One commenter at the Washington Times has really managed to annoy me. He was responding to my review, published Friday, of the book Stephen Fry in America. Here’s what “vandux” had to say:
Still going on about Waco? Wow. Why didn’t you add some comments about Janet Reno’s appearance, just for good measure? Always a bit shocking to me to see how easily people have forgotten the lessons of Oklahoma City, and how they reach back to the Clinton years to cite abuses of state power when so many were committed during 2001-2009.
Now, for context, here’s the passage in my piece:
[Fry's] specific observations are often dead-on but when he slips into generalizations, especially those involving American history, things can get ugly. He calls the shootings by the National Guard at Kent State during 1970 anti-war protests, which left four students dead, one paralyzed, and eight seriously injured, “Perhaps the most shameful and shocking example to date of ruthless state power perpetuated in America against its own citizens.” Perhaps an editor should have asked Mr. Fry to consider the fiery FBI-Branch Davidian showdown in Waco, Texas.
Where to start?
1) There were several lessons that could be learned from the Oklahoma City bombing, I suppose. Not one of them was that Waco was OK.
2) Janet Reno could be as good looking as Christina Hendricks. That still wouldn’t have any bearing on her complicity in that massacre.
3) I’m no fan of the government that came after Clinton’s but what comparable abuse of state power against American citizens occurred under George W. Bush?
Anyway, go read the review. Arts & Letters Daily linked it it, with this blurb:
Stephen Fry has found something nice to say about nearly every American state he has visited. Except New Jersey… more»
If you watch the address tonight, you MUST drink every time the president of the United States:
1- Mentions “hope” or “change”.
2- Says, “I’m going to be straight with the American people.”
3- Argues health care reform will reduce, not expand, the deficit.
4- Blames anything on his precedessor or some variation on that, i.e., “The failed policies of the previous eight years.”
5- Says, “Now we didn’t say it would be easy.”
6- Says, “Now I’ve listened to the American people.”
7- Says, “The Amercan people didn’t send us to Washington to argue.”
8- Argues that his administration didn’t want to have to take over GM and Chrysler.
9- Argues that green jobs programs will solve the nation’s 10% unemployment.
10- Says they are fighting “the lobbyists and special interests” and/or deals “behind closed doors.”
11- Hugs Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, while walking to or from the podium.
12- The cameras catch any lawmaker sleeping or texting while the president is giving the address.
Asked how he pulled out a win in the second compulsory round in last year’s competition, he explained that he is urged on by the energy of the crowd, adding that he can hit a “level of shamelessness” that only the few and the proud are able to reach and rock.
– Caroline Cullen of On Tap magazine, interviewing air guitar champion Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier prior to last year’s championship bout at the 9:30 Club in DC.
From the June 2009 issue of Young American Revolution:
Denis Dutton is a professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, but he’s had a greater impact on the American academy than any dozen professors who have toiled their whole careers in the United States. Dutton founded the journal Philosophy and Literature, which frequently made headlines with its annual Bad Writing Contest. The idea was to mock turgid scholarly writing and thereby shame profs into using language in such a way that intelligent people could understand what the hell they were talking about.
In 1998, the award went to University of California, Berkeley post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler for this peach of a passage:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
If you didn’t make it all the way through that or get the gist, don’t feel bad. As Dutton wrote when he was bestowing top honors on Butler: “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.” It’s the academic equivalent of “Ignore the man behind the curtain!”
As enjoyable as Philosophy and Literature was, it was the growth of the Internet in the late ’90s that really made Dutton’s name. The most famous and most enduring of his online projects is Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). These days, the site is owned by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Arts & Letters Daily grew out of Dutton’s “Phil-Lit” e-mail list. The simple site’s motto is veritas odit moras—truth hates delay. Six days a week, the site’s three news columns bring readers the latest in “ideas, criticism, [and] debate.”
News sites pine for a link from the Drudge Report. Academic journals and opinionated outlets pray for an Arts & Letters Daily teaser. These are short squibs followed by a link to the article. A teaser of this review might read: “What matters more: that a book is enjoyable or that its argument proves correct?” more>>
That was the question that bounced around this critic’s highly evolved brain like a long game of box ball as I read The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. The argument probably should matter more. But it’s rare to read a book aimed at a highly literate audience that is this laugh-out-loud funny. The experience turns what would have been an obvious answer into a moment of sober philosophical reflection: facts or funny? Hmmm.
And by funny, I mean mordant and deadpan. Dutton gives us funny because it’s obvious: “Medicine began from a pretheoretical understanding of health and disease; as a developed discipline, medicine has produced sophisticated theories and clinically effective cures, but not in ten thousand years has it abolished the ordinary distinction between robust good health and feeling nauseated or bleeding to death.”
And funny because it’s unexpected: “In order to better understand how innate instincts interact with cultural traditions, I want to turn to another powerful universal instinct that has clear cultural implications: incest avoidance.”
Dutton gets so much right about so many subjects that one is tempted to concede the central argument of his book as thanks for not wasting our time. He doesn’t even get around to pressing his case seriously for over a hundred pages. The first half of The Art Instinct is a quarrel about art in which Dutton cuts the knees off of a host of art critics, anthropologists, and vulgar multiculturalists who insist that art is culturally constructed and that there can be no aesthetic universals. In refuting this, Dutton is by turns analytical and scathing.
Analytical: It’s true the art instinct manifests itself differently in different cultures, Dutton concedes. He further acknowledges that some modern art is so weird that it really is suspect. But he comes up with 12 criteria that form a rough cross-cultural answer to the question, “What is art?” Art, he explains, involves (1) “direct pleasure.” It takes (2) “skill and virtuosity,” a sense of (3) “style,” and (4) “novelty and creativity” to produce. It is open to (5) “criticism” and involves (6) “representation” and (7) “special focus.” Arts are a channel for (8) “expressive individuality” and combine (9) “emotional saturation” with (10) “intellectual challenge.” Artistic refinement is furthered by (11) “art traditions and institutions.” Arts are an (12) “imaginative experience,” above all.
Scathing: In chapter 4, “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art,” Dutton shows how critics who argue such things are confused about foreign cultures and often astonishingly ignorant of their own. “Despite the fact that jyonti paintings [by women from Uttar Pradesh] are straightforward, colorfully stylized depictions of Hindu mythological themes … [anthropologist Lynn] Hart insists on using ‘producer’ instead of ‘artist’ and ‘visual image’ instead of ‘art’ to refer to this work (if it is ‘work’),” Dutton writes. He insists, sensibly, that if images look and function like art then they are, in fact, art.
If you were inclined to believe that art is entirely culturally constructed, you will probably be less so after reading the first half of The Art Instinct. Art is just too much a part of the history of mankind, in every era and every civilization, to deny Dutton’s argument. Tastes and traditions vary wildly. But with the exception of some excesses of modern art—think Andres Serrano, or Duchamp’s urinal—we can all recognize plays, movies, carvings, paintings, embroidery, poetry, decoration, storytelling, and the like as art.
There does indeed appear to be an art instinct, or set of instincts, that form an important part of human nature. Huns, Britons, and even neoconservatives can recognize this brute fact. Where Dutton is less persuasive, however, is in his theorizing about where the art instinct came from. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued forcefully that much of what makes us human is not an evolutionary adaptation but a by-product of that adaptation. According to Gould, our large brains are the adaptation, and most of human culture is what Afro sporting painter Bob Ross would call a “happy accident.”
Gould admitted that we do have some instincts but contended that we are free from most evolutionary pressures that limit other animals. Dutton counters that humans are far more hardwired and that most of our circuitry was installed by evolutionary developments during the Pleistocene period. The human capacities that make art possible were preserved from this prehistoric era because they proved useful in survival and reproduction. It’s ironic that Gould’s politics were of the Left, while the more deterministic Dutton is something of a classical liberal.
Dutton might well be right, but it’s hard to know for sure. Stephen Colbert made light of Dutton’s highly speculative arguments when he interviewed the author on the “Colbert Report.” When Dutton talked about the survival and reproduction advantages of our ancient ancestors’ imaginative abilities, Colbert quipped that cavemen “were using their imagination. Like imagine what it would be like to not be devoured by a saber tooth tiger. What would that be like? Think big!” and asked, “Is everybody doing art just to get laid?” Colbert also asked, “Mr. Dutton, is there any chance that I am art?”
Sometimes the most unfair questions are the best ones. Dutton’s perspective is informed by a school of thought called “evolutionary psychology” that tries to understand the mind through the lens of human evolution. This approach has led to some important insights. But even Dutton admits that some speculations of evolutionary psychology are far-fetched. He cites one example of linguist and evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker—who blurbs this book—tripping all over himself in attempting to explain how storytelling can confer evolutionary advantage. Dutton believes Pinker erred by reducing stories to their morals—after all, he argues, it would be fairly easy to drum those morals into people’s heads without the stories. Yet Dutton may be embarking on a similarly reductionist project. The Art Instinct wants us to understand art as a product of human evolution but, like Gould, I suspect there’s much more to it than that.
So the Guardian asked me to do a piece on what Scott Brown means for Barack Obama. Specifically, I was asked to answer the question, Does this mean that Obama is the new Jimmy Carter? Well…
The special election to replace the late senator Ted Kennedy should have been an easy pick-up for the Democrats. Yes, they put up an awful candidate in Martha Coakley, but it shouldn’t have mattered. Massachusetts is one of the bluest states in the nation. Barack Obama won it by 26 points a little over a year a year ago. And yet, the Republican revellers at Scott Brown’s victory rally were chanting Obama’s old slogan on Tuesday night. Yes we can! [more...]
On today’s Liberty Week, my co-host Richard Morrison was back, and the American Spectator’s Joe Lawler took the third mic.
We talked about the Massachusetts elections, Google, global warming, Venezuelan super markets, “Mugabenomics,” and relief for poor Hatians. Give it a listen.
(NYR#10)
Ignore those exit polls, folks. Two reasons:
1) They’re just about never right.
2) Exit pollsters are annoying gits who should not be encouraged.
(NYR#9)