Politics of Recognition, Dr. AMY GUTMANN

Politics of Recognition, 
Dr. AMY GUTMANN


Historically informed, philosophical perspective on what is at
stake in the demand made by many people for recognition of

their particular identities by public institutions. In the ancien

régime, when a minority could count on being honored (as

“Ladies” and “Lords”) and the majority could not realistically

aspire to public recognition, the demand for recognition

was unnecessary for the few and futile for the many. Only

with the collapse of stable social hierarchies does the demand

for public recognition become commonplace, along

with the idea of the dignity of all individuals. Everyone is an

equal—a Mr., Miss, Mrs., or Ms.—and we all expect to be

recognized as such. So far, so good.

But the claims of equal citizens in the public sphere are

more problematic and conflict-ridden than our appreciation

of the collapse of aristocratic honor would lead us to expect.

Taylor highlights the problems in the ingenious attempt by

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers to satisfy the perceived

universal need for public recognition by converting

human equality into identity. The Rousseauean politics of

recognition, as Taylor characterizes it, is simultaneously suspicious

of all social differentiation and receptive to the homogenizing—

indeed even totalitarian—tendencies of a politics

of the common good, where the common good reflects

the universal identity of all citizens. The demand for recognition

may be satisfied on this scheme, but only after it has

been socially and politically disciplined so that people pride

themselves on being little more than equal citizens and

therefore expect to be publicly recognized only as such. Taylor

rightly argues that this is too high a price to pay for the

politics of recognition.

Liberal democracies, pace Rousseau, cannot regard citizenship

as a comprehensive universal identity because (1) people

are unique, self-creating, and creative individuals, as

John Stuart Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson famously recognized;

and (2) people are also “culture-bearing,” and the cultures

they bear differ depending on their past and present

INTRODUCTION

identifications. The unique, self-creating, and creative conception

of human beings is not to be confused with a picture

of “atomistic” individuals creating their identities de novo and

pursuing their ends independently of each other. Part of the

uniqueness of individuals results from the ways in which

they integrate, reflect upon, and modify their own cultural

heritage and that of other people with whom they come into

contact. Human identity is created, as Taylor puts it, dialogically,

in response to our relations, including our actual dialogues,

with others. The dichotomy posed by some political

theorists between atomistic and socially constructed individuals

is therefore a false one. If human identity is dialogically

created and constituted, then public recognition of our identity

requires a politics that leaves room for us to deliberate

publicly about those aspects of our identities that we share,

or potentially share, with other citizens. A society that recognizes

individual identity will be a deliberative, democratic

society because individual identity is partly constituted by

collective dialogues.

Granting the totalitarian tendency of the Rousseauean

quest for a politics that comprehensively recognizes the

identity of citizens, Taylor argues that public institutions

should not—indeed cannot—simply refuse to respond to the

demand for recognition by citizens. The anti-Rousseauean

demand to be publicly recognized for one’s particularity is

also as understandable as it is problematic and controversial.

We disagree, for example, as to whether in the name of

human equality and treating all people as equals society

should treat women the same way that it treats men, considering

pregnancy as another form of physical disability, or differently

in recognition of those aspects of our identities that

are distinctly tied to gender, such as the social identity of

most American women as child-bearers and primary childrearers.

We disagree as to whether African-American students

are better served by public schools with a curriculum

specially designed to emphasize African-American culture or

by a curriculum that is common to all students. The demand

for recognition, animated by the ideal of human dignity,

points in at least two directions, both to the protection of the

basic rights of individuals as human beings and to the acknowledgment

of the particular needs of individuals as

members of specific cultural groups. Because Taylor takes seriously

the stakes on both sides of the controversy, he does

not jump aboard any political bandwagon, or offer simple solutions

where there are none.

Nor do Susan Wolf, Steven C. Rockefeller, and Michael

Walzer, who in commenting on Taylor’s essay suggest new

ways of conceiving the relationship between our personal

identities and our political practices. Wolf focuses on the

challenges of feminism and multicultural education. Although

the situation of women is often compared to that of

disadvantaged cultural minorities, Wolf suggests that there

is a critical distinction between the two cases. Whereas political

recognition of the distinctive contributions and qualities

of minority cultures is most often viewed as a way of treating

members of those cultures as equals, political recognition of

the distinctiveness of women as women is typically identified

with regarding women as unequals, and expecting (or

even requiring) women to stay in distinctively “feminine”

and subordinate places in society. And yet the demand for

public recognition by women is in another significant way

similar to the demand made by many minorities. Full public

recognition as equal citizens may require two forms of respect:

(1) respect for the unique identities of each individual,

regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, and (2) respect for

those activities, practices, and ways of viewing the world

that are particularly valued by, or associated with, members

of disadvantaged groups, including women, Asian-Americans,

African-Americans, Native Americans, and a multitude

of other groups in the United States.

Steven C. Rockefeller rightly worries about the abuse of

the second requirement, respect for individuals as they identify 

with particular cultural groups. If members of groups are

publicly identified with the dominant characteristics, practices,

and values of their group, one might wonder whether

our particular identities—as English or French Canadians,

men or women, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, or

Native Americans, Christians, Jews, or Muslims—will take

public precedence over our more universal identity as persons,

deserving of mutual respect, civil and political liberties,

and decent life chances simply by virtue of our equal

humanity. Recognition of every individual’s uniqueness and

humanity lies at the core of liberal democracy, understood as

a way of political and personal life. The liberal democratic

value of diversity therefore may not be captured by the need

to preserve distinct and unique cultures over time, which

provide each separate group of people with a secure culture

and identity for themselves and their progeny. Rockefeller

follows John Dewey in connecting the democratic value of

diversity instead with the value of expanding the cultural,

intellectual, and spiritual horizons of all individuals, enriching

our world by exposing us to differing cultural and intellectual

perspectives, and thereby increasing our possibilities

for intellectual and spiritual growth, exploration, and enlightenment.

Does this liberal democratic view downplay the human

need for secure and separate cultural identities? It is probably

impossible to say with any certainty in light of the relatively

few developed democracies in our world. So for the

sake of challenging this democratic vision, we might suppose

that its ideal of individuals flourishing in a mobile, multicultural

society (or world) does indeed underestimate the

need of people as members of discrete ethnic, linguistic, and

other cultural groups for public recognition and preservation

of their particular cultural identities. Even in light of this

challenge, the liberal democratic view offers a morally significant

and politically useful antidote to the demand for cultural

recognition as it is now commonly made on behalf of

distinct groups. Liberal democracy is suspicious of the demand

to enlist politics in the preservation of separate group

identities or the survival of subcultures that otherwise would

not flourish through the free association of citizens. And yet

democratic institutions, more than any others, tend to expose

citizens to a diverse set of cultural values. Hence liberal

democracy enriches our opportunities, enables us to recognize

the value of various cultures, and thereby teaches us to

appreciate diversity not simply for its own sake but for its

enhancement of the quality of life and learning. The liberal

democratic defense of diversity draws upon a universalistic

rather than a particularistic perspective.

What exactly is the universalistic perspective with which

liberal democracy views and values multiculturalism? Building

on Taylor’s analysis, Walzer suggests that there may not

be one universalistic perspective, but two, which pull liberal

democracies in different political directions. Or, more accurately,

there is one universalistic principle, widely accepted

by people who broadly believe in human equality and incompletely

institutionalized in liberal democratic societies:

“Treat all people as free and equal beings.” But there are two

plausible and historically influential interpretations of this

principle. One perspective requires political neutrality

among the diverse and often conflicting conceptions of the

good life held by citizens of a pluralistic society. The paradigm

of this perspective is the American doctrine of separation

of church and state, where the state not only protects

the religious freedom of all citizens but also avoids as far as

possible identifying any of its own institutions with a particular

religious tradition.

The second liberal democratic perspective, also universalistic,

does not insist on neutrality for either the consequences

or the justification of public policies, but rather permits public

institutions to further particular cultural values on three

conditions: (1) the basic rights of all citizens—including freedom

of speech, thought, religion, and association—must be

protected, (2) no one is manipulated (and of course not coerced)

into accepting the cultural values that are represented

by public institutions, and (3) the public officials and institutions

that make cultural choices are democratically accountable,

not only in principle but also in practice. The paradigm

of this perspective is democratic subsidy for, and control

over, education in the United States. At the same time that

our constitution requires separation of church and state, it

grants states wide latitude in determining the cultural content

of children’s education. Educational policy in America,

far from requiring neutrality, encourages local communities

to shape schools partly in their particular cultural image, so

long as they do not violate basic rights, such as freedom of

conscience or the separation of church and state.

Walzer sees the two universalistic perspectives as defining

two different conceptions of liberalism, the second more

democratic than the first. What Walzer calls “Liberalism 2,”

inasmuch as it authorizes democratic communities to determine

public policy within the broad limits of respect for individual

rights, also authorizes them to choose policies that

are, more or less, neutral among the particular cultural identities

of groups. Because Liberalism 2 is democratic, it can

choose Liberalism 1, state neutrality, through a democratic

consensus. Walzer thinks this is what the United States has

democratically chosen. And Liberalism 1 chosen within Liberalism

2 is what Walzer would choose, because it is in keeping

with the dominant social understanding of the United

States as a society of immigrants, where each cultural group

is free to fend for itself, but not to enlist the state in support

or recognition of its particular cultural projects.

When I listen to the discordant voices raised in recent debates

over multiculturalism, I find it hard to say what we as

a society have chosen, at least at this level of abstraction.

Apart from the difficult, perhaps inescapable, problem of figuring

out what “we” have chosen, perhaps it is a mistake to

think that we have chosen, or need to choose, one liberalism

or the other for all of our public institutions and policies. Perhaps

the two universalisms are better interpreted not as two

distinct and politically comprehensive conceptions of liberalism

but as two strands of a single conception of liberal democracy

that recommends—indeed occasionally even requires—

state neutrality in certain realms such as religion,

but not in others, such as education, where democratically

accountable institutions are free to reflect the values of one

or more cultural communities as long as they also respect the

basic rights of all citizens. The dignity of free and equal beings

requires liberal democratic institutions to be nonrepressive,

nondiscriminatory, and deliberative. These principled

constraints leave room for public institutions to recognize the

particular cultural identities of those they represent. This

conclusion identifies liberal democracy at its best with both

the protection of universal rights and public recognition of

particular cultures, although for significantly different reasons

from those that Taylor recommends. The results of

democratic deliberations consistent with respect for individuals’

rights (freedom of speech, religion, press, association,

and so on), not the survival of subcultures, come to the defense

of multiculturalism.

Along with Taylor’s essay, the comments of Wolf, Rockefeller,

and Walzer are intended to stimulate more constructive

discussions of the issues surrounding multiculturalism

than those that now dominate public discourse. In that same

spirit, we might also consider here the debate over multiculturalism

closer to home, the public controversy over multiculturalism

that has hit the campuses of American colleges

and universities, where we have witnessed some of the most

acrimonious arguments. Even though life and death do not

hang on the outcome, the political identity of Americans, the

quality of our collective intellectual life, and the nature and

value of higher education are all at issue. So the stakes are

rightly perceived as high. Consider the opening lines of an

op-ed piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal in the midst of

the controversy that raged over Stanford University’s core

curriculum: “The intellectual heritage of the West goes on

trial at Stanford University today. Most predict it will lose.”

The controversy referred to by the author of the piece, Isaac

Barchas, a Stanford classics major, revolved around the content

of Stanford’s only year-long requirement in “Western

Culture.” Students were required to choose one of eight

courses, all of which shared a core reading list of fifteen

works by classical thinkers such as Plato, Homer, Dante, and

Darwin.

If Barchas’s characterization is correct, the intellectual

heritage of the West lost at Stanford three years ago, with

remarkably little opposition from the faculty. The faculty

voted, 39 to 4, to replace the requirement in Western Culture

with one called “Culture, Ideas, and Values” that

adds works of some non-European cultures and works by

women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native

Americans to a contracted core of the classics. The Old and

New Testament, Plato, Saint Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau,

and Marx remain in the new core.

In the ensuing public debate over whether to change the

content of such core courses, one side—call them “essentialists”—

argued that to dilute the core with new works for the

sake of including previously unheard voices would be to forsake

the values of Western civilization for the standardlessness

of relativism, the tyranny of the social sciences,

lightweight trendiness, and a host of related intellectual

and political evils. Another, diametrically opposed side—call

them “deconstructionists”—argued that to preserve the core

by excluding contributions to civilization by women, African-

Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans as

if the classical canon were sacred, unchanging, and unchangeable

would be to denigrate the identities of members

of these previously excluded groups and to close off Western

civilization from the influences of unorthodox and challenging

ideas for the sake of perpetuating sexism, racism, Euro-

centrism, closed-mindedness, the tyranny of Truth (with a

capital “T”), and a host of related intellectual and political

evils.

Much more is at issue, and of value, here than meets the

ear in the public debate between essentialists and deconstructionists.

If the intellectual heritage of the West went on

trial at Stanford and other campuses that have considered

changing their core curricula, then the intellectual heritage of

the West lost before the trials began. Neither the intellectual

heritage of the West nor the liberal democratic ideal of higher

education can be preserved by a decision to require or not to

require of every university student several courses in fifteen,

thirty, or even a hundred great books. Nor can our heritage

be eradicated by a decision to decrease the number of canonical

books to make room for newer, less established, less

widely esteemed or even less lasting works that speak more

explicitly to the experiences or better express the sense of social

alienation of women and minorities. The reason is not

that Western civilization will not stand or fall on such small

decisions. A long train of seemingly small abuses can create

a large revolution, as we Americans, of all people, should

know.

There is another reason, which has been lost in the public

debate. Liberal education, an education adequate to serve

the life of a free and equal citizen in any modern democracy,

requires far more than the reading of great books, although

great books are an indispensable aid. We also need to read

and think about books, and therefore to teach them, in a

spirit of free and open inquiry, the spirit of both democratic

citizenship and individual freedom. The cultivation of that

spirit is aided by immersion in profound and influential

books, like Plato’s Republic, which expose us to eloquently

original, systematically well-reasoned, intimidating, and unfamiliar

visions of the good life and good society. But liberal

education fails if intimidation leads to blind acceptance of

those visions or if unfamiliarity leads us to blind rejection.

These two signs of failure are too often reflected in the

public debate over multiculturalism on college and university

campuses. In resisting the substitution of new works for

old ones, essentialists suggest that the insights and truths of

the old will be lost by even partial substitution, which is typically

what is at stake in controversies like the one at Stanford.

But preservation of tried-and-true verities is not among

the best reasons for including the classics in any list of required

reading at the university level. Why not say that great

books like Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics are among the

most challenging to anyone who wants to think carefully,

systematically, and critically about politics? It is intellectual

idolatry, and not philosophical openness and acuity, that

supports the claim, frequently articulated but rarely defended,

that the greatest philosophical works—judged by

such standards as originality and eloquence, systematic reasoning,

depth of moral, psychological, or political understanding,

and influence on our inherited social understandings—

contain the greatest wisdom now available to us on all

significant subjects.

Is Aristotle’s understanding of slavery more enlightening

than Frederick Douglass’s? Is Aquinas’s argument about civil

disobedience more defensible than Martin Luther King’s or

John Rawls’s? If not, then why not assign students The Autobiography

of Frederick Douglass, “Letter from Birmingham City

Jail,” and A Theory of Justice alongside the Politics and Summa

Theologiae? Although Rousseau’s understanding of women

challenges contemporary feminism, it is far less credible or

compelling on intellectual grounds than Virginia Woolf’s, Simone

de Beauvoir’s, or Toni Morrison’s insights on women.

Similarly, Hannah Arendt offers a perspective on political

evil that goes beyond that of any canonical political philosopher.

Were essentialists explicitly to open their public argument

to the possibility that the classics do not contain comprehensive

or timeless truths on all significant subjects, they

could moderate their critique and recognize the reasonableness 

of some proposed reforms that create more multicultural

curricula.

A significant internal obstacle that stands in the way of

moderation is the belief held in reserve by some essentialists

that the classics, especially the works of Plato and Aristotle,

are the key to timeless moral and political truths, the truths

of human nature. In the spirit of Robert Maynard Hutchins,

essentialists often invoke Plato, Aristotle, and “nature” as

critical standards. The argument, explicitly made by Hutchins

but only intimated by Allan Bloom and other contemporary

critics, goes roughly as follows: The highest form of

human nature is the same in America as in Athens, as

should be the content of higher education, if it is to be true

to the highest in human nature, the intellectual virtues cultivated

to their greatest perfection. Here is Hutchins’ succinct

formulation: “Education implies teaching. Teaching implies

knowledge. Knowledge is truth. The truth is everywhere the

same. Hence education should be everywhere the same. I do

not overlook the possibilities of differences in organization,

in administration, in local habits and customs. These are details.”

1 Essentialists honor and invoke the great books as the

critical standard for judging both “lesser” works and societies

that inevitably fail to live up to Platonic or Aristotelian

standards.

One need not in any way denigrate the great books or defend

a standardless relativism to worry about the way in

which the essentialist critique of multiculturalism partakes of

intellectual idol worship. Compare the essentialist defense of

the canon to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s approach to books, as

argued in “The American Scholar.” Emerson’s perspective

serves as an important challenge to essentialism, and yet no

contemporary critic takes up this challenge: “The theory of

books is noble. . . . But none is quite perfect. As no air-

pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither

can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local,

the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure

thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote

posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second

age.”2 Emerson is not saying that because even the best

books are to some significant extent conventional and rooted

in a particular social context, we should read them primarily

for what they reflect about their own times rather than what

they can say to us and our times. We can still learn a lot

about the human condition from Plato’s Republic, or about

our obligation to the state from the Crito. But we cannot learn

everything profound about obligation, let alone everything

worth knowing about the human condition, from reading

Plato, Aristotle, or the entire corpus of canonical works.

“Each age,” Emerson concludes, “must write its own

books.”3 Why? Because well-educated, open-minded people

and liberal democratic citizens must think for themselves. In

liberal democracies, a primary aim of liberal arts universities

is not to create bookworms, but to cultivate people who are

willing and able to be self-governing in both their political

and personal lives. “Books are the best of things, well used,”

Emerson argues, “abused, among the worst. What is the

right use? . . . They are for nothing but to inspire.”4

It would also be a form of intellectual idolatry to take

Emerson’s words as gospel. Books do more than inspire.

They also unite us in a community, or communities, of learning.

They teach us about our intellectual heritage, our culture,

as well as about foreign cultures. American universities

may aspire to be more international, but to the extent that

our liberal arts curriculum along with our student body is

still primarily American, it is crucial, as Wolf suggests in her

comments, that universities recognize who “we” are when

they defend a core curriculum that speaks to “our” circumstances,

culture, and intellectual heritage. Not because students

can identify only with works written by authors of the

same race, ethnicity, or gender, but because there are books

by and about women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans,

and Native Americans that speak to neglected parts of our

heritage and human condition, and speak more wisely than

do some of the canonical works. Although social injustices

concern us all, neglect of noncanonical literature is more

acutely perceived by people who identify themselves with

the neglected, and the exclusion of such works is not unreasonably

thought to reflect lack of respect for members of

these groups, or disregard for part of their cultural identities.

Criticism of the canon per se should not therefore be equated

with tribalism or particularism. Emerson was guilty of neither

when he argued that each age must write, and presumably

also read, its own books.

Radically opposed to essentialism, deconstructionists erect

a different obstacle to liberal democratic education when

they deny the desirability of shared intellectual standards,

which scholars and students of diverse cultural backgrounds

might use to evaluate our common education. Although deconstructionists

do not deny the possibility of shared standards,

they view common standards as masks for the will to

political power of dominant, hegemonic groups. This reductionist

argument about intellectual standards is often made

on behalf of groups that are underrepresented in the university

and disadvantaged in society, but it is hard to see how it

can come to the aid of anyone. The argument is self-undermining,

both logically and practically. By its internal logic,

deconstructionism has nothing more to say for the view that

intellectual standards are masks for the will to political

power than that it too reflects the will to power of deconstructionists.

But why then bother with intellectual life at all,

which is not the fastest, surest, or even most satisfying path

to political power, if it is political power that one is really

after?

Deconstructionism is also impractical. If intellectual standards

are political in the sense of reflecting the antagonistic

interests and will to power of particular groups, then disadvantaged

groups have no choice but to accept the hegemonic

standards that society imposes on the academy and the academy

in turn imposes on them. The less powerful cannot possibly

hope to have their standards win out, especially if their

academic spokespersons publicize the view that intellectual

standards are nothing more than assertions or reflections of

the will to power.

The deconstructionist outlook on the academy not only

deconstructs itself, it does so in a dangerous way. Deconstructionists

do not act as if they believed that common standards

are impossible. They act, and often speak, as if they

believed that the university curriculum should include works

by and about disadvantaged groups. And some version of

this position, as we have seen, is defensible on universalistic

grounds. But the reduction of all intellectual disagreements

to conflicts of group interests is not. It does not stand up to

evidence or reasoned argument. Anyone who doubts this

conclusion might try to demonstrate in a nontautological

way that the strongest arguments for and against legalizing

abortion, not the arguments offered by politicians but the

most careful and compelling philosophical arguments, simply

reflect the will to power, class and gender interests of

their proponents.

Reductionism of intellect and argument to political interest

threatens to politicize the university more profoundly and

destructively than ever before. I say “threatens” because deconstructionism

has not actually “taken over” the academy,

as some critics claim. But the anti-intellectual, politicizing

threat it poses is nonetheless real. A great deal of intellectual

life, especially in the humanities and the “soft” social sci-

ences, depends upon dialogue among reasonable people

who disagree on the answers to some fundamental questions

about the value of various literary, political, economic,

religious, educational, scientific, and aesthetic understandings

and achievements. Colleges and universities are the

only major social institutions dedicated to fostering knowledge,

understanding, intellectual dialogue, and the pursuit

of reasoned argument in the many directions that it may

lead. The threat of deconstructionism to intellectual life in

the academy is twofold: (1) it denies a priori that there are any

reasonable answers to fundamental questions, and (2) it reduces

every answer to an exercise of political power.

Taken seriously, on its own terms, the deconstructionist

defense of a more multicultural curriculum itself appears as

an assertion of political power in the name of the exploited

and oppressed, rather than as an intellectually defensible reform.

And deconstructionism represents critics and criticisms

of multiculturalism, however reasonable, as politically

retrograde and unworthy of intellectual respect. Whereas

essentialists react to reasonable uncertainty and disagreement

by invoking rather than defending timeless truths,

deconstructionists react by explaining away our different

viewpoints, presuming they are equally indefensible on intellectual

grounds. Intellectual life is deconstructed into a political

battlefield of class, gender, and racial interests, an

analogy that does not do justice to democratic politics at its

best, which is not merely a contest of competing interest

groups. But the image conveyed of academic life, the real

arena of deconstructionist activity, is more dangerous still

because it can create its own reality, converting universities

into political battlefields rather than mutually respectful

communities of substantial, sometimes even fundamental,

intellectual disagreement.

Deconstructionists and essentialists disagree about the

value and content of a multicultural curriculum. The disagreement

is exacerbated by the zero-sum nature of the

choice between canonical and newer works, when a few required

core courses become the focus in academic and public

discussions of what constitutes a good education. But disagreement

about what books should be required and how

they should be read is not in itself terribly troubling. No university

curriculum can possibly include all the books or represent

all the cultures worthy of recognition in a liberal democratic

education. Nor can any free society, let alone any

university of independent scholars and teachers, expect to

agree on hard choices between competing goods. The cause

for concern about the ongoing controversies over multiculturalism

and the curriculum is rather that the most vocal parties

to these disputes appear unwilling to defend their views

before people with whom they disagree, and to entertain seriously

the possibility of change in the face of well-reasoned

criticism. Instead, in an equal and opposite reaction, essentialists

and deconstructionists express mutual disdain rather

than respect for their differences. And so they create two

mutually exclusive and disrespecting intellectual cultures in

academic life, evincing an attitude of unwillingness to learn

anything from the other or recognize any value in the other.

In political life writ large, there is a parallel problem of disrespect

and lack of constructive communication among the

spokespersons for ethnic, religious, and racial groups, a

problem that all too often leads to violence.

The survival of many mutually exclusive and disrespecting

cultures is not the moral promise of multiculturalism, in politics

or in education. Nor is it a realistic vision: neither universities

nor polities can effectively pursue their valued ends

without mutual respect among the various cultures they contain.

But not every aspect of cultural diversity is worthy of

respect. Some differences—racism and anti-Semitism are obvious

examples—ought not to be respected, even if expressions

of racist and anti-Semitic views must be tolerated.

The controversy on college campuses over racist, ethnic,

sexist, homophobic, and other forms of offensive speech di-

rected against members of disadvantaged groups exemplifies

the need for a shared moral vocabulary that is richer than

our rights to free speech. Suppose one grants that members

of a university community should have the right to express

racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, and homophobic views provided

they do not threaten anyone. What is left to say about the

racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, and homophobic remarks that

have become increasingly common on college campuses?

Nothing, if our shared moral vocabulary is limited to the

right of free speech, unless one challenges racist and anti-

Semitic statements on free speech grounds. But then the

public issue will quickly shift from the pernicious content of

the speech to the speaker’s right of free speech.

Everything is left to say, however, if we can distinguish

between tolerating and respecting differences. Toleration extends

to the widest range of views, so long as they stop short

of threats and other direct and discernible harms to individuals.

Respect is far more discriminating. Although we need

not agree with a position to respect it, we must understand

it as reflecting a moral point of view. Someone with a prochoice

position on abortion, for example, should be able to

understand how a morally serious person without ulterior

motives might be opposed to legalizing abortion. There are

serious moral arguments to be made against legalization.

And vice versa. A multicultural society is bound to include a

wide range of such respectable moral disagreements, which

offers us the opportunity to defend our views before morally

serious people with whom we disagree and thereby learn

from our differences. In this way, we can make a virtue out

of the necessity of our moral disagreements.

There is no virtue in misogyny, racial and ethnic hatred, or

rationalizations of self-interest and group interest parading

as historical or scientific knowledge. Undeserving of respect

are views that flagrantly disregard the interests of others and

therefore do not take a genuine moral position at all, or that

make radically implausible empirical claims (of racial inferi-

ority, for example) that are not grounded upon publicly

shared or accessible standards of evidence. Incidents of hate

speech on college campuses fall into this category of disrespectable

speech. Racist and anti-Semitic slogans are indefensible

on moral and empirical grounds, and add nothing

valuable to democratic deliberation or intellectual life. They

reflect a refusal to treat people as equals, along with an unwillingness

or inability to provide publicly accessible evidence

for presuming other groups of people fundamentally

inferior to oneself and one’s group. Hate speech violates the

most elementary moral injunction to respect the dignity of all

human beings, and simply presumes the fundamental inferiority

of others.

As communities dedicated to intellectual inquiry, universities

should give the broadest protection to free speech. But,

having protected everyone’s right to speak, university communities

need not and should not be silent when faced with

racist, anti-Semitic, or other disrespectable speech. Members

of academic communities—faculty, students, and administrators—

can use our right to free speech to denounce disrespectable

speech by exposing it for what it is, flagrant disregard

for the interests of other people, rationalization of

self-interest or group interest, prejudice, or sheer hatred of

humanity. There is no valuable understanding to be gained

directly from the content of disrespectable speech. Even so,

incidents of hate speech challenge members of liberal democratic

communities to articulate the most fundamental moral

presuppositions that unite us. We fail ourselves and, more

importantly, the targets of hate speech if we do not respond

to the often unthinking, sometimes drunken disregard for

the most elementary standards of human decency.

Respectable moral disagreements, on the other hand, call

for deliberation, not denunciation. Colleges and universities

can serve as models for deliberation, by encouraging rigorous,

honest, open, and intense intellectual discussions, both

inside and outside the classroom. The willingness and ability

to deliberate about our respectable differences is also part of

the democratic political ideal. Multicultural societies and

communities that stand for the freedom and equality of all

people rest upon mutual respect for reasonable intellectual,

political, and cultural differences. Mutual respect requires a

widespread willingness and ability to articulate our disagreements,

to defend them before people with whom we disagree,

to discern the difference between respectable and

disrespectable disagreement, and to be open to changing

our own minds when faced with well-reasoned criticism.

The moral promise of multiculturalism depends on the exercise

of these deliberative virtues.

Chanson d’automne -Paul Verlaine-

Chanson d’automne

-Paul Verlaine-

*

Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne

Blessent mon coeur

D’une langueur

Monotone.

Tout suffocant

Et blême, quand

Sonne l’heure,

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens

Et je pleure

Et je m’en vais

Au vent mauvais

Qui m’emporte

Deçà, delà,

Pareil à la

Feuille morte.

**

Que serais-je sans toi - Aragon -

Que serais-je sans toi

- Aragon -

Que serais-je sans toi qui vins à ma rencontre

Que serais-je sans toi qu'un cur au bois dormant

Que cette heure arrêtée au cadran de la montre

Que serais-je sans toi que ce balbutiement

J'ai tout appris de toi sur les choses humaines

Et j'ai vu désormais le monde à ta façon

J'ai tout appris de toi comme on boit aux fontaines

Comme on lit dans le ciel les étoiles lointaines

Comme au passant qui chante on reprend sa chanson

J'ai tout appris de toi jusqu'au sens du frisson

Que serais-je sans toi qui vins à ma rencontre

Que serais-je sans toi qu'un cur au bois dormant

Que cette heure arrêtée au cadran de la montre

Que serais-je sans toi que ce balbutiement

J'ai tout appris de toi pour ce qui me concerne

Qu'il fait jour à midi qu'un ciel peut être bleu

Que le bonheur n'est pas un quinquet de taverne

Tu m'as pris par la main dans cet enfer moderne

Où l'homme ne sait plus ce que c'est qu'être deux

Tu m'as pris par la main comme un amant heureux

Que serais-je sans toi qui vins à ma rencontre

Que serais-je sans toi qu'un cur au bois dormant

Que cette heure arrêtée au cadran de la montre

Que serais-je sans toi que ce balbutiement

Qui parle de bonheur a souvent les yeux tristes

N'est-ce pas un sanglot de la déconvenue

Une corde brisée aux doigts du guitariste

Et pourtant je vous dis que le bonheur existe

Ailleurs que dans le rêve ailleurs que dans les nues

Terre terre voici ses rades inconnues

Que serais-je sans toi qui vins à ma rencontre

Que serais-je sans toi qu'un cur au bois dormant

Que cette heure arrêtée au cadran de la montre

Que serais-je sans toi que ce balbutiement

The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids - Agnes Callard - NYT, The Stone

The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids

By Agnes Callard Nov. 22, 2019

Here is an anecdote I was not allowed to post on Twitter.

On a recent trip to Costco, the kids were fighting in the back of the car and I asked my husband, “Why do we have such bad children? Is it because we’re bad parents?” He said, “Yes, but it’s not our fault, we must’ve had bad parents.” I said, “But that’s not their fault — ” and my 6-year-old son interrupted, enraged, yelling from the back of the car, “IT’S ALL GOD’S FAULT!”

Your own reaction to this story can tell you why my son wouldn’t let me tweet it: He doesn’t want you to think he’s cute. (He has consented to have it appear here. No children’s rights were violated in the writing of this essay.) When he was saying those words, he was not trying to entertain. He was angry — at me, at my husband, at God and, after I asked him whether I could tweet it, at you for the way he knew you would react.

My oldest son is 15, and he finds my Twitter behavior undignified. (“Why does the world need to know that we are at Costco?”) He feels that a teacher, mentor and role model should cultivate a distance, even a mystique, so as to elicit the kind of respect she needs from her students, advisees and admirers. If people do not think they know you, then you do not need to worry, as my 6-year-old did, that you have left yourself in their interpretive hands. You can restrict their thoughts about you.

To allow others to think about us in whatever way they feel like — perhaps to laugh at us, perhaps to dismiss us — is a huge loss of control. So why do we allow it? What is the attraction of it? I think that it’s the increase in control we get in return. Social media has enabled the Great Control Swap. And it is happening right now, beneath our notice.

The first baby step toward the Great Swap was the shift from phone calls to texts. A phone interaction requires participants to be “on the same time,” which entails negotiations over entrance into and exit from the conversation. Consider all the time we spend first on, “Is this a bad time to call? Can you talk?” And then later on, “O.K., gotta go, talk to you soon, see you later, good talking to you … ” (It’s only in the movies that you can just hang up on someone.) Everyone has been in a phone conversation that ended much later than they wanted it to; the form subjects us to the will of another.

A text or email interaction, by contrast, liberates the parties so that each may operate on their own time. But the cost comes in another form of control: data. Homer’s “winged words” fly from the mouth of one directly to the ear of another, but text-based communication requires stationary words: One person puts them down, so the other can come along and read them at her leisure. And that means they leave a trail.

Imagine a man conducting a romantic affair exclusively by email. He needn’t lie to his wife about fake “business trips,” since he can pursue his shenanigans right under her nose. Likewise, he avoids undesirable entanglements with his mistress: He doesn’t even need to buy her dinner! Email allows him the control to steer the two women out of the way of one another — but the price he pays is a very robust data trail. His affair has a text archive. If his mistress decides to write a book about it, she can be scientific. She needn’t rely on memory or vague impressions. She can systematically analyze their interactions and quote his exact words.

Our anger at social media companies resembles this man’s anger over his mistress’s theft of his “private data.” We wanted one kind of control, and didn’t reckon with the fact that we’d have to pay for it with another kind. We wanted to be able to interact with other people entirely in our own time, with people who make no demands on us. We wanted entry and exit to be painless. We understood from the start that this form of socializing — like an affair without physical contact — was shallower than the other, more demanding kind. We were prepared to accept that trade-off, but failed to grasp that we were trading away more than depth. We were also trading away a kind of control.

As my children appreciate, the control issue goes well beyond whether Facebookmonetizes our data. It is also a matter of making oneself into a thing that others can own. When I’ve told you what my son said, it’s not “his data” anymore. He can’t control whether you laugh at it, or what tone you use when you do.

We don’t like to acknowledge just how much we are willing to pay for distance from other people. For example, people warn prospective parents that having a baby is expensive, but that isn’t exactly true. What’s expensive is getting away from your baby. If you don’t want to feed them with your body, you buy formula and bottles. If you don’t want them looking at you all the time, you buy contraptions to entertain them. A stroller so you don’t have to carry them, a crib so you don’t have to sleep with them, a house with extra rooms so you don’t even have to sleep near them, child care so that you can get farther away yet: These are the costs that add up. You don’t pay much for babies, but you pay a lot to escape them.

All of us have a desire to connect, to be seen. But we live in a world that is starting to allow us to satisfy that desire without feeling the common-sense moral strictures that have traditionally governed human relationships. We can engage without obligation, without boredom and, most importantly, without subjecting our attention to the command of another. On Twitter, I’m never obligated to listen through to the end of someone’s story.

The immense appeal of this free-form socializing lies in the way it makes one a master of one’s own time — but it cannot happen without a place. All that data has to sit somewhere so that people can freely access it whenever they wish. Data storage is the loss of control by which we secure social control: Facebook is our faithless mistress’s leaky inbox.

When we alienate our identities as text data, and put that data “out there” to be read by anyone who wanders by, we are putting ourselves into the interpretive hands of those who have no bonds or obligations or agreements with us, people with whom we are, quite literally, prevented from seeing “eye to eye.” People we cannot trust.

The Great Control Swap buys us control over the logistics of our interactions at the cost of interpretive control over the content of those interactions. Our words have lost their wings, and fallen to the ground as data.


Agnes Callard (@AgnesCallard) is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.” She writes a monthly column on public philosophy at The Point magazine.

The Perils of Abstraction - Christy Wampole - NYT, The Stone

The Perils of Abstraction

By Christy Wampole  Nov. 12, 2019

“Show me what winning looks like.”

This was how Senator Elizabeth Warren, in September’s Democratic presidential debate, described the appeal she has made “every time one of the generals come through” as she sought to understand by what measure our military intervention in Afghanistan could be considered a success. In place of an abstraction — “success” — she wanted something concrete. Ms. Warren’s plea, startling in its simplicity, highlights the perilous nature of abstraction and invites us to study the various ways in which it may be deployed to control, cancel or kill people.

In the social and political realms, an abstraction is an idea — love, liberty, Leninism — that has no palpable form. When we speak about something in the abstract, we take concrete instances and average them into generalized — and necessarily reductive — concepts. Through this process, things, events and people lose their visibility and density. The world becomes a series of signs and numbers standing in for things themselves.

Among the thinkers of the past century, the French philosopher Simone Weil stands out as a powerful analyst of the many ways in which abstraction could damage our politics and our soul.

In a 1936 essay, originally titled “Let Us Not Start Another Trojan War” but better known by the title of its English translation, “The Power of Words,” Weil drew a relationship between the increasing abstraction of words and the pretexts used for war. “In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends,” she wrote. “Our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities.”

Weil saw in her historical moment a loss of a sense of scale, a creeping ineptitude in judgment and communication and, ultimately, a forfeiture of rational thought. She observed how political platforms being built upon words like “roots” or “homeland” could use more abstractions — like “the foreigner,” “the immigrant,” “the minority” and “the refugee” — to turn flesh-and-blood individuals into targets. Finally, she understood how central abstractions were in legitimizing unwarranted authority, in pitting people against one another, and in justifying indefensible wars, discrimination and other forms of brutality.

While Weil was describing Europe on the verge of catastrophic war, this insight can also help us understand the demoralizing reality of contemporary American politics.

There is no doubt that driven by the explosion of new and more accessible technologies, our world has become more and more abstract: from the advent and expansion of cyberwarfare, through demographic research and online banking and trading, to algorithmic commerce and the move toward cashless societies. The tendency toward abstraction, though, is not merely restricted to the realm of technology. It extends to our social, intellectual and political lives — including the various isms (feminism, racism, colonialism, nationalism and so on) that we use to sum up human systems and behaviors.

Abstractions often arise when there is too much to know and too little time in which to know it. Submerged in a superabundance of information, abstractions — in the guise of statistics or stereotypes — seem to act as valuable timesavers. But what we save in time, we lose in nuance and exactitude. And there is a greater danger: When the world grows more complex, as it has in our age of global technocracy, specialists begin to monopolize information and use it as a tool of control.

Weil described this dynamic well in a 1934 essay, “Analysis of Oppression,” in a passage about the origins of religious thought. She argued that when the religious rites meant to help humans gain favor from the gods grow “too numerous and complicated to be known by all,” these rites become “the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests.” And, she concluded, “Nothing essential is changed when the monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests.”

When politicians like Elizabeth Warren speak of “the generals” you can be sure they refer only partly to real people and much more to archetypes — the Generals — that have accumulated lifetimes of semantic and cultural baggage. This can also be true of other groups like the Women, the Students, the African-Americans, the Russians and so on. We know other such powerful words: Government, Corporation, Faith, Civilization, Culture, Nation. “When empty words are given capital letters, then, on the slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruin in their name without effectively grasping anything to which they refer,” Weil wrote, “for the simple reason that they mean nothing.”

This is why she was against all political parties. She believed they require fealty to vague ideas without an understanding of the facts, material contingencies and concrete realities necessary for effective governance. Political parties are generators of abstractions, churned out endlessly for one purpose only — so that the Party can survive and grow. In one economical sentence, Weil summed up why political cooperation requires us all to get out of our heads and dispense with abstractions, if only for a little while: “The number 2 thought of by one man cannot be added to the number 2 thought of by another man so as to make up the number 4.”

It would serve each of us well to make a collective effort to inventory our beliefs, assess how much they rely on abstractions, and consider how a move away from the abstract and toward the concrete might bring us all closer to understanding what winning looks like.

Christy Wampole is an associate professor of French literature and thought at Princeton University and the author, most recently, of “Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Metaphor.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

ولما رأى الجموع صعد إلى الجبل.فلما جلس تقدم اليه تلاميذه. ففتح فاه وعلمهم قائلاً:
طوبى للمساكين بالروح. لأن لهم ملكوت السموات.
طوبى للحزانى. لأنهم يتعزون.
طوبى للودعاء. لأنهم يرثون الأرض.
طوبى للجياع والعطاش إلى البر. لأنهم يشبعون.
طوبى للرحماء. لأنهم يرحمون.
طوبى لأنقياء القلب. لأنهم يعاينون الله.
طوبى لصانعي السلام. لأنهم أبناء الله يدعون.
طوبى للمطرودين من أجل البر. لأن لهم ملكوت السموات.
طوبى لكم إذا عيّروكم وطردوكم وقالوا عليكم كل كلمة شريرة من أجلي كاذبين. افرحوا وتهللوا. لأن أجركم عظيم في السموات. فإنهم هكذا طردوا الأنبياء الذين قبلكم أنتم ملح الأرض. ولكن إن فسد الملح فبماذا يملح. لا يصلح بعد لشيء إلا لأن يطرح خارجًا ويداس من الناس.
أنتم نور العالم. لا يمكن أن تخفى مدينة موضوعة على جبل. ولا يوقدون سراجًا ويضعونه تحت المكيال بل على المنارة فيضيء لجميع الذين في البيت. فليضئ نوركم هكذا قدام الناس لكي يروا أعمالكم الحسنة ويمجدوا أباكم الذي في السموات لا تظنوا أني جئت لأنقض الناموس أو الأنبياء.

قد سمعتم أنه قيل للقدماء لا تقتل. ومن قتل يكون مستوجب الحكم. وأما أنا فأقول لكم إن كل من يغضب على أخيه باطلًا يكون مستوجب الحكم. ومن قال لأخيه رقا يكون مستوجب المجمع. ومن قال يا أحمق يكون مستوجب نار جهنم. فإن قدمت قربانك إلى المذبح وهناك تذكرت أن لاخيك شيئا عليك فاترك هناك قربانك قدام المذبح واذهب أولا اصطلح مع أخيك. وحينئذ تعال وقدم قربانك. كن مراضيًا لخصمك سريعًا ما دمت معه في الطريق. لئلا يسلمك الخصم إلى القاضي ويسلمك القاضي إلى الشرطي فتلقى في السجن. الحق أقول لك لا تخرج من هناك حتى توفي الفلس الاخير.

ليكن كلامكم نعم نعم لا لا. وما زاد على ذلك فهو من الشرير.

سمعتم أنه قيل عين بعين وسن بسن. وأما أنا فأقول لكم لا تقاوموا الشر. بل من لطمك على خدك الأيمن فحوّل له الآخر أيضاً. ومن أراد أن يخاصمك ويأخذ ثوبك فاترك له الرداء أيضا.
ومن سخرك ميلاً واحداً فاذهب معه اثنين.
من سألك فأعطه.
ومن أراد أن يقترض منك فلا ترده.

سمعتم أنه قيل تحب قريبك وتبغض عدوك. وأما أنا فأقول لكم أحبوا أعداءكم. باركوا لاعنيكم. أحسنوا إلى مبغضيكم. وصلّوا لأجل الذين يسيئون إليكم ويطردونكم. لكي تكونوا أبناء أبيكم الذي في السموات. فإنه يشرق شمسه على الأشرار والصالحين ويمطر على الأبرار والظالمين. لأنه إن أحببتم الذين يحبونكم فأي أجر لكم.أليس العشارون أيضا يفعلون ذلك. وإن سلمتم على إخوتكم فقط فأي فضل تصنعون. أليس العشارون أيضًا يفعلون هكذا. فكونوا أنتم كاملين كما أن أباكم الذي في السموات هو كامل.

My Father’s Stack of Books -Kathryn Schulz- NewYorker -

My Father’s Stack of Books

"When he was a child, books were gifts. For his daughters, he made sure they were a given." 

Kathryn SchulzMarch 25, 2019

My father loved books ravenously, and his always had a devoured look to them.

Illustration by Rose Wong

When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a remarkable harmony—one that anyone who has ever tried to organize a home library would envy—among thematic, alphabetic, and aesthetic demands. The other, which governed the upstairs books, was instituted by my father, and was based on the conviction that it is very nice to have everything you’ve recently read near at hand, in case you get the urge to consult any of it again; and also that it is a pain in the neck to put those books away, especially when the shelves on which they belong are so exquisitely organized that returning one to its appropriate slot requires not only a card catalogue but a crowbar.

It was this pair of convictions that led to the development of the Stack. I can’t remember it in its early days, because in its early days it wasn’t memorable. I suppose back then it was just a modest little pile of stray books, the kind that many readers have lying around in the living room or next to the bed. But by the time I was in my early teens it was the case—and seemed by then to have always been the case—that my parents’ bedroom was home to the Mt. Kilimanjaro of books. Or perhaps more aptly the Mt. St. Helens of books, since it seemed possible that at any moment some subterranean shift in it might cause a cataclysm.

The Stack had started in a recessed space near my father’s half of the bed, bounded on one side by a wall and on the other by my parents’ dresser, a vertical behemoth taller than I would ever be. At some point in the Stack’s development, it had overtopped that piece of furniture, whereupon it met a second tower of books, which, at some slightly later point, had begun growing up along the dresser’s other side. For some reason, though, the Stack always looked to me as if it had defied gravity (or perhaps obeyed some other, more mysterious force) and grown down the far side of the dresser instead. At all events, the result was a kind of homemade Arc de Triomphe, extremely haphazard-looking but basically stable, made of some three or four hundred books.

I have no idea why we called this entity the Stack, considering the word’s orderly connotations of squared-off edges and the shelving areas of libraries. It’s true that the younger side of the Stack mounted toward the ceiling in relatively tidy fashion, like the floors of a high-rise—a concession to its greater proximity to the doorway, and thus to the more trafficked area of the bedroom, where a sudden collapse could have been catastrophic. But the original side was another story. Few generally vertical structures have ever been less stacklike, and no method of storing books has ever looked less like a shelf.

Some people love books reverently—my great-aunt, for instance, a librarian and a passionate reader who declined to open any volume beyond a hundred-degree angle, so tenderly did she treat their spines. My father, by contrast, loved books ravenously. His always had a devoured look to them: scribbled on, folded over, cracked down the middle, liberally stained with coffee, Scotch, pistachio dust, and bits of the brightly colored shells of peanut M&M’s. (I have inherited his pragmatic attitude toward books and deliberately break the spine of every paperback I start, because I like to fold them in half while reading them.) In addition to the Stack, my father typically had on his bedside table the five or six books he was currently reading—a novel or two, a few works of nonfiction, a volume of poetry, “Comprehensive Russian Grammar” or some other textbooky thing—and when he finished one of these he would toss it into the space between the dresser and the wall. Compression and accumulation—especially accumulation—did the rest.

To my regret, I have only a single photograph of the result. I have spent a great deal of time studying it, yet find many of the books in it impossible to identify. Some tumbled into the Stack spine in, rendering them wholly unknowable, while others fell victim to low resolution, including a few that are maddeningly familiar: an Oxford Anthology whose navy binding and gold stamp I recognize but whose spine is too blurry to read; a book that is unmistakably a Penguin Classic, but that hardly narrows it down; an Idiot’s Guide to I don’t know what. In some cases, I can make out the title but had to look up the author: “Pirate Latitudes” (Michael Crichton), “Mayflower” (Nathaniel Philbrick), “Small World” (David Lodge), “The Way Things Were” (Aatish Taseer). In others, conversely, I can see the author but not the title: something by Carl Hiaasen, something by Wally Lamb, something by Nadine Gordimer, something by Gore Vidal.

Plenty of other books in the Stack, however, are perfectly visible, and perfectly familiar. There’s the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe; there’s “Pale Fire” and “White Teeth”; there’s “Infinite Jest” and “Amerika.” There’s Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose,” a book my father mailed to me in my early twenties, together with “Our Mutual Friend,” when I was travelling and lonely and had run out of things to read. In the Stack, Stegner’s novel has achieved its own angle of repose, alongside Richard Friedman’s “Who Wrote the Bible?” and Antonio Damasio’s “The Feeling of What Happens.” Above that is Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage,” about Lewis and Clark’s westward journey, and Diane McWhorter’s “Carry Me Home,” about the civil-rights movement in Birmingham. There’s Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” and Beryl Markham’s “West with the Night.” There are books I can remember discussing with my father—Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live”—together with books I had no idea he’d read and, despite his insatiable curiosity, no idea he would have cared to read: the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds, Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation,” Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.”

I’m not sure exactly when this photograph of the Stack was taken. It must have been after the fall of 2012, since one of the books visible is Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” which came out in September of that year, and before 2016, when my parents moved out of their home of thirty years and into a condo, the kind with no stairs for them to fall down and less space to manage as they aged. There were plenty of books in the new place, though, and a nice wide clearing by the side of the bed, so I suspect that, given enough time, it would have housed some kind of Stack 2.0. But it did not, because seven months after my parents moved in my father died. On his bedside table at the time was a new edition of “Middlemarch,” together with a copy of “SPQR,” Mary Beard’s history of ancient Rome, and Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong.” “Middlemarch” my father regarded as the greatest novel in the English language and had been rereading for at least the sixth time. I don’t know if he had completed either of the other two books, or even begun them. But it doesn’t make any difference, I suppose. No matter when my father died, he would have been—as, one way or another, we all are when we die—in the middle of something.

I don’t know where my father got his love of books. His own father, a plumber by trade, was an epic raconteur but not, to my knowledge, much of a reader. His mother, the youngest of thirteen children, was sent for her protection from a Polish shtetl to Palestine at the start of the Second World War, only to learn afterward that her parents and eleven of her twelve siblings had perished in Auschwitz. Whoever she might otherwise have been died then, too; the woman she became was volatile, unhappy, and inscrutable. My father was never even entirely sure how literate she was—in any language, and least of all in English, which he himself began learning at the age of eleven, when the family arrived in the United States on refugee visas and settled in Detroit.

It’s possible that my father turned to books to escape his parents’ chronic fighting, although I don’t know that for sure. I do know that when he was nineteen he left Michigan for Manhattan, imagining a glamorous new life in the city that had so impressed him when he first arrived in America. Instead, he found penury on the Bowery. To save money, he walked each day from his tenement to a job at a drugstore on the Upper West Side, then home again by way of the New York Public Library. Long before I had ever been there myself, I heard my father describe in rapturous terms the countless hours he had spent in what is now the Rose Reading Room, and the respite that he found there.

But if books were a gift for my father—transportive, salvific—he made sure that, for his children, they were a given. In one of my earliest memories, he has suddenly materialized in the doorway of the room where my sister and I were playing, holding a Norton Anthology of Poetry in one hand and waving the other aloft like Moses or Merlin while reciting “Kubla Khan.” Throughout my childhood, it was his job to read aloud to us at bedtime; to our delight, he could not be counted on to stick to the text on the page, and on the best nights he ditched the books altogether and regaled us with the homegrown adventures of Yana and Egbert, two danger-prone siblings from, of all places, Rotterdam. (My father had a keen ear for the kind of word that would make young children laugh, and that was one of them.) Those stories struck me as terrific not only at the time but again much later, when I was old enough to realize how difficult it is to construct a decent plot. When I asked my father how he had done it, he confessed that he had routinely whiled away his evening commute constructing those bedtime tales. I regret to this day that none of us ever thought to write them down.

In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister, or a writer, like me. As it was, he derived endless vicarious pleasure from his daughters’ work. Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way. Still, given his particular bent, having a daughter who got paid to read books was perhaps the consummate example of seeing to it that your kids had a better life than your own.

In the weeks and months after my father’s death, my family and I went through his belongings, donating whatever was useful, getting rid of what no one would want, and divvying up the things we loved, the things that reminded us of him. As a result, some of my father’s books are my books now: my Dickens and Dostoyevsky, my biology and natural history, my literary fiction and light verse and tragedy. They came with me the summer after he died, when my partner and I moved in together and merged our worldly possessions. Along with the rest of the books, they were the first things we unpacked and put away.

Although I often identify as my father’s daughter, there’s no mistaking which half of my genome and rearing was involved in organizing our household books. Not only does Philip Roth come after Joseph Roth on our shelves; “The Anatomy Lesson” comes after “American Pastoral,” and the nonfiction is subdivided into Linnaeus-like distinctions. And yet, as my father knew, a perfect shelving system is also inherently an imperfect one. The difficulty isn’t all the taxonomic gray areas—whether to keep T. S. Eliot’s criticism with his poetry, for instance, or whether Robert McNamara’s “In Retrospect” belongs with memoirs or with books about the Vietnam War. The difficulty is that anything that is perfectly ordered is always threatening to become imperfect and disorderly—especially books in a household of readers. You are forever acquiring new ones and going back to revisit the old, spotting some novel you’ve always intended to read and pulling it from its designated location, discovering never-categorized books in the office or the back seat or under the bed. You can put some of these strays away, of course, but, collectively, they will always spill out beyond your bookshelves, permanently unresolved, like the remainder in a long-division problem. This is a difficulty that goes well beyond libraries. No matter how beautifully your life is arranged, no matter how lovingly you tend to it, it will not stay that way forever.

I keep two pictures of my father on my desk now. One is a photograph, taken a year or so before his death, of the two of us walking down the street where I grew up. My dad has his hand on my shoulder, and although in reality I am steadying him—he was already beginning to have trouble walking—it looks as if he is guiding me. It is the posture of a father with his daughter, as close to timeless as any photograph could be. The other is the picture of the Stack. Strictly speaking, of course, that one isn’t a photograph of my father at all, and yet I can’t imagine a better image of the kinds of things that normally defy a camera. My father’s exuberant, expansive mind; the comic, necessary, generous-hearted compromises of my parents’ marriage; the origins of my own vocation—they are all there in the Stack, aslant among the books, those other bindings. ♦

Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest.

ارحمني يا الله - من وحي المزمور الخمسين- Majida Al Roumi

ارحمني يا الله، كعظيم رحمتك، وكمثل رأفتك، 

أمح مآثمي يا الله ارحمني يا الله

اغسلني كثيرا من اثمي، ومن خطيئتي طهرني،

لأني أنا عارف بآثامي، لك وحدك خطئت والشر قدامك صنعت يا الله 

ارحمني يا الله

لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني.

نجني من الدماء 

ولك يليق المجد يا الله ارحمني يا الله.

*

ارحمني يا الله، كعظيم رحمتك، وكمثل رأفتك، أمح مآثمي يا الله ارحمني يا الله اغسلني كثيرا من اثمي، ومن خطيئتي طهرني، لأني أنا عارف بآثامي، لك وحدك خطئت والشر قدامك صنعت يا الله ارحمني يا الله لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني. نجني من الدماء ولك يليق المجد يا الله ارحمني يا الله.

*

ارحمني يا الله .. ارحمني يا الله

كعظيم رحمتك .. وكمثل رأفتك

أمحو مأثمي يا الله .. ارحمني يا الله

اغسلني كثيرا من اثمي .. ومن خطيئتي طهرني

لأني أنا عارف بأثامي .. لك وحدك خطأت

والشر قدامك صنعت .. ارحمني يا الله

لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك .. وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني

نجني من الدماء .. ولك يليق المجد يا الله

*

ارحمني يا الله 

كعظيم رحمتك وبحسب رأفتك

امحُ مآثمي يا الله

ارحمني يا الله 

لا تطرحني من أمام وجهك

وروحك القدوس لا تنزعه مني

نجني من الدماء 

فلك يليق المجد يا الله

ارحمني يا الله 

____________________

من وحي المزمور الخمسين

Only You -Rumi-

Only You 

-Rumi-

"all my feelings have the color you desire to paint"

*

only you

i choose

among the entire world 

is it fair

of you

letting me be unhappy 

my heart

is a pen

in your hand 

it is all

up to you

to write me happy or sad 

i see only

what you reveal

and live as you say 

all my feelings

have the color

you desire to paint 

from the beginning

to the end

no one but you 

please make

my future

better than the past 

when you hide

i change

to a Godless person 

and when you

appear

i find my faith 

don't expect

to find any more in me

than what you give 

don't search for

hidden pockets because

i've shown you that

all i have

is all you gave.

HOW I BECAME A MADMAN - Gibran -

HOW I BECAME A MADMAN

- Gibran -

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: 

One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives -- I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves." 

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me. 

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman. 

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us. 

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

***

The name before the name before mine - Jay Besemer

The name before the name before mine

- Jay Besemer

 The unknown has hold of me and its grip is strong as honey on the underside of a spoon   

The unknown i mean is not the usual one the future the tomorrow of survival         

But the past and what happened in the name of the name after mine and in the name of the name before mine     

I do not know enough to speak I do not know enough to remain silent        

There is a fear that holds me and it sounds like wind it sounds like katydids in catalpa        

Ah the tall grass of the days before I knew there was a before me    

Where do I live if there’s no home remaining

Where do I live if the home I helped build can never be mine and the one I was born into never was         

Individual vs. the Crowd, and the Power of the Minority -Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard on Nonconformity, the Individual vs. the Crowd, and the Power of the Minority

“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”

By Maria Popova

“When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her spectacular meditation on happiness and conformity, “you surrender your own integrity [and] become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” And yet conformity is not only a survival strategy for us but also something institutionally indoctrinated in our culture.

A century earlier, the great Danish writer and thinker Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855), celebrated as the first true existentialist philosopher and an active proponent of the benefits of keeping a diary, contemplated this eternal tension between the individual and the crowd. Writing in The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard (public library) — the same fantastic window into his inner world that gave us Kierkegaard’s prescient insight on the psychology of online trolling and bullying — he considers how our incapacity for quiet contemplation cuts us off from our true self and instead causes us to adopt by passive absorption the ideals of others.

Lamenting the tendency to take our values from the “very loud talk” of the crowd rather than by “each individual going alone into his secret closet to commune quietly with himself” — something he had come to consider the root of our unhappiness — he writes:

One can very well eat lettuce before its heart has been formed; still, the delicate crispness of the heart and its lovely frizz are something altogether different from the leaves. It is the same in the world of the spirit. Being too busy has this result: that an individual very, very rarely is permitted to form a heart; on the other hand, the thinker, the poet, or the religious personality who actually has formed his heart, will never be popular, not because he is difficult, but because it demands quiet and prolonged working with oneself and intimate knowledge of oneself as well as a certain isolation.

A year later, in 1847, Kierkegaard revisits the question of the individual and the crowd:

The evolution of the world tends to show the absolute importance of the category of the individual apart from the crowd… But as yet we have not come very far concretely, though it is recognized in abstracto. That explains why it still impresses people as prideful and overweening arrogance to speak of the separate individual, whereas this precisely is truly human: each and every one is an individual.

And yet, Kierkegaard argues, most of us find it too daunting to live as individuals and instead opt for the consolations of the crowd:

Most people become quite afraid when each is expected to be a separate individual. Thus the matter turns and revolves upon itself. One moment a man is supposed to be arrogant, setting forth this view of the individual, and the next, when the individual is about to carry it out in practice, the idea is found to be much too big, too overwhelming for him.

Illustration from How to Be a Nonconformist, a 1968 satire of conformity-culture written and illustrated by a high school girl

Conformity becomes our hedge against this overwhelming idea:

Of course it is more secure to have a solid position in life, some official appointment which does not demand nearly as much of one… Most people lead far too sheltered lives, and for that reason they get to know [the divine] so little. They have permanent positions, they never put in their utmost effort…

Another year later, he returns to the subject and argues that the real arrogance is not in living up to our individuality but in denying it, and in effect denying the individuality of others:

Each human being has infinite reality, and it is pride and arrogance in a person not to honor his fellow-man…. It is a paralogism that one thousand human beings are worth more than one… The central point about being human is that the unit “1” is the highest; “1000” counts for less.

Two years later, in 1850, Kierkegaard makes a poignant case for the vital role of the minority as an antidote to the chronic groupthink of the majority:

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion — and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion, which then becomes that of the majority, i.e., becomes nonsense by having the whole [mass] on its side, while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

In regard to Truth, this troublesome monster, the majority, the public, etc., fares in the same way as we say of someone who is traveling to regain his health: he is always one station behind.

Two centuries before Zadie Smith wrote about the privilege of self-actualization, Kierkegaard is keenly aware of the class element in this interplay between minority and majority, between the individual and the crowd:

I want people to sit up and take notice, to prevent them from idling away and wasting their lives. Aristocrats take it for granted that a lot of people will always go to waste. But they keep silent about it; they live sheltered lives pretending that all these many, many people simply do not exist. That is what is ungodly about the superior status of the aristocrats; in order to be comfortable themselves they do not even call attention to anything.

Vowing not to be like the aristocrats himself, he — a self-described “complete composite of dialectics” — offers his own solution:

I will call the attention of the crowd to their own ruination. And if they don’t want to see it willingly, I shall make them see it by fair means or foul. Please understand me — or, at least, do not misunderstand me. I do not intend to beat them… I will force them to beat me. Thus I actually compel them. For if they begin to beat me, they will probably pay attention; and if they kill me, they most definitely will pay attention, and I shall have won an absolute victory.

Kierkegaard’s rationale behind this strategy is rather humanistic in considering what it takes to awaken the individual human spirit from the trance of the crowd:

[Individuals] are not so corrupt that they actually wish to do evil, but they are blinded, and don’t really know what they are doing. It is all a matter of baiting them for decisive action… A crowd triumphs if one cedes the way, steps aside, so that it never comes to realize what it is doing. A crowd has no essential viewpoint; therefore if it happens to kill a man it is eo ipso halted; it pays heed and comes to its senses.

He later adds:

Nobody wants to be this strenuous thing: an individual; it demands an effort. But everywhere services are readily offered through the phony substitute: a few! Let us get together and be a gathering, then we can probably manage. Therein lies mankind’s deepest demoralization.

Photographs from ‘Exactitudes,’ a global project highlighting the implicit conformity of subcultures. Click image for more.

But Kierkegaard’s most poignant point arrives shortly before his death, in 1854, when he addresses with prescient precision our modern anxiety about being alone, stressing its absolute vitality in living up to our individual potential:

The yardstick for a human being is: how long and to what degree he can bear to be alone, devoid of understanding with others.

A man who can bear being alone during a whole life-time, and alone in decisions of eternal significance, is farthest removed from the infant and the society-person who represent the animal-definition of being human.

In a remark to which Anne Lamott might have the perfect response, he adds:

Testifying to the fact that man is spirit … with the passing centuries, as polished brutishness mounts, becomes increasingly necessary, but also requires increasingly greater effort.

The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard is a short yet infinitely rewarding read. For a counterpoint to this particular excerpt, see Norman Mailer on the instinct for nonconformity, then revisit Kierkegaard on our greatest source of unhappiness and why anxiety enhances creativity rather than hinders it.

A Bird with a Clipped Wing - Rumi -

A Bird with a Clipped Wing

- Rumi -

If the wind had taken me to you,

I would have held tight to the skirts of the wind.

I miss you so much that I would fly to you faster than a bird;

But how can a bird with a clipped wing fly

The Flies in the Market-Place - Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra -

"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves..." V.W.

The Flies in the Market-Place

Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra 

Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.

Forest and rock know how to be silent with you. Be like the tree which you love, the broad-branched one -- silently and attentively it overhangs the sea.

Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

In the world even the best things are worthless without those who make a side-show of them: these showmen, the people call great men.

Little do the people understand what is great -- that is to say, the creator. But they have a taste for all showmen and actors of great things.

Around the creators of new values revolves the world: -- invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.

The actor has spirit, but little conscience of the spirit. He always believes in that with which he most strongly inspires belief -- in himself!

Tomorrow he has a new belief, and the day after, one still newer. Like the people, he has quick perceptions and fickle moods.

To defeat -- that means for him: to prove. To drive to frenzy -- that means for him: to convince. And blood is to him the best of all arguments.

A truth which glides only into refined ears, he calls falsehood and nothing. He believes only in gods that make a big noise in the world!

Full of clattering fools is the market-place, -- and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.

But the hour presses them; so they press you. And also from you they want Yes or No. Alas! would you set your chair between Pro and Con?

Do not be jealous of those unyielding and impatient men, you lover of truth! Never yet did truth cling to the arm of the unyielding.

On account of those abrupt ones, return into your security: only in the market-place is one assailed by Yes? or No?

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.

Far away from the market-place and from fame happens all that is great: far away from the market-place and from fame have always dwelt the creators of new values.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee to where a rough, strong breeze blows!

Flee into your solitude! you have lived too closely to the small and the pitiful. Flee from their invisible vengeance! For you they have nothing but vengeance.

No longer raise your arm against them! They are innumerable, and it is not your job to be a flyswatter.

Innumerable are the small and pitiful ones; and rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin of many a proud structure.

You are not stone; but already have you become hollow from many drops. You will yet break and burst from the many drops.

I see you exhausted by poisonous flies; I see you bleeding and torn at a hundred spots; and your pride refuses even to be angry.

They would have blood from you in all innocence; blood is what bloodless souls crave -- and therefore they sting in all innocence.

But you, profound one, you suffer too profoundly even from small wounds; and before you have healed, the same poison-worm crawls over your hand.

You are too proud to kill these gluttons. But take care lest it be your fate to suffer all their poisonous injustice!

They buzz around you also with their praise: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want to be close to your skin and your blood.

They flatter you, as one flatters a God or devil; they whimper before you, as before a God or devil; What does it come to! They are flatterers and whimperers, and nothing more.

Often, also, do they show themselves to you as friendly ones. But that has always been the prudence of cowards. Yes! cowards are wise!

They think much about you with their petty souls -- you are always suspect to them! Whatever is much thought about is at last thought suspicious.

They punish you for all your virtues. They pardon you entirely -- for your errors.

Because you are gentle and of honest character, you say: "Guiltless are they for their small existence." But their petty souls think: "Guilty is every great existence."

Even when you are gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by you; and they repay your beneficence with secret maleficence.

Your silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once you are humble enough to be vain.

What we recognize in a man, we also irritate in him. Therefore be on your guard against the small ones!

In your presence they feel themselves small, and their baseness gleams and glows against you in invisible vengeance.

You did not see how often they became silent when you approached them, and how their energy left them like the smoke of a waning fire?

Yes, my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors, for they are unworthy of you. Therefore they hate you, and would rather suck your blood.

Your neighbors will always be poisonous flies; what is great in you -- that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude -- and there, where a rough strong breeze blows. It is not your job to be a flyswatter.