Jon Cogburn's Blog

The Cramps - Tear It Up

Nun for you!

Another bad dream last night.

In this one I was called before the House Unamerican Activities Committee and subjected to hours of abuse by angry Representatives. Instead of accusing me of being a secret communist though, they accused me of being a nun.

"Are you now or have you ever been a nun? Are you aware of any secret nun agents who have infiltrated philosophy departments in the United States?" Etc. Etc. They were very angry.

I tried my hardest to convince them. I pointed out that I wasn't Catholic, and that my lifestyle made it clear I'd never taken vows of poverty, chastity, or obedience. But nothing convinced them. A drunk Republican yelled at me that even if that was true it would only establish that I was not Dominican (the other orders apparently take different vows). I explained that if I lived according to "papal enclosure" rules I wouldn't be able to attend academic conferences (though again, many nuns don't live according to those rules). I tried to explain the difference between a "nun" and a "religious sister"  (the kind of vow one takes and the focus of good works), but nothing I did established my innocence in front of the United States government.

In fact non-ignorance always made this kind of thing worse; the less illiterate I proved myself to be, the more it convinced them that I was a nun or some kind of nun secret agent. How could somebody possibly know this stuff if they weren't really a nun?

And clearly, there was something wrong with me. Why wasn't my head filled with sports and reality television trivia?

At the apex of the dream I absolutely cracked. It began with the admission that, like nuns, I prayed for peace (the drunk Republicans screamed and banged their shoes on their table at this) and for the poor. Then it just snowballed with me admitting more and more nunish things I did until it reached the point where I gave them names of several academics I know who are or had been secret nuns. I was crying in the dream, and in the underdetermined way of all dreams, it wasn't clear whether I really was a secret nun and naming my comrades, or whether I was just naming names of innocent people so that I myself wouldn't face jail time and blacklisting. And I don't know which would have been worse. . .

Will the people I named now have the same nightmare as a result? Will they get called in front of the committee and threatened until they crack and name names? What if some of them don't crack? Will they then have dreams of being ostracized, fired, and jailed? Will an Edward R. Murrow come to their defense and convince the good citizens of Morpheus' American Empire that the real enemy is us, our asinine Representatives who accuse good men and women of being nuns without any evidence? Or are there to be no more Murrows, and we are all now damned to a world of dreams where the worst of us can gain power and money by exploiting unfounded, nebulous fears and the resentment of the ignorant? I shudder.

wisdom from April, 2002

David

By the rivers of Babylon we sat mourning and weeping when we remembered Zion.
 
On the poplars of that land we hung up our harps.
 
There our captors asked us for the words of a song; Our tormentors, for a joyful song: "Sing for us a song of Zion!"
 
But how could we sing a song of the LORD in a foreign land?
 
If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither.
 
May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you, If I do not exalt Jerusalem beyond all my delights.
 
Remember, LORD, against Edom that day at Jerusalem. They said: "Level it, level it down to its foundations!"
 
Fair Babylon, you destroyer, happy those who pay you back the evil you have done us!
 
Happy those who seize your children and smash them against a rock.

Gandhi
Gandhi
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

Tolstoy

It was not long after joining the Church that I started to learn that what I liked most about the Christian faith was not at all important to the Church fathers. What is most important in Church teaching is the Church itself and how we should act in church meetings. At first I thought, "What of it? The Church is not against love and all that goes with it. I do not like all of the added talk about itself and all of the teaching about how important meetings are, but it does not hurt anyone."

Yet the longer I tried to follow the Church, the more I learned that what the Church was teaching really did hurt people very much. The Church did not take a stand against war, killing prisoners, or cruel actions against small groups who were different from most other people in the country. The sad truth is that the Church encouraged all of these things and was at times the leading force behind them.

I could see that something was wrong, but for some time I was confused, because the Church would always say that it agreed with the teachings of Christ. It would, from time to time, talk about showing love and being humble and all the other things that Christ taught; but it did so in such a way that always left me feeling it did not really believe these things were important. I was not happy with what it was saying.

. . . .What I needed was a life built on the truths in the teachings of Christ; but I could not find that in the Church. The rules for life that I learned from the Church were very opposite to the rules Christ gave me. What I learned in the Church was a lot of rules about religion, and very little about the Christian life that Christ talked about.

On things like war and how to act toward people from other religions, the church always ended up on the side of the very things that Christ was against. With their lips they talked of being humble, not judging, forgiving and loving others, and giving up everything for Christ; but in their actions it seemed that they were moving in the opposite direction.

. . . .Is this really what Christ wanted? The answer had to be in the Gospels themselves. So I read them… again and again. Out of them all, I found that the best part was when Jesus preached to his followers from the top of a hill, in Matthew 5, 6, and 7. I studied these sayings more than any others. What Jesus said there, in his longest talk to so many people, is so clear and straight to the point, so easy to understand, that I believed the answer to my questions must be there.

It is in Matthew 5, 6, and 7 that Jesus talks about us turning the other cheek to those who hurt us, about giving our shirt to those who would take our coat, about living in peace with others, about loving our enemies. I loved these sayings; but I had a problem with them too. I had a feeling that these things would not work in the real world… that only Jesus himself could do them. Was I to believe that Jesus was serious in what he was saying? I turned to writings from the Church to see what they said. They argued that Jesus never planned for us to take these sayings seriously. They said that he told us to do things that we could never do, so that we would give up trying to follow him and follow what the church leaders were saying about just believing that God loves us and about just believing that it is not important to God that we obey him. I was not happy with this way of understanding the Gospels. It did not sound like something Christ would do. Why would he make the rules so very clear if he did not plan for us to follow them? In reading these rules, I always had the feeling that God was talking straight to me, and that he was telling me to do something that I could and should do. The Church told me to forget about the rules and just say more prayers. But I believed that God was asking me to do something myself to show that I believed Jesus when he said these things.

After reading all that I could find from the experts, I did what Christ told us to do in another place, and that is to "change and become like little children". I stopped trying to find an "expert" way to make it say what it was not saying, and I started reading it as I would if I was reading it for the first time, through the eyes of a child. The part that became my key in understanding it all was in Matthew 5:38-39: "You have heard that it was said, Take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; but I say to you, Do not fight against the evil person."

On reading this, the truth jumped out at me. Christ did mean for us to do just what he was saying here. But the words I had been blind to before were the words "Do not fight against the evil person." In the past I had only started from the words about turning the other cheek. By themselves, these words and the words that followed them sounded crazy. If I were to follow the words as they were written, I would give up everything and let others destroy me. What was the point of such an action? I was not strong enough to bring such pain on myself without a good reason. Now, after reading the words about not fighting against the evil person, I could see the reason. Christ was not telling us to go out of our way to bring pain on ourselves. He very clearly did mean for us to turn the other cheek or give up our shirt, but only because that might be the price we would have to pay for not fighting against the evil person.

He was saying that when we are doing our best not to fight against evil people, there will be times when they will hit us again and again. There will be times when they will take our coat and our shirt too. There will be times when they will ask us for things and not give them back. But in all of this, we should be clear that we will not hit back. We must not stop loving our enemies, for doing this is the only way to truly change the evil in the world. Seeing this made me believe that Jesus really did want us to obey this teaching.

It is like a father sending his son off on a long trip. He does not tell his son to go without sleep or to stop eating or to be wet or cold, but he does tell him that these things may happen, and if they do, he should not stop or give up. And so God does not choose for us to go through pain; but he knows that this will happen if we try to do what is right. When it happens, he does not want us to stop doing what is right. This was the piece of the statue that made all the other pieces go together for me. In the whole of the Gospels I could see that Christ was calling on us not to fight against the evil person. Taking up our cross to follow Christ is choosing to pay any price in obeying this rule. Christ himself knew that the price would be death on the cross, and he sent Peter away when Peter argued against such a price. He died without hitting back, and he told his followers that if they chose to live by the sword they would die by it. His first followers all lived their lives without returning evil for evil.

So Christ means what he says. You can say that what he said was difficult. You could say that you do not think people will be happy if they live that way. You can even say that what he said was stupid, and his followers were stupid for following him in doing it. But what you cannot say is that he did not mean it, or that he and his followers did not do it themselves.

Ernest Friedrich

. . . .even as the Australian weeps when he encounters pain, and laughs and makes merry when joy and happiness are granted him, even so dost thou weep, my brother Eskimo, and so, O African and O Chinese, weepest thou too and so weep I.

And as we all, all human beings, equally feel joy and pain, let us fight unitedly against the common monstrous enemy, War.

We shall unite in protesting against, in weeping over the accursed mass murders for which we all bear equal guilt.

. . . .The bourgeois poet in his strength glorified this War in verse and the proletarian writer wrote in glowing wrath against this mass murder.

But all the treasury of words of all men of all lands suffices not, in the present and in the future, to paint correctly this butchery of human beings.

. . . .Show these pictures to all men who still can think!

He who then still believes in this mass butchery, let him be locked up in a madhouse, let us avoid him as we do the plague!

. . . .They lack the courage, these war-thinkers and war leaders, to go themselves into the battle, and themselves to die a sweet "heroic death".

That is why they invented such beautiful phrases as "Fatherland" and "Field of Honour" and spoke of "defence" and uttered other lies.

And he who did not permit himself to be enthused to death by military music and by lying legends of the "enemy" of "the invaded".

Him they forced against his will into the murderer's uniform, him they ordered to murder and to rob for the interests of the money-bags.

I know of one practical way of preventing war for all time to come.

Many, many years ago the doctor, it is said, was fully responsible with his own life and property for the life of his patients.

If the patient died at the hands of his doctor, the latter died too. Such was the law.

And so let there be also a law for kings, presidents, generals and, last but not least, newspaper writers: "Whoever forces men into war or provokes them to mass murders, shall be responsible with all his property and possessions and with his own life for the safety and the sufferings of the soldiers.

The king who rallies people to his standard shall himself bear the standard.

And if a soldier should be reduced to beggary, the king shall go out begging with him.

If huts are burnt down in wars, so also shall palaces and castles be set in flames.

And always, for each human life that is sacrificed at the front, shall one king or one minister rest in peace on the "field of honour" for the Fatherland.

And the newspaper writers that agitate for war, shall be detained as hostages for the life of each single warrior!"

Such a law, however, will never come into being, and no "disarmament" or "peace" conference will give heed to my proposal.

. . . .True heroism lies not in murder, but in the refusal to commit murder. Rather fill all prisons and workhouses and all the mad-houses of all lands, than murder and die in the service of Capital!

The last and most dreadful war has not yet broken out which cast gas and poison and flames on human beings and animals and houses.

It lies in our hands, in our power, to prevent, to hinder, this most dreadful tragedy.

Let the great, inspiring example of consistent conscientious objectors be our model.

They suffered death for their consistent "No!" rather than themselves become murderers!

I WILL NOT!

Stronger than all violence, than the sabre and the rifle, is our spirit, is our will! Repeat these three words: "I will not!" Give content to these words and all wars in future will be impossible.

What then will all Capital of the whole world, what will all the kings and presidents do, when the entire people in all lands arise with the cry: WE WILL NOT!

AND YOU WOMEN! If your husbands should be too weak, then carry out the work yourselves!! Prove that the bond of love with the husband is stronger than an army order! Do not let your men go to the front! Do not decorate their rifles with flowers! Cling to the necks of your husbands! Do not let them go even when the order to depart calls! Tear up all the rails, throw yourselves before the locomotives!

WOMEN! REALISE THIS IF YOUR HUSBANDS SHOULD BE TOO WEAK!

Mothers of all lands unite!

 

bit of wisdom from new agey types?

I'm not a fan of very much new age stuff (as Beck says, call me when the new age is old enough to drink), but one idea that does resonate with me is the idea that we waste a great deal of our lives obsessing about four things: (1) money, (2) those we cannot forgive, (3) those we wish to control, and (4) those whose approval we seek.

I'm probably worst about (4). I actually sometimes get physically ill when people are angry with me.

I realize that this is a weakness, but paradoxically it is not as weak as the opposite. People who don't care enough what others think are dysfunctional and (obviously with notable exceptions) usually not very successful. However, (4) does drain a lot of my energy and I think has led me to moral cowardice at times. I've been wondering how I can get better about this without falling into the opposite realm of insensate cloddishness.

I think the solution is by keeping focused on (1), (2), and (3). If money is not your biggest focus, if you really can forgive those who trespass against you and (and this is actually much harder) others, and if you really can wean yourself from the desire to control others (this requires respecting other people's choices even in many cases where they might be stupid or harmful- because Satan's greatest deceit is convincing us that our desire to control others is really our desire to help them), then you won't be an insensate clod.

This looms big and small. Most of us are angry at people we perceive to be oppressing others. This is very common in the workplace, where your co-workers are responsible to other workers (especially those lower down on the pole), shareholders, and customers. [In public universities you have the following equations (workers = students, faculty, staff, administration, and political officers), (shareholders = taxpayers), and (customers = parents and taxpayers (the most ignorant of whom also benefit enormously from living in an educated society)).] When you perceive your colleagues and bosses doing things that are detrimental to any of these groups it can make you livid. But this anger is almost always just an enormous waste of energy and it can end up rationalizing just your own desire to control others (via whatever you are doing to rectify the situation). But then the real danger is becoming the monster you fight.

Whenever I get into debates involving the good of any part of LSU I find that saying the most obvious things almost always provokes defensive anger and disapproval that then makes me feel ill.

I think I can break out of this if I make sure that my behavior does not involve the desire for more money (via the administrative route), the inability to forgive others (via getting in a moral rage), or the desire to control others (via the need to be seen winning the argument). If I can make my contributions to LSU without these things then it really shouldn't matter if some people disapprove. I can react to the disapproval in a spirit of love.

I realize this all sounds pretty new agey, but I most evil comes from people trying to do good but getting it horrendously wrong. From the biggest global issue to the smallest workplace disagreement, it is vitally important that the way you go about doing good not remove your love for others (even and especially your enemies) and not rationalize the ethics/psychology of control.

I'll get off my soapbox now. I'm not sure how universal any of the above is (I would never tell someone who doesn't have enough money for medical treatment that they just need to get over it). It does work for me in my present situation though.

two freakouts on the UCO campus in the sunshine

When I'm coming down with a mild cold the most minor dissonance can wreck my serenity.

Yesterday was a beautiful day even by spring-in-Edmond standards. The sky was almost the color of Indian jewelry. Though it was not windy on the ground, the clouds continued a stately procession across the sky, many doing the cloud equivalent of the slow exercise of the elderly San Fransiscan Chinese

For an hour or so I sat by the artificial lake on the UCO campus reading Bulgakov, thinking about what makes good writing good, and enjoying the planet. At the UCO lake there are four or five adult Canadian geese with strange iridescent highlights in their plumage. They sun themselves and swim around in the lake. This day there were also eight tiny goose chicks (goslings?) following two of the geese (their parents?) in another stately procession. As a new parent myself, and a fellow child of God, it was amazing to watch. One led the chicks to a place where water runs over rocks and watched them carefully as they drank, bathed themselves, played their somewhat inscrutable, yet gentle, goose games. The other goose (the first one's spouse?) stood guard the whole time, keeping an eye on everyone. It was a perfect moment.

But then across the lake these undergraduate males started hooting and hollering about something. "Whoo! Yeah!" etc. . . followed by whoops of forced laughter. I couldn't tell what they were so excited about, but I knew in my heart that teenaged perpators of genocide made the same whoops the world over and throughout all history. They kept laughing and screaming and it made me deeply ashamed to be human. I could tell the goose on watch duty was becoming incredibly anxious and I wanted to tell him that it was going to be alright, but it really wasn't. There he was, being the best Canadian goose he could be, but surrounded by humans doing hideously lousy jobs at being humans. It was bone-weary sad.

Then as I was about to cross a street on the way home it happened again. This elderly black woman was waiting to turn left in her ancient Econoline van. She looked over at me as if to say, "I'm sorry I'm pulled so far forward into the pedestrian crossing." We smiled at each other and I began my traversal behind her van. But then I heard, "Fucking hurry it up already!" and then almost jumped out of myself from a car horn. The hurry-man was of course male and he drove a new jeep with his cigarette bearing arm hanging out of the window. He was healthy and privileged, and in his ecosystem the old black woman and me only existed as creatures to serve him or get out of the way. He didn't look enraged, just inhuman (or all too human, when I think of the geese). He kept screaming obscenities and of course I did the dysfunctional thing I almost always do in such circumstances. I froze in the middle of the street. The only way I got myself moving again was by making the sign of the cross. I don't know if he saw it, and it really wasn't a very nice thing to do, sort of the Christian version of giving him the bird.

I trudged home.

I wish I could say I've been making prayers for all of the impatient people, the rude people, and the geese, the goslings, and drivers of rusted out old vans too. I wish I had been praying for the sick, the prisoners, the heartbroken, the meek and weak. . . But I've really just been playing with my dog. He really likes it when you throw a tennis ball. You can do it like a hundred times and he never gets bored. Neither do I.

music for April, 2008

Baton Rouge
I miss Baton Rouge tonight (in a few months I'll miss Edmond).

Here's a song I wrote about Baton Rouge.

Key lyrics:

my hometown // nobody frowns // we just smile and pray

sometimes we fall // into the wall // but only at the end of the day

Columbus
And here's a song I wrote about Columbus, Ohio. All true! If you can hear past my ham-handed singing (and over-literal lyrics), the melody is pretty nice.

Montgomery

And one about Montgomery, Alabama. Again, all true after a fashion, but still obviously not John Prine (in case you are wondering, this is a picture of me from the 1987 Jefferson Davis Highschool Yearbook). I used to play this in a cow-punk band and it works pretty well with electric guitars. In this performance I speed it up halfway through and the acoustic guitar ends up sounding like background music for late 1960's bad comedy movie "zaniness,"  the presence of which ruins otherwise good movies like The Mouse that Roared.

Incidentally, I think the first use of fast traditional music (in particular banjo) to connote zaniness was Bonnie and Clyde. The scene in Bonnie in Clyde that features it is actually a great piece of art. It's all comedic and then  suddenly someone gets shot in the face. The juxtaposition is powerful and disturbing, more disturbing than in Jackie Brown where De Niro's character shoots one of Samuel Jackson's girlfriends and you initially laugh and then stop, realizing what you are doing.

After Bonnie and Clyde it became a trope that banjo music was cheerful and fun (Steve Martin even had a great routine about how the banjo could have saved President Carter because all banjo music was happy; something he knew to be false), and every horrible bit of sixties comedy broadcasted "zaniness" by using banjo music. The omnipresence of this destroyed the aesthetic sensibilities of a generation of Americans (which had been in the process of being revived by Harry Smith's astounding Anthology of American Folk Music and then the return to folk musical darkness typified by the Doors and Leonard Cohen), not to be repaired until the Coen Brother's Oh Brother Where Art Thou showed people the depths of Appalachian Music (albeit, the Brothers Coen get a demerit for the dancing bit and costumes during "In the Jailhouse Now").

There's less zaniness in popular film now, but it's been replaced with laughing-merely-to-show-you-get-the-joke where the joke is demonstrably unfunny. "Getting the joke" for many people just involves registering that a joke is intended in that part of the movie. But the joke itself is often not really a joke, but just some stupid reference to another cultural turd floating in the toilet bowl of American television, music, film, and general celebutardation.

Sorry, I didn't intend for this to turn into a rant. The thing bugs me the most about cultural illiteracy and damaged aesthetic sensibilities in an American Idol nation is that geniuses like Mike West and Danny Barnes have had to scrimp for money. These guys have written songs for the ages. The universe comes aware of itself by way of their music. And yet, the part of the universe that compromises the rest of us is not doing its job. It is quite possible that West and Barnes' catalogs will go out of print and their music will stop being played after they are gone. This chills me.

After the shameful way we treated Melville and Poe (and how many Melvilles and Poes have disappeared from history because nobody ever thought to take their music out of the "nonfiction- whales" part of the library after they were safely dead?), you'd think the universe would get it's act together. . . One more sad bit of evidence that Hegel was not 100% correct about everything.

Austin

I have one about Austin called "She's Coming Back to Texas," but that song descends to such depths of over-literalality that I can't stand it.

I played it on a beach once in one of those trade-the-guitar around things where nobody listens to anyone else's songs because everyone wants to be the center of attention.

I did learn a valuable song writing lesson from all of that.

Never mention in what is supposed to be a sad song that your beloved left you for the man who created Brad Pitt's smile (true story!). People will laugh (I now realize with justification).

Even then Brad Pitt's glamour was such that his very teeth conferred magical powers upon an otherwise shlubby dentist.

In real life the reason my then beloved came back to Texas (but not to me) was because the dentist died of cancer. It was actually horrible and I am a bad man (and worse musician) for putting that in the song too. It was only funny in a thoroughly cringing worse-than-songs-by-Ricky-Gervais'-character-in-the-office (and see here) way.

Stafford Betty

[Sam] Harris [bestselling author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation] has kept company with contemplatives, men and women who know how to stop the whir of their own thoughts and tiptoe into an awareness that completely transcends their own puny egos. Paul Tillich called this the ground of being, and contemporary Buddhist writers, with whom Harris is in particular sympathy, use that phrase too. What does this ground of being feel like? Catholic mystics like Father Keating and Bede Griffiths, O.S.B., conceive of it as a joyous, compassionate, loving, powerful, boundless, light-filled reality that can be known intimately in the private sanctuary of their own mind. Leading American Buddhist teachers like Surya Das and Thubten Chodron would not disagree.

Faith of a Skeptic

Would Harris object to such a conception? Given his openness to the life of the deep mind (shall we call it the spirit?), I do not see why he should. It avoids the following pitfalls. It does not define God in a way that invites logical problems when we try to square God’s existence with evil, and it does not place God on the outskirts of Uranus far removed from the human heart. It does not insist on God’s being a person like us, a kind of overgrown superego, but it does not make God into some sort of impersonal energy either. However one defines God in the last analysis, the God we are looking at grows directly out of deep meditative experience. It reserves the first chair for the experiencer, not the system-builder. Harris, I believe, would approve.

. . . .Sam Harris, like all of us, is a work in progress. If he pays more attention to the hints of a transcendent reality to which deep meditation vibrates, it is possible that his reputation as the country’s most obstreperous debunker of religion will give way to something closer to that of the Hebrew prophets. Like them, he has every right to express outrage over the dangerous absurdities that blotch the world’s religions. We should be grateful to Harris for doing it so well. The danger for him, though, is that he could be blinded by his own contempt. Harris should know that any effort to bury faith-based religion under godless reason is futile.

Men and women, however learned and sophisticated, will insist on their gods. For most people life without them, and without the possibility of salvation that their gods bring, would be simply unbearable. For that reason as much as any other, faith in them will never become obsolete. What the world needs is not less faith, but better gods.

Brian Leiter

Applicants to PhD and MA programs have now mostly received offers of admission and, if they are lucky, are making choices between different departments.  I want to reiterate a point made in the PGR, namely, that students are well-advised to talk to current students at the programs they are considering.   There are often things you will want to know that you won't glean from familiarity with the excellence of the faculty's work, even if that remains the most important, if defeasible, reason for choosing a particular department.  Here are some examples of information that no ranking, no departmental brochure, and no "official" departmental representive will tell you about; all of these are drawn from stories I've heard from students over the last few years about ranked departments (the departments will remain unnamed, obviously).  You can think of them as representing "types" of problems you should be aware of before enrolling.  I've tweaked some of the details to protect identities.

The Absent Faculty:  Are the faculty who look so good on paper actually around and interested in working with students? I heard a story about a key senior person in one department who is an alcoholic, and who simply ignores his students.  In another department, almost all the graduate students had to sign an open letter to the faculty a few years ago protesting the failure of faculty to return graded papers and their general lack of interest in mentoring the students.   In yet another department, a well-known senior member of the faculty spent so much time travelling and lecturing around the world, that he rarely had time to review or discuss work carefully with students. 

The Sexual Predator Faculty:  Are women treated as young philosophers and aspiring professionals, or do faculty regularly view them as a potential source for dates and sexual liasons?  It's a bit shocking to realize that this is still a live issue in some departments, but, sadly, it is.  Are faculty-student sexual relations common in the department?  What happens when the relations end?  Are there repeated cases of sexual harassment complaints against faculty in the department?  Do they ever result in discipline?  I suppose it is possible this could be an issue for male students, but all the reports I've gotten over the years have been from women victimized by male faculty. 

The Nasty Faculty:  Talented philosophers and scholars often differ, dramatically, in how pleasant they are personally and professionally.  I recall the story of one department where a member of the faculty was known to reduce students to tears in seminar.  In another department, a faculty member regularly refuses to work with students, even those interested in his areas; he works only with those he deems "worthy," and there are not many of them!  In another department, faculty openly express doubts about the competence of the graduate students and their ability.  Make sure the philosophers who seem most interesting to you don't fall into these categories!

The Factionalized Faculty:  Many faculties are "factionalized," in the sense that there are sub-groups that rarely see "eye to eye" about departmental issues, from appointments to admissions.  Where this becomes worrisome, though, for a prospective student is when certain members of the faculty who share interests and approaches control all the key resources--fellowships, resources for speakers etc.--and use that control to define "in" and "out" groups of faculty and students:  students with the "wrong" philosophical interests or who express an interest in the "wrong" faculty members are denied access to important perks and support.  This kind of ugly factionalization is less common, but it exists. 

I wish it were possible to meaningfuly measure and evaluate faculties along these important dimensions, but, alas, it is not.  I can report, based on accumulated anecdotes over many years, that some departments are really exceptional for how pleasant they are as places to do graduate study:  faculty are engaged, kind, supportive, committed, and professional in their interactions with students. Arizona, North Carolina, MIT, UC Riverside, and U Mass/Amherst are among those about which one regularly hears these kinds of glowing reports.  I have no doubt there are many others, and the way for a prospective student to discover them is to talk to lots of current students.

Good luck with your decisions!

why confessions? at what price anonymity?

I was talking with my friend Neal Hebert last night about Richard Russo's hilarious academic novel, Straight Man.

From a newspaper perspective (Hebert is the opinion editor of the LSU Daily Reveille) it is interesting in the novel that the main character has an anonymous newspaper column called "Lucky Him" (and if you don't know what that is homage to, go to amazon now and order the rightly honored book here) where he reveals the dark, absurd heart of academia. There are a couple of interesting things in the novel concerning this. The first is that everybody knows that it's really his column, so it's not really anonymous. The second is that the novel has excerpts from the column, and the stuff he's writing in first person in the novel is much more acidic about the ironies and idiocies of the ivory tower.

The conversation got me thinking about a couple of things. First, confessional culture is huge in the United States right now. Every other month somebody'ss true life memoirs are shown to be substantially falsified so as to make for betterr reading. This raises a few questions. Why do people want to confess? This is a common thing in human history: including Roman Catholicism's confessions to a priest, the sorry end of show trials in the Soviet Union, and the self-confessions that were part and parcel of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And now with weblogging everybody can be their own band of raving cultural revolutionaries as well as victim. Why this pervasive desire? Does any real absolution come from this? And doesn't dignity demand that we hold some things back?

Second, anonymity is a strange thing. Neal said that you would have a very difficult time keeping the identity of the writer of a "Faculty Confidential" column secret. He also said that there were scads of ethical issues concerning anonymous sourcing.

In academia the biggest role for anonymity is in the blind refereeing process (see my post here). But you also now have extremely funny (and alternately depressing) blogs (Philosophy Job Market Blog and Rate Your Students) where people complain about facets of the academy.

But Brian Leiter is well known now for his complaints about the way anonymity works on the Philosophy Job Market Blog. If I understand him correctly, he is not complaining about the bitch-and-moan-over-a-beer aspect of the blog. Rather, he is complaining about people with jobs anonymously dispensing very bad advice to job seekers. But why should anonymity lead to worse advice in this context?

I think it's that as a matter of human nature people pervasively try to rationalize their own decisions, and anonymity somehow makes this much, much worse. The big example in the Philosophy Job Market Blog concerned the issue of whether you should go on the market every year even after you have a tenure track job. The tenured and tenure-track people saying this is a bad idea (it's a recipe for unhappiness for most people, if you are good enough then people will come after you, trying to get out instead of investing in the place hurts your tenure chances in all sorts of ways, you can go on the market after getting tenure anyhow, etc.) all posted using their own names, and the tenure and tenure-track people defending the practice all posted anonymously. So what does it say that they were rationally defending something, but unwilling to put their name under the defense? At the very least it undermined the claim that it does not hurt your reputation to be seen as the kind of person who always goes un the market. But I think there is a deeper connection between the amount of unreasonable rationalization people will engage in when being anonymous. I can't exactly discern why this is the case though. If anyone has any ideas, I'd be interested (Neal?)

difference between Victorian versus Puritanical attitudes

I've Amazon wishlisted Denfeld's "The New Victorians." Denfeld, Camille Paglia (who is my favorite public intellectual), etcetera are sometimes called "post-feminists" but that's really misapplying a term from Faludi's first book. "Post-feminism" was initially the idea that since feminism was successful we don't need to worry about all of this stuff any more. But Denfeld, Paglia are concerned with "first wave" feminist issues such as equality with men, child care, job opportunities, and reproductive rights. So now some people are calling this stuff, "third wave" feminism. I think this is also unfortunate, because it conceals similarities between paradigmatic thinkers from all three waves and suppresses very important difference between them. To lump together Germaine Greer and Elaine Showalter as "second wave feminists" is goofy. And to lump together Camille Paglia, Rene Denfeld with people who take Kristeva, Cixous, and Irigary seriously and attempt to "apply" Derrida's ideas (the very concept of which Derrida regarded as (oxy)moronic) is equally awful. Likewise, recent work on psycho-somatic illness by Showalter has more in common with Paglia than any paradigmatic "second wave" stuff, even though Showalter is one of the most celebrated second wave thinkers.

Anyhow, the Denfeldian critique has made me think about what differentiates Victorian attitudes about sex and gender from Puritanical attitudes. Both tend to lead to what I take are indefensible restrictions of liberty, for example people's freedom to make and watch pornography or engage in prostitution. But the reasoning and motivations are importantly different.

Victorianism as a sexual world-view essentially involves: (1) reinforcing a class distinction between new, educated middle classes and the poor, (2) imagining women such that lack of meaningful labor is proper. Ironically in societies where there is more social mobility than previously, those recently raised need to distinguish themselves more.

In Victorian England the need to reinforce class distinctions led to a spate of very bad grammar books that purported to teach new middle class people how to speak correctly, that is unlike poor people. Unfortunately those who wrote the grammar books just knew Latin, so they said that things you couldn't do in Latin (split an infinitive) should not be done in English. But the books sold like crazy. I think the same thing happened with sexual mores in the Victorian period. According to the ideology poor people behaved like animals. At the height of the ideology a women who enjoyed sex was seen as brutish and animalistic. Neo-Victorian opponents of pornography are the same today. In spite of the fact that 40% of pornographic DVDs are purchased by women (as are nearly all of the 150 MILLION romance novels sold each year in the United States alone, most of which are mildly to very pornographic), and that much of it couples oriented, academic discussions of porn assume that only men enjoy it. When confronted with the fact that so many women purchase it, the typical line is that they are in a state of ideological corruption due to their poverty and ignorance. Which is another way of saying that we educated middle class academics know better than the kind of people who go on Jerry Springer.

The second point legitimizes our horrible war against prostitution, which ends up being a war against prostitutes. In countries where prostitution is illegal, prostitues (especially street-prostitutes, as opposed to dancers, escorts, and masseuses) are subject to routine awful violence both from police, johns, the prison system, and their pimps.

Proper Victorian women were delicate flowers much given to fainting fits and all forms of psychosomatic illness (somehow this ideology co-existed with all of the maids, washerwomen, etc. who still had to work).  On this view, the proper place of women is to be essentially passive. But then women are always thought of as victims. Again, most contemporary academic discussion of prostitution is deranged precisely in this way (for a discussion of a recent book that actually uses empirical methods to expose the massive distortions and lies of the current moral panic over "trafficking" see here). According to the view of women that legitimizes their being taken out of the work force, it is apriori that no woman would rationally decide to be a stripper or prostitute, therefore they are all victims just in virtue of being sex-workers.

I would like to say we are moving past neo-Victorian mores in this country as a result of the liberatory power of the world wide web or some march towards greater sophistiation, but I think it's mostly the result of the United States becoming less socially mobile over the last 35 years. Victorianism only succeeds as a governing social philosophy when you have a growing middle class with enough money where the wives don't have to work. This has imploded in the United States, and continues to implode as we experience great economic growth with no growth in real median income.

On the other hand I think that Gary Kamiya's thesis (argued for here) that Puritanical sexual mores have declined in part because of the web is pretty plausible. While Victorian sexual mores and gender roles come from upward social mobility, Puritanism is something for the lower classes. I think it is characterized by two dynamics: (1) trying to sublimate oneself towards very difficult labor demands, and (2) the apartheid dynamic where one group (poor men) can be oppressed but not mind so much because they get to crap on someone else (women). The apartheid dynamic is why Puritanism is usually pushed on the poor by their economic betters. With Puritanism, the woman may still have to work, but she is still to be subservient to the husband at home. They sublimation dynamic explains why Puritanism is (unlike Victorian mores) anti-alcohol in addition to being anti-sex.

I know that contemporary neo-Victorian feminists actually offer arguments for all the stuff about "objectification" of women. Unfortunately the empirical data goes against much of this. (1) Countries where women are publicly "objectified" in the ways offensive to academic feminists and countries where prostitution are legal are the very countries where women have the most autonomy and parity with men, and the contrapositive correlation holds as well (radical muslims defend burkas on exactly the same grounds that neo-Victorians critique the cult of beauty in American popular culture). (2) There is very strong evidence that the bases for physical attraction are innate and cross cultural. Barbie has nothing to do with it. Yes. Yes. In high school and college the guys whose bodies approximated the ideal of the He Man action figures got a lot more attention from the high school girls than my ugly and skinny self did. But it would be absurd to blame He Man or Brad Pitt or whoever for that.