E.L. Doctorow is one author of whom I have only read a little over the years. (I did pick up Ragtime, long ago, and while it had its interest in its use of historical figures it did not seem to me to add up to very much.) Still, I did find some interest in Doctorow's remarks during his interview by journalist Bill Moyers back in 1988, because of the ways in which he broke with the tendency prevailing in literature and "respectable" intellectual life, rather than the ways in which he has been representative of it.
In that interview, at least, it was Doctorow's view that contemporary writers had become "Miniaturists," writing small stories about small things and ignoring "the big story"--"who we are, what we're trying to be, what our fate is, where we will stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned." He also drew a comparison between the situation of the 1980s and that of the interwar period, when writers (he named Dreiser and Hemingway as examples) "whether they were on the Right or the Left . . . Marxists . . . [or] southern Agrarians . . . whether they believed in the past or the future," all seemed to be " vitally connected to [a] crisis which everyone recognized" as the crisis of the time, whereas "our crisis today" (which in America he thought a crisis of democracy) "is something that we recognize as writers or that we have any particular passion for." In explaining that situation he stressed what seemed to him a declining tolerance of political criticism in America (except when it was of other countries, especially those on the official Enemies List), and the fatuousness of the standard behind which proponents of the view hid that treated Dissent--the kind that as his interlocutor Bill Moyers put it "challenge[s] the underlying belief system of the rulers," what Doctorow called their "mythology"--as having no place in art, or anywhere else, such that anyone who does question it "is going to find himself in a very uncomfortable position," with "orthodox intellectuals . . . defending the prevailing myths" eagerly playing their part in that.
Of course, Doctorow was less than perfectly consistent in challenging those orthodoxies himself, expressing a characteristically centrist suspicion of "ideology" and pluralistic resistance to "truth claims" (in his talk of the "democratic mind"), and also a characteristically centrist, psychologism-touched pessimism about people (citing Wilhelm Reich's remark about "the average man's mind [being] structured for fascism"). Indeed, Doctorow shows himself a horseshoe theorist, speaking of Fascism and Communism as equivalents at one point as sources of "violence and evil." All this certainly carried over to his view of fiction. (The writer who "knows what's right and . . . wrong . . . good and . . . bad . . . is going to write worthless stuff" he declares, seeming to all but regard confusion and muddle as an artistic necessity!)
Still, the extent to which he did raise the matter of the evasions of authors and the shrinking space for dissent is undeniable, with something of this combination of views reflected in his stance toward the Cold War. He did not reject the "orthodox" view of the Cold War as necessary opposition to a threatening Communism, but he also did not hesitate to see the Cold War as having played a pernicious part in it, as having "cut into our democratic sense of ourself," citing the security state with its militarism, its "secrecy and deception and assassination and all sorts of un-American things . . . defending democracy by attacking people who ran the world who don't do it the way we want it done."
It seems to me that few of our major writers dared say that much in his time, and still fewer of them since, all as what he saw as troubling in society and in art has only come to dominate it the more completely.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
"Entrepreneurship" and Self-Made Millionairedom in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay
Reflecting upon the rise and fall of his uncle's pharmaceutical empire in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909) George Ponderovo remarks "the supreme unreason of" the situation which saw his uncle Edward--who "created nothing . . . invented nothing . . . economised nothing," whose businesses never "added any real value to human life at all" and indeed "were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in advertisements for money"-- was rewarded by the "community in which we live" "for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies" with "a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions" at his peak (the equivalent of a billionaire in today's terms).
The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."
In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.
All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)
The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."
In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.
All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)
"Why Do So Many People Want to be Writers?"
The answer to that question is that "so many people" are convinced that they have something to say, and find satisfaction in saying it. The human artistic impulse, for which the Market provides such wretchedly little outlet, should not be underrated. Ever.
Still, as Upton Sinclair observes in Money Writes!, it is also the case that being a writer, or at least one of the few who can be said to have really "made it" as a writer, looks like a very agreeable way of getting a paycheck compared to most of the jobs the world offers--an alternative to a life of quiet desperation. That the stodgy bourgeois sneers at such desires only affirms the fact--the more in as a stodgy bourgeois highly approves a life of quiet desperation for the many.
Still, as Upton Sinclair observes in Money Writes!, it is also the case that being a writer, or at least one of the few who can be said to have really "made it" as a writer, looks like a very agreeable way of getting a paycheck compared to most of the jobs the world offers--an alternative to a life of quiet desperation. That the stodgy bourgeois sneers at such desires only affirms the fact--the more in as a stodgy bourgeois highly approves a life of quiet desperation for the many.
How Film Viewers Respond to Tracy Flick
Alexander Payne's Election hit theaters a quarter of a century ago, and, I think, has lingered a bit more in pop cultural consciousness than most of its contemporaries. (Thus did A.O. Scott devote a piece to it a few years back, which is characteristically Scott and therefore not worth reading, but all the same, testimony to its presence.)
Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.
My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.
Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.
My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Notes From a Reader's Journey Through the World of Literature
For some years now I have found myself gravitating toward the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in my "discretionary" fiction reading. I suppose this is because I am too much of a "modern" to be very drawn to what came before--and not "Modernist" enough for what came after.
That said I am much more interested in some parts of that stream of literature than others, the Symbolists, Decadents and company having little interest for me. Good old realism/naturalism appeals to me more strongly than ever these days--particularly where it has been combined with that "discovery of society" of which Karl Polanyi wrote.
Maybe it helps in this that the art critics of our time are so dismissive of such work. Critical respectability has, I think, tended to make me skeptical of the claims for the value of a literary work, rather than the opposite--especially given what the critics have so often been, all the way down to our times.
That said I am much more interested in some parts of that stream of literature than others, the Symbolists, Decadents and company having little interest for me. Good old realism/naturalism appeals to me more strongly than ever these days--particularly where it has been combined with that "discovery of society" of which Karl Polanyi wrote.
Maybe it helps in this that the art critics of our time are so dismissive of such work. Critical respectability has, I think, tended to make me skeptical of the claims for the value of a literary work, rather than the opposite--especially given what the critics have so often been, all the way down to our times.
"Traditional vs. Self-Publishing"
Back when there was more talk about the phenomenon of self-publishing than we hear now due to the comparative novelty of e-book readers, print-on-demand and services like Createspace and Kindle Direct, established, traditionally-published writers made characteristically pompous statements about why an aspiring writers should forgo the seemingly quick and easy path of publishing themselves in favor of the route of getting a publishing firm to take them and their book on.
I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.
The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.
The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.
Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.
I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.
The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.
The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.
Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.
Of "Artistic Freedom"
In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair early on acknowledges the time he spent laying the intellectual groundwork for his survey of American literature as it stood circa 1927, and answered those who would take issue with it the argument that "You cannot understand a plant except you know the soil and climate in which it has grown," with the "soil and climate" here the "political and economic" forces that make literature what it is--in his view, and I think in the view of those who have not been robbed of their judgment by the Cult of High Modernism, an "unwholesome thing" that "is poisoned with pessimism."
Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.
A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.
Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.
A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.
On the Demand for "Humility" in Film Directors: A Few Thoughts
In Vincent Minnelli's cinematic classic The Bad and the Beautiful producer Jonathan Shields gets into an argument with director Von Eilstein over the shooting of a particular scene in their film. In the course of the subsequent argument Von Eilstein tells Shields that "In order to direct a picture you need humility."
Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).
Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.
It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."
I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.
Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).
Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.
It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."
I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.
Is There Really a Political Divide by Gender Within Generation Z?
It seems to have become fashionable to claim the opening of a chasm between men and women of the younger generation in this political era--with women skewing left, and men right. Indeed, the editorial board of the Washington Post declared last November that the divide might threaten the institution of marriage itself (!).
I have to admit myself skeptical of such claims, frankly, because the mainstream news media loves, Loves, LOVES to play up "polarization." This is partly because this enables it to bemoan that polarization in that way that lets their centrist selves feel that they are the "adult in the room" (Oh how they love that hackneyed phrase!), but more importantly because emphasizing divisions of gender, ethnicity, region, religiosity, "culture" and all the rest gets us away from those matters of hard interest and policy that the media does not love reporting about (as that study discussed in the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated quantitatively, not least by looking at the front page of the Post itself).
Moreover, it seems there is more than the media's well-known prejudices in support of such skepticism. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp demonstrates, the conclusions that those promulgating the gender divide narrative derived from polling data are far from unimpeachable, or broadly supported, especially if one remembers just how large a matter politics is. Thus Mr. Beauchamp in the end, while admitting that it is not the most satisfying answer, says that the only honest one is "We don't know"--which seems to me excellent reason to be attentive to what we actually do know, which is that there has been an enormous public-elite divide on many of the issues that transcends the lines the media like to stress, and the truth an uncomfortable one for the guardians of the "conventional wisdom."
I have to admit myself skeptical of such claims, frankly, because the mainstream news media loves, Loves, LOVES to play up "polarization." This is partly because this enables it to bemoan that polarization in that way that lets their centrist selves feel that they are the "adult in the room" (Oh how they love that hackneyed phrase!), but more importantly because emphasizing divisions of gender, ethnicity, region, religiosity, "culture" and all the rest gets us away from those matters of hard interest and policy that the media does not love reporting about (as that study discussed in the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated quantitatively, not least by looking at the front page of the Post itself).
Moreover, it seems there is more than the media's well-known prejudices in support of such skepticism. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp demonstrates, the conclusions that those promulgating the gender divide narrative derived from polling data are far from unimpeachable, or broadly supported, especially if one remembers just how large a matter politics is. Thus Mr. Beauchamp in the end, while admitting that it is not the most satisfying answer, says that the only honest one is "We don't know"--which seems to me excellent reason to be attentive to what we actually do know, which is that there has been an enormous public-elite divide on many of the issues that transcends the lines the media like to stress, and the truth an uncomfortable one for the guardians of the "conventional wisdom."
Is Every Day Now Eliza Doolittle Day?
With the idiots of the media abuzz with talk of chatbots for over a year now (we can seem to be going from "The Singularity is Near!" to "The Singularity is Here!"), some have bothered to look into the history of the technology in however clumsy a way, and in the process reminded those who had forgotten (and informed those who never knew) of the fact that the first chatbot, created way back in 1964, was named ELIZA--after the then-recent hit stage and film musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
What Do We Mean by "Freedom of Speech?" And the Defense of the Right to That Freedom?
The remark "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is famously attributed to the eighteenth century French philosophe Voltaire.
For the purposes of this discussion whether or not the attribution has been established as historically accurate is completely irrelevant, what matters instead the reason why so many cite the words in the first place--their summing up what it truly means to stand for free speech, a readiness not only to uncompromisingly defend that speech of which one approves, but also that which they disapprove, for the sake of sheer principle.
Not many live up to this standard, least of all those who most loudly claim to do so these days. As Aurelien Mondon has written (in discussion of the situation in France, though it seems to me we see the same trend everywhere else), "it has become commonly accepted in public discourse that free speech simply means the right of the powerful to offend without any consequences or any potential criticism."
Such a standard of freedom of speech is a perversion of the concept. This is not only because it completely rejects the spirit of defending speech on principle rather than because one approves the particular statement, but also because the fight for freedom of speech has, above all, been to defend the right of those out of power to speak--while this conception of "free speech" pointedly sacrifices their right to giving the powerful yet more latitude that they already have; to, as a practical matter, enabling them to "punch down" with even more complete immunity than they already possessed. Indeed, considering it I am reminded of Winston Churchill's remark that "[s]ome people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Anyone who sincerely cares about freedom of speech should be disgusted that such a conception of this freedom has prevailed. However, you are unlikely to hear much from those who think that way. After all, the mainstream media we have is firmly on the side of the powerful, and of their punching down--and inclines to the view that people who actually have principles are insane "ideologues" who may well be allowed to exercise their "freedom of speech," but never where an appreciable audience might be likely to hear them, not if they have anything to say about the matter.
For the purposes of this discussion whether or not the attribution has been established as historically accurate is completely irrelevant, what matters instead the reason why so many cite the words in the first place--their summing up what it truly means to stand for free speech, a readiness not only to uncompromisingly defend that speech of which one approves, but also that which they disapprove, for the sake of sheer principle.
Not many live up to this standard, least of all those who most loudly claim to do so these days. As Aurelien Mondon has written (in discussion of the situation in France, though it seems to me we see the same trend everywhere else), "it has become commonly accepted in public discourse that free speech simply means the right of the powerful to offend without any consequences or any potential criticism."
Such a standard of freedom of speech is a perversion of the concept. This is not only because it completely rejects the spirit of defending speech on principle rather than because one approves the particular statement, but also because the fight for freedom of speech has, above all, been to defend the right of those out of power to speak--while this conception of "free speech" pointedly sacrifices their right to giving the powerful yet more latitude that they already have; to, as a practical matter, enabling them to "punch down" with even more complete immunity than they already possessed. Indeed, considering it I am reminded of Winston Churchill's remark that "[s]ome people’s idea of free speech is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage."
Anyone who sincerely cares about freedom of speech should be disgusted that such a conception of this freedom has prevailed. However, you are unlikely to hear much from those who think that way. After all, the mainstream media we have is firmly on the side of the powerful, and of their punching down--and inclines to the view that people who actually have principles are insane "ideologues" who may well be allowed to exercise their "freedom of speech," but never where an appreciable audience might be likely to hear them, not if they have anything to say about the matter.
Of Class and Accent in Britain and America: A Few Thoughts
In The English Tribe Stephen Haseler, considering Englishness and Britishness as the twentieth century drew toward its end, with "Europe" looking very much like Britain's future (how remote all that seems now!), he considered among much else the development of a distinct upper-class English accent in the country's public schools by late Victorian times, reinforced by social and other pressures at Oxbridge, the Bar, the Church and the Court (in short, the gamut of what AJP Taylor called "The Thing!"), "which would serve as the authoritative voice of Englishness, and . . . mark out rulers from ruled" not just at home but internationally (as the language of a not merely national but imperial ruling class) which has since come to be called "Received Pronunciation." In turn, the then-emergent means of mass communication reinforced in a manner Haseler did not hesitate to call Orwellian and totalitarian--indeed, "the most 'totalitarian' piece of cultural engineering" the country saw in the entire twentieth century.
I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.
I am inclined to agree, and struck by how after the passing of all that the accent was supposed to represent and serve--empire and hegemony and the Victorian social order, the plausibility of a view of Britain at the center of and dominant force in world affairs--and what many regard as the sheer obnoxiousness of the accent (Haseler himself uses words like "ungenerous" and "unengaging" to describe it), it has endured, and so too at least some of the respect shown its users. In the United States, certainly, people of conventional mind commonly equate this Received Pronunciation with superior intelligence, education, culture in that way memorably satirized by Michael Bluth's mistaking every one of a mentally disadvantaged woman's utterances for profound thoughts simply because she spoke them in that accent on Arrested Development.
Of "Mere Rhetoric"
I agreed with that Professor that the latter is indeed the common understanding, and that this case of affairs means an impoverishment of the term which helps close our minds to an important area of human endeavor--one with which, for whatever it is worth, I have personally had to do for a very long time as not just a writer, but a composition instructor. Still, he struck me as exceedingly, depressingly, oblivious to the reasons why we ended up in that situation--our living in a society that devalues verbal communication and its study, and a commercial culture and a political culture which through their crassness and viciousness foster only cynicism about what people say, reducing the consideration of "rhetoric" to sneering at "mere rhetoric," such that the common understanding can scarcely be any other than what he regretted its being.
"Money Doesn't Buy Happiness"
It seems worth acknowledging that there is truth in the saying that "Money doesn't buy happiness."
However, money does buy your way out of a lot misery--and other obstacles--and so makes finding happiness a lot easier, a fact which should not be slighted.
It is just as with the saying that "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." Rich and sick is not great--but it is a lot easier to protect your health when you do have money. And if you fall sick, you can get along a lot better in that condition if you have money than if you don't have it, a fact which also ought not to be slighted.
However, money does buy your way out of a lot misery--and other obstacles--and so makes finding happiness a lot easier, a fact which should not be slighted.
It is just as with the saying that "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." Rich and sick is not great--but it is a lot easier to protect your health when you do have money. And if you fall sick, you can get along a lot better in that condition if you have money than if you don't have it, a fact which also ought not to be slighted.
"Money Doesn't Matter"
We live in a society which few will deny is defined by its capitalistic nature and market values are treated as ultimately the only values that matter; where "success" and "failure" and status and power are equated with money to the point of individuals being "worth" what they have; where it is impossible to meet one's most basic physical needs at all without acquiring a certain not very low minimum sum of money such that many die all the time for its lack and comfort, all as a dignity and freedom are impossible without a good deal more money than that; where any responsible individual is supposed to orient their whole life and the upbringing of their children toward the making of money; where those who have more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime organize society around the maximization of their chances to make as much more money in as short a time as possible with the consequences for everyone and everything else irrelevant to them regardless of how disastrous they may well be, "Let the bodies pile in their thousands" merely the beginning of such callousness, as they concede absolutely nothing to claims for any other good.
Yet we are also told constantly that "Money doesn't matter."
How does one reconcile this contradiction?
One can do it very simply by recognizing that the statement that "Money doesn't matter" is a lie, or at the very least incomplete. When people tell you that "Money doesn't matter" what they mean is that your not having money does not matter to them, all as, of course, their having money matters enormously to them.
In short, it is a hypocritical screen for callousness--and an exceedingly stupid one at that. Alas, stupid hypocrisy on behalf of callousness is par for the course in this culture.
Yet we are also told constantly that "Money doesn't matter."
How does one reconcile this contradiction?
One can do it very simply by recognizing that the statement that "Money doesn't matter" is a lie, or at the very least incomplete. When people tell you that "Money doesn't matter" what they mean is that your not having money does not matter to them, all as, of course, their having money matters enormously to them.
In short, it is a hypocritical screen for callousness--and an exceedingly stupid one at that. Alas, stupid hypocrisy on behalf of callousness is par for the course in this culture.
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