…you can find in my kid’s fourth grade reading assignment, that classic, Jean Merrill’s The Pushcart War.
In Chapter IX, “The Secret Campaign Against the Pushcarts,” Merrill describes the truckers’ skillful use of captive media. An anonymous columnist in a weekly owned by one of the truck companies wrote again and again about “The Pushcart Menance.” This was the latest in a series of reports that purported to document threats to wholesome living in New York, all of which happen to be, just by coincidence matters of concern to trucks trying to ease their way through the streets.
Trees, it seems were “unsanitary” — the leaves, ya’ know — and that anonymous “people” wanted to banish them from sidewalks in order to widen roadways. Sidewalks themselves — and other obstacles to wider streets, like houses and churches and small candy stores, were “unsound and unsanitary” and hence ripe for removal in support of easing traffic flow.
But trees and shops and sidewalks were as nothing in that last few months and weeks before the war, compared to the overt threat to civic order posed by the five hundred or so pushcarts licensed to do business on the byways of New York. So, in that spring, Merrill reports, the “Community Reporter” produced a flurry of stories “that made it sound as if pushcarts were even more unsound and unsanitary than trees, houses, schools, churches and candy stores.”
Now that would not have mattered much, for the captive rag in which these columns appeared was such transparently crap that Merrill notes, “some grocers had trouble giving it away, as most of their customers did not mind a few leaves falling off trees.” But, cannily, the paper was also sent, gratis, to the influential: ”members of the City Council and other important people.”
You can guess what comes next. Some free shopper makes a noise and…
Let Merill tell you how it worked — and still does:
Enough people did see the Community Reporter’s column for one of the more respectable papers to announce a series entitled: ”Pushcarts — Are They a Menace to Our Streets?”
When in doubt, don’t question the assertion, report the controversy.
And, even better (or more true to life), the respectable — that is to say, for “respectable,” read “serious” — series, the MSM reporter interviewed not the pushcart peddlars, but Big Moe Mammoth, legendary head of Mammoth Moving, famed for its Baby Mammoths, Mama Mammoths, and the very Mighty Mammoth truck whose assault on Morris the Florist triggered open warfare on the streets of New York City.
In case you were wondering, Merrill published her prophetic tale in 1964. You couldn’t call it fiction today.
Here, via MIT World, is the video of my talk in the MIT Writer’s Series to explain the who, what, why of that book I’ve mentioned here once or twice, Newton and the Counterfeiter. (Amazon,Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound and across the pond at Amazon.co.uk,Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son) Bonus video: a wonderfully generous and over the top introduction by my colleague, Junot Diaz — short story artist and novelist beyond compare, Pulitzerite and all that, and a kind man.
The punditocracy is, as we all know by know, frighteningly well populated by naked emperors. David Brooks is not the most egregious — not for lack of trying, I admit — but given the competition, I’m not even sure if he makes the top ten.
But he is exemplary, and his column of November 2 provides a great case study of how elite opinion composes itself — and yet makes, seemingly, no contact with the world of experience the rest of us inhabit.
In that column Brooks advances the following argument: that the sexual adventurers have never had it so good — or at least so easy — thanks to the advent of cell phones and social media…and that the rise of this technologically-enhanced libertinism has cast all of us out of “the Happy Days era” — his term, to our sorrow and loss.
Oy.
Where to begin?
Well, Ta-Nehisi Coates has already identified the essential flaw in this particular column. He writes of Brooks — and “conservative” (actually radical) nostalgia:
This is a theme residing in the conservative soul–a professed, thinly-reasoned skepticism of the fucked-up now, contrasted against a blind, unquestioning acceptance of the hypermoral past. This is a human idea–most people, like those slaves, believe some point in the past was better. And indeed, in some case the past was demonstrably better. But the writer who would argue such has to prove it. He can’t just accept his innate hunch.
Exactly so. To put the same thought into the frame of this blog: it is a central theme of what happens around here that much journalistic sin would be avoided, and much gain for the republic accrued, if only the habits of scientific thinking penetrated the punditocracy (and the citizenry at large, of course).
If you are aspire to a job like the one Brooks holds, and you want to think and write well about our world, then you need to acquaint yourself with the standard tools of a scientist working on more or less any problem: notions of quantification; of the importance of empiricism and of analysis;of what might be called informational hygiene and the proper skepticism in the face of claims of fact unsupported by a clear portrait of how those “facts” came to be known…all the tools with which researchers try to make sure that what they think they know is real.
And if there is a single unifying flaw that connects most of the really disastrous punditry and opinion “journalism” flooding the intertubes these days, it is that so many — and most of the most prominent — don’t come close to this standard. Rather, their approach seems to be dominated by the “too good to check” approach to whatever received wisdom they may wish to purvey…
…which brings me back to Mr. Brooks.
His essential claim is that reading the accounts of 132 New Yorkers who chose to offer New York magazine with a diary of one week’s worth of their sex and social lives demonstrates that modern technology has fundamentally transformed courtship, love, and by extension the fabric of meaning in society.
It’s a superficially plausible argument. It certainly feels as if various technological developments — geolocation for one, the ease with which it is possible to converse with multiple individuals or groups over multiple information channels for another — have the power to alter, even undermine, the experience of a one-on-one conversation, carnal or otherwise.
But, as Ta-Nehisi says, prove it.
And this Brooks doesn’t — and he fails to do so in a way implicates him in twin sins: claims of fact unsupported by the evidence, and flaws of logic that undermine each step of his argument.
Let’s watch, shall we?
First of all, the entire premise of the column rests on sample bias. He bases his conclusions about all manner of things — sexual habits, commitment and ritual issues and all the rest, on a gloss of the words of 132 twice-selected people who chose to share their sexual adventures with an audience of millions. Remember — these came from (a) those that chose to write about their sex lives and (b) who did so with enough gusto to be selected for maximum audience titillation by some folks aiming to sell magazines.
Problems anyone?
Brooks, lazy but not dumb, is of course alert to half the issue. He writes,
“people who send in sex diaries to a magazine are not representative of average Americans.”
But never mind. Because Brooks knows the answer already, these unrepresentative adventurers are, suddenly, representative:
“the interplay between technology and hook-ups will be familiar to a wide swath of young Americans.”
So what is this territory, foreign to us greybeards for whom Brooks wishes to serve as Virgil, guiding us through the sexual underworld enjoyed by Kids These Days? “On nights when they are out, the diarists are often texting multiple possible partners in search of the best arrangement.” This, Brooks writes,
leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don’t want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners….You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions.
So, let me get this straight: Brooks is saying that texting produces novel sexual marketing strategies…and, that folks raised to sexual maturity in the “Happy Days era” gained a pureness of heart that derived from their lack of have access to the same technology.
The logical flaw is obvious, I think: there is a difference between saying technology renders something easier and that such technology makes the same practices possible.
And empirically, I have to say that reading this made me wonder if Brooks has either pulse or memory. The notion that in some glorious past folks seeking the or many mates haven’t cloaked themselves in confidence or tried to game the chase between hunger for the most desirable and the potential loss of the available misses everything I observed in myself and my peers from junior high school on.
More concretely, if you don’t trust personal recollection (and why should you…see above), then look to the literature. Data matters. What people have done when they approach such questions systematically, helps those who would think with their gut or other organs straighten themselves out.
You can begin with the Kinsey studies of 1948 and 1953, which show that depending on socioeconomic class, between 67 and 98% of men engaged in premarital sex — the bane of Happy Days nostalgia, with 68% doing so before they turned 18. The number for women topped out a 50%.
(Half a nation of bad girls back there in Daddy Eisenhower’s ranch house? Who knew? Everyone. Except of course, Mr. Brooks).
Or, more recently, one could check the National Health and Social Life Survey for data on numbers of sexual partners (and much else besides), collected in a massive survey in 1992. There, you will find that within the prior year 11.7 percent of women and 23.4 percent of men of all ages had more than one sexual partner, and that the pursuit of such variety is skewed — surprise! – to folks 18-24, of whom 32.3 percent report playing the field.
That is: Brooks has no idea whether the anecdotes on which he bases his conclusion that we’re doomed to emotional evisceration describe anything that is in fact new — and there is plenty of evidence within easy reach of a bit of googling to suggest that sexually active folks have been, well, active for a while.
Doing even such minimal research, is dangerous, of course. It might make it more difficult to write passages like this.
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Say what?
This is nonsense on so many levels. Remember the Kinsey numbers: lots of sex happened in the ’50s, much of it outside the formal bounds of the guardrails in question. For a literary confirmation, you might want to check in on this text. It’s post Ike but pre Free Speech Movement (the other FSM).
And then there’s the logical flaw here: one of Brooks’s favorite cons, the false dichotomy. Does Brooks really think that social media exist outside social institutions? In that case, who are the people being texted in the diaries that so offend his sense of propriety? As I read through them, it looks kind of familiar folks from neighborhoods, workplaces and friend/family networks.
More:
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era.
Ahh…now we get it. Women who might like (a) jobs that give them economic independence and (b) sex, made enormously less life-changingly risky by access to reliable contraception, are at fault.
But yet again, data matter. Here is where the real idiocy of the whole column comes into play. Brooks asserts that nasty sexually active women (and presumably their sexually engaged partners) have destroyed a traditional path of encounter-relationship-marriage.
Brooks knows this how? He doesn’t say, because, I infer, he doesn’t actually know anything at all.
He doesn’t cite data on changes in the number of sexual partners over the years; he doesn’t discuss the long term patterns — pre texting, post contraception — that show a drop in both marriage and divorce rates.
He doesn’t note the fact that the number of unmarried living-together couples has increased tenfold from the Happy Days era to know, a reservoir of committed couples not captured in the marriage and divorce statistics. (It has nearly doubled since 1990, and one wonders what would happen to the marriage statistics if only cohabiting same-sex couples enjoyed the bare minimum of equal protection under the law.)
And so on: whatever the data may be, with whatever problems of interpretation, Brooks doesn’t engage any of it, and thus has no basis for saying that familiar patterns of human mating have fallen prey to the evilss inherent in text message.
I’ll give Brooks this. He’s clever.
Unlike Serious Person wannabe Megan McCardle, to take a favorite target here, he doesn’t commit himself to many real claims of fact that could simply be shown to be false.
Rather, as in the three paragraphs leading to his Extremely Serious Person conclusion, he avers, (a) that “the opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage compartmentalization” [aside: was this man never at a party with more than one object of desire present?--ed.]; (b) that same opportunity” …seems to encourage an attitude of contingency;” and it (c) “…also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment.”
Now that’s playing it safe.
You can’t quite call him wrong…because it only seems that he is completely off track…
Except I can and will.
Worse still, he is gutless. He thinks he knows something so important that it must not be false, and therefore should not be checked. That is, as any scientist knows, the fastest ticket to hell anyone nominally committed to reality can buy.
I’ll close with one last example, just because it gives me an excuse to post some Youtubes I wanted to get up there anyway. Brooks writes
Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.
But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace. In today’s world,the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act than the choice of an erotic partner.
Oh my dear FSM.
It’s not just the women, it’s those damned environmentalists too.
Lot’s to dissect here, but why? Brooks is mailing it in through this passage, as he has for the column as a whole, I suppose.
I could point out that “texting” and “the utilitarian mindset” are not equivalents, either as entitites in the world — one is an action, the other is a worldview — nor as complementary phenomena. One may txt a love letter — hell , whole novels are written on cell phones — while it is almost overwhelmingly obtuse for Brooks to use a scary word like “utilitarian” to mean, I think, “instrumental,” and not that philosophical position that is, at least for some, the gateway to a truly humane understanding of our obligations to our fellows.
I could note that his maunderings about love as a holy cause is the stuff of Regency Romances, and capturing none of the extraordinarily rich history of both the idea and experience of love and marriage, that legal commitment that is as much about property law as it is about passion. (See Middlemarch if you want eloquent testimony to that hard truth). [Update: or as Tim notes in the comments, ponder the history of love as the enemy of sound marriage -- as in Tim's on-target example of the source of tragedy in Romeo and Juliet.]
I could note that Wallace Stevens was an insurance man, William Carlos Williams a doctor, and that poet laureate of anti-Semitism, the man whose poetry was better than his cause, T. S. Eliot, was a banker. And yet somehow these men, fulfilling their utilitarian obligations within the brutal feedback mechanism that is the market, somehow managed to write a lick or two more imaginatively and poetically than one Mr. David Brooks, himself a prosodic peddlar of easy nostalgia and misremembered pasts.
But why bother, when Brooks’ true sin in this passage is his attempt to neuter the Boss. I mean, Bruce Springsteen can surely write as romantic a ballad as anyone… but he’s also written this:
And this:
And, if you really want to get your Jersey groove on, this:
(and if you think this one’s a paean to self sacrifice and selfless commitment, you might want to ponder the concept of fever in the context of love. Just sayin.)
Seriously, Mr. Brooks.
Dude.
Trust me on this. There is nothing more painful than watching an aging never-cool guy — long past the need for coolth — trying to be catch the wave just once in life.
Which means, right here and right now: Don’t go bandying your Bruce at me.
I’ll be speaking about what Isaac Newton’s work as a currency cop, investigator and prosecutor can tell us about the scientific revolution as lived experience, and not just as some disembodied sequence of ideas and discoveries.
Reckless finance; seventeenth century sex toys; the experimental method and more. If you are in the neighborhood of 201 East Bridge on the Caltech campus tomorrow at 4 p.m., stop on by.
Getting my orders as usual from GOS, specifically Bill in Portland Maine, I follow BiPM’s link to this video:
I don’t think I need for this blog’s readership to talk about the biology of sex and sexuality. I don’t think I need talk about the dangers of simple minded appeals to what I think of as cottage evolutionary arguments (see this post by PZ Myers for a dissection of just such arguments.) I don’t think that the folks who cluster around this little campfire need a lecture about the dangers of universalizing particular individual claims of religious belief or obligation.
But I do think it is important — surpassingly so — to articulate in as simple and as direct terms as possible why same-sex marriage matters to the entire American polity. That is because if the idea of inalienable rights has any meaning, rights must be rights. Which is what Paul Roeddicker is saying above.
…well, not formally so, but I think what follows could well fall into the bounds of an argument constructed to the requirements of informal discourse — and what could be more devoid of formality than this here blog?
Some might say that the nature of those defenses confirms the original proposition: to compare a public statement that a given media organization is biased is obviously not the same thing as constructed and concealing an enemies list of people and organizations targeted for disruption and retribution.*
The former is a “we report, you decide” moment; the second is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Further support for this kind of dispositive dismissal of Fox’s defense comes from a couple of very recent media tempests, most notably the false claim that Fox was singled out for exclusion from an administration media event, credulously picked up by other media outlets.
But all of this is inferential. After all, it’s just possible, I suppose, that Fox’s pattern of talking points – driven coverage slanted in favor of one party and against the current administration is simply the result of meticulous news gathering producing the patterns presented as news on Fox.
So, given that a theme of this blog is that the point of understanding a bit about science is to help one think about what’s going on around us, I decided to see if I could find some empirical measures to test the claim that Fox is not truly a news gathering institution.
So, in my ongoing tribute to Warner Wolf, let’s go to the videotape (or teh Google, as we now all bow to the sovereign of the intertubes).
How can we determine whether or not Fox is a news organization? Let’s try a version of the what in arithmetic would be called the transitive property. If we can agree on the notion that some other entity nominally comparable to Fox or two are real news services, then we can see how well Fox matches up with them. If Fox and its competitors are recognizably similar as institutions, then we can say that just as if a = b and b= c, then a= c, Fox is a real news enterprise. If not, not.**
So let’s see, shall we?
According to Journalism.org’s latest review of the state of cable news, (from which most of the figures below have been drawn, unless othewise linked) Fox lags behind CNN and ahead of MSNBC in the raw calculation of budget for news — though with the major caveat that MSNBC uses the news-gathering apparatus of its sister organization, NBC News as its major source of journalism. In what follows I’ll focus on the CNN vs. Fox comparison almost exclusively.
CNN had in 2008 the highest budget of the cable nets, coming in at 686 million and change.
Fox’s total was 521 million and change: notably less, but still substantial.
CNN’s staff totaled about 4,000 last year.
Fox’s US staff was 1200, and while I could not readily find Fox’s overseas’ totals, these matter less than one might imagine, for reasons to be explained below.
For a broad comparison, NBC News’ staffing total, as of the most recent round of cuts, is somewhere in the neighborhood, probably slightly below 6,000.
So: in budget terms Fox is a competitor, though not the leader, but it’s staffing totals hint at a different story. Remember that news gathering is a labor intensive business — you need producers and associate producer/reporters to actually find out stuff that can make it on air — and the fact that Fox has one third the numbers of its rival CNN is suggestive.
Dig a little deeper, though, and the suggestion becomes a little more solid.
Back at Journalist.org, the budget totals get broken down into two broad categories: programming and general/administration. These aren’t terribly informative categories, but let’s just look at the breakdown.
Fox spends 2/3rds of its budget on programming, about 316 million, leaving only 156 million for everything else.
CNN flips that ratio, almost, spending 273 million on programming and 380 million on G/A.***
Why does this matter? Because, while it is difficult — impossible really — to get into the weeds of either CNN or Fox’s detailed spending priorities with this kind of top level numbers, broadly speaking, programming is not news gathering.
What it certainly covers is the cost of the on-air talent and the production of the stuff you see on screen. And the disparity in spending totals and staffing priorities reflected in the CNN vs. Fox comparison reveals both a lingering effect of the history of each network, and the blunt fact that Fox is in at least one crucial way different from CNN.
The history: CNN as it was first conceived and executed by Ted Turner and his team followed the strategy of emphasizing the brand and the product and not personalities. No one anchor or on-air personality was supposed to be seen as the face of the network; no one was to have the power of a Chronkite or a Jennings.
That’s changed, somewhat, obviously, with a prime time lineup including the likes of Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs, and Larry King. These, however loathesome (and yes, I’m looking at you, Lou), are stars and are paid accordingly, costs attributed to the programming in CNN’s cost structure.
But the daytime lineup and the bulk of the news programming (as opposed to the talk/opining side of CNN), is not so personality driven, and the cost of on-air talent follows that relative (and deliberate) lack of star power. From 9-4 on weekdays, the net offers programming under a single title — “CNN Newsroom” — with multiple hosts, and a corresponding and house-culturally appropriate emphasis on the brand and the activity. Follow that up with three more hours of “The Situation Room” and precede it by three hours of “American Morning” and you get the idea.
Fox, by contrast, emphasizes its on air talent throughout its schedule. Fox shows with the names of the hosts attached start at 1 p.m. and continue with reruns through till the 6 a.m. debut of “Fox and Friends.” It’s signature hosts command formidable salaries. Bill O’Reilly, for example, is estimated to take in an approximate 10 million dollars a year under his latest Fox contract.
Whatever you think of O’Reilly, that is not an outlandish number by the outlandish standards of media star salaries. Contrast that with Jay Leno’s reported numbers at the end of his Tonight Show run: a cool 27 million; or perhaps a more direct comparison would be to Katie Couric’s salary of approximately 15 million.
But if O’Reilly’s take-home and that of his fellow Fox headliners is in line with the prices networks are willing to pay for ratings success and advertiser interest, such sums still put an enormous amount of pressure on the total budget for a news operation. Something has to give.
Just as one last illustration of the point. When NBC recently cut about 5 percent of its news division staff — 300 people, it tried to whack those least likely to affect its capacity to gather news. Dateline, a magazine program, got hammered — but the rest of the news division was to be left mostly alone. Expensive talent was let go to preserve producer jobs — and those producers are the front line journalists in TV news.
At Fox, by contrast, its budget priorities emphasize on-air vs the nuts and bolts of actually gathering news. This is where those staffing numbers begin to take shape. Why, with 70% of the budget does Fox only deploy on the order of 1/3 the staff CNN does?
Answer number one is what is already obvious in the disparity in the programming expenditures of the two nets: Fox has a more expansive on-air operation than CNN does. It relies on stars, and it has a very high standard (in cable terms) of production values on set — another expensive programming choice.
And the corollary of that is that the actual work of finding the news counts for less…with the confirmation coming directly from one of the few available direct measures of new gathering capacity, the number of bureaus a network supports.
Fox has been increasing its bureau coverage — as of 2008, it maintained 17 bureaus, up from 12 in 2007.
CNN, by contrast, staffs 46 bureaus, up ten from 2007.
Crucially, Fox maintains a risible international presence: just six overseas offices with none in Latin America or Africa, just one in Asia — and that Hong Kong, and not Beijing or Tokyo,or Delhi, or Islamabad –only one in the Middle East (Jerusalem, and not Baghdad or Tehran), to accompany the usual suspects in Europe — London, Paris, Rome and Moscow.
Pitiful.
Even little, last place MSNBC does better, and CNN completely rolls up the pretender: five bureaus in Latin America, seven in Europe, including Istanbul, which geographically straddles the line between that continent and Asia, six in the Middle East…and you get the picture.
So, to wind this up. Is Fox News a news organization with sizzle? Or is it sizzle in drag as a journalistic operation.
And the answer is that with some exceptions, (I’m looking at you, Shep Smith) Fox is not a news producing organization. I wouldn’t call it talk radio either, pace the President.
Rather, Fox News is best understood as an entertainment service. The way it spends its money is the way that entertainment divisions of networks parcel out the bucks.
They pay for high-profile, highly rated on-air talent. They dress up that talent in the sets that look like a news operation — but then, so does Jon Stewart, so does Stephen Colbert, (hell, so did Lou Grant). They do hire some folks to dig up stories, and they broadcast their work in the quietest moments of the day…but that’s a relatively low cost trick to apply the costuming of news to an operation designed mostly to engage the emotions of their audience, and not to inform them — which is, of course, the classic dividing line (honored often in the breach, to be sure) between entertainment and news.
But when it gets down to where they actually put the bulk of its resources, Fox News behaves strikingly different from CNN and broadcast network news divisions.
They don’t put in the hours, the dollars or the people to do what they claim to do. They decide (what to cover)…but they do not report, at least with nothing like the level of effortof their competitors.
So, to the proposition that Fox News is not a news organization: it has been shown that Fox News differs substantially from CNN in its journalistic efforts.
As CNN generally regarded is a news organization, then the fact that Fox does not compare with its rival demonstrates that it is not a conventional journalistic operation.
That which to be proved has been demonstrated…or more briefly …
Q.E.D.
Update: There is, of course, a reason that Fox has opted for the entertainment model over the news organization approach. It works.
*Just in case you were wondering about what that distinction means in practice: Obama and his aides say they take extra precautions when dealing with Fox, viewing them as an advocacy outlet for their political opponents. Nixon’s men wanted to unleash the IRS (and CIA-trained burglers) on those that offended them. What part of that difference is hard to understand.
**And yes, I do understand that applying the transitive property to objects like news operations, putative or otherwise, contains pitfalls not found in arithmetic. Just havin’ some fun, y’all; don’t get too literal on me here.
***These numbers don’t match the above totals because they reflect the original budget plans for 2008, and the totals above reflect actual expenditures; I don’t have access to the updated breakdown, but the points that follow track the decision making of the networks, and these budget intentions contain the decision makers priorities.
Image: Norman Rockwell, “Fact & Fiction,” cover illustration for Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper, vol. 124, no. 3201, 11 January 1917
Jim Leffert, a fellow member of perhaps the most broad-spectrum Jewish congregation in existence, Harvard Hillel’s Worship and Study Minyan, reads more than almost anyone I can think of, and writes about his voracious and small “c” catholic habit for the benefit of that congregation and on GoodReads. His latest is below. Winter’s coming…stock up on books. (And no, I didn’t post this because of the mention in passing of my latest book below, but mention it he does, for which my thanks.)
If I were to weigh in, I’d add that I fully share Jim’s enthusiasm for Stone’s Trial of Socrates — perhaps more than fully, given that I didn’t feel the book slowed down at all; I found it gripping throughout. I haven’t read the new Ian Pears, but I think I was somewhat less caught up in his Instance of the Fingerpost than Jim was. Reading his comments below, though, makes me think I should take a second look. And my thanks to Jim for alerting me to the Sister Pelagia stories. I’d never heard of them, but they sound like the kind of haute beach reading I truly love.
Anyway — the point of this all is to celebrate the book any which way we can, so read, then read.
So you think that Socrates is deservedly one of civilization’s culture heroes for his pioneering use of the dialectic method in philosophy and for being a martyr for philosophic inquiry when he ran afoul of the Athens city fathers, who sentenced him to death by swallowing hemlock? I.F. Stone doesn’t think so, and in this book he lays out evidence to explain why the democratic government of Athens tried and executed him. Stone may not excuse the decision to execute Socrates but he makes a case for why it happened.
Analyzing a variety of ancient sources, he demonstrates that Socrates had great contempt for Athens’ democratic form of government and continually ridiculed it to his young tutees; energetically advocated an “enlightened” rule by autocratic dictators; did little or nothing to speak out against or stand up against the dictatorial regimes that periodically took over Athens; and points out that his tutees, who were all from the aristocratic class, included two of the main dictators.
Stone also argues that had Socrates wished to, he could have persuaded the jury to give him a lesser punishment. Instead, because Socrates wanted to die, he baited the jury and goaded them into imposing this unusually severe sentence. Stone comes out swinging on the first page of this book and never lets up. He fires away: Socrates loved to poke holes in others’ reasoning to make them look stupid but did not offer a viable alternative to others’ thinking; furthermore, he didn’t take his wife and children’s well-being into consideration when he goaded his captors into making him kick the bucket. The book moves a little slowly in some places, but all in all, it offers an enlightening analysis of Greek philosophy, politics, literature, political history, and legal practices as he explicates the most memorable legal case of the 5th century B.C.E.
Aviva Kempner’s fine documentary about Gertrude Berg, titled “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg”, led me to check out Berg’s 1961 memoir. According to Kempner, Berg was an important culture hero who translated the immigrant Jewish experience into a prime time nationwide radio and later television show that lasted a quarter of a century. A creative force acknowledged as the inventor of the sitcom, Berg conceived the characters, hired the actors, and wrote every episode.
Molly and Me is a charming, entertaining, and at times poignant portrait of Berg’s immigrant family’s struggles and strivings (sort of an “All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown”), her experiences growing up at her family’s Catskills hotel, and her entry into and life in show business. Unfortunately, about 60 pages before the end, the book runs out of steam. By now, she is a famous and accomplished performer and the only suspense she offers is how much will she worry and sweat and, by her own account, torment the people around her as opening night approaches, before finding out that she is again triumphant.
It turns out that the real reason that the book sags is that Berg omits the heartbreaking story of how the blacklist claimed her co-star, Philip Loeb and led eventually to the demise of her show, despite Berg’s efforts to protect him and keep the show going. For this story, you’ll have to go to Kempner’s fine film, to Glenn Smith’s biography of Berg, or to the thinly fictionalized account offered in the film The Front, in which Loeb’s best friend Zero Mostel portrays a character based on him.
With The Instance of the Fingerpost, Pears created a new kind of masterwork—a historical novel constructed intricately to work like clockwork, which glides sequentially from one subjective narrator to another, so that each section unveils new explanations that upend the previous narrator’s picture of the characters’ motivations and actions . In addition, this remarkable novel draws the reader deep into 17th century England’s skullduggery and political and geopolitical machinations. A subsequent novel, The Dream of Scipio, presented three stories, spanning 15 centuries. Continuously inter-cutting from one story to another, that book intertwined the three human dramas as it brought to life the political and ideological backdrop of each story and era.
Pears’ latest novel, Stone’s Fall, is as ambitious as An Instance of the Fingerpost. Three sequential sections, each with a different narrator, piece together a story that continues from 1867 until 1910 (the sections are in reverse chronological order). The mystery to be explored (as introduced years later in the early 1950’s) is why British titan of industry John Stone plummeted from the window of his town home in 1909. Was it an accident? Suicide? Was he pushed? Stone’s alluring and mysterious widow hires a crime reporter from a London newspaper not to solve this mystery, but rather to tie up a serious loose end that is critical for unblocking the disposition of Stone’s estate. The reporter is seriously mesmerized by the widow (leading me to wonder at times if the book was going to turn out to be a remake of The French Lieutenant’s Woman), but the twists and turns of their relationship merely set off the labyrinthine plot.
As if A Tale of Two Cities was insufficient, Pears gives us three—London, Paris, and Venice–plus side visits to the provinces. The book is a rich brew that includes not only the characters’ personal dramas, but also crises in the British and European financial system (in this respect, the book is a sequel to Tom Levenson’s Newton and the Counterfeiter), industrial and technological history of the late 19th and early 20th century military industrial complex (a la Richard Powers), geopolitical machinations, scandal, skullduggery, and many other ingredients that convey a sense of time and place. At times, the characters go into overdrive in order to an ending that left me disappointed, but Stone’s Fall is an absorbing and rewarding read nonetheless.
Boris Akunin (the pseudonym of Georgian writer Grigory Chkhartishvili) has written 11 detective novels, taking place in the 19th century, which feature Russian secret agent and detective Erast Fandourin. Five of these novels have appeared in English. The present book is the third volume in a more recent series that takes place in the waning years of the Russian Empire—around 1910—and that feature an inquisitive and adventurous nun, Sister Pelagia, as the hero.
Having missed the first two installments, I am unaware of the extraordinary and tragic events that led young Polina Andreevna to take up the habit and retire to a convent in rural Zavolzhsk by the Volga River, where she serves as headmistress for the local school. In this book, however, Sister Pelagia soon leaves the monastery and travels far afield, as she seeks to solve the murder of a man believed to be Manuila, a charismatic Russian preacher and founder of a sect of Russians who want to live like Jews and travel to the Holy Land. Manuila is despised both by xenophobic and anti-Semitic elements
in Russia and by the established Jewish religious community, but the reasons for his attempted assassination are unclear. When the murdered man turns out to be a sect member who was posing as Manuila for security reasons, Sister Pelagia resolves to find the real Manuila in order to protect him from harm and to resolve the mystery of who is after him. SisterPelagia is also vexed by a vision that she has involving a cave and a red cockerel.
Sister Pelagia’s ally in her detective efforts is Matvei Bentsionovich Berdichevsky, a public prosecutor who is himself an assimilated Jew who has converted to Russian Orthodoxy. Berdichevsky’s zeal to get to the bottom of this mystery is amplified by his infatuation with Sister Pelagia. As Berdichevsky pursues his leads deep into the heart of reactionary governmental and quasi-governmental circles, we encounter the political convulsions and intrigues of the time, and particularly the anti-Semitic hostility that boiled over periodically into pogroms and later, into the infamous Beiliss blood libel trial (as detailed in Maurice Samuel’s fine book, Blood Accusation). While Berdichevsky investigates in Zhitomir and St. Petersburg, Sister Pelagia, forced to flee Russia, travels to the Holy Land, where she encounters a group of Zionist Halutzim, a Palestinian Arab guide, a group of homosexuals who are re-establishing Sodom with the help of an American millionaire, and the assassin, who is determined to eliminate her and Manuila.
I was impressed by Akunin’s extensive use of material from Jewish sources throughout the story. The twists and turns of the tale are truly impressive, and one may find humor, pathos, rationalistic ratiocination, political intrigue, and spiritual mysteries nicely brought together.
Jim Leffert is a psychologist who practices in Cambridge and Framingham, Massachusetts.
Star studded crowd. Gov. Patrick, Sen. Kerry, and local congressman Mike Capuano are here.
12:45: Obama takes the podium. Wild applause. This is Obama country.
First words: Thank you MIT!
In joke: ”I’ll be here a while. I understand a bunch of engineering students have put my motorcade on top of Building Ten.
Reference image:
12:49: Politician shout outs are now over. Now the president is touting all the lovely things being done at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Makes the link to the notion of Americans as innovators willing to take risks on projects that might fail — and on the US as a place willing to support such efforts.
References Lincoln’s move during the Civil War to establish Land Grant Colleges; Roosevelt’s signing of the GI bill; after Sputnik, US invests in space technology….
So, the claim is being made that we have always been about innovation; that ambition is “in our DNA” — a phrase I understand and loathe.
But now — the economic challenges are huge. ”Economy in which we all share opportunity is one in which we all share crisis.” Said in context of globalized economy.
Says: Energy that powers our economy also undreminse our security and threatens our planet”
12:53 Nation that gets to clean energy wins the next economic revolution “I want America to be that nation.” (applause)
That’s why, he says, the stimulus act has more clean energy funding than ever appropriated before…summarizes what the 89 billion bucks in the stimulus packae will go to fund.
Talks about a Massachusetts project — a test facility for wind turbine blades. It is notable that Obama so readily digs at least one layer down into the technical details; its a rhetorically powerful way to claim not just support for a good cause, but the real value of that cause, the notion that we are spending cash on things that matter. Smart guy, I’ve heard.
Many props to Governor Patrick — local Mass politics are a subtext here.
12:59: Pivot to the comprehensive legislation we need and discussing the implications of Kerry’s climate change bill. Mentions cleaner fossil fuels; biofuels, nuclear, wind, waves and sun.
Saying that there is a long, planned, intelligible path from an economy powered by fossil fuel dependence/carbon pollution threats to one that is sustainable; not making the claim that we can get there in one swoop.
Talks about DOD and business leaders and others coming round to the notion that global warming and dependence on fossil fuels is a national security and economic threat…making the case for the necessity, not merely the desirability of action.
Again, it’s an interesting strategy rhetorically; it seems to me that he is working hard to box in opponents to a smaller and less defensible position. I hope it works.
He says explicitly that the opponents are being marginalized — but that they will fight harder as we get closer to a bill.
“They will say that we are destroying our eocnomy…when it is”what we got now that’s threatening it.
“We’re going to have to work on those folks. But there is a more dangerous myth — because we are all complicit in it.”
That there is nothing we can do “it’s pessimism” …that politics are broken etc…
1:01: That implies we can’t solve problems any more, says POTUS, and he knows that can’t be true….we’ve seen it at MIT and elsewhere…we’ve done it before (electricity) etc.
Writing teacher here. This is an ugly phrase: of innovators “they will lead us in the future as they have done so in the past.”
Can’t quite get my head around that one.
Ends with a pep paragraph…we can do this…we’re Americans, and we’re damn good at this kind of thing.
Last thoughts from your blogger:
He’s a good speaker, which we knew. He’s smart as hell, which we also knew. He’s a political process man. This had no new initiatives or proposals in it, nor even a central, strong outline of how the specific actions discussed add up to the path to a sustainable energy future some decades out.
Rather, this speech seemed more or less to lay down a marker: we’ve got some things going…we need now to pass the next piece of legislation — Kerry’s cap and trade plus other stuff bill is the one the President specifically referenced, along with the House bill already passed.
The praise for the various specific projects and research initiatives were designed to answer critics who say that we can’t escape fossil fuel use Most of the speech by running time was devoted to various general and specific paeans to the capacity of Americans to get this part of the job done.
Given that everybody, and especially me, are critics, here’s what I thought the speeh missed most: I wanted to hear in this context a real and dire description of what failure here would mean, not just for the environment, but for the economy and safety of US citizens en masse and individually.
That is — I think it’s pretty well established that projecting the dire consquences of a 4 degree warming is still a hard thing to grasp (though this map is a good place to start). But if you talk about the cost of wars, or even merely of the budget year over year for Centcom…if you talk about clean energy jobs lost to other nations even now (see e.g. this story on the Chinese vs. American economic edge in solar energy products.)…if you talk about the lives lost here at home through the pollution being caused now by our current energy use pattern (18,o00 a year according to this report, about the same number as homicides for the last year I could pull the data quickly. (See this CDC fact sheet and click through to the PDF listed as the source for the summary numbers.)…if you go after the harm we suffer now through our dependence on our current energy mix, then the urgency for change and the willingness to assume risk in the service of that change will go up.
To be fair: he did very clearly make the case that powerful interests in this area, like DOD, understand the implications of inaction and now favor significant energy policy change. But he didn’t bring the reasons why home and down to the you and me level as sharply as I would have liked.
President Obama has the best pulpit in the world to preach this. He has the right temperament too, by which I mean not his famous cool, but his genuine optimism, his sense that no problem is too hard for us to tackle. That side of him was on display in full measure today, and I liked it. But I think he needs to light more of a fire under us (sorry) on the other side, to remind us the most dangerous option we have right now is to stand pat.
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Image: Luis Ricardo Falero, “
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