The Scales Fall From my Eyes
Okay, I give in. I’ve had a conversion experience. I’ve recognized the error of my ways. All these people who have been telling me what a horrible elitist I am have worn me down. I’m convinced. It’s true, I am an elitist, and that makes me a terrible person, so I have to stop. Okay. I’ll stop. I’ll become a better person. I won’t like anything that is not extremely popular, and I won’t dislike anything that is extremely popular. (God, for instance.) I won’t do anything that lots of people don’t do, and I won’t refrain from doing anything that lots of people do. I’ll become as humble and modest and unassertive as the people who tell me what a horrible elitist I am – and they are very modest and humble and unassertive indeed, and never do anything at all that a majority of their fellow humans don’t also do. From this moment I shall take such people as my role model, and be just like them.
So the first thing I have to do – even before I give away all my books and replace them with different ones (but perhaps I shouldn’t give them away? Perhaps that would only be passing the corruption on to other people, encouraging them to be elitist in my place? Perhaps I should simply throw them all in the bin?) – is stop making judgments between good and bad. Because that’s where the harm lies, I’m told. That’s where it gets me, that’s what makes an elitist a terrible person – it’s this business of making judgments. At least in aesthetic matters, and the like. In areas where judgments can’t be grounded. It’s okay (I take it) to say one hammer is better than another, because you can show that it does the job better (pounding the nail in, breaking the window, whatever). But you can’t say one poem or play or song or concerto is better than another because none of those things can pound nails or break windows – you can’t show a job that a good one can do better than a bad one, therefore when you say one is better than another you’re just hand-waving. Except you’re not just hand-waving, it’s worse than that, and that’s where the terrible person thing comes in. I’m told.
Here’s how the argument goes, if I understand it correctly. Judgments of quality in aesthetic matters cannot be grounded, therefore they are simply rhetoric – there is nothing else they can be; therefore they are necessarily power plays. So, if that’s right, every time I say or even think that, say, Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ or Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is better as poetry than, say, Pinter’s anti-war poem, I’m making a power play and nothing else.
Now, I’ll admit, I resisted that idea at first. I thought it was wrong. In fact I was sure it was, because, if nothing else, of my own inner experience of the matter. Naturally that can’t be conclusive to anyone else, on account of how my mind is my mind and not anyone else’s, but it was convincing to me. My sense of the difference between poetry I think good and poetry I don’t think good doesn’t feel like a power play, it feels like something to do with thinking about the poetry as poetry. The truth is, it seemed to me that the act of telling me that my opinions are elitist power plays itself looked far more like a power play than my opinions do. In fact it kind of felt like a power play in the same way that a full-scale invasion by an army would, or a loud knock on the door at 3 a.m. followed by shouts of ‘Police! Open up!’ would. I felt quite skeptical that my mere opinions or reading habits could have quite the same effect.
But that was then. As I say, I’ve had a conversion experience. I’ve realized that all this resistance and disbelief of mine is just a sign of how thoroughly corrupt all my thinking is. I’m considering entering a convent. But in the meantime there is much that I can do, starting, as I said, with ceasing to make judgments between good and bad.
Of course, this will result in something of a change in the nature of B&W. I’ve realized it will mean I’ll have to stop writing these N&Cs, for one thing. That may seem a little drastic, but it’s not – because what I’ve realized is that it is quite impossible to write at all without constantly making an endless series of tiny imperceptible sub-aware judgments of quality. It’s obvious if you think about it. I mean, what else am I doing every time I use one word rather than another? Eh? I’m making a judgment! Oh, shit! Think of it! With every single word I type, I’m rejecting tens of thousands of other words I don’t write! Godalmighty – why have I never thought of this before? I’m so ashamed. All those hurt feelings, all those tens of thousands of words turning sobbing to their pillows every single time I type a word. Oh noooo – I’m so sorry guys. I’ll stop. I’ll just finish this one and then I’ll stop.
And the words are just the beginning. There are ideas, thoughts, links; there’s organization, paragraph breaks, punctuation. One judgment after another. So you can see: N&C is quite impossible. And then News links will be different, because I will have to just pick them at random. And Articles will be different, because I won’t read them, I’ll just accept everything sight unseen, and of course I won’t do any editing or proofreading, because what does that involve other than judgments? Well I suppose I could proofread, because there are some rules one can follow. That needn’t be entirely subjective. But could I do it in a purely objective way? Could I do it without any element of judgment (and thus, remember, power play) creeping in? I’m not at all sure. Especially since I now realize I’m an almost insanely judgmental person. No, it’s too risky, I can’t proofread, and I certainly can’t edit. So Articles will just be whatever turns up in the Inbox. In Focus – I think I’d better just delete the whole of In Focus, because it’s completely corrupt, and I don’t see how I could do any new ones.
And then there’s other editing work I do, which is also suffused with aesthetic judgments. I guess I’ll have to stop doing that too. And as for writing books – ! Well it’s obvious how hopeless that is. Okay…let’s see. I could be a janitor (and have in the past, so that’s cool). I could do yard work. No gardening, because that’s full of aesthetic judgments too, but I could cut grass. There are a lot of lawn-service outfits around here, I’ll just try one of them.
I’m becoming less terrible already, I think. Hope you guys don’t mind too much about the changes to B&W. I’ll do it after work – will be much quicker now, without all that judging to do.
So, you’re going to become one of the infinite monkeys?
Perhaps we need the “Elitists” webring…
I’ve been trying to wean my students off what I call “IMHOitis”–that is, the desperate attempt to forestall all criticism of one’s own opinions by loudly advertising that, well, they’re one’s own opinions. If it’s just your opinion, why on earth should I (or anyone else) care?
But then, I’m a young fogey.
One of the infinite blindfolded monkeys. I don’t want to make this too easy.
Maybe that’s what I should say I am – a fogey. Maybe that would serve to split the difference between ‘You’re an elitist’ and ‘Am not’.
Miriam – I understand that “in my opinion” can be a strategy to preemptively defuse emotional responses to a controversial point, and avoid getting sucked into a more agressive level of argument. A kind of tactical humility. It can suggest open-mindedness – it doesn’t necessarily suggest “anything goes, all is relative”.
However, that strategy doesn’t necessarily work in all circumstances. When I said to someone recently “I’m just putting forward my opinion – don’t I have a right to have that opinion?”, they said, in effect, “No, you most certainly don’t have a right to that opinion, because it causes you to act in an irresponsible way”.
“It’s okay (I take it) to say one hammer is better than another, because you can show that it does the job better (pounding the nail in, breaking the window, whatever). But you can’t say one poem or play or song or concerto is better than another because none of those things can pound nails or break windows…therefore when you say one is better than another you’re just hand-waving.”
See, this gets at the problem I have with aesthetic relativism. Many, if not most aesthetic relativists will grant you that certain works of art accomplish certain things well. They’ll grant that Jane Austen offers a sophisticated, nuanced perspective on ethics and society. They’ll further grant that this quality makes it useful for cultivating higher order thinking, ethical reflection and the like. They just won’t grant you that you’re entitled to conclude that any of these things make the novel “good” in any defensible sense.
So according to them, we can say that Austen is well-crafted, sophisticated, ethically rich, and can justifiably defend its usefulness for developing thinking and reflection – we just can’t say it’s “good.” How reasonable a stance is this? If the novel’s accomplishments correspond to qualities regarded as human values, we seem to have some reason to conclude that there is something good about them.
Of course, this is the point at which aesthetic relativists who are also ethical relativists will jump ship, since they don’t thing ethics can be grounded either. But I think “grounding’ is a weasel word – it’s a linguistic way of commiting the slippery slope fallacy. In ethics as in aesthetics, there can be good reasons for arguing certain positions without having to depend on “absolute” hierarchies of good and bad.
Phil
‘In ethics as in aesthetics, there can be good reasons for arguing certain positions without having to depend on “absolute” hierarchies of good and bad.”‘
Well that’s what I keep trying to argue. I hadn’t thought of calling ‘grounding’ a weasel word – I wish I had, since the argument was with someone who claims he’s won the argument no matter what. The way I kept putting it was that yes, granted, it can’t be grounded in the sense that it’s a human judgment, and is meaningful only to humans – but that humans can still say useful (interesting etc) things about it inside that box. That’s really quite a big box, so I don’t see why that’s not good enough for human purposes.
Well, sure, IMHO can be a way of forestalling aggression, and we’ve all used it that way. And there are times when it’s appropriate to signal that you don’t intend your opinion to carry argumentative weight. I’ve got an opinion about opera–namely, that I don’t like it–but that’s an opinion without any real authority: I don’t like opera because it’s an acquired taste that I’ve never spent any real time trying to acquire, and so there’s no reason why a genuine opera-lover with a real understanding of the form should take my opinion seriously. At all. (And this, quite frankly, is the sort of opinion that I wouldn’t even bother bringing into a discussion, unless explicitly asked. I’d much rather learn by listening to someone who understands opera.)
However, my students tend to use IMHO as a means of fencing off their comments, which is a different issue altogether, I think.
If you’re typing blindfolded, aren’t you just waving your hands? And isn’t that part of the judgemental thing?
Oh rats, I guess so. Hand waving no matter what I do. I can’t win.
Miriam and Robin, you think the IMHO thing might be a US mannerism? I bet it is. Kind of like ‘like’ – that’s a sort of fencer off too – oh and even more, the rising inflection thing? That’s very US? They don’t do it in the UK? And it’s so maddening? I know grown ups who do it and they sound so absurd? As if they need you to reassure them after every sentence they utter?
“The way I kept putting it was that yes, granted, it can’t be grounded in the sense that it’s a human judgment, and is meaningful only to humans – but that humans can still say useful (interesting etc) things about it inside that box. That’s really quite a big box, so I don’t see why that’s not good enough for human purposes.”
Right, there are many things that are only part of the human social world, including not only art but also ethics and politics. The political example might be an interesting one to think about. Politics can’t be said to exist anywhere but in human society, and political issues tend to resist final and absolute resolution. But it would be fallacious to therefore conclude that all political ideas are equal, since some are clearly uninformed or naive or just plan dumb. So it’s not a choice between pure relativism or absolutism, despite the false clarity that words like “grounding” tend to convey.
Simon Blacburn says some interesting things about these issues in “Think,” but I really need to go fetch that book from the basement before attempting a summary of his ideas.
Phil
Oh, dear–when I was adjuncting at Anonymous Research I, a visiting Englishman actually wrote some doggerel about the whole “like” thing. “Kind of” got in there too. I’ll try to reconstruct it:
Like you I know what I kind of like like
And I kind of like like like you;
Do you kind of like know what I’m trying to say?
Do you kind of like like me too?
Like?
There. Isn’t it a relief to cast off your oppressive elitism, Ophelia? Go thou and read Jackie Collins.
I have a solution: be an unrepentant elitist like me. :)