride in a specifically American identity and a specifically American citizenship a special power among the motivations to political action. I believe, with Tagore and his character Nikhil, that this emphasis on patriotic pride is both morally dangerous and, ultimately, subversive of some of the worthy goals patriotism sets out to serve -- for example, the goal of national unity in devotion to worthy moral ideals of justice and equality. These goals, I shall argue, would be better served by an ideal that is in any case more adequate to our situation in the contemporary world, namely the very old ideal of the cosmopolitan, the person whose primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.
Perhaps many people would agree with my emphasis on truth for a small sector of education, for example, mathematics and science. Who would urge the teaching of false mathematics? But what about the rest of the curriculum? Well, even history should aim at teaching truths. Which historical truths should be taught is a difficult matter, but I do not think we should teach historical falsehoods, nor misleading historical theses, where a misleading thesis is one that is itself true but invites inferences to further conclusions that are false.
Several objections can readily be anticipated here. First, some people deny the existence of objective truth altogether; or they deny that there is truth in certain subject matters, so my principles cannot apply there. Second, it may be observed that many truths are too complicated, or require too many qualifications, to inflict on young children. Surely it is permissible to simplify even at the cost of inaccuracy. Third, it may often be preferable to let students learn truths on their own rather than have teachers (or textbooks) present those truths. Fourth, who is to decide what is true and therefore what should be taught? How should schools and teachers proceed when there are divergent opinions in the local or professional community?
Starting with the first objection, I regret that I cannot here address a global skepticism or nihilism about truth. I plan to address this topic in a book I am currently writing,1 but it cannot be satisfactorily treated in a short conference paper that has other issues on its agenda. Suffice it to say that I find global critiques of truth based on postmodernist, social constructivist, or relativist themes unpersuasive. Let me turn, then, to restricted skepticism about truth. I grant that there may be domains lacking in truth values, and my theses would have no direct application to those domains. But notice that in any domain we may distinguish primary judgments from secondary judgments. To illustrate, a primary judgment in the aesthetics of music might be: "Beethoven's Eroica is greater than Mozart's 40th Symphony." A secondary judgment in this area would be: "Some music lovers think (or say) that the Eroica is greater than Mozart's 40th for reasons A, B, and C." Even if primary judgments in this area lack truth values, secondary judgments clearly have them, and it is plausible to expect teachers to aim at teaching some of these true secondary judgments. A similar point might be made in ethics. Even if it is conceded that primary statements of an ethical sort lack truth values, there are truth-valuable secondary statements that may well be worth teaching; and the true ones are to be preferred to the false.
In saying that we can interpret photographs as answers to questions, I don't mean that we always do, only that we often do, that in principle we always can, and that it is a useful way to think about photographs. The question we ask may be very simple and descriptive: What does Yosemite look like? What does the Republican candidate for President look like? How did our family and friends look in 1957? Sometimes the questions are historical or cultural: How did people take pictures in 1905? How do they take them in Yorubaland? What did the battlefield at Gettysburg look like? Sometimes they are scientific: Is this lung tuberculous? If I bombard an atomic nucleus in a certain way, what will happen? Sometimes they are psychological: What is the true character of the Republican candidate for President? Sometimes they ask for an abstraction: What is the essence of virginal innocence or Mexican peasant life or the urban experience?
I like this approach because it recognizes the wide variety of the kinds of things for which truth is claimed. A little while ago, Jason posted an interview with Errol Morris in which Morris derides the notion of a subjective truth, citing the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz as a proposition that can be decisively proven or discredited. He goes on to claim that truth is never a matter that can be settled by a survey of an audience. But, as Becker points out above, sometimes truth "asks for abstraction" and sometimes the only adjudicator of the truth of something, like a photograph of Mexican peasant life, is a community of viewers. So bite down hard on that, Errol Morris. I got your truth right here. posted by neel master at 10:45 AM
Wednesday, January 09, 2002
It was Simone de Beauvoir's birthday yesterday. Once, during a phase whose innocence I can't possibly hope to recapture, I mistakenly pronounced her name boo-vee-ay. That was embarassing.
Nowadays, I'm significantly more able to discuss French philosophers. An incident last fall is revealing: during a casual conversation, I criticized someone for mispronouncing "Foucault."
It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: 'Even in Russia women still are women'; and other erudite persons - sometimes the very same - say with a sigh: 'Woman is losing her way, woman is lost.' One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. 'What has become of women?' was asked recently in an ephemeral magazine.
But first we must ask: what is a woman? 'Tota mulier in utero', says one, 'woman is a womb'. But in speaking of certain women, connoisseurs declare that they are not women, although they are equipped with a uterus like the rest. All agree in recognising the fact that females exist in the human species; today as always they make up about one half of humanity. And yet we are told that femininity is in danger; we are exhorted to be women, remain women, become women. It would appear, then, that every female human being is not necessarily a woman; to be so considered she must share in that mysterious and threatened reality known as femininity. Is this attribute something secreted by the ovaries ? Or is it a Platonic essence, a product of the philosophic imagination? Is a rustling petticoat enough to bring it down to earth? Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essence, it is hardly patentable. It is frequently described in vague and dazzling terms that seem to have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the seers, and indeed in the times of St Thomas it was considered an essence as certainly defined as the somniferous virtue of the poppy.
But conceptualism has lost ground. The biological and social sciences no longer admit the existence of unchangeably fixed entities that determine given characteristics, such as those ascribed to woman, the Jew, or the Negro.
Brian and the Beatles looked at each other apprehensively. "We've never smoked marijuana before," Brian finally admitted. Dylan looked disbelievingly from face to face. "But what about your song?" he asked. The one about getting high?"
The Beatles were stupefied. "Which song?" John managed to ask.
Dylan said, "You know..." and then he sang, "and when I touch you I get high, I get high..."
John flushed with embarrassment. "Those aren't the words," he admitted. "The words are, 'I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide...'"
Dylan couldn't wait to initiate them. The preparations to secure the hotel suite took half an hour before Dylan was even allowed to produce the grass. The doors were closed and bolted, and towels from the bathroom were stuffed into every crevice and crack. The blinds were pulled tight and the drapes drawn against the Park Avenue traffic. Finally, a bemused Dylan was allowed to roll the first joint.
Dylan lit the joint, gave them instructions on how to smoke it, and passed it on to John. John took it from him but was too scared to try it himself and passed it on to Ringo, whom he called "my royal taster". Ringo Held onto the joint and finished it himself while Dylan and Aronowitz rolled half a dozen others.
Rock 'n' roll brought psychedelics into popular culture even for the millions of Americans who never knew what marijuana smelled like. For better and for worse, the fusion of rock and psychedelics helped change fashion, art, politics, and social attitudes about everything from sex to schooling.
But changed them how? The largest and wealthiest and best-educated generational cohort in American history stood on the brink of maturity with rock music pounding in its veins and power at its fingertips. The blues, albeit in diluted form, gave much of this power. (Of the twelve songs the Beatles routinely played on this concert tour, five were unmistakably blues-based: "Twist and Shout," "You Can't Do That," "Roll Over Beethoven," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," and "Long Tall Sally.") But now these millions of kids were about to lay their hands on another power, a power the historian of the '60s approaches with some trepidation because two dominant cultural attitudes toward psychedelics work in tandem to repress serious thinking about them. On the one hand, there is fear and distrust: psychedelics are lumped together with all other drugs, including heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine, and amphetamines. All are the same and all are evil. On the other hand, there is a bemused and knowing sophistication: psychedelics are merely psychochemical entertainment. They're just fun. Groovy, man.
The truth lies somewhere between these two takes. Psychedelics are powerful. Psychedelics are distinctive. As research in the fields of psychopharmacology, religion, and anthropology makes perfectly clear, psychedelics do something no other drugs can, and that mysterious something lies very close to the human sense of wonder that is formalized in the world's religions.
Holy jeez. I thought Howard S. Becker, pioneering mid-century sociologist of deviance, was dead. I just assumed. But he's not dead at all. He's teaching at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he's got a web page called "Howie's Page." It's sort of sad when you discover that a minor intellectual idol maintains a page called "Howie's Page." Oh well. The part of his article I've quoted is a quick primer in the problem with words.
Let me explain the problem. When social scientists study something--a community, an organization, an ethnic group--they are never the first people to have arrived there, newcomers to an unpeopled landscape who can name its features as they like. Every topic they write about is part of the experience of many other kinds of people, all of whom have their own ways of speaking about it, specialized words for the objects and events and people involved in that area of social life. Those special words are never neutral objective signifiers. Rather, they express the perspective and situation of the particular kinds of people who use them. The natives are already there and everything in that terrain has a name, more likely many names.
If we choose to name what we study with words the people involved already use, we acquire, with the words, the attitudes and perspectives the words imply. Since many kinds of people are involved in any social activity, choosing words from any of their vocabularies thus commits us to one or another of the perspectives already in use by one or another of the groups there. Those perspectives invariably take much for granted, making assumptions about what might better be treated, social scientifically, as problematic.
Take the topic of marijuana. People who use it have a language for talking about it. They speak of "getting high." They have many synonyms for marijuana, speaking of it, for instance, as "grass." They might speak of the person they buy marijuana from as a "connection." Other people, whose worlds also contain marijuana--physicians, lawyers, police--will have other words for the same things, perhaps speaking of "addiction" and "cannabis" and "pushers." The language of users suggests that use is voluntary, pleasurable, innocent; the language of some others suggests that it is involuntary, evil, harmful.
What things are called almost always reflects relations of power. People in power call things what they want to and others have to adjust to that, perhaps using their own words in private, but accepting in public what they cannot escape. Whatever I and my friends think, marijuana is defined as a narcotic drug by people who can make that name and perspective stick.
The social scientist's problem, simply, is what to call the things we study. If I study marijuana, do I speak of "marijuana addiction" or, as I chose to do, in a minor linguistic variation that connoted a serious shift in perspective, of "marijuana use"? Do we speak of "getting high on," of "being intoxicated by," or of "being under the influence of" this substance?
If I choose the terms used by the people who "own" the territory, and therefore choose the perspectives associated with those terms, I let my analysis be shaped by conventional social arrangements and the distribution of power and privilege they create. This has both technical and moral consequences.
Goffmania is a weblog dedicated to the influential American social psychologist Erving Goffman.
Who's responsible? Neel is a college student in eastern Pennsylvania. Jason is a writer in the Midwest. Sue has driven a school bus in Wisconsin for 34 years.
A sociologist well-known for his analyses of human interaction, Erving Goffman relied less on formal scientific method than on observation to explain contemporary life. He wrote on subjects ranging from the way people behave in public to the different "forms" of talk, and always from the point of view that every facet of human behavior is "significant in the strategy and tactics of social struggle, " a Times Literary Supplement critic says. Roy Harris, in another Times Literary Supplement review, calls Goffman "a public private-eye. . . forever on the lookout for candid-camera evidence which might lead to divorce proceedings between ourselves and our social images."
