Ignorance and Bliss
by Mark Lilla

The source of the proverb "Ignorance is bliss" is a poem by the 18th-century English poet Thomas Gray, who wrote in passing: "Where ignorance is bliss,/ Tis folly to be wise." Though the poem is now forgotten, the verse remains very much alive in the English language and reminds us of an important and often forgotten element of our intellectual and spiritual tradition, especially as that tradition has been filtered through the European Enlightenment. The assumption of the Enlightenment was that ignorance is, always and everywhere, a curse, and that lifting it is the duty of all magnanimous thinkers. This is not to say, as some have charged, that the Enlightenment was in the grip of its own ignorance--a naive optimism about our ability to reason, or a blind faith in the progress to be expected once the shackles of religion and despotism were removed. The mainstream of the Enlightenment was actually quite pessimistic about how much ground an army of writers and scientists could hope to gain against the well-trained battalions of cardinals and privy councilors. Their optimism lay not in their faith in ultimate success but in their unquestioned assumption that every inch of territory won back from the forces of darkness would be transformed into a garden. Knowledge, they believed, could only contribute to happiness.

Malleable though it may be, this equation of knowledge with happiness can be found at the very root of the Western philosophical tradition--one is tempted to say, it is the root. Plato´s Republic takes a long detour through the issues of politics in order to establish to the satisfaction of two young men that knowledge, virtue, and happiness are identical. The crux of the conversation is to determine what constitutes knowledge, virtue, or happiness and what is the genuine object of each, and the questions are complicated by the recognized difficulty of turning recalcitrant human nature around and enticing it out of the cave. But genuine knowledge, were we to achieve it, would be happiness; that is the Socratic position. And although no subsequent thinker has been so bold as to defend without qualification the equation of knowledge with happiness, it remains an inspiration to the mainstream of philosophical and scientific tradition down to our time.

Of course, there have been important modifications. Aristotle contrasted intellectual virtue with the moral virtues and distinguished the kinds of happiness each could bring; the Stoics and Skeptics, ancient and modern, raised doubts about our capacity for knowledge and the existential posture we should adopt toward ignorance; Kant tried to wean us from vain metaphysical speculations and to refocus our attention on the moral duties revealed through practical reason; Marxists and structuralists cast dark shadows of ideological suspicion on any claim to impartial knowledge; American pragmatists attempted to reorient our thinking from the search for unshakable principles to the continuous revision of intellectual constructs in line with practical demands and interests. Yet in every one of those cases, however strong the critique of our faculties or the prudential warnings against over-reliance on them, and however developed the recognition of the variety of human pursuits and the kinds of happiness they can bring, knowledge as such is never considered to be a potential source of unhappiness, or ignorance a kind of bliss.

posted by neel master at 2:38 PM

The Campus Diversity Fraud
by John McWhorter

The diversity imperative now so powerful on campus arose almost by chance, springing from a remark Justice Lewis Powell made in his concurrence in the Bakke decision. Allan Bakke had charged the medical school at the University of California at Davis with discrimination for twice turning him down, despite his high grades and admissions-test scores, while routinely admitting black students with C averages and poor admissions-test scores. The court found that quota systems like Davis’s were unconstitutional, but Powell’s opinion hedged slightly, asserting that it was appropriate for schools to base their admissions decisions upon a quest for a “diverse student body.” Powell’s statement provided a justification that universities, including the University of Georgia, quickly seized upon as a cover for admitting black students with significantly lower qualifications than those of white or Asian students. Instead of ending campus affirmative action, Bakke became its license.

White guilt is a dangerous and addictive drug, and for 20-plus years the Bakke decision has supported stricken higher-education administrators in their habit. Meanwhile, the diversity shibboleth has taught a generation of young Americans that black students are more important for their presence in promotional brochure photographs than for their scholastic qualifications—an essentialization now as rife among black as among white students. This message ultimately perpetuates the very underperformance that has made the fig-leaf diversity notion necessary.

posted by neel master at 2:29 PM

Blacklash?
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The contemporary rhetoric of gay rights sounds suspiciously like the rhetoric utilized by black leaders in the movement for civil rights. This angers some black leaders mightily; Henry Louis Gates explores the tension.

Prejudices, of course, don't exist in the abstract; they all come with distinctive and distinguishing historical peculiarities. In short, they have content as well as form. Underplaying the differences blinds us to the signature traits of other forms of social hatred. Indeed, in judging other prejudices by the one you know best you may fail to recognize those other prejudices *as* prejudices.

To take a quick and fairly obvious example, it has been observed that while anti-black racism charges its object with inferiority, anti-Semitism charges its object with iniquity. The racist believes that blacks are incapable of running anything by themselves. The anti-Semite believes (in one popular bit of folklore) that thirteen rabbis rule the world.

How do gays fit into this scheme? Uneasily. Take that hard-ridden analogy between blacks and gays. Much of the ongoing debate over gay rights has fixated, and foundered, on the vexed distinction between "status" and "behavior." The paradox here can be formulated as follows: Most people think of racial identity as a matter of (racial) status, but they respond to it as behavior. Most people think of sexual identity as a matter of (sexual) behavior, but they respond to it as status. Accordingly, people who fear and dislike blacks are typically preoccupied with the threat that they think blacks' aggressive behavior poses to them. Hence they're inclined to make exceptions for the kindly, "civilized" blacks: that's why "The Cosby Show" could be so popular among white South Africans. By contrast, the repugnance that many people feel toward gays concerns, in the first instance, the status ascribed to them. Disapproval of a sexual practice is transmuted into the demonization of a sexual species.

posted by neel master at 2:09 PM

Unhappy Anniversary
by Eric Alterman

My father is a political talk junkie. To this day, his Sunday schedule is structured by a sequence of televised charades: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, lunch, McLaughlin Group, and until recently, Firing Line. His appetite is sustained through the week with daily doses of Crossfire (which we have watched since the glory days of Kinsley and Buchanan.) My father meets my predictable objections by the defense that he enjoys these shows as boxing matches. The pugilistic analogy is apt, I suppose, because enjoying boxing presumes there is something to be enjoyed in watching people try to kill each other for no reason and with no context.

Well, this week marks the 20th anniversary of The McLaughlin Group, the godfather of the current talk format; the Nation's Eric Alterman is not pleased. The author of Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy, Alterman worries that this sort of empty political talk is insidious and dangerous. His column for The Nation this week reveals a seething contempt for John McLaughlin, which I doubt is wholly undeserved:

Before building his television empire, he earned his fame as a Jesuit sex lecturer. He ran a hapless Senate race in 1970 in Rhode Island as a McGovernite Republican--yes, you read that right--but still managed, with Patrick Buchanan's assistance, to land a job in the Nixon White House. There, in priestly garb, he defended the Unindicted Co-Conspirator as "a moral man, thirsting for truth." Nine days before Nixon's resignation, McLaughlin predicted that Watergate would soon be viewed as a "mere footnote to a glorious administration."

posted by neel master at 5:38 PM

Girls Just Want to Be Mean
by Margaret Talbot

I don't like cribbing links from other weblogs, but I'll do it if I have to. This article, which I found at Arts and Letters Daily, is from the latest edition of the New York Times Magazine. It's about preteen girls and the peculiar and perhaps devastating ways in which they are mean to one another. Recently, psychologists have turned their clinical and theoretical gazes toward this meanness, and one of the products of this turn is a theory known as relational aggression. Relational aggression is the female version of male bullying; since adherence to cultural standards of femininity demands that girls do not actually hit each other, they appear to have developed tactics of domination and control that mobilize the economy of attention, praise, and confidence that form the social world of young girls.
posted by neel master at 1:24 PM