Brought Low by the List
By Tom McBride
Academics, of which I am one, are meant to be serious persons. Once known for their tweeds with patches and their dignified mien at marching ceremonies, they are now serious in other ways. Stanley Fish has commented on how Volvo boxcars are an expression of academic plain living and high thinking. A faculty member once told another that he disliked the Marx Brothers because they were “vulgar” and was shocked when his colleague replied that they were supposed to be. Today’s academics are concerned with child rearing, the ecology of foodstuffs, and constructions of social identities. They speak in long paragraphs.
At my college, nothing is more serious than preparing for the onslaught of new students. In the late 1990s, the day before new students were due, I was about to convene a meeting of seminar leaders who would be devoting their autumns and early winters to the transformation of recent high schoolers into profound scholars. Such terms as engaged learning and critical thinking hovered earnestly in the air. Just before I went into the meeting, our public relations director stopped me with a request: Would I distribute to my colleagues a List—called the Mindset List—of 50 items that purported to capture the attitudes, beliefs, and values of entering college students? He was about to release this List to the media and wanted to be truthful in saying that the faculty had already seen it. As the director of the first-year seminar program, I agreed grudgingly—not only because the meeting would be busy but also because it would be serious.
A glance at the Mindset List told me it was not serious. It contained such items as “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead,” and “They have probably never dialed a telephone,” and “Brake lights have always been in the rear view windows of automobiles.” The List stated with glee and whimsy all the cultural phenomena that had not always existed by any means, but that our narrow, uneducated first-year students believed had always existed by every means. I dutifully distributed this List to my colleagues, who perused it with a rapid indifference. Some, I swear, glowered as well.
Three days later our public relations director stepped into my office and told me the Today program, on the National Broadcasting Company in New York, wanted to interview me (first-year seminar director) day after tomorrow about this List. As one who had long ago given up television (except for PBS) for NPR, most of my memories of this program stemmed from childhood. I assumed that Dave Garroway (the genial and suicidal host) and Frank Blair (the ponderous newsreader) and the chimp J. Fred Muggs were no longer on the program, but I wondered about slightly glum Hugh Downs. Was he still on the show? Mostly, however, I wondered how and why this program would want to interview me, and what about this List had so pinched a nerve with a national television program. I told our P.R. director that going out to New York on such short notice would be impossible, as I had to take my daughter on that day to an important appointment with her orthodontist. A few hours later, when I was finally convinced to go, I called the orthodontist’s secretary to explain that I would be on a national television program and would be unable to make the appointment. She said she understood, that she believed me wholly, and did I know that she was really Barbara Walters.
By now readers will have warmed to my theme. My daughter’s appointment had little to do with my unwillingness. Anxiety about speaking to millions, if only for a few moments, had even less to do with my reluctance. No. It was that this program was doubtless trivial, superficial, obsessed with sound bites. This was a program in which a chimpanzee had once costarred. This was no place for a Serious Academic.
I told my wife that although I had done 30 years of serious teaching and scholarship I would now be recalled only for being on TV for five minutes about that List. She said that otherwise I would not be remembered at all. It was then that I decided to go.
• • • • •
Backstage with me were Senator John McCain and Professor Alan Dershowitz. The presence of the latter reassured me somehow. We briefly discussed the List, and Dershowitz opined that even top students today assume that Sacco and Vanzetti are baseball players. After McCain and Dershowitz left to go on the program, I spoke to an attractive woman whom I did not recognize but who told me she had played the role of a character named Mary Ann on the series Gilligan’s Island. Here I was at my most nerdy when I had to explain that I had not watched television in many years. She said she understood. She told me that the program was promoting her as a self-styled expert on “island psychology” on the eve of the first “reality” show, in which all but one “survivor” would be “kicked off the island.” Again, I wished I had not agreed to appear on this program. I saw my academic dignity about to be shredded. Could I ever again walk into a classroom and command the respect accorded to Those Who Are Supposed To Know?
The interview went about as I expected: not as bad as I had feared but nowhere near as well as I had hoped. I could not speak in paragraphs, and the host, who (unlike myself) knew television, politely but firmly interrupted my elaborate vocabulary. I tried but failed to say something about “horizontal” versus “vertical” influences on generations. I expressed anxiety about the “cultural illiteracy” of the young, but this was quickly shunted aside by a joke, from the List, that the older generation, no stranger themselves to cultural illiteracy, did not know what a “Trapper Keeper” was. The host then displayed this fancy and inefficient backpack, then all the rage with the young and the restless.
When I got to the airport right after the show, two people came up to me and offered compliments. By the time I got to O’Hare Field, no one recognized me. When I got home, no one but the cat was about. He was hungry.
• • • • •
Since that day our college public relations director has produced an entire generation of Mindset Lists. He and I have given many interviews about the annual List. We have traveled to give talks about it. We have been paid (not much). It is as though I am a jejune adolescent who, having one time walked into a billiards hall and beer joint, has now become addicted to both. Unlike Gore Vidal, I have failed to master the fine art of how to be an intellectual on TV. I am now in that postlapsarian world inhabited by undignified, soiled academics. I have exchanged seriousness for a modicum of fun.
Still I have, I protest, maintained a certain inner dignity and reflection. My experience with the media and the List has overlapped with my own experience of significant aging. As such, I have discovered that the List is doubly humbling: not only to me personally, as I have traded my paragraphs for sound bites, but also to many others who find the List an annual, masochistic—if gentle—reminder of the fact that they are getting old. American culture changes so rapidly that former students in their mid-thirties tell me the List makes even them feel out of it. My teaching of Shakespeare’s plays has become more and more informed by a sense that generational disaffection is at the center of his project. The erotically charged cruelty to the long-resented Lear, the phoniness (in Hamlet’s eyes) of the middle-aged Claudius and Gertrude, the Macbeths’ seething envy of that old sofa King Duncan, Shylock’s despite of the superficial, partying youngsters: All of these have come to strike me as brilliant renditions of the poignant complexities of being old amidst the young, or of being young amidst the old. Whether this side of Shakespeare would have struck me as much had I not endured countless interviews about how the List makes everyone over 40 feel ancient, I cannot say for sure, but I suspect the List has, in its own way, made me more aware this particular human factor in the work of the Bard.
• • • • •
And I look at my own students—they who seem younger to me by the minute—rather differently. I still encourage them, in the words of Housman, to be ready when trouble comes, and argue that the expansion of possibility inherent in great literature is one of the best ways to do so. The readiness is all. But now I find myself saying to them that in truth I hope they never have to understand, from personal experience, what Things Fall Apart and To the Lighthouse—illuminations of time’s brutal indifference to tradition and sanity alike—really mean.
I find myself feeling sorry for them as the aging victims of the humbling List just 20 years hence. Dignity is not the exclusive turf of academics. We just work harder at keeping it green. •
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
4.10.08
Barnyard Cookery
Foodies in New York were the first to encounter this term, through
the writings of restaurant critic Adam Platt in New York magazine.
A play on "haute cuisine", the traditional high cookery of France,
it describes a restaurant whose house style emphasises the quality
of the ingredients and where they come from rather to a greater
extent than their preparation. Fresh, good-quality ingredients,
often organic and sourced locally according to season, are cooked
well and served simply. The idea behind it is farm cooking at its
best, hence "barnyard". But it's often at a premium price at the
New York eateries first identified with the tag and which have
since been described as "pretentiously unpretentious". "Haute
barnyard" has spread beyond New York, with sightings from both
Australia and the UK; in the latter country it has been taken up by
the restaurant critic Jay Rayner in particular.
* The Village Voice, 30 July 2008: The ongoing hunger for American
countrified cuisine made with greenmarket ingredients and spun
upscale (coined "haute barnyard" by New York magazine's Adam Platt)
shows no signs of flagging. Get all the farmhouse chic you can
swallow at Forge and Hundred Acres, twin additions to the genre.
* The Observer, 21 Sept. 2008: Market is the sort of place any of
us would like to be able to call our local: a small, simple
restaurant serving food with its own solid but definable character
- that great term "haute barnyard" comes to mind once more - at a
reasonable
the writings of restaurant critic Adam Platt in New York magazine.
A play on "haute cuisine", the traditional high cookery of France,
it describes a restaurant whose house style emphasises the quality
of the ingredients and where they come from rather to a greater
extent than their preparation. Fresh, good-quality ingredients,
often organic and sourced locally according to season, are cooked
well and served simply. The idea behind it is farm cooking at its
best, hence "barnyard". But it's often at a premium price at the
New York eateries first identified with the tag and which have
since been described as "pretentiously unpretentious". "Haute
barnyard" has spread beyond New York, with sightings from both
Australia and the UK; in the latter country it has been taken up by
the restaurant critic Jay Rayner in particular.
* The Village Voice, 30 July 2008: The ongoing hunger for American
countrified cuisine made with greenmarket ingredients and spun
upscale (coined "haute barnyard" by New York magazine's Adam Platt)
shows no signs of flagging. Get all the farmhouse chic you can
swallow at Forge and Hundred Acres, twin additions to the genre.
* The Observer, 21 Sept. 2008: Market is the sort of place any of
us would like to be able to call our local: a small, simple
restaurant serving food with its own solid but definable character
- that great term "haute barnyard" comes to mind once more - at a
reasonable
3.10.08
Cote D'Azur
The words of Sandy Wilson’s song from his incomparably camp musical, The Boyfriend, don’t do justice to the archness of the place. Throw down the lexicon of louche and you can bet a sou to a euro that the page it opens on will have the South of France, the Riviera, the Côte d’Azur, or any of the other wonderfully evocative soubriquets of the place, written somewhere on it.
From the boulevardiers of the Promenade des Anglais to the flâneurs of Cannes the place reeks of naughtiness and indolence. It is, though, not quite decadent. The French cannot do rock’n’roll, even with a small pair of r’s, and shouts of ‘Eez Parditime’ at the Voile Rouge don’t ring true. The mood on the Côte d’Azur is deeply vain and solipsistic and doesn’t allow for dirtiness.
But this naughtiness is what gives it such perennial charm and gaiety. It is just a very pleasant place to be. I have been there penniless with only youth, some feeble French chat-up lines and three chords on the guitar at my side; and latterly middle-aged, but with rich and generous friends; and both extremes have been equally agreeable. However, it would be a savage place to be broke with just the three chords and not in the first flush of youth, for it is a place that worships daily at the altars of Venus and Mammon, if I may mix myths. And down there they do.
The splendour of the yachts and the beauty of the bathing lovelies are celebrated shamelessly. There is no place less envious in the world. Once any idea of the real world has been suspended it is the best al fresco theatre in the world. Where once the English milords sauntered, mad old nannies forbade their wards from bathing for an hour after eating (what was that about?) and sterling held sway, the boaters and spats have disappeared and the rouble and dollar have muscled in. But that is part of the whole Riviera game. Its venality and willingness to serve the current captain of the financial castle have kept it alive, but the money is taken with such panache that it is worth having your pockets picked. What is so extraordinary about the place is that despite the endless influx of foreigners over so long and the assimilation of their words, habits and fashions, the local culture and patois has remained resolutely and unequivocally French.
In the hills above St Paul de Vence, a spot as delightful as any you could find, I drank hot chocolate and dunked croissants on a Sunday morning while watching a bum of bicyclists (a collective noun coined by my father) in absurd kit, despite their age, ride through the little village square. Some stopped and had a drink or a wonderfully inappropriate smoke and some rode through waving to the others. There was the toc of boules and the occasional Gallic expletive, and the smell of France was in the air. The memory of every French trip I have had since I was a boy assaulted my senses. At moments like these I love the place.
This scene, played out so close to the absurdity of the beach, not that far below, was absolutely as removed from it as it was possible to be and would have been the same from time immemorial. I sensed the ghost of some stray baronet with loud Franglais asking his way back to Nice in the Bentley. Their answer to what they make of these excesses so close by would, I suspect, be a Provençal shrug. No golden-egg-laying goose has ever been made into foie gras down here.
Despite its political vacillations over the years there is something very permanent about the Riviera. Its ethos is unashamedly self-serving but it needs to be. It is, after all, their country and we are just transient interlopers helping to keep them all going through the rest of the year outside the big shuttered-up houses that few locals can afford so that they can keep it fluffed for the new season.
Alors, while the French cannot do rock’n’roll, they can do summer chic like no one else and watching the parade by the backs of the boats in St Tropez harbour or the wrinkled old prunes in shameful thongs flicking their fingers to order some fabulous young creature to their table at Club 55, they outglamour all other nations effortlessly. The autumn-summer relationships, however obviously fiscal, are unremarkable here; sensuality and just, well, sex fizzle in the suncream-scented air. Laissez-faire is a French thing. In England McGill would have painted a postcard of the pert breasts nestling either side of their date’s hearing aid and the locals would have turned the beaches into golf links.
Still, golf is at least an English word that they use. I am shocked, though, on re-reading this to see how many French words I have had to use to describe the place. Is there no word in our language for, ’ow you say, le goodtime, as the French have it? And they do... a lot.
From the boulevardiers of the Promenade des Anglais to the flâneurs of Cannes the place reeks of naughtiness and indolence. It is, though, not quite decadent. The French cannot do rock’n’roll, even with a small pair of r’s, and shouts of ‘Eez Parditime’ at the Voile Rouge don’t ring true. The mood on the Côte d’Azur is deeply vain and solipsistic and doesn’t allow for dirtiness.
But this naughtiness is what gives it such perennial charm and gaiety. It is just a very pleasant place to be. I have been there penniless with only youth, some feeble French chat-up lines and three chords on the guitar at my side; and latterly middle-aged, but with rich and generous friends; and both extremes have been equally agreeable. However, it would be a savage place to be broke with just the three chords and not in the first flush of youth, for it is a place that worships daily at the altars of Venus and Mammon, if I may mix myths. And down there they do.
The splendour of the yachts and the beauty of the bathing lovelies are celebrated shamelessly. There is no place less envious in the world. Once any idea of the real world has been suspended it is the best al fresco theatre in the world. Where once the English milords sauntered, mad old nannies forbade their wards from bathing for an hour after eating (what was that about?) and sterling held sway, the boaters and spats have disappeared and the rouble and dollar have muscled in. But that is part of the whole Riviera game. Its venality and willingness to serve the current captain of the financial castle have kept it alive, but the money is taken with such panache that it is worth having your pockets picked. What is so extraordinary about the place is that despite the endless influx of foreigners over so long and the assimilation of their words, habits and fashions, the local culture and patois has remained resolutely and unequivocally French.
In the hills above St Paul de Vence, a spot as delightful as any you could find, I drank hot chocolate and dunked croissants on a Sunday morning while watching a bum of bicyclists (a collective noun coined by my father) in absurd kit, despite their age, ride through the little village square. Some stopped and had a drink or a wonderfully inappropriate smoke and some rode through waving to the others. There was the toc of boules and the occasional Gallic expletive, and the smell of France was in the air. The memory of every French trip I have had since I was a boy assaulted my senses. At moments like these I love the place.
This scene, played out so close to the absurdity of the beach, not that far below, was absolutely as removed from it as it was possible to be and would have been the same from time immemorial. I sensed the ghost of some stray baronet with loud Franglais asking his way back to Nice in the Bentley. Their answer to what they make of these excesses so close by would, I suspect, be a Provençal shrug. No golden-egg-laying goose has ever been made into foie gras down here.
Despite its political vacillations over the years there is something very permanent about the Riviera. Its ethos is unashamedly self-serving but it needs to be. It is, after all, their country and we are just transient interlopers helping to keep them all going through the rest of the year outside the big shuttered-up houses that few locals can afford so that they can keep it fluffed for the new season.
Alors, while the French cannot do rock’n’roll, they can do summer chic like no one else and watching the parade by the backs of the boats in St Tropez harbour or the wrinkled old prunes in shameful thongs flicking their fingers to order some fabulous young creature to their table at Club 55, they outglamour all other nations effortlessly. The autumn-summer relationships, however obviously fiscal, are unremarkable here; sensuality and just, well, sex fizzle in the suncream-scented air. Laissez-faire is a French thing. In England McGill would have painted a postcard of the pert breasts nestling either side of their date’s hearing aid and the locals would have turned the beaches into golf links.
Still, golf is at least an English word that they use. I am shocked, though, on re-reading this to see how many French words I have had to use to describe the place. Is there no word in our language for, ’ow you say, le goodtime, as the French have it? And they do... a lot.
Andre Previn at 80
Like a reluctant witness after a shoot-out, André Previn peers around the door of his flat, gripping the door frame and watching me approach down the dim corridor. We're high in a portered block on Manhattan's Upper East Side where Previn - tiny, beaky, full of amused dismay at the world and the generally unsatisfactory nature of the people in it - lives when he isn't touring. Inside, a grand piano takes up most of the living room. How ever did they get it up here? Previn blinks, as if he had never considered it. "I have no idea."
The composer will be 80 next year, the age of lifetime achievement awards, which sometimes feel to him like obituaries and make him want to scream: "But I'm still working!" There was the Glenn Gould prize and the honorary knighthood, and now Gramophone magazine is giving him a gong for outstanding contribution to the something or other. "It's not the Pulitzer prize and it's not the Nobel prize and it's not the Drama Critics prize. Still, it's very nice of Gramophone, which I've read all my life." His voice is high and dreamy and slightly arcane-sounding, like the Tin Man's. "I don't," he says, "tend to take myself all that seriously," though there is an edge to his teasing that I wouldn't like to see fully blown.
The work hasn't let up. The day after we meet, Previn will fly to Munich to perform with his fifth and (to date) final ex-wife, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the violinist he rather sweetly calls "my best friend". He is conducting the London Symphony Orchestra at Christmas and has a new opera opening in Houston in the spring. Based on Brief Encounter, it uses some of Noël Coward's original script together with a libretto by the British writer John Caird - a return in spirit, perhaps, to Previn's first career as a film scorer at MGM. Between 1958 and 1964 he won four Academy awards for his original music, including work on Gigi and Porgy & Bess. But no, he says, writing Brief Encounter was not like writing a film score. "Do you know I haven't set foot in a movie studio in, wait a second, 30 ... in 43 years? There is a statute of limitations. People shouldn't bring it up." He smiles dangerously.
Lots of other things annoy Previn. Travel: "That bloody airport. You get shunted around. Too awful." Technology: "I don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work." The marketing of classical music. He is particularly irritated by Lang Lang, the hugely successful Chinese pianist who throws himself about at the piano like Elton John. "It's a circus act, you know? Why doesn't he just come out and juggle? He's an amazing pianist, but I can't watch, not for one minute. And yet he is probably the biggest box-office success in the world, for a classical musician." Mind you, he says, there have always been people willing to muck around to get publicity. "And sometimes, in the case of Bernstein - well, even there, I wasn't all that crazy about it, but I thought the music-making was quite remarkable." He doesn't think Lang Lang will last. "People will get tired of all the shenanigans."
Previn's disdain for showing off comes from his 16 years in Hollywood. He joined MGM while still a schoolboy in Los Angeles, in 1946, and turned down the offer of finishing his education at the studio's in-house school, where he would have been a classmate of Liz Taylor's. He had come to the attention of the music department after doing arrangements for a local radio show. Though the adolescent Previn was awestruck by the studio, even then something in him militated against being wholly consumed by it.
For the next 16 years he scored dozens of movies with what he calls "commercial cornball music". He made good money and had a secure job. But he felt trapped, and his father, who had his own demons, thought he was wasting his talent. The family, who were Jewish, had been forced to flee the Nazis when Previn was 10, leaving everything behind in Germany, most problematically his father's career as a successful barrister. In his new country he became a piano teacher. "My father couldn't practise law because he didn't know the language. I never realised until much later in my life that he was really quite a hero. He left Germany, didn't have a dime, didn't speak the language, had a family, and yet he managed to get us through it. That was an act of heroism. But I never got along with him all that well."
Previn also realised after the fact that his own success at MGM must have been difficult for his father. "Because I was working hard and I was making strides. And he wasn't. But he was a remarkable man."
And his mother?
"And my mother - " He smiles. "I could do no wrong."
At the age of 32, to the horror of his peers, Previn resigned from the studio to concentrate on his classical career. "At MGM you knew you were going to be working next year, you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."
His faith in himself was, of course, borne out. But though he admits he was cocky, he says he has never become an intolerable egotist, not the stereotypical maestro. "When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed." He chuckles. "It's true."
There were a few wilderness years before his big break at the Houston Symphony Orchestra and, from there, his 11-year tenure as principal conductor at the LSO. He wound up living back in Germany at one point, which I imagine was difficult. German is his first language (French his second, English his third) and he still uses it for the alphabet, days of the week and basic arithmetic. But there must, surely, have been bitterness towards the country to overcome? There is a long pause. "No. I was - I was selfish enough and then realistic enough to know that as a musician I really had to go back there. It never bothered me. I mean, I'm aware of it. But it never bothered me in terms of, 'What did they do to my family?' No. It's not a big drama."
It is England he misses now. He lived there with Mia Farrow, his third wife, for most of the 1970s, in an idyllic house in Surrey. ("Not in the stockbroker part.") Those were the glory years, when the LSO was frequently on television and Previn's youthful looks and shaggy hair became well known. Astonishingly, he and the orchestra made an average of 14 albums a year. "And now it's two. Somebody told me classical records constitute less than 1% of the sales of records. So I say, let's not even talk about doing a Tchaikovsky symphony. Let's do some Tippett or some Messiaen, or something. But then, who the hell is going to buy that? Nobody buys anything any more. It's all a crapshoot."
It is sometimes claimed that the best classical composers are working in the film industry: Morricone, John Williams, even Andrew Lloyd Webber. Previn worked on the scoring for the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, as a favour to his friend Norman Jewison, who directed. "I'm not a great fan of Lloyd Webber's. He doesn't need me to be a fan. Believe me." And the others? He winces. "John Williams is without question talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that. But, no, of the others ... You know, when I hear Titanic - James Horner - which was a huge hit, it's the same 16 bars played 185 times. It's not interesting." His favourite composer of theatre music is Harold Arlen; his favourite lyricist is Sondheim; beyond that, there isn't much to excite him in musical theatre these days. "Those awful Disney musicals - mermaids with long eyelashes, that's not interesting."
Orchestras have changed, too. In the 1970s the LSO players were, says Previn, "pretty much of a rowdy crowd. Going on a tour with them was unbelievable. There was a great deal of inimitably great playing, and also astonishingly bad behaviour." He lights up at the memory and says it was like being on a school trip. "And now they show up in a suit. They play fabulously well, but ... " He tails off. Even at their rowdiest, the LSO never gave him a hard time, even though he was young and relatively inexperienced. "No. It's only when they think you're faking that they can't forgive you. That's good. I agree with that."
Those years in London and Surrey were some of the happiest of his life. Previn and Farrow had six children, three of whom they adopted from the far east. Despite his European sensibility, he found England occasionally mystifying. Previn belonged to the Garrick club, and one day the secretary invited him to bring Farrow to dinner there. "I said, 'OK, I'll tell her, she might enjoy it very much.' He said, 'Yes, oh and by the way, you must forgive me for this but she can't use the main staircase. The women have to go round the back.' And I said, 'What?' And I went home and told Mia and she said, 'You have 10 minutes in which to quit the club.' And I said, 'I've already done it.' Unbelievable. Mia was the wrong person to try that on."
They are still friends; he sees her frequently in New York. One of his children rings during the interview, and while speaking to her his accent becomes noticeably more American. "Darling, no, I'm fine. I'm fine, honey. Oh yes. Thanks a lot, honey. Do that, sweetie. All right, darlin'. Bye bye." He admires his ex-wife a lot. "She goes to Darfur like other people go to New Jersey. She does a lot of good there."
One of his sons is a rock guitarist who took up the instrument because it was one of the few his father had no knowledge of. "I couldn't blame him." He plays for an obscure group, but is very successful, says Previn. "Because when I say successful I mean he plays well and he likes what he's playing. That's success."
The last time he heard a piece of new music that really set him on fire was when he was a teenager, listening to Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. But he still gets excited at new renditions of old pieces; he heard Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera House last month - "That just floored me. My God, what a piece." Does it depress him, the gap between the ideal of how a piece of music might be and what it is in reality? "It can't be helped. It works in both directions. I sometimes hear a piece of mine and there will be moments in it that are better than I thought they'd be. And then there will be moments when I think I should have done better. The only thing that always works is mediocrity. As soon as you try for the bull's eye you could also miss the whole target."
And has he had many misses?
"Oh, darling, are you kidding? Any number of things. But I've written some things I like. I quite liked Streetcar. I hope I like Brief Encounter. I love the violin concerto that I wrote for Anne-Sophie. I like my quartet." Next, he'd like to do an opera for A Man for All Seasons. "We'll see."
And regrets? A big sigh. "Privately, yes. I've made some very poor choices in my private life. But as a professional, no, not really."
A few years ago, he took a drive past his old house in Surrey. He saw that the new owner had subdivided his beloved woods at the back into nine separate lots. It was unbelievably painful. "I thought, I can't see this." And he vowed, as he tends to, not to go back.
The composer will be 80 next year, the age of lifetime achievement awards, which sometimes feel to him like obituaries and make him want to scream: "But I'm still working!" There was the Glenn Gould prize and the honorary knighthood, and now Gramophone magazine is giving him a gong for outstanding contribution to the something or other. "It's not the Pulitzer prize and it's not the Nobel prize and it's not the Drama Critics prize. Still, it's very nice of Gramophone, which I've read all my life." His voice is high and dreamy and slightly arcane-sounding, like the Tin Man's. "I don't," he says, "tend to take myself all that seriously," though there is an edge to his teasing that I wouldn't like to see fully blown.
The work hasn't let up. The day after we meet, Previn will fly to Munich to perform with his fifth and (to date) final ex-wife, Anne-Sophie Mutter, the violinist he rather sweetly calls "my best friend". He is conducting the London Symphony Orchestra at Christmas and has a new opera opening in Houston in the spring. Based on Brief Encounter, it uses some of Noël Coward's original script together with a libretto by the British writer John Caird - a return in spirit, perhaps, to Previn's first career as a film scorer at MGM. Between 1958 and 1964 he won four Academy awards for his original music, including work on Gigi and Porgy & Bess. But no, he says, writing Brief Encounter was not like writing a film score. "Do you know I haven't set foot in a movie studio in, wait a second, 30 ... in 43 years? There is a statute of limitations. People shouldn't bring it up." He smiles dangerously.
Lots of other things annoy Previn. Travel: "That bloody airport. You get shunted around. Too awful." Technology: "I don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work." The marketing of classical music. He is particularly irritated by Lang Lang, the hugely successful Chinese pianist who throws himself about at the piano like Elton John. "It's a circus act, you know? Why doesn't he just come out and juggle? He's an amazing pianist, but I can't watch, not for one minute. And yet he is probably the biggest box-office success in the world, for a classical musician." Mind you, he says, there have always been people willing to muck around to get publicity. "And sometimes, in the case of Bernstein - well, even there, I wasn't all that crazy about it, but I thought the music-making was quite remarkable." He doesn't think Lang Lang will last. "People will get tired of all the shenanigans."
Previn's disdain for showing off comes from his 16 years in Hollywood. He joined MGM while still a schoolboy in Los Angeles, in 1946, and turned down the offer of finishing his education at the studio's in-house school, where he would have been a classmate of Liz Taylor's. He had come to the attention of the music department after doing arrangements for a local radio show. Though the adolescent Previn was awestruck by the studio, even then something in him militated against being wholly consumed by it.
For the next 16 years he scored dozens of movies with what he calls "commercial cornball music". He made good money and had a secure job. But he felt trapped, and his father, who had his own demons, thought he was wasting his talent. The family, who were Jewish, had been forced to flee the Nazis when Previn was 10, leaving everything behind in Germany, most problematically his father's career as a successful barrister. In his new country he became a piano teacher. "My father couldn't practise law because he didn't know the language. I never realised until much later in my life that he was really quite a hero. He left Germany, didn't have a dime, didn't speak the language, had a family, and yet he managed to get us through it. That was an act of heroism. But I never got along with him all that well."
Previn also realised after the fact that his own success at MGM must have been difficult for his father. "Because I was working hard and I was making strides. And he wasn't. But he was a remarkable man."
And his mother?
"And my mother - " He smiles. "I could do no wrong."
At the age of 32, to the horror of his peers, Previn resigned from the studio to concentrate on his classical career. "At MGM you knew you were going to be working next year, you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had."
His faith in himself was, of course, borne out. But though he admits he was cocky, he says he has never become an intolerable egotist, not the stereotypical maestro. "When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed." He chuckles. "It's true."
There were a few wilderness years before his big break at the Houston Symphony Orchestra and, from there, his 11-year tenure as principal conductor at the LSO. He wound up living back in Germany at one point, which I imagine was difficult. German is his first language (French his second, English his third) and he still uses it for the alphabet, days of the week and basic arithmetic. But there must, surely, have been bitterness towards the country to overcome? There is a long pause. "No. I was - I was selfish enough and then realistic enough to know that as a musician I really had to go back there. It never bothered me. I mean, I'm aware of it. But it never bothered me in terms of, 'What did they do to my family?' No. It's not a big drama."
It is England he misses now. He lived there with Mia Farrow, his third wife, for most of the 1970s, in an idyllic house in Surrey. ("Not in the stockbroker part.") Those were the glory years, when the LSO was frequently on television and Previn's youthful looks and shaggy hair became well known. Astonishingly, he and the orchestra made an average of 14 albums a year. "And now it's two. Somebody told me classical records constitute less than 1% of the sales of records. So I say, let's not even talk about doing a Tchaikovsky symphony. Let's do some Tippett or some Messiaen, or something. But then, who the hell is going to buy that? Nobody buys anything any more. It's all a crapshoot."
It is sometimes claimed that the best classical composers are working in the film industry: Morricone, John Williams, even Andrew Lloyd Webber. Previn worked on the scoring for the film version of Jesus Christ Superstar, as a favour to his friend Norman Jewison, who directed. "I'm not a great fan of Lloyd Webber's. He doesn't need me to be a fan. Believe me." And the others? He winces. "John Williams is without question talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that. But, no, of the others ... You know, when I hear Titanic - James Horner - which was a huge hit, it's the same 16 bars played 185 times. It's not interesting." His favourite composer of theatre music is Harold Arlen; his favourite lyricist is Sondheim; beyond that, there isn't much to excite him in musical theatre these days. "Those awful Disney musicals - mermaids with long eyelashes, that's not interesting."
Orchestras have changed, too. In the 1970s the LSO players were, says Previn, "pretty much of a rowdy crowd. Going on a tour with them was unbelievable. There was a great deal of inimitably great playing, and also astonishingly bad behaviour." He lights up at the memory and says it was like being on a school trip. "And now they show up in a suit. They play fabulously well, but ... " He tails off. Even at their rowdiest, the LSO never gave him a hard time, even though he was young and relatively inexperienced. "No. It's only when they think you're faking that they can't forgive you. That's good. I agree with that."
Those years in London and Surrey were some of the happiest of his life. Previn and Farrow had six children, three of whom they adopted from the far east. Despite his European sensibility, he found England occasionally mystifying. Previn belonged to the Garrick club, and one day the secretary invited him to bring Farrow to dinner there. "I said, 'OK, I'll tell her, she might enjoy it very much.' He said, 'Yes, oh and by the way, you must forgive me for this but she can't use the main staircase. The women have to go round the back.' And I said, 'What?' And I went home and told Mia and she said, 'You have 10 minutes in which to quit the club.' And I said, 'I've already done it.' Unbelievable. Mia was the wrong person to try that on."
They are still friends; he sees her frequently in New York. One of his children rings during the interview, and while speaking to her his accent becomes noticeably more American. "Darling, no, I'm fine. I'm fine, honey. Oh yes. Thanks a lot, honey. Do that, sweetie. All right, darlin'. Bye bye." He admires his ex-wife a lot. "She goes to Darfur like other people go to New Jersey. She does a lot of good there."
One of his sons is a rock guitarist who took up the instrument because it was one of the few his father had no knowledge of. "I couldn't blame him." He plays for an obscure group, but is very successful, says Previn. "Because when I say successful I mean he plays well and he likes what he's playing. That's success."
The last time he heard a piece of new music that really set him on fire was when he was a teenager, listening to Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra. But he still gets excited at new renditions of old pieces; he heard Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Metropolitan Opera House last month - "That just floored me. My God, what a piece." Does it depress him, the gap between the ideal of how a piece of music might be and what it is in reality? "It can't be helped. It works in both directions. I sometimes hear a piece of mine and there will be moments in it that are better than I thought they'd be. And then there will be moments when I think I should have done better. The only thing that always works is mediocrity. As soon as you try for the bull's eye you could also miss the whole target."
And has he had many misses?
"Oh, darling, are you kidding? Any number of things. But I've written some things I like. I quite liked Streetcar. I hope I like Brief Encounter. I love the violin concerto that I wrote for Anne-Sophie. I like my quartet." Next, he'd like to do an opera for A Man for All Seasons. "We'll see."
And regrets? A big sigh. "Privately, yes. I've made some very poor choices in my private life. But as a professional, no, not really."
A few years ago, he took a drive past his old house in Surrey. He saw that the new owner had subdivided his beloved woods at the back into nine separate lots. It was unbelievably painful. "I thought, I can't see this." And he vowed, as he tends to, not to go back.
Language
Babble On, Say Researchers In 'Linguists' Documentary
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 2, 2008; C01
Doesn't your life seem like a daily adventure in linguistics? Americans today routinely encounter more languages from more continents than at any time in the past century. Whether you're getting a meal or a clean shirt or a cab, or visiting a university or a hospital or simply walking through the mall, it's easy to think you're living in the golden age of language diversity.
But apparently, you would be wrong.
Languages are dying by the hundreds -- the thousands -- all over the world as you stand there trying to figure out the menu on Wilson Boulevard. And before you can be churlish enough to say, yeah, and the problem with that would be what? -- wasn't life better before the Tower of Babel? -- here comes a movie to set you straight that is so au courant, if you know what we mean, that it was shown at Sundance.
Called "The Linguists," it is basically a home movie with better than average production values -- which, come to think of it, may be a useful definition of indie movies -- that could have been subtitled "Dave and Greg's Excellent Language Adventures."
These guys travel to parts of Siberia, Bolivia and India so truly godforsaken that the film of Arizona Indian country looks cosmopolitan. All in the service of warning us that half the world's 7,000 languages are going extinct. These include Gta', in India, which features words that efficiently capture concepts at which English flails. Such as:
· "Goteh," which means "bring something from an inaccessible place with the help of a long stick";
· "Nosore," which means "to free someone from a tiger"; and
· "Poh," which means "to kill lice by pressing them under your nails."
It also turns out that in the Bella Coola/Nuxalk language of Canada, you can find such words as "stshlh" for "afterbirth" or "stsnts" for "transsexual/hermaphrodite."
We know what you're thinking. You want to buy a vowel.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
National Geographic is hosting a multi-culti All Roads Film Festival at its headquarters at 17th and M streets NW tonight through Sunday, and "The Linguists" is the opening-night attraction. Its success on the indie circuit is no small accomplishment. Even the film's director, Daniel A. Miller, acknowledges the challenge of dealing with linguists.
"My wife's friend at Berkeley was a linguistics major and we privately called her Data -- as from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' -- because of her monotone recitation of mostly emotionless observations," he writes in his director's notes.
When the filmmakers first met a young researcher in endangered languages, K. David Harrison, "he seemed like the perfect protagonist. He was as young as we were in 2003 yet looked better on camera. At the same time, he was a bit of a control freak."
His co-researcher, Gregory Anderson, "was Oscar to David's Felix. We found out in time that Greg was a recovering Deadhead, the father of two and both a huge fan of extreme fighting and a black belt. He also spoke close to 20 languages and had founded with David the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages."
Thus does the movie strive to make an adventure out of seeing all the ways the human mind can make sense of the world with language. The trailer's eloquent sell asks who "will circle the planet to hear the last whispers of a dying language, racing against time to hear words rarely spoken before they're never heard again?"
Ask why we care about recording a language that only three people speak, and Harrison replies, "If we were to give a rationale purely for selfish reasons, it would be, after those speakers die, we'll have a scientific record of the language."
But in addition, "science is playing catch-up in many respects to the people who have lived there for thousands of years and know about that ecosystem," says Anderson. "So since all of these ecosystems are under collapse now, it would behoove us to not just throw away this knowledge that people have accrued over the millennia."
And their knowledge doesn't translate out of their language?
"There are approximations that can be made, of course," says Anderson. "Which is why you're capable of reading Dostoevski even if you don't know Russian."
Languages divide as well as unite -- ask Canada. The luxury of embracing global language diversity is palatable in part because the world has succeeded in creating a lingua franca, a universal language -- English. A quarter of the world's population speaks it, according to David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Four or five times as many people speak English as a second language as do those who consider it their first.
"The Linguists" visits a boarding school in India where parents eagerly send their kids to learn a way to make a living -- running a sewing machine, for example. These kids speak 60 home languages, but as often as not they are taught in English because, the film acknowledges with some rue, it is the most efficient way to give them a good education.
If these parents are more concerned with their kids' economic futures than they are with the preservation of their tribal languages, what's wrong with that?
"English won the competition for languages," says Anderson. "The English-first laws are all inane because it's a fait accompli." And all those other languages he records? "We serve the heritage communities of these languages," he says.
"There's really a global movement going on right now for language revitalization," says Harrison. "A lot of it looks dire and depressing and the trend is downward, but people have realized that they were presented with a false choice: that they had to give up their identity, give up their language, become part of a homogenized melting-pot culture. People are pulling back from that and reasserting their roots, their ethnic identity, their multiple identities, their heritage languages and affiliations.
"There's a better attitude nowadays where people don't just pay lip service to the idea of diversity, but they understand that diversity does actually strengthen a society, strengthens us intellectually, strengthens us socially."
Weren't things better before the Tower of Babel?
"I was raised in a religious tradition that views multilingualism as quite literally a punishment from God," says Harrison. "It was intended to 'confound' -- that was the exact word that was used. But there are alternative mythologies. There are still societies today" -- in New Guinea and South America -- "that actually require their members to marry a person who is a speaker of a different language. Diversity has a survival value."
"Yeah," chimes in Anderson, "they call it hybrid vigor in biology."
H. Russell Bernard is a grand old man of endangered-language research, having devoted four decades to it. The chairman emeritus of the University of Florida anthropology department and the former editor in chief of the American Anthropologist takes the long view about disappearing language diversity.
"We're conducting this experiment where we had 35,000 years of language proliferation. About 500 years ago it started contracting, since the age of discovery and conquest and colonialism. We know that the proliferation of languages was the natural order of things for a very long time. Modern Homo sapiens is conducting an experiment to reduce that, to maybe one. It's hubris, but why shouldn't we do that -- translate it all into one?
"If I had 20 to 30 planets on which to conduct this experiment, in which some proliferate and some stay the same, and I could monitor it for 2,000 or 3,000 years, and could tell what the consequences were, I would not be so concerned about whether the experiment we're conducting is good or bad for humankind.
"Without that comparison," however, Bernard says, experimenting in language extinction "seems to me utterly reckless."
Meanwhile, you ask Anderson and Harrison whether they realize they are causing their National Geographic publicist to pound her head against her desk.
What a great opportunity, she thought. Language diversity! She promptly started to line up interviews with Spanish-language media. That's when she learned that of the 25 languages the two could speak, none of those was Spanish.
Twenty-five languages and none of them is Spanish? you say to the boys, incredulously. Aren't you ashamed?
"Yeah, I know," says Anderson.
"We're terrible."
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 2, 2008; C01
Doesn't your life seem like a daily adventure in linguistics? Americans today routinely encounter more languages from more continents than at any time in the past century. Whether you're getting a meal or a clean shirt or a cab, or visiting a university or a hospital or simply walking through the mall, it's easy to think you're living in the golden age of language diversity.
But apparently, you would be wrong.
Languages are dying by the hundreds -- the thousands -- all over the world as you stand there trying to figure out the menu on Wilson Boulevard. And before you can be churlish enough to say, yeah, and the problem with that would be what? -- wasn't life better before the Tower of Babel? -- here comes a movie to set you straight that is so au courant, if you know what we mean, that it was shown at Sundance.
Called "The Linguists," it is basically a home movie with better than average production values -- which, come to think of it, may be a useful definition of indie movies -- that could have been subtitled "Dave and Greg's Excellent Language Adventures."
These guys travel to parts of Siberia, Bolivia and India so truly godforsaken that the film of Arizona Indian country looks cosmopolitan. All in the service of warning us that half the world's 7,000 languages are going extinct. These include Gta', in India, which features words that efficiently capture concepts at which English flails. Such as:
· "Goteh," which means "bring something from an inaccessible place with the help of a long stick";
· "Nosore," which means "to free someone from a tiger"; and
· "Poh," which means "to kill lice by pressing them under your nails."
It also turns out that in the Bella Coola/Nuxalk language of Canada, you can find such words as "stshlh" for "afterbirth" or "stsnts" for "transsexual/hermaphrodite."
We know what you're thinking. You want to buy a vowel.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
National Geographic is hosting a multi-culti All Roads Film Festival at its headquarters at 17th and M streets NW tonight through Sunday, and "The Linguists" is the opening-night attraction. Its success on the indie circuit is no small accomplishment. Even the film's director, Daniel A. Miller, acknowledges the challenge of dealing with linguists.
"My wife's friend at Berkeley was a linguistics major and we privately called her Data -- as from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' -- because of her monotone recitation of mostly emotionless observations," he writes in his director's notes.
When the filmmakers first met a young researcher in endangered languages, K. David Harrison, "he seemed like the perfect protagonist. He was as young as we were in 2003 yet looked better on camera. At the same time, he was a bit of a control freak."
His co-researcher, Gregory Anderson, "was Oscar to David's Felix. We found out in time that Greg was a recovering Deadhead, the father of two and both a huge fan of extreme fighting and a black belt. He also spoke close to 20 languages and had founded with David the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages."
Thus does the movie strive to make an adventure out of seeing all the ways the human mind can make sense of the world with language. The trailer's eloquent sell asks who "will circle the planet to hear the last whispers of a dying language, racing against time to hear words rarely spoken before they're never heard again?"
Ask why we care about recording a language that only three people speak, and Harrison replies, "If we were to give a rationale purely for selfish reasons, it would be, after those speakers die, we'll have a scientific record of the language."
But in addition, "science is playing catch-up in many respects to the people who have lived there for thousands of years and know about that ecosystem," says Anderson. "So since all of these ecosystems are under collapse now, it would behoove us to not just throw away this knowledge that people have accrued over the millennia."
And their knowledge doesn't translate out of their language?
"There are approximations that can be made, of course," says Anderson. "Which is why you're capable of reading Dostoevski even if you don't know Russian."
Languages divide as well as unite -- ask Canada. The luxury of embracing global language diversity is palatable in part because the world has succeeded in creating a lingua franca, a universal language -- English. A quarter of the world's population speaks it, according to David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Four or five times as many people speak English as a second language as do those who consider it their first.
"The Linguists" visits a boarding school in India where parents eagerly send their kids to learn a way to make a living -- running a sewing machine, for example. These kids speak 60 home languages, but as often as not they are taught in English because, the film acknowledges with some rue, it is the most efficient way to give them a good education.
If these parents are more concerned with their kids' economic futures than they are with the preservation of their tribal languages, what's wrong with that?
"English won the competition for languages," says Anderson. "The English-first laws are all inane because it's a fait accompli." And all those other languages he records? "We serve the heritage communities of these languages," he says.
"There's really a global movement going on right now for language revitalization," says Harrison. "A lot of it looks dire and depressing and the trend is downward, but people have realized that they were presented with a false choice: that they had to give up their identity, give up their language, become part of a homogenized melting-pot culture. People are pulling back from that and reasserting their roots, their ethnic identity, their multiple identities, their heritage languages and affiliations.
"There's a better attitude nowadays where people don't just pay lip service to the idea of diversity, but they understand that diversity does actually strengthen a society, strengthens us intellectually, strengthens us socially."
Weren't things better before the Tower of Babel?
"I was raised in a religious tradition that views multilingualism as quite literally a punishment from God," says Harrison. "It was intended to 'confound' -- that was the exact word that was used. But there are alternative mythologies. There are still societies today" -- in New Guinea and South America -- "that actually require their members to marry a person who is a speaker of a different language. Diversity has a survival value."
"Yeah," chimes in Anderson, "they call it hybrid vigor in biology."
H. Russell Bernard is a grand old man of endangered-language research, having devoted four decades to it. The chairman emeritus of the University of Florida anthropology department and the former editor in chief of the American Anthropologist takes the long view about disappearing language diversity.
"We're conducting this experiment where we had 35,000 years of language proliferation. About 500 years ago it started contracting, since the age of discovery and conquest and colonialism. We know that the proliferation of languages was the natural order of things for a very long time. Modern Homo sapiens is conducting an experiment to reduce that, to maybe one. It's hubris, but why shouldn't we do that -- translate it all into one?
"If I had 20 to 30 planets on which to conduct this experiment, in which some proliferate and some stay the same, and I could monitor it for 2,000 or 3,000 years, and could tell what the consequences were, I would not be so concerned about whether the experiment we're conducting is good or bad for humankind.
"Without that comparison," however, Bernard says, experimenting in language extinction "seems to me utterly reckless."
Meanwhile, you ask Anderson and Harrison whether they realize they are causing their National Geographic publicist to pound her head against her desk.
What a great opportunity, she thought. Language diversity! She promptly started to line up interviews with Spanish-language media. That's when she learned that of the 25 languages the two could speak, none of those was Spanish.
Twenty-five languages and none of them is Spanish? you say to the boys, incredulously. Aren't you ashamed?
"Yeah, I know," says Anderson.
"We're terrible."
2.10.08
Chinese Science
Until fifty years ago, it was widely assumed that China had no tradition of scientific thought and innovation. Meticulous observation and reasoned deduction were taken to be European traits, as was the application of scientific principles to industrial production. The Chinese were supposed to be good at imitating, not originating; and the notion that the West’s scientific and industrial revolutions owed anything to the East’s inventiveness seemed laughable. We now know better. Ancient China’s precocity in almost every field of scientific achievement has since been acknowledged – in medicine, metallurgy, ceramics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, mathematics. Ridicule has turned to awe, tinged with trepidation.
This dramatic reversal is credited to one man, the redoubtable Dr Joseph Needham, plus a small team of devoted disciples and a monumental work of scholarship. All three provide rich matter for Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass, while the stature of Needham’s great work may be judged by the appearance of a new volume on ferrous metallurgy, the twenty-fourth in his Science and Civilisation in China series. Fifty years since the first volume appeared, and thirteen since Needham died, the work of assessing pre-Qing China’s scientific achievement goes on. “Sci[ence] in general in China – why [did it] not develop?”, wondered Needham in an aide-memoire jotted down in 1942. Later touted as “the Needham question”, this conundrum about why so promising a tradition failed to generate its own industrial revolution has never been satisfactorily answered – by Needham or anyone else. But the idea behind it – that China did indeed once excel in science – has generated an industry of its own. Mining the world’s most richly documented culture for references to scientific and technological practice now provides employment for a host of scholars; many of them enjoy the resources on offer at Cambridge University’s specially built Needham Research Institute; and seldom has there not been a volume of Science and Civilisation in China making its stately progress across the print floor of the University Press.
For revealing how, in almost every conceivable field of scientific endeavour, the Chinese had preceded other nations, Needham was hailed as “the Erasmus of the twentieth century”, fawned on by the Left and feted by international academe. The Fellows of Caius College, Cambridge, made him their Master; Beijing, no less than Taipei, showered him with honours. Yet, boisterous and headstrong, Needham was not without his critics. Cambridge had cause to resent his long absences and reluctance to teach. Washington steadfastly refused him entry following his endorsement of Communist claims that US aircraft had dropped cholera-infected rats on North Korea. Forums designed to further the cause of international understanding were something of a deathtrap for Needham. He was hoodwinked by his Maoist friends – and by a Soviet-laid germ-trail in respect of the rats. It was not until the Cultural Revolution that his faith in Communist China began to waver. His flaws and foibles were legion, and it is these that seem to have recommended him to that connoisseur of bookish eccentricity, Simon Winchester.
Bomb, Book and Compass (these being some of the undisputed products of Chinese invention) is no more a standard biography than was The Surgeon of Crowthorne (Winchester’s book about William Minor and the OED). Instead, Winchester delivers a masterly narrative, rich in description and quirky asides, and as undemanding as it is compelling. Needham, we learn, though a distinguished embryologist, self-taught sinologist and general polymath, was susceptible to distractions. He was keen on steam engines, morris dancing, singing and swimming in the nude. A Communist in all but party membership, he yet remained a devout Anglo-Catholic; and a dedicated husband in so far as his compulsive womanizing permitted.
Nearly half of Winchester’s book is devoted to the years (1943–6) that Needham spent in China as the head of a wartime agency called the Sino-British Scientific Co-operation Office. Winchester insists it had nothing to do with intelligence gathering and was solely concerned with offering encouragement and materials to scientific institutions uprooted by the Japanese invasion. But it does seem to have involved more adventurous travel than the distribution of books and laboratory equipment strictly required. Though based in Chongqing, the capital of unoccupied China, Needham was seldom there. It was his first visit to China and would be his only extended residence in the country; he was determined to make the most of it. His three major journeys, one by truck to Gansu in the north-western desert, another by road to Yunnan in the south-west, and a third mainly by rail to Fuzhou in the south-east, were as notable for what he learned about Chinese science as for what he imparted to it. Indeed, the immense collection of books and artefacts that he brought back probably outweighed the largesse he distributed. Shipped to Cambridge, they would provide the raw material for Science and Civilisation in China and the core of the Needham Research Institute’s extensive library.
Winchester has retraced these expeditions exhaustively. He makes good use of the reports submitted at the time, and writes of China with real affection. The Man Who Loved China, which is the title of his book in the US, could as well apply to the author as the subject. But all this leaves little room for the rest of Needham’s career, which is sketched in the broadest of strokes, and none at all for the ongoing debate over the methodology of Science and Civilisation in China.
Needham’s purpose was to demonstrate not just the scale of early China’s scientific achievement, but its importance in the development of world science. Even his disciples have had difficulty with this. In his handsome contribution on ferrous technology – Part Eleven of the fifth volume, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, in Science and Civilisation in China – Donald B. Wagner dissociates himself from Needham’s faith in both “the essential virtue of Progress” and “modern natural science as a measure of historical value”. Like others, he is also unhappy with Needham’s extraction of Chinese science from its geographical, cultural and social context and his categorization of it into essentially Western disciplines – chemistry, physics, biology, etc – that were unfamiliar to the Chinese. And finally, though he wrestles with the Needham dictum that the West owed its eventual technological superiority to the East, Wagner concludes that in respect of iron, “the results are not by any means conclusive”.
Unfazed by such apostasy, Needham stuck to his task well into his nineties (he died in 1995). He devoured every available text and interrogated every known authority for the earliest Chinese references to any relevant technology. Finding that these generally predated anything in other cultural traditions, he then awarded to China a precedence based on priority and offered conjectures as to how this technology might subsequently have spread to other receptive societies. He was, in short, a committed diffusionist; he made no allowance for the possibility of independent invention and parallel development elsewhere. He also made no allowance for the profusion and antiquity of Chinese textual sources compared with those of other cultures. The doubtful nature of references to ferrous technology in, for instance, India’s historiography does not prove that this material was unknown there; witness the famous iron pillar at the Qutb in Delhi. It merely affirms the comparative paucity of the textual resources available for pre-Islamic India.
Notching up these Chinese “inventions and discoveries” and awarding to each a date based on the earliest known reference became something of an obsession for Needham. Several such listings appear in his published works and have since been adapted by admirers; Winchester reproduces a representative example. But while one can hardly quarrel with “Blast furnace – 3rd century b.c.”, “Book, printed, first to be dated – a.d. 868”, or “Crank handle – 1st century b.c.”, the whole exercise invites ridicule with the inclusion of items such as “Wheelbarrow, sail-assisted – 6th century a.d.”, “Great Wall of China – 3rd century b.c.”, or “Bookworm repellent – no date”. For reducing the painstakingly researched and elegantly written tomes of Science and Civilisation in China to the level of general knowledge trivia, Needham himself must bear much blame. But what Donald Wagner’s new volume well demonstrates is the extent to which recent archaeology, while modifying some of Needham’s conclusions, generally supports the veracity of the textual testimony and so the value of his life’s great work.
Simon Winchester
BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS
Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China
336pp. Viking. £20.
978 0 670 91378 7
Donald B. Wagner
SCIENCE AND CIVILISATION IN CHINA
Volume Five: Chemistry and Chemical Technology Part Eleven: Ferrous Metallurgy
478pp. Cambridge University Press. £120 (US $220).
978 0 521 87566 0
This dramatic reversal is credited to one man, the redoubtable Dr Joseph Needham, plus a small team of devoted disciples and a monumental work of scholarship. All three provide rich matter for Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass, while the stature of Needham’s great work may be judged by the appearance of a new volume on ferrous metallurgy, the twenty-fourth in his Science and Civilisation in China series. Fifty years since the first volume appeared, and thirteen since Needham died, the work of assessing pre-Qing China’s scientific achievement goes on. “Sci[ence] in general in China – why [did it] not develop?”, wondered Needham in an aide-memoire jotted down in 1942. Later touted as “the Needham question”, this conundrum about why so promising a tradition failed to generate its own industrial revolution has never been satisfactorily answered – by Needham or anyone else. But the idea behind it – that China did indeed once excel in science – has generated an industry of its own. Mining the world’s most richly documented culture for references to scientific and technological practice now provides employment for a host of scholars; many of them enjoy the resources on offer at Cambridge University’s specially built Needham Research Institute; and seldom has there not been a volume of Science and Civilisation in China making its stately progress across the print floor of the University Press.
For revealing how, in almost every conceivable field of scientific endeavour, the Chinese had preceded other nations, Needham was hailed as “the Erasmus of the twentieth century”, fawned on by the Left and feted by international academe. The Fellows of Caius College, Cambridge, made him their Master; Beijing, no less than Taipei, showered him with honours. Yet, boisterous and headstrong, Needham was not without his critics. Cambridge had cause to resent his long absences and reluctance to teach. Washington steadfastly refused him entry following his endorsement of Communist claims that US aircraft had dropped cholera-infected rats on North Korea. Forums designed to further the cause of international understanding were something of a deathtrap for Needham. He was hoodwinked by his Maoist friends – and by a Soviet-laid germ-trail in respect of the rats. It was not until the Cultural Revolution that his faith in Communist China began to waver. His flaws and foibles were legion, and it is these that seem to have recommended him to that connoisseur of bookish eccentricity, Simon Winchester.
Bomb, Book and Compass (these being some of the undisputed products of Chinese invention) is no more a standard biography than was The Surgeon of Crowthorne (Winchester’s book about William Minor and the OED). Instead, Winchester delivers a masterly narrative, rich in description and quirky asides, and as undemanding as it is compelling. Needham, we learn, though a distinguished embryologist, self-taught sinologist and general polymath, was susceptible to distractions. He was keen on steam engines, morris dancing, singing and swimming in the nude. A Communist in all but party membership, he yet remained a devout Anglo-Catholic; and a dedicated husband in so far as his compulsive womanizing permitted.
Nearly half of Winchester’s book is devoted to the years (1943–6) that Needham spent in China as the head of a wartime agency called the Sino-British Scientific Co-operation Office. Winchester insists it had nothing to do with intelligence gathering and was solely concerned with offering encouragement and materials to scientific institutions uprooted by the Japanese invasion. But it does seem to have involved more adventurous travel than the distribution of books and laboratory equipment strictly required. Though based in Chongqing, the capital of unoccupied China, Needham was seldom there. It was his first visit to China and would be his only extended residence in the country; he was determined to make the most of it. His three major journeys, one by truck to Gansu in the north-western desert, another by road to Yunnan in the south-west, and a third mainly by rail to Fuzhou in the south-east, were as notable for what he learned about Chinese science as for what he imparted to it. Indeed, the immense collection of books and artefacts that he brought back probably outweighed the largesse he distributed. Shipped to Cambridge, they would provide the raw material for Science and Civilisation in China and the core of the Needham Research Institute’s extensive library.
Winchester has retraced these expeditions exhaustively. He makes good use of the reports submitted at the time, and writes of China with real affection. The Man Who Loved China, which is the title of his book in the US, could as well apply to the author as the subject. But all this leaves little room for the rest of Needham’s career, which is sketched in the broadest of strokes, and none at all for the ongoing debate over the methodology of Science and Civilisation in China.
Needham’s purpose was to demonstrate not just the scale of early China’s scientific achievement, but its importance in the development of world science. Even his disciples have had difficulty with this. In his handsome contribution on ferrous technology – Part Eleven of the fifth volume, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, in Science and Civilisation in China – Donald B. Wagner dissociates himself from Needham’s faith in both “the essential virtue of Progress” and “modern natural science as a measure of historical value”. Like others, he is also unhappy with Needham’s extraction of Chinese science from its geographical, cultural and social context and his categorization of it into essentially Western disciplines – chemistry, physics, biology, etc – that were unfamiliar to the Chinese. And finally, though he wrestles with the Needham dictum that the West owed its eventual technological superiority to the East, Wagner concludes that in respect of iron, “the results are not by any means conclusive”.
Unfazed by such apostasy, Needham stuck to his task well into his nineties (he died in 1995). He devoured every available text and interrogated every known authority for the earliest Chinese references to any relevant technology. Finding that these generally predated anything in other cultural traditions, he then awarded to China a precedence based on priority and offered conjectures as to how this technology might subsequently have spread to other receptive societies. He was, in short, a committed diffusionist; he made no allowance for the possibility of independent invention and parallel development elsewhere. He also made no allowance for the profusion and antiquity of Chinese textual sources compared with those of other cultures. The doubtful nature of references to ferrous technology in, for instance, India’s historiography does not prove that this material was unknown there; witness the famous iron pillar at the Qutb in Delhi. It merely affirms the comparative paucity of the textual resources available for pre-Islamic India.
Notching up these Chinese “inventions and discoveries” and awarding to each a date based on the earliest known reference became something of an obsession for Needham. Several such listings appear in his published works and have since been adapted by admirers; Winchester reproduces a representative example. But while one can hardly quarrel with “Blast furnace – 3rd century b.c.”, “Book, printed, first to be dated – a.d. 868”, or “Crank handle – 1st century b.c.”, the whole exercise invites ridicule with the inclusion of items such as “Wheelbarrow, sail-assisted – 6th century a.d.”, “Great Wall of China – 3rd century b.c.”, or “Bookworm repellent – no date”. For reducing the painstakingly researched and elegantly written tomes of Science and Civilisation in China to the level of general knowledge trivia, Needham himself must bear much blame. But what Donald Wagner’s new volume well demonstrates is the extent to which recent archaeology, while modifying some of Needham’s conclusions, generally supports the veracity of the textual testimony and so the value of his life’s great work.
Simon Winchester
BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS
Joseph Needham and the great secrets of China
336pp. Viking. £20.
978 0 670 91378 7
Donald B. Wagner
SCIENCE AND CIVILISATION IN CHINA
Volume Five: Chemistry and Chemical Technology Part Eleven: Ferrous Metallurgy
478pp. Cambridge University Press. £120 (US $220).
978 0 521 87566 0
Nobel Prize?
Horace Engdahl, the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy, thinks US authors are overrated.
For all the people who have incorrectly predicted for years that the next Noble Prize in literature would go to Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon or some other American, it's now come time to face reality. That's because Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize selection committee, has revealed why American authors have no chance in Stockholm. In his opinion, American writers are "too insular," "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" and too ignorant to write good books. And Engdahl claims to know the reason behind their narrow-mindedness, too: "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."
The fact that a huge part of the "big dialogue" these days is significantly influenced by the works of Roth, Pynchon, Updike, DeLillo and Auster appears to bother him so much that he won't even pay any attention to it. Or could it be that the star of this literary critic and editor, who is well-known in Sweden, is waning, and he's trying to draw attention to himself by pulling the lion by the tail?
In response, Harold Augenbraum, the director of the National Book Foundation in the United States, has announced his plans to send Engdahl a recommended-reading list of works by American authors. So, there is still a chance for an amicable settlement of the issue.
But the fact remains that Engdahl's collection of somewhat pompous works published in 1999 under the title "Meteors" never quite made it to the best-seller list of the New York Times. After one well-meaning critic called the work "airy," could the sledge hammer now be falling? The man who translated Kleist and Schlegel into Swedish might just have a personal reason for resenting the country full of notorious best-selling authors and Nobel Prize candidates for such disrespect. But he's not really right to do so.
In retrospect, the fact that Europe continues to be the center of the literary universe, as Engdahl claims, might just have something to do with the diversity of traditions here. But to think that that is the reason why the majority of Nobel Prize winners in literature are European is somewhat skewed logic. In the end, Europe's multitude of countries also have many more chances than the US, a land of many peoples whose literary tradition combines those absorbed from places, both within and outside of Europe, into a new form of world literature.
American authors, such as Faulkner and Hemingway, had a major influence on European literature after World War II. And even the famous crime novels of Sweden have Anglo-American roots. And American authors like David Guterson and Annie Proulx have actually managed to capture the rest of the world's imagination with stories of American rednecks living along the Pacific Northwest coast or on "Brokeback Mountain."
For the last decade and a half, the Nobel Prize in literature has eluded the Americans. Since Toni Morrison became the last American author to win it (in 1993), people haven't been taking the prize as seriously anymore. By selecting exotic token choices and veteran compromise candidates, all the selection committee has succeeded in doing is to put literature editors under a lot of pressure to find anyone who knows of or can even remember the winner after the judgments have been announced in Sweden.
Mention the names Harold Pinter or Dario Fo, and people will probably ask if they're still around. Mention Doris Lessing, and they'll wonder whether she's already won it.
Mention Gao Xingjian, and the response will be: "Who's that? Has he written something?"
So much is printed and so many phone calls are made in such a short amount of time to get the announcement from Stockholm into the papers and onto television and radio programs. But two days later, the news has faded into obscurity.
Time and again, the decisions of the Nobel Prize committee have fallen on unfertile soil, which has already been paved over by new releases and book-fair favorites. And when there aren't any new works from the winners or when he or she disappears out of public view, then the Nobel Prize effect goes "poof," leaving no traces worth mentioning in the book trade.
Horace Engdahl's provocation does succeed in making the whole issue a bit more exciting. If the prize doesn't go to either an American or one of the favorites in the second week of October, it would be a surprise that would be doubly honored by newspaper columnists. But if a Comorian lyric poet takes the prize, people will assume that Engdahl was just expressing the opinion of the entire Nobel Prize committee.
But the truth is that, as always, Horace Engdahl has merely stirred up a tempest in a teapot. Uncle Sam has other things to worry about at the moment, and American authors will survive even without the Nobel Prize. And that might exactly turn out to be the worst possible response because the public esteem for a prize has much more to do with its winners than with the opinion of a secretary on the committee.
This time around, the literature business might look to Stockholm with a little more excitement -- before going back to taking care of their trade-fair hangovers.
For all the people who have incorrectly predicted for years that the next Noble Prize in literature would go to Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon or some other American, it's now come time to face reality. That's because Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel Prize selection committee, has revealed why American authors have no chance in Stockholm. In his opinion, American writers are "too insular," "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture" and too ignorant to write good books. And Engdahl claims to know the reason behind their narrow-mindedness, too: "They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."
The fact that a huge part of the "big dialogue" these days is significantly influenced by the works of Roth, Pynchon, Updike, DeLillo and Auster appears to bother him so much that he won't even pay any attention to it. Or could it be that the star of this literary critic and editor, who is well-known in Sweden, is waning, and he's trying to draw attention to himself by pulling the lion by the tail?
In response, Harold Augenbraum, the director of the National Book Foundation in the United States, has announced his plans to send Engdahl a recommended-reading list of works by American authors. So, there is still a chance for an amicable settlement of the issue.
But the fact remains that Engdahl's collection of somewhat pompous works published in 1999 under the title "Meteors" never quite made it to the best-seller list of the New York Times. After one well-meaning critic called the work "airy," could the sledge hammer now be falling? The man who translated Kleist and Schlegel into Swedish might just have a personal reason for resenting the country full of notorious best-selling authors and Nobel Prize candidates for such disrespect. But he's not really right to do so.
In retrospect, the fact that Europe continues to be the center of the literary universe, as Engdahl claims, might just have something to do with the diversity of traditions here. But to think that that is the reason why the majority of Nobel Prize winners in literature are European is somewhat skewed logic. In the end, Europe's multitude of countries also have many more chances than the US, a land of many peoples whose literary tradition combines those absorbed from places, both within and outside of Europe, into a new form of world literature.
American authors, such as Faulkner and Hemingway, had a major influence on European literature after World War II. And even the famous crime novels of Sweden have Anglo-American roots. And American authors like David Guterson and Annie Proulx have actually managed to capture the rest of the world's imagination with stories of American rednecks living along the Pacific Northwest coast or on "Brokeback Mountain."
For the last decade and a half, the Nobel Prize in literature has eluded the Americans. Since Toni Morrison became the last American author to win it (in 1993), people haven't been taking the prize as seriously anymore. By selecting exotic token choices and veteran compromise candidates, all the selection committee has succeeded in doing is to put literature editors under a lot of pressure to find anyone who knows of or can even remember the winner after the judgments have been announced in Sweden.
Mention the names Harold Pinter or Dario Fo, and people will probably ask if they're still around. Mention Doris Lessing, and they'll wonder whether she's already won it.
Mention Gao Xingjian, and the response will be: "Who's that? Has he written something?"
So much is printed and so many phone calls are made in such a short amount of time to get the announcement from Stockholm into the papers and onto television and radio programs. But two days later, the news has faded into obscurity.
Time and again, the decisions of the Nobel Prize committee have fallen on unfertile soil, which has already been paved over by new releases and book-fair favorites. And when there aren't any new works from the winners or when he or she disappears out of public view, then the Nobel Prize effect goes "poof," leaving no traces worth mentioning in the book trade.
Horace Engdahl's provocation does succeed in making the whole issue a bit more exciting. If the prize doesn't go to either an American or one of the favorites in the second week of October, it would be a surprise that would be doubly honored by newspaper columnists. But if a Comorian lyric poet takes the prize, people will assume that Engdahl was just expressing the opinion of the entire Nobel Prize committee.
But the truth is that, as always, Horace Engdahl has merely stirred up a tempest in a teapot. Uncle Sam has other things to worry about at the moment, and American authors will survive even without the Nobel Prize. And that might exactly turn out to be the worst possible response because the public esteem for a prize has much more to do with its winners than with the opinion of a secretary on the committee.
This time around, the literature business might look to Stockholm with a little more excitement -- before going back to taking care of their trade-fair hangovers.
1.10.08
Palin in Perspective
Sarah Palin has put a new face and voice to the long-standing, powerful, but inchoate movement in US political life that one might see as a mutant variety of Poujadism, inflected with a modern American accent. There are echoes of the Poujadist agenda of 1950s France in its contempt for metropolitan elites, fuelling the resentment of the provinces towards the capital and the countryside towards the city, in its xenophobic strain of nationalism, sturdy, paysan resistance to taxation, hostility to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most targeted demographic in the country. In 1992, Ross ‘Clean out the Barn’ Perot and his United We Stand America followers looked for a while as if they were going to up-end the two-party system, with Perot leading George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the midsummer polls. In 1996, Pat Buchanan (‘The peasants are coming with pitchforks’) appealed to the same bloc of voters with a programme that was militantly Christian, white, nativist, provincial, protectionist and anti-Washington. In 2000, Karl Rove cleverly enrolled this quasi-Poujadist faction in his grand alliance of libertarians, born-agains and corporate interests. It’s worth remembering that in 2004 every American city with a population of more than 500,000 voted for Kerry, and that the election was won for Bush in the outer suburbs, exurbia and the countryside – peasants with pitchforks territory. For an organisation so wedded to its big-city corporate clients, the Republican Party has been hugely successful in mopping up the votes of low-income, lightly educated rural and exurban residents.
Most large American cities, especially in the West, are situated in counties that extend far beyond the city limits. Liberal urban governments with high property-tax rates and progressive environmental policies wield great power (some say tyranny) over their rural hinterlands, delivering ukases about land use and conservation: brush-cutting is to be limited to 40 per cent of the property; ‘setbacks’ of 100 feet are required from streams and wetlands; new churches are denied building permission because they are deemed ‘large footprint items’ in ‘critical habitat areas’ etc. So the householder or farmer sees ‘the city’ making unwarranted infringements of his God-given right to manage his land as he pleases, and imagines his precious tax-dollars being squandered on such urban fripperies as streetcar lines and monorails. These local quarrels spread to infect whole states. In Washington state, where I live, almost every ill that befalls people in the timberlands and agricultural regions, far from any city, is confidently attributed to ‘liberals from Seattle’, a nefarious conspiracy of wealthy, tree-hugging elitists with law degrees from East Coast universities, whose chief aim is to destroy the traditional livelihoods of honest citizens living on either side of the Puget Sound urban corridor. Poujade – and Jean-Marie Le Pen – would have had a field day here; as, I’m afraid, will the McCain-Palin ticket in November.
Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders. Reagan the Hollywood actor, Perot the data-processing billionaire, Buchanan the DC journalist, and George W. Bush the energy-industry scion and owner of a merely recreational ranch in Crawford, Texas, have had very little in common with their rural and exurban constituents, and their gestures at farmyard, strip-mall or cowboy-boot cred have tended to come across as phoney and embarrassing. Photographed inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people watched her speech on television. When she said, ‘Difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick!’ even in the liberal redoubt of Seattle I thought I heard a roar of delighted recognition coming from my neighbours on the hill. Palin doesn’t need to say what Poujade used to tell his listeners, ‘Look me in the eye, and you will see yourself,’ and ‘I’m just le petit Poujade, an ordinary Frenchman like you’: all she needed was her trademark blink from behind her librarian glasses, and to turn on her pert, wrinkle-nosed smile, in order to convince a crucial sector of the American electorate, male and female, that it sees in her a looking-glass reflection, suitably flattering in both form and content, of itself. Sarah, c’est moi.
Like Wally the Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the style she developed as mayor of Wasilla and then perfected in her triumphant gubernatorial campaign in 2006. Transcripts and videos from her time in Alaska show her parlaying the barest minimum of rhetorical and intellectual resources into a formidable electoral weapon. The least one can say of her is that she quickly learned how to make the most of herself.
What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.
She has great political gifts, combining the competitive instincts of a Filipino gamecock with the native gumption she first displayed in her 1996 race to become mayor of Wasilla, when she blindsided the incumbent mayor by running not on local but on state and national issues, as the pro-gun and pro-life candidate. Mayors have no say on abortion or on gun laws, but Palin got the support of the local Evangelicals (it greatly helped that her – Lutheran – opponent’s surname was Stein and her backers put it about that he was a Jew) and of gun-owners who keenly supported a bill, then pending in the state legislature, that would affirm the right of Alaskans to carry concealed weapons into public buildings. On more typical mayoral concerns, she promised to halve Wasilla’s property tax and ‘cut out things that are not necessary’, citing the bloated budgets for the museum, the library and arts and recreation. She won the election with 616 votes to Stein’s 413.
There followed what some Wasillaites saw as her reign of terror. She demanded resignation letters from all the city managers, ridding herself of the museum director, the librarian (whom she was later forced to rehire), the public works director, the city planner and the police chief, who’d argued against the concealed weapons bill and had supported a measure to close the town’s bars at 2.30 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. at weekends (the owners of the Mug-Shot Saloon and the Wasilla Bar had given money to Palin’s campaign). City employees were forbidden by her to speak to the press, and during her first four months in office she provoked a string of appalled editorials in the local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman:
Wasilla found out it has a new mayor with either little understanding or little regard for the city’s own laws.
Palin seems to have assumed her election was indeed a coronation. Welcome to Kingdom Palin, the land of no accountability.
Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth . . . Wasilla residents have been subjected to attempts to unlawfully appoint council members, statements that have been shown to be patently untrue, unrepentant backpedalling, and incessant whining that her only enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of former mayor John Stein.
Surrounding herself with fellow congregants from the Pentecostalist Wasilla Assembly of God and old school chums from Wasilla High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher used to extol. She abolished its building codes and signed a series of ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on a house being built by one of her campaign contributors, she sacked him.
Having come to power saying that her agenda was to pare down Wasilla to ‘the basic necessities, the bare bones’, she surprised its citizens when she redecorated the mayor’s office at a reported cost of $50,000 salvaged from the highways budget; its new red flock wallpaper matched her bold, rouge-et-noir taste in personal outfits. Another $24,000 of city money went on a white Chevy Suburban, known around Wasilla, without affection, as the mayormobile. She hired a city administrator to deputise for her in the day-to-day running of Wasilla’s affairs and employed a lobbyist in DC to wheedle lawmakers into meeting the town’s ever-expanding list of claims for congressional ‘pork’ (so named from the antebellum custom of rewarding slaves with barrels of salt pork). That expenditure, at least, paid off: during Palin’s six-year tenure as mayor, the federal government doled out more than $1000 for every man, woman and child in Wasilla. Her pet project was a $14.7m ice rink and sports complex, which opened in 2004. It is said to be lightly used, it has left the city servicing a massive debt, and a Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit continues over the bungled way in which Palin acquired the land on which it’s built.
Present-day Wasilla is Palin’s lasting monument. It sits in a broad alluvial valley, puddled with lakes, boxed in on three sides by sawtoothed Jurassic mountains, and fringed with woods of spruce and birch. Visitors usually aim their cameras at the town’s natural surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s a generic Western settlement, and one sees Wasillas in every state this side of the 100th meridian: the same competing gas stations, fast-food outlets, strip malls and ‘big box’ stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Fred Meyer and Home Depot, each with a vast parking lot out front, on which human figures scuttle with their shopping trolleys like coloured ants, robbed of their proper scale. (It has to be said that Pierre Poujade, champion of the small shopkeeper, would have been outraged by this sight.)
Wasilla is what inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive and superstitious trust in the benevolent authority of the free market. Palin’s view of aesthetics was nicely highlighted in 1996, a few months before she ran for mayor, when a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News happened to light on her in an excited crowd of five hundred women queuing up in the Anchorage J.C. Penney’s, waiting to snag the autograph of Ivana Trump, who was in town to hawk her eponymous line of scent.
‘We want to see Ivana,’ Palin said, who admittedly smells like a salmon for a large part of the summer, ‘because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.’
The blot on the Alaskan landscape that is Wasilla is the natural consequence of a mindset that mistakes Ivana Trump for culture.
Palin’s political gumption was never better exercised than it was five years ago. Follow closely this rather intricate sequence of manoeuvres, because it reveals a lot about her. In 2002, towards the end of her term as mayor, she mounted an underfunded run for the office of lieutenant-governor, and came a close second in the Republican primary. She then attached herself to the gubernatorial campaign of Alaska’s junior US senator, Frank Murkowski, speaking by his side at every possible opportunity. The reason? If Murkowski won the governorship, his Senate seat would be in his gift, and Palin had set her heart on going to DC. On the trail, she fêted him, slathering on the butter and topping it with jam. Murkowski won, the vacancy in the US Senate yawned, and Palin went to Juneau for an interview. After due consideration, the new governor – this being Alaska – decided that the person best qualified for the job was his own daughter, Lisa. He could hardly have delivered a more insulting blow. However, his largesse was not yet exhausted and he gave Palin the consolation prize of a seat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a part-time job that paid $122,400 a year – good money, but not at all what she was after.
The aggrieved Palin reluctantly accepted. She now had Murkowski in her sights, and he might have been wise to consider the fates of the Wasilla police chief, city attorney, museum director and others who had dared to cross her in the past. She chaired the Conservation Commission (in Alaska, the word ‘conservation’ means something rather different from what it means elsewhere), on which she was joined by the chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, a former oil company manager, and Dan Seamount, a geologist. She kept a watchful eye on Ruedrich, and office gossip came back to her with the news that he was conducting Republican Party business on his state computer, in state time: an ethics violation with which she was intimately familiar, since she’d been caught doing the same thing back in Wasilla, where the mayoral letterhead, fax machine and email account had been used in her campaign for the lieutenant-governorship a few months before.
Palin reported Ruedrich to Murkowski, but the governor, already mired in accusations of incompetence and worse, refused to take her calls. More Nancy-Drew-style detective work suggested that Ruedrich was misusing his position as impartial regulator to shill for a coal-bed methane company. One would give a lot to have been a fly on the wall at commission meetings during the summer and early autumn of 2003, as the improbably well-named Mr Seamount, a leftover from the previous Democratic administration, sat quietly by during the sulphurous confrontations between Ruedrich and Palin, who quickly made public both her complaints against Ruedrich and the governor’s refusal to take notice of them. As she told the Anchorage Daily News on 7 November 2003, ‘It’s distracting, it’s confusing, it’s frustrating. It’s not fair to Alaskans to have these questions about a possible conflict hanging over the head of this agency.’ Late the next day, Ruedrich resigned from the commission. Palin herself, forbidden by the governor to discuss the Ruedrich affair with journalists, resigned – to great acclaim in the Alaskan press – in January 2004.
The timing of these moves was immaculate. Murkowski was fast becoming the most unpopular governor on record, and the leaders of the state Republican Party, the ‘good ol’ boy network’, as Palin calls them now, had already attracted great public odium for their cronyism and underhand dealings with the oil and gas companies. The FBI was preparing to move in. At the last count, at least 14 public officials, oil company executives and Alaskan politicians (including the state’s senior US senator, Ted Stevens, and its only US congressman, Don Young) are now either on trial, indicted, under federal investigation or in jail, and it’s probable that there are more charges and more suspects still to come.
After she left the commission, Palin told people that her whistleblowing had ‘destroyed her political career’ – a calculated disingenuity if ever there was one. But she came closer to the truth when, in an understandably cocky op-ed piece, published in the Daily News in April 2004, she wrote: ‘Success in the sports arena is essentially the same in the political arena . . . All I ever really needed to know I learned on the basketball court.’ Following Murkowski’s appointment of his daughter to the Senate, Palin had taken possession of the ball, dribbled it brilliantly through the ranks of her slower-witted opponents, leaped for the hoop, and scored a clean slam dunk.
Alaskan journalists fawned on her. At a low point in the state’s political history, especially for Republicans, Palin had bravely stood up against the leaders of her own party and exposed corruption. She’d taken on the governor, the party chairman and the oil companies, and unselfishly sacrificed her hopes of advancement in the process. At that time, it would have been unseasonable to suggest that simple jealousy and opportunism might have played as large a part in her actions as moral principle, and the Daily News bestowed on her the ultimate newspaper accolade when it used her first name only in a headline on the front page of its B section: ‘What Would Sarah Do? We’ll See Come the Next Big Election’. Eight years before, in her first appearance in the paper, she’d been a fishy-smelling nonentity in the crowd of fame-suckers at J.C. Penney’s; now she was a beloved statewide mascot.
It was as a mascot (‘New Energy for Alaska!’) that she ran in the 2006 gubernatorial election, humiliating Murkowski in the primary, and comfortably beating Tony Knowles, a former governor and the Democratic candidate, in November. When she took the oath of office in – appropriately – the Carlson Center sports arena in Fairbanks, the crowd of six thousand broke into a deafening chant of ‘Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!’ and had to be silenced before the ceremony could go on.
Then she went back to Juneau and started sacking state officials, from the attorney-general down, so that she could replace them with malleable old friends from her church and Wasilla High.
Alaska is unique among the states in that every permanent resident without a felony conviction is entitled to a share in the proceeds from its oil and gas resources. Each autumn, eligible Alaskans receive payments based on the interest accrued by the state’s Permanent Fund during the previous year. In 2007, Palin again ‘stood up to Big Oil’ when she successfully forced a bill through the legislature which raised the tax on oil companies’ net profits from 22.5 per cent to 25 per cent, ensuring a gush of money into the Permanent Fund and a hike in the size of cheques sent out to the citizenry. The move was strongly resisted by the Republican establishment, always averse to taxing ‘windfall profits’ and zealous in the defence of its cronies and contributors in the oil industry, but it was wildly popular among ordinary Alaskans, bred to expect handouts, whether from the federal or the state government. That year, Palin announced the biggest payment in six years, $1654, with a whoop of ‘Oh, baby!’ Late this summer, with oil prices still at around $125 a barrel, she was able to trump that number with an all-time record of $2069, plus a further one-off payment of $1200 to help Alaskans deal with the spiralling price of gasoline and heating fuel. For a hard-pressed family of four, that translated into a cheque for $13,076 – a jackpot figure, equivalent to 45 weeks of pay at the Alaskan minimum wage rate of $7.15 an hour, enough to pay cash for a new Ford Focus, or put down the deposit on a pretty nice house. (The federal poverty line for a four-person family is just over $20,000.)
It’s no wonder that Palin’s approval rating stands at more than 80 per cent in her home state: populist leaders are rarely able to reward their constituents with lavish contributions to their personal bank accounts, and there’s nothing like money for making people feel generously bipartisan. (Imagine how the polls might change if every family in Britain received a cheque for a little over £7000, personally signed, as it were, by Gordon Brown.) The Evita-like adulation that ‘Sarah’ was gaining in Alaska began to spread as a rumour through the nation in February, when she was first tipped as a possible running-mate for McCain, with Rush Limbaugh, the far-right radio rabble-rouser, as her noisiest fan. Her reputation for levying taxes on big business in order to fill the pockets of the common man – Alaska’s own Robin Hood – struck a profound chord in the hearts of the ‘dittoheads’, as Limbaugh’s faithful sheep describe themselves, and when McCain eventually nominated Palin, Limbaugh took to calling him John McBrilliant, having previously abused him as a traitor to the Republican cause.
Before Palin, McCain was lucky to draw a crowd of a few hundred; with Palin, he has been rallying Obama-sized turnouts of many thousands. Liberals have tried to comfort themselves by putting this down to her novelty value, a quality they hope will pass its expiry date well before the November election, and by dismissing her as another Dan ‘Potatoe’ Quayle or Admiral ‘Who am I? What am I doing here’ Stockdale, two of the last century’s most memorably inept vice-presidential choices. Many hope that the present financial crisis will so deepen and darken that McCain’s cavalier attitude to economics (‘Not something I’ve understood as well as I should’) and Palin’s seeming total ignorance of the subject will scare American voters into electing Obama. They expect reason to prevail and disenchantment to set in as Palin’s many contradictions and untruths are exposed in the press and on TV. They believe that her views on abortion are alienating all but fervently Evangelical and Catholic women. The line to spin over the dinner table is that ‘she only energises the base.’
But as politicians of both parties in Alaska have discovered, underestimating Palin nearly always turns out to be a fatal error. For – when on form – she has the ability to connect with that surly mass of occasional, floating voters who feel themselves to have been disenfranchised by more orthodox politicians and who respond to her as a paragon of domestic good sense and decency in a world rendered ever more incomprehensible by the dark arts of the elites.
She belongs to no elite. After drifting through five colleges in six years, she eventually secured a degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, less ivy than sagebrush league. Short of majoring in chiropractic, she could hardly have had a higher education less offensive to the Limbaughites. As Obama stands tarred in their eyes by his Columbia and Harvard connections, so Palin represents the healthy values of the church and the outdoors against those of the deeply suspect East Coast universities.
Importantly, she’s unimpressed by ‘science’, whether it’s the science of evolution, anthropogenic climate change or the Endangered Species Act. In a period of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction. It is also – especially in the phrase ‘best available science’ – very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for instance, Palin contentiously advocates drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she both promises well-paid jobs and champions the precious American liberty to do what the hell you like in your own backyard. Likewise, her fight against listing the polar bear as an endangered species, even as the sea ice melts under its feet – which has entailed blandly denying the findings of her own state scientists – sits well with a large, disgruntled rural sector of the population which has seen jobs lost, mills closed and property devalued in order to protect such critters as the northern spotted owl and the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly. The director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance says that her motto is ‘cut, kill, dig and drill’ and that she lives ‘in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilising accepted science’. For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero.
She has nicely positioned herself for national consumption as the enemy of the effete and over-sophisticated cities; a ‘gal’, as she says, from the remote provinces, untainted by the stain of the urban. In her convention speech, she managed to paint Wasilla as if it were the idealised small town of sentimental memory, complete with the drugstore soda fountain, barbershop striped pole, sociable Main Street and rosy-cheeked postmistress. ‘Long ago,’ she said, comparing her own rise with that of the 33rd president,
a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri, he followed an unlikely path – he followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer [Westbrook Pegler, the McCarthyite newspaper columnist] observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.
By implication, then, big city people are unpatriotic (Palin’s last phrase was a sneer at Michelle Obama, a lifelong Chicagoan); they are insincere slackers and draft dodgers – in a word, liberals. The passage reminded Republicans of their party demographics, their strength in the exurbs, and prepared the ground for an assault on the metropolitan manners and mores of their Democratic opponents, in a depressingly effective piece of hokum.
In Alaska, she has deployed her end-times fundamentalist beliefs with considerable adroitness, nimbly walking the tightrope between pleasing the church crowd and reassuring her secular constituency of her essential moderation. She appears to have learned from her early experience in Wasilla, when, pressed by her backers in the Assembly of God, she suggested to the librarian that such ‘unsuitable’ books as Daddy’s Roommate and Pastor, I Am Gay be removed from the library, only to backtrack later with the claim that she was merely asking a ‘rhetorical’ (she meant hypothetical) question. Since then, as governor, she’s handled such issues with impressive wiliness. When the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that gay partners of state employees must receive the same benefits as heterosexual spouses, the legislature passed a bill to block the payments. Palin made clear her sympathy with the bill’s intent, but refused to sign it on the grounds that to do so would be to ‘violate my oath of office’. Similarly, she endeared herself to Evangelicals during her gubernatorial campaign by saying that ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside evolution in the state’s public schools: ‘Teach both,’ she said, but then declined to back a bill which would have made that teaching mandatory. Playing politics by the rules of basketball, improvising her moves according to the requirements of the moment, she is too opportunistic (some say pragmatic) to be an ideologue. While she likes to trumpet her narrow theology, with its stress on Calvinist predestination and the imminence of the Rapture (the Iraq war is ‘a task that is from God’), she simultaneously manages to embody her state’s peculiar brand of live-and-let-live libertarianism.
The unfolding details of ‘Troopergate’ will probably not seriously damage her, because the nation seems to have decided that her ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, is a low-life skunk (‘He tasered the kid’) who deserved everything he got. Her various family troubles, including Wooten and her pregnant teenage daughter, help to underscore her authenticity as the people’s candidate; and so do such peccadillos as charging the state $60 per diem for living in her own house in Wasilla. Some politicians (the late Charles Haughey, plain ‘Charlie’ to all Ireland, comes to mind) have the invaluable knack of reminding their constituents of their own easily forgivable improbities, and Palin appears to be one of them. Proven hypocrisy is another matter, but though her time as mayor and governor has been studded with incidents of bullying, meanness and an unseemly thirst for personal revenge, no one has called her a hypocrite, so far as I can tell.
The most likely cause of her undoing will – strangely – be the McCain campaign. In St Paul, unveiled as the goose who could lay for the Republicans the golden egg of the presidency, she brimmed with the inflated self-assurance of the small-world conqueror, and held a national audience in the palm of her hand as she recited the same confident platitudes that served her so well in Alaska. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and McCain and his advisers should have left well alone, left ‘Sarah’ to be her vote-winning self. Instead, they seem to be no less alarmed by her than liberals are, and have taken to force-feeding her, stuffing her gullet with ‘talking points’ on foreign and domestic policy. Under their frantic tuition, Palin has recently looked less likely to lay the golden egg than to produce inferior goose-liver pâté.
On 17 September, she was temporarily released from the crammers and allowed to take questions at a town hall meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where someone in the crowd said that there was in certain circles a ‘perception’ that foreign policy was not her forte. Palin replied:
Well, I think because I am a Washington outsider that opponents are going to be looking for a whole lot of things that they can criticise, and they can kind of try to beat the candidate here who chose me as his partner to kind of tear down the ticket. But as for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared, and I know that on 20 January, if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we’ll be ready. I’ll be ready. I have that confidence. I have that readiness, and if you want specifics with specific policy or countries, go ahead, and you can ask me. You can even play stump the candidate if you want to. But we are ready to serve.
At which point, McCain leaned into the microphone to say: ‘She’s commander of the Alaskan National Guard.’ A little later, she was asked a friendly question on her top subject, energy policy, specifically oil.
Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.
This was a new and startling Sarah Palin, the dim student, flustered by more teaching than her poor head could bear. Molecules! Fungible! Commodity! She flung the words like bean bags at a blackboard. She never talked this way in Alaska, and would never have done so in Michigan, if her new tutors hadn’t succeeded in temporarily addling her brains. More, much more, of the same gibberish was on display in her recent extended interview on CBS with Katie Couric. On the proximity of Russia to Alaska: ‘It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where – where do they go? It’s Alaska.’
She may yet regain her poise. Her populist appeal is still enormous, and it’s far too early to start dancing on her grave, as some commentators have already tried to do. Palin’s campaign-trail mistakes will not calm that deep groundswell of public feeling of which she is now the national figurehead. But, for the last few days, as her education at the hands of her captors has proceeded, we in the cities, with our elitist liberal ideas and our stark terror of what further harm the United States might inflict on itself and the world under a third consecutive Republican administration, have been just a little less likely to wake up screaming at three in the morning.
Most large American cities, especially in the West, are situated in counties that extend far beyond the city limits. Liberal urban governments with high property-tax rates and progressive environmental policies wield great power (some say tyranny) over their rural hinterlands, delivering ukases about land use and conservation: brush-cutting is to be limited to 40 per cent of the property; ‘setbacks’ of 100 feet are required from streams and wetlands; new churches are denied building permission because they are deemed ‘large footprint items’ in ‘critical habitat areas’ etc. So the householder or farmer sees ‘the city’ making unwarranted infringements of his God-given right to manage his land as he pleases, and imagines his precious tax-dollars being squandered on such urban fripperies as streetcar lines and monorails. These local quarrels spread to infect whole states. In Washington state, where I live, almost every ill that befalls people in the timberlands and agricultural regions, far from any city, is confidently attributed to ‘liberals from Seattle’, a nefarious conspiracy of wealthy, tree-hugging elitists with law degrees from East Coast universities, whose chief aim is to destroy the traditional livelihoods of honest citizens living on either side of the Puget Sound urban corridor. Poujade – and Jean-Marie Le Pen – would have had a field day here; as, I’m afraid, will the McCain-Palin ticket in November.
Until now, the political leaders who’ve used the movement to their electoral advantage have come to it as outsiders. Reagan the Hollywood actor, Perot the data-processing billionaire, Buchanan the DC journalist, and George W. Bush the energy-industry scion and owner of a merely recreational ranch in Crawford, Texas, have had very little in common with their rural and exurban constituents, and their gestures at farmyard, strip-mall or cowboy-boot cred have tended to come across as phoney and embarrassing. Photographed inside J.C. Penney’s or Costco or Safeway, they’ve looked hardly less exotic than poor Michael Dukakis did on board his ill-advised tank. But the moment that Sarah Palin stepped up to the mike at the Republican Convention in St Paul, and began talking in her homely, mezzo-soprano, Far Western twang, she showed herself to be incontestably the real thing. Americans, starved of völkisch authenticity in their national politicians, thrilled to her presence on the stage. Forty million people watched her speech on television. When she said, ‘Difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? Lipstick!’ even in the liberal redoubt of Seattle I thought I heard a roar of delighted recognition coming from my neighbours on the hill. Palin doesn’t need to say what Poujade used to tell his listeners, ‘Look me in the eye, and you will see yourself,’ and ‘I’m just le petit Poujade, an ordinary Frenchman like you’: all she needed was her trademark blink from behind her librarian glasses, and to turn on her pert, wrinkle-nosed smile, in order to convince a crucial sector of the American electorate, male and female, that it sees in her a looking-glass reflection, suitably flattering in both form and content, of itself. Sarah, c’est moi.
Like Wally the Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the style she developed as mayor of Wasilla and then perfected in her triumphant gubernatorial campaign in 2006. Transcripts and videos from her time in Alaska show her parlaying the barest minimum of rhetorical and intellectual resources into a formidable electoral weapon. The least one can say of her is that she quickly learned how to make the most of herself.
What is most striking about her is that she seems perfectly untroubled by either curiosity or the usual processes of thought. When answering questions, both Obama and Joe Biden have an unfortunate tendency to think on their feet and thereby tie themselves in knots: Palin never thinks. Instead, she relies on a limited stock of facts, bright generalities and pokerwork maxims, all as familiar and well-worn as old pennies. Given any question, she reaches into her bag for the readymade sentence that sounds most nearly proximate to an answer, and, rather than speaking it, recites it, in the upsy-downsy voice of a middle-schooler pronouncing the letters of a word in a spelling bee. She then fixes her lips in a terminal smile. In the televised game shows that pass for political debates in the US, it’s a winning technique: told that she has 15 seconds in which to answer, Palin invariably beats the clock, and her concision and fluency more than compensate for her unrelenting triteness.
She has great political gifts, combining the competitive instincts of a Filipino gamecock with the native gumption she first displayed in her 1996 race to become mayor of Wasilla, when she blindsided the incumbent mayor by running not on local but on state and national issues, as the pro-gun and pro-life candidate. Mayors have no say on abortion or on gun laws, but Palin got the support of the local Evangelicals (it greatly helped that her – Lutheran – opponent’s surname was Stein and her backers put it about that he was a Jew) and of gun-owners who keenly supported a bill, then pending in the state legislature, that would affirm the right of Alaskans to carry concealed weapons into public buildings. On more typical mayoral concerns, she promised to halve Wasilla’s property tax and ‘cut out things that are not necessary’, citing the bloated budgets for the museum, the library and arts and recreation. She won the election with 616 votes to Stein’s 413.
There followed what some Wasillaites saw as her reign of terror. She demanded resignation letters from all the city managers, ridding herself of the museum director, the librarian (whom she was later forced to rehire), the public works director, the city planner and the police chief, who’d argued against the concealed weapons bill and had supported a measure to close the town’s bars at 2.30 a.m. on weekdays and 3 a.m. at weekends (the owners of the Mug-Shot Saloon and the Wasilla Bar had given money to Palin’s campaign). City employees were forbidden by her to speak to the press, and during her first four months in office she provoked a string of appalled editorials in the local paper, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman:
Wasilla found out it has a new mayor with either little understanding or little regard for the city’s own laws.
Palin seems to have assumed her election was indeed a coronation. Welcome to Kingdom Palin, the land of no accountability.
Mayor Palin fails to have a firm grasp of something very simple: the truth . . . Wasilla residents have been subjected to attempts to unlawfully appoint council members, statements that have been shown to be patently untrue, unrepentant backpedalling, and incessant whining that her only enemies are the press and a few disgruntled supporters of former mayor John Stein.
Surrounding herself with fellow congregants from the Pentecostalist Wasilla Assembly of God and old school chums from Wasilla High, the 32-year-old mayor set about turning the town into the kind of enterprise society that Margaret Thatcher used to extol. She abolished its building codes and signed a series of ordinances that re-zoned residential property for commercial and industrial use. When the city attorney ordered construction to stop on a house being built by one of her campaign contributors, she sacked him.
Having come to power saying that her agenda was to pare down Wasilla to ‘the basic necessities, the bare bones’, she surprised its citizens when she redecorated the mayor’s office at a reported cost of $50,000 salvaged from the highways budget; its new red flock wallpaper matched her bold, rouge-et-noir taste in personal outfits. Another $24,000 of city money went on a white Chevy Suburban, known around Wasilla, without affection, as the mayormobile. She hired a city administrator to deputise for her in the day-to-day running of Wasilla’s affairs and employed a lobbyist in DC to wheedle lawmakers into meeting the town’s ever-expanding list of claims for congressional ‘pork’ (so named from the antebellum custom of rewarding slaves with barrels of salt pork). That expenditure, at least, paid off: during Palin’s six-year tenure as mayor, the federal government doled out more than $1000 for every man, woman and child in Wasilla. Her pet project was a $14.7m ice rink and sports complex, which opened in 2004. It is said to be lightly used, it has left the city servicing a massive debt, and a Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit continues over the bungled way in which Palin acquired the land on which it’s built.
Present-day Wasilla is Palin’s lasting monument. It sits in a broad alluvial valley, puddled with lakes, boxed in on three sides by sawtoothed Jurassic mountains, and fringed with woods of spruce and birch. Visitors usually aim their cameras at the town’s natural surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s a generic Western settlement, and one sees Wasillas in every state this side of the 100th meridian: the same competing gas stations, fast-food outlets, strip malls and ‘big box’ stores like Wal-Mart, Target, Fred Meyer and Home Depot, each with a vast parking lot out front, on which human figures scuttle with their shopping trolleys like coloured ants, robbed of their proper scale. (It has to be said that Pierre Poujade, champion of the small shopkeeper, would have been outraged by this sight.)
Wasilla is what inevitably happens when there are no codes, no civic oversight, no planning, when the only governing principle in a community is a naive and superstitious trust in the benevolent authority of the free market. Palin’s view of aesthetics was nicely highlighted in 1996, a few months before she ran for mayor, when a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News happened to light on her in an excited crowd of five hundred women queuing up in the Anchorage J.C. Penney’s, waiting to snag the autograph of Ivana Trump, who was in town to hawk her eponymous line of scent.
‘We want to see Ivana,’ Palin said, who admittedly smells like a salmon for a large part of the summer, ‘because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.’
The blot on the Alaskan landscape that is Wasilla is the natural consequence of a mindset that mistakes Ivana Trump for culture.
Palin’s political gumption was never better exercised than it was five years ago. Follow closely this rather intricate sequence of manoeuvres, because it reveals a lot about her. In 2002, towards the end of her term as mayor, she mounted an underfunded run for the office of lieutenant-governor, and came a close second in the Republican primary. She then attached herself to the gubernatorial campaign of Alaska’s junior US senator, Frank Murkowski, speaking by his side at every possible opportunity. The reason? If Murkowski won the governorship, his Senate seat would be in his gift, and Palin had set her heart on going to DC. On the trail, she fêted him, slathering on the butter and topping it with jam. Murkowski won, the vacancy in the US Senate yawned, and Palin went to Juneau for an interview. After due consideration, the new governor – this being Alaska – decided that the person best qualified for the job was his own daughter, Lisa. He could hardly have delivered a more insulting blow. However, his largesse was not yet exhausted and he gave Palin the consolation prize of a seat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, a part-time job that paid $122,400 a year – good money, but not at all what she was after.
The aggrieved Palin reluctantly accepted. She now had Murkowski in her sights, and he might have been wise to consider the fates of the Wasilla police chief, city attorney, museum director and others who had dared to cross her in the past. She chaired the Conservation Commission (in Alaska, the word ‘conservation’ means something rather different from what it means elsewhere), on which she was joined by the chairman of the state Republican Party, Randy Ruedrich, a former oil company manager, and Dan Seamount, a geologist. She kept a watchful eye on Ruedrich, and office gossip came back to her with the news that he was conducting Republican Party business on his state computer, in state time: an ethics violation with which she was intimately familiar, since she’d been caught doing the same thing back in Wasilla, where the mayoral letterhead, fax machine and email account had been used in her campaign for the lieutenant-governorship a few months before.
Palin reported Ruedrich to Murkowski, but the governor, already mired in accusations of incompetence and worse, refused to take her calls. More Nancy-Drew-style detective work suggested that Ruedrich was misusing his position as impartial regulator to shill for a coal-bed methane company. One would give a lot to have been a fly on the wall at commission meetings during the summer and early autumn of 2003, as the improbably well-named Mr Seamount, a leftover from the previous Democratic administration, sat quietly by during the sulphurous confrontations between Ruedrich and Palin, who quickly made public both her complaints against Ruedrich and the governor’s refusal to take notice of them. As she told the Anchorage Daily News on 7 November 2003, ‘It’s distracting, it’s confusing, it’s frustrating. It’s not fair to Alaskans to have these questions about a possible conflict hanging over the head of this agency.’ Late the next day, Ruedrich resigned from the commission. Palin herself, forbidden by the governor to discuss the Ruedrich affair with journalists, resigned – to great acclaim in the Alaskan press – in January 2004.
The timing of these moves was immaculate. Murkowski was fast becoming the most unpopular governor on record, and the leaders of the state Republican Party, the ‘good ol’ boy network’, as Palin calls them now, had already attracted great public odium for their cronyism and underhand dealings with the oil and gas companies. The FBI was preparing to move in. At the last count, at least 14 public officials, oil company executives and Alaskan politicians (including the state’s senior US senator, Ted Stevens, and its only US congressman, Don Young) are now either on trial, indicted, under federal investigation or in jail, and it’s probable that there are more charges and more suspects still to come.
After she left the commission, Palin told people that her whistleblowing had ‘destroyed her political career’ – a calculated disingenuity if ever there was one. But she came closer to the truth when, in an understandably cocky op-ed piece, published in the Daily News in April 2004, she wrote: ‘Success in the sports arena is essentially the same in the political arena . . . All I ever really needed to know I learned on the basketball court.’ Following Murkowski’s appointment of his daughter to the Senate, Palin had taken possession of the ball, dribbled it brilliantly through the ranks of her slower-witted opponents, leaped for the hoop, and scored a clean slam dunk.
Alaskan journalists fawned on her. At a low point in the state’s political history, especially for Republicans, Palin had bravely stood up against the leaders of her own party and exposed corruption. She’d taken on the governor, the party chairman and the oil companies, and unselfishly sacrificed her hopes of advancement in the process. At that time, it would have been unseasonable to suggest that simple jealousy and opportunism might have played as large a part in her actions as moral principle, and the Daily News bestowed on her the ultimate newspaper accolade when it used her first name only in a headline on the front page of its B section: ‘What Would Sarah Do? We’ll See Come the Next Big Election’. Eight years before, in her first appearance in the paper, she’d been a fishy-smelling nonentity in the crowd of fame-suckers at J.C. Penney’s; now she was a beloved statewide mascot.
It was as a mascot (‘New Energy for Alaska!’) that she ran in the 2006 gubernatorial election, humiliating Murkowski in the primary, and comfortably beating Tony Knowles, a former governor and the Democratic candidate, in November. When she took the oath of office in – appropriately – the Carlson Center sports arena in Fairbanks, the crowd of six thousand broke into a deafening chant of ‘Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!’ and had to be silenced before the ceremony could go on.
Then she went back to Juneau and started sacking state officials, from the attorney-general down, so that she could replace them with malleable old friends from her church and Wasilla High.
Alaska is unique among the states in that every permanent resident without a felony conviction is entitled to a share in the proceeds from its oil and gas resources. Each autumn, eligible Alaskans receive payments based on the interest accrued by the state’s Permanent Fund during the previous year. In 2007, Palin again ‘stood up to Big Oil’ when she successfully forced a bill through the legislature which raised the tax on oil companies’ net profits from 22.5 per cent to 25 per cent, ensuring a gush of money into the Permanent Fund and a hike in the size of cheques sent out to the citizenry. The move was strongly resisted by the Republican establishment, always averse to taxing ‘windfall profits’ and zealous in the defence of its cronies and contributors in the oil industry, but it was wildly popular among ordinary Alaskans, bred to expect handouts, whether from the federal or the state government. That year, Palin announced the biggest payment in six years, $1654, with a whoop of ‘Oh, baby!’ Late this summer, with oil prices still at around $125 a barrel, she was able to trump that number with an all-time record of $2069, plus a further one-off payment of $1200 to help Alaskans deal with the spiralling price of gasoline and heating fuel. For a hard-pressed family of four, that translated into a cheque for $13,076 – a jackpot figure, equivalent to 45 weeks of pay at the Alaskan minimum wage rate of $7.15 an hour, enough to pay cash for a new Ford Focus, or put down the deposit on a pretty nice house. (The federal poverty line for a four-person family is just over $20,000.)
It’s no wonder that Palin’s approval rating stands at more than 80 per cent in her home state: populist leaders are rarely able to reward their constituents with lavish contributions to their personal bank accounts, and there’s nothing like money for making people feel generously bipartisan. (Imagine how the polls might change if every family in Britain received a cheque for a little over £7000, personally signed, as it were, by Gordon Brown.) The Evita-like adulation that ‘Sarah’ was gaining in Alaska began to spread as a rumour through the nation in February, when she was first tipped as a possible running-mate for McCain, with Rush Limbaugh, the far-right radio rabble-rouser, as her noisiest fan. Her reputation for levying taxes on big business in order to fill the pockets of the common man – Alaska’s own Robin Hood – struck a profound chord in the hearts of the ‘dittoheads’, as Limbaugh’s faithful sheep describe themselves, and when McCain eventually nominated Palin, Limbaugh took to calling him John McBrilliant, having previously abused him as a traitor to the Republican cause.
Before Palin, McCain was lucky to draw a crowd of a few hundred; with Palin, he has been rallying Obama-sized turnouts of many thousands. Liberals have tried to comfort themselves by putting this down to her novelty value, a quality they hope will pass its expiry date well before the November election, and by dismissing her as another Dan ‘Potatoe’ Quayle or Admiral ‘Who am I? What am I doing here’ Stockdale, two of the last century’s most memorably inept vice-presidential choices. Many hope that the present financial crisis will so deepen and darken that McCain’s cavalier attitude to economics (‘Not something I’ve understood as well as I should’) and Palin’s seeming total ignorance of the subject will scare American voters into electing Obama. They expect reason to prevail and disenchantment to set in as Palin’s many contradictions and untruths are exposed in the press and on TV. They believe that her views on abortion are alienating all but fervently Evangelical and Catholic women. The line to spin over the dinner table is that ‘she only energises the base.’
But as politicians of both parties in Alaska have discovered, underestimating Palin nearly always turns out to be a fatal error. For – when on form – she has the ability to connect with that surly mass of occasional, floating voters who feel themselves to have been disenfranchised by more orthodox politicians and who respond to her as a paragon of domestic good sense and decency in a world rendered ever more incomprehensible by the dark arts of the elites.
She belongs to no elite. After drifting through five colleges in six years, she eventually secured a degree in journalism at the University of Idaho, less ivy than sagebrush league. Short of majoring in chiropractic, she could hardly have had a higher education less offensive to the Limbaughites. As Obama stands tarred in their eyes by his Columbia and Harvard connections, so Palin represents the healthy values of the church and the outdoors against those of the deeply suspect East Coast universities.
Importantly, she’s unimpressed by ‘science’, whether it’s the science of evolution, anthropogenic climate change or the Endangered Species Act. In a period of stagnant wages and rising unemployment, science has been vilified as the enemy of working-class jobs in such industries as mining, timber, agriculture and construction. It is also – especially in the phrase ‘best available science’ – very widely seen as the cause of unpardonable infringements of individual property rights. When, for instance, Palin contentiously advocates drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, she both promises well-paid jobs and champions the precious American liberty to do what the hell you like in your own backyard. Likewise, her fight against listing the polar bear as an endangered species, even as the sea ice melts under its feet – which has entailed blandly denying the findings of her own state scientists – sits well with a large, disgruntled rural sector of the population which has seen jobs lost, mills closed and property devalued in order to protect such critters as the northern spotted owl and the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly. The director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance says that her motto is ‘cut, kill, dig and drill’ and that she lives ‘in the Stone Age of wildlife management, and is very opposed to utilising accepted science’. For many voters, that’s ample reason to see her as a folk hero.
She has nicely positioned herself for national consumption as the enemy of the effete and over-sophisticated cities; a ‘gal’, as she says, from the remote provinces, untainted by the stain of the urban. In her convention speech, she managed to paint Wasilla as if it were the idealised small town of sentimental memory, complete with the drugstore soda fountain, barbershop striped pole, sociable Main Street and rosy-cheeked postmistress. ‘Long ago,’ she said, comparing her own rise with that of the 33rd president,
a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri, he followed an unlikely path – he followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency. And a writer [Westbrook Pegler, the McCarthyite newspaper columnist] observed, ‘We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity,’ and I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I grew up with those people. They’re the ones who do some of the hardest work in America, who grow our food, and run our factories, and fight our wars. They love their country in good times and bad, and they’re always proud of America.
By implication, then, big city people are unpatriotic (Palin’s last phrase was a sneer at Michelle Obama, a lifelong Chicagoan); they are insincere slackers and draft dodgers – in a word, liberals. The passage reminded Republicans of their party demographics, their strength in the exurbs, and prepared the ground for an assault on the metropolitan manners and mores of their Democratic opponents, in a depressingly effective piece of hokum.
In Alaska, she has deployed her end-times fundamentalist beliefs with considerable adroitness, nimbly walking the tightrope between pleasing the church crowd and reassuring her secular constituency of her essential moderation. She appears to have learned from her early experience in Wasilla, when, pressed by her backers in the Assembly of God, she suggested to the librarian that such ‘unsuitable’ books as Daddy’s Roommate and Pastor, I Am Gay be removed from the library, only to backtrack later with the claim that she was merely asking a ‘rhetorical’ (she meant hypothetical) question. Since then, as governor, she’s handled such issues with impressive wiliness. When the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that gay partners of state employees must receive the same benefits as heterosexual spouses, the legislature passed a bill to block the payments. Palin made clear her sympathy with the bill’s intent, but refused to sign it on the grounds that to do so would be to ‘violate my oath of office’. Similarly, she endeared herself to Evangelicals during her gubernatorial campaign by saying that ‘intelligent design’ should be taught alongside evolution in the state’s public schools: ‘Teach both,’ she said, but then declined to back a bill which would have made that teaching mandatory. Playing politics by the rules of basketball, improvising her moves according to the requirements of the moment, she is too opportunistic (some say pragmatic) to be an ideologue. While she likes to trumpet her narrow theology, with its stress on Calvinist predestination and the imminence of the Rapture (the Iraq war is ‘a task that is from God’), she simultaneously manages to embody her state’s peculiar brand of live-and-let-live libertarianism.
The unfolding details of ‘Troopergate’ will probably not seriously damage her, because the nation seems to have decided that her ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, is a low-life skunk (‘He tasered the kid’) who deserved everything he got. Her various family troubles, including Wooten and her pregnant teenage daughter, help to underscore her authenticity as the people’s candidate; and so do such peccadillos as charging the state $60 per diem for living in her own house in Wasilla. Some politicians (the late Charles Haughey, plain ‘Charlie’ to all Ireland, comes to mind) have the invaluable knack of reminding their constituents of their own easily forgivable improbities, and Palin appears to be one of them. Proven hypocrisy is another matter, but though her time as mayor and governor has been studded with incidents of bullying, meanness and an unseemly thirst for personal revenge, no one has called her a hypocrite, so far as I can tell.
The most likely cause of her undoing will – strangely – be the McCain campaign. In St Paul, unveiled as the goose who could lay for the Republicans the golden egg of the presidency, she brimmed with the inflated self-assurance of the small-world conqueror, and held a national audience in the palm of her hand as she recited the same confident platitudes that served her so well in Alaska. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and McCain and his advisers should have left well alone, left ‘Sarah’ to be her vote-winning self. Instead, they seem to be no less alarmed by her than liberals are, and have taken to force-feeding her, stuffing her gullet with ‘talking points’ on foreign and domestic policy. Under their frantic tuition, Palin has recently looked less likely to lay the golden egg than to produce inferior goose-liver pâté.
On 17 September, she was temporarily released from the crammers and allowed to take questions at a town hall meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where someone in the crowd said that there was in certain circles a ‘perception’ that foreign policy was not her forte. Palin replied:
Well, I think because I am a Washington outsider that opponents are going to be looking for a whole lot of things that they can criticise, and they can kind of try to beat the candidate here who chose me as his partner to kind of tear down the ticket. But as for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared, and I know that on 20 January, if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we’ll be ready. I’ll be ready. I have that confidence. I have that readiness, and if you want specifics with specific policy or countries, go ahead, and you can ask me. You can even play stump the candidate if you want to. But we are ready to serve.
At which point, McCain leaned into the microphone to say: ‘She’s commander of the Alaskan National Guard.’ A little later, she was asked a friendly question on her top subject, energy policy, specifically oil.
Of course, it’s a fungible commodity and they don’t flag, you know, the molecules, where it’s going and where it’s not. But in the sense of the Congress today, they know that there are very, very hungry domestic markets that need that oil first. So, I believe that what Congress is going to do also, is not to allow the export bans to such a degree that it’s Americans who get stuck holding the bag without the energy source that is produced here, pumped here. It’s got to flow into our domestic markets first.
This was a new and startling Sarah Palin, the dim student, flustered by more teaching than her poor head could bear. Molecules! Fungible! Commodity! She flung the words like bean bags at a blackboard. She never talked this way in Alaska, and would never have done so in Michigan, if her new tutors hadn’t succeeded in temporarily addling her brains. More, much more, of the same gibberish was on display in her recent extended interview on CBS with Katie Couric. On the proximity of Russia to Alaska: ‘It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America, where – where do they go? It’s Alaska.’
She may yet regain her poise. Her populist appeal is still enormous, and it’s far too early to start dancing on her grave, as some commentators have already tried to do. Palin’s campaign-trail mistakes will not calm that deep groundswell of public feeling of which she is now the national figurehead. But, for the last few days, as her education at the hands of her captors has proceeded, we in the cities, with our elitist liberal ideas and our stark terror of what further harm the United States might inflict on itself and the world under a third consecutive Republican administration, have been just a little less likely to wake up screaming at three in the morning.
Intuition and Philosophy
If anything can be pursued in an armchair, philosophy can," the esteemed Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson told the Aristotelian Society, of London, a few years ago. That may sound like an innocuous truism: No one pictures Bertrand Russell doing his philosophical cogitation anywhere but in a club chair, or perhaps in bed, postcoitally (given his adventurousness in that arena). But, in fact, Williamson's remarks are fighting words these days, thanks to the rise of a cohort of philosophers who believe that the armchair arguments of philosophers need to be probed and tested through surveys of ordinary people and laboratory experiments using human subjects. If philosophers want to demonstrate that their arguments comport with how the mind really works, say the proponents of experimental philosophy, they need to get off their duffs.
Does that sound like an incendiary charge? Indeed, an armchair in flames has become the informal symbol of the experimental-philosophy movement, also known as "x-phi." Online you can buy a burning-armchair T-shirt or watch a burning-armchair YouTube video, accompanied by the x-phi alt-rock anthem. The aggressive symbol is only partly tongue-in-cheek: Some experimental philosophers believe they are simply augmenting and supplementing traditional philosophical work, but others view themselves as overturning a significant number of philosophical projects. They think they are calling into question methodologies that philosophers have made use of "for 2,400 years," as the Rutgers philosopher Stephen Stich, a pioneer of x-phi, puts it.
Experimental philosophy has percolated on the edge of the discipline for several years, yet remains dogged by this question: Will it mature into a central, respected strand of philosophy or remain a semi-fringe endeavor, viewed from the mainstream as the kind of work that should be done (if at all) in psychology departments — with the results perhaps pondered later by "real" philosophers?
At the heart of experimental philosophy lies a suspicion of so-called "intuitions." An intuition in philosophy is something far more potent than it is in ordinary discourse. Intuitions rear their heads when philosophers write such things as, "In this case, we would surely say …," or, "It would be natural to say …" (for example, that killing a man to harvest his organs is wrong). It is a deeply rooted sense, tested from multiple angles and honed through thought experiments and dialogue. The trustworthiness of intuitions (whose roots can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, who thought they represented glimpses of the true, ideal world usually hidden from us) hardly goes undebated by traditional philosophers — quite the opposite — but the experimental philosophers apply a new kind of pressure. They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.
Experimental philosophy has suggested, for example, that people from East Asian cultures may have different intuitions on very basic philosophical questions — reference (what nouns refer to in certain situations), morality, epistemology (what it means "to know" something) — than members of Western societies do. Experimental philosophers also draw on work by contemporary psychologists demonstrating just how malleable human cognition is, how easily redirected and reshaped it is by external cues, even as the conscious mind remains blissfully unaware. Opinions on crime and punishment, for instance, can be altered by placing people in a dirty room designed to trigger feelings of disgust: Subjects in such experiments respond more punitively when asked what should be done to certain hypothetical criminals.
"If we keep getting the same kind of results with the right kinds of controls and right kind of experiments," says Stich, "then there is a problem with the central method that philosophers have used throughout the 20th century, and for a long time before that": the reliance on armchair intuitions.
Understandably, such claims have met with resistance. "A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem," writes Judith Jarvis Thomson, the noted MIT moral philosopher, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "so I don't see how their empirical investigations can be thought to have any bearing on any philosophical problem — much less help anyone to solve a philosophical problem."
When several philosophers, including Stich and Joshua Knobe, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with a few psychologists, including the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, proposed to Oxford University Press a new journal focusing on empirical studies of moral philosophy, they got back one particularly scathing anonymous review: "This group," it said, "is overly impressed by dubious functional MRI studies purporting to demonstrate the neurophysiological underpinnings of moral thinking, and by small sample, 'rinky-dink experiments' conducted by philosophers who are not trained experimentalists."
While much of the proposal authors' work was "perfectly philosophically respectable," the reviewer said, "a great deal of their interest lies in what I can only describe as the desire to eliminate morality (or at least the study of morality) from the discipline of philosophy itself." Other reviews were more favorable, although Oxford has not made a decision about the journal.
There are signs, however, that experimental philosophy is coming into its own. One was the publication in June of Experimental Philosophy (Oxford), a greatest-hits anthology edited by Knobe and Shaun Nichols, of the University of Arizona. What's more, the National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded Nichols and Ron Mallon, of the University of Utah, $180,000 to invite some top experimental philosophers to Utah next summer to present the basics to professors unacquainted with the subject. The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, held a conference in September at which Stich and Williamson were to argue for and against the armchair, while the University of Cologne, in Germany, sponsored a gathering last month titled "The Armchair in Flames?" And the chair of the American Philosophical Association, Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Princeton, has written about x-phi as a positive development.
X-phi'ers were especially pleased that Caltech mentioned experimental philosophy as a subfield of interest — an apparent first — when it recently posted an ad for a tenure-track job in philosophy. "I just came out of grad school in 2005," says Thomas Nadelhoffer, who teaches at Dickinson College and runs the influential x-phi blog Experimental Philosophy, which has some 70 contributors. "We were universally told back then to do the best we could to hide that we do this stuff. Now people wear it on their sleeve."
In "An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto," the opening chapter of Experimental Philosophy, Knobe and Nichols say their critics would be right to reject the approach if the parody version of it reflected reality: But no one, they say, believes that philosophical questions — What acts count as "intentional"? Is it permissible to kill one innocent person to save five? — can be resolved by studying the answers ordinary people give. Rather, Knobe and Nichols argue, "The suggestion is just that, whatever else we do, we should also be looking at people's intuitions … as a way of coming to a deeper understanding of how the human mind works."
If Stich is the provocateur of the movement, upending 2,400 years of philosophizing with a single blow, Knobe is the diplomatic young star, emphasizing in a gentle voice that he merely wants philosophers to embrace "new tools" and that, for the most part, the reception of x-phi has been "a testament to the community of philosophy, and how open they are to different methodologies." A precocious 2006 Ph.D. from Princeton, he'd done some postgraduate work in a psychology lab at the University of Oregon under Bertram Malle, before enrolling in grad school. He finds himself drawn, he says, to the sorts of questions philosophers debated until the 19th century, as opposed to those of the 20th century, when the discipline got diverted into narrower, logic-chopping channels.
"From the beginning," he says, "Nietzsche was inspirational to me. I was interested in working on the kinds of questions he was interested in: how people make moral judgments, how moral judgments affect the way we understand our world." But while most Nietzsche scholars wrote essays on the philosopher's work, Knobe continues, "I was interested in doing experiments to answer the questions that he asked." Indeed, Knobe has argued, in a paper written with the University of Chicago's Brian Leiter, that Nietzsche deserves a spot alongside Aristotle and Kant in the pantheon of moral philosophers — in fact, above them. That's because Nietzsche argued that morality is the product of neither a virtuous upbringing, focused on creating firm character, nor the pure application of reason, but comes from individual, innate, sometimes unalterable attributes of humans — the sort of traits experimental philosophers like Knobe now pursue.
Knobe's best-known papers demonstrate how ordinary people's understanding of such things as intention, which philosophers have traditionally treated as value-neutral (one either tries to do something or doesn't, independent of the moral content of the act), is in fact shot through with moral considerations. Consider this scenario, used in numerous scholarly articles: A corporate chairman is presented by a vice president with a proposal for a new project. The VP explains that the project will increase profits but hurt the environment. The chairman replies, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They do, and predictably the environment is harmed.
Did the CEO intentionally damage the environment? In one of Knobe's most cited studies, some 82 percent of students said yes.
Then take this scenario: Same chairman, same VP, but this time the VP says the program will help the environment. The CEO, again, replies that he doesn't care; his only concern is money. He gives a thumbs-up and, again, as predicted, the environment is helped. This time only 23 percent of students say the CEO intentionally helped the earth, although the scenarios are logically identical.
That people's judgment about intentionality is shaped by the degree of harm done by the act being evaluated, also known as the Knobe effect, has been demonstrated in subjects from India, among 4-year-olds, even among people who suffer from deficits in their emotional processing. Some traditional philosophers had suggested in passing — using their intuition — that moral judgments might be shaping judgments about intention, but Knobe offered the striking data.
The study of intentionality is not purely ivory-tower stuff. Every time a U.S. bomber kills civilians in the course of combating the Taliban, the laws of war demand that the military investigate whether the pilots and their commanders intentionally caused the deaths and should be punished.
Knobe has found this intertwining of moral judgment with analytic assessment across a range of human thought: when we try to ascertain what people truly "value," for example, and when we judge people who have acted in situations in which they had little choice but to do what they did. (Presented with a hypothetical deterministic universe, in which every action can be predicted in advance, test subjects still say, oddly, that they would hold wrongdoers responsible.)
One could argue that the asymmetry in judgments about intentionality amounts to simple error, just as clearly as when people flip heads nine times in a row and then say they are "due" for a tails. But Knobe says it makes more sense to say that "intention" and "moral blame" cannot be neatly disaggregated without doing violence to the way the mind functions (as opposed to how philosophers think it should function). "From the beginning, your whole process of figuring out what is going on in the world is saturated with moral judgment," he says.
Other philosophers, even those of an experimental bent, are quicker to say that the test subjects are mistaken. Nadelhoffer, for example, in an essay in Experimental Philosophy, argues that courts may want to make jurors aware of this psychological puzzle, lest defendants who cause harm unintentionally (under the traditional understanding) receive punishments better suited to purposeful, coldblooded criminals.
One way that researchers have followed up Knobe's work is to parse even more finely the answers people provide in these surveys. Adam Feltz, a philosopher at Florida State University, and Edward T. Cokely, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, recently found that subjects' answers to the chairman question correlated with personality traits: Extroverts were more likely to say that the CEO who harmed the environment did so intentionally than introverts were. Extroverts, being more socially minded, may be more primed to punish those who violate societal norms.
In fact, while Knobe speaks of pinning down "folk philosophy," or how ordinary people make sense of the world, the latest developments seem to underscore just how many folk philosophies there are. Alfred Mele, of Florida State, has investigated the Knobe effect and identified a multitude of subgroups, each of which responds to the scenarios in a distinct way, worthy of analysis. Although he's a sometime participant in x-phi, and hardly an enemy, he's still not sure where this work is headed. "I think the project of finding and understanding folk concepts of this and that is interesting," he says. "But it won't settle a lot of deeper philosophical questions."
That was precisely the point that New York University's J. David Velleman made in one of the most-famous takedowns of experimental philosophy. After Slate published a brief article about the trend in 2006, Velleman said (on the now-defunct Web site Right2Left.com) that many of the so-called x-phi discoveries "are not exactly news to traditional philosophers."
"Of course," he went on to say, "it's useful to know what most people think about intentional action and moral responsibility. In philosophizing on these topics, we can't stray too far from what people think. … Even Aristotle relied on endoxa — received opinions — as a starting point of his inquiries.
"Maybe Aristotle was the first 'experimental philosopher,' then? No. Aristotle knew that the real philosophizing starts after the endoxa have been surveyed. His view remains true today."
Today Velleman says he does not want to be painted as an enemy of experimental philosophy, or to be interviewed on the subject. But via e-mail, he affirms that he is dubious about whether philosophy departments ought to be training students in experimental methodology (none currently does so systematically), given limited resources. Still, he says, he is willing to let the marketplace of ideas settle the question.
X-phi'ers now tend to pick up their experimental chops by wandering over to psychology or cognitive-science departments, collaborating with psychologists, or working with someone already part of the movement. Sean Kelly, the first philosopher with a laboratory at Harvard since William James (Kelly studies visual cognition), suggests that they're working in a Jamesian spirit. When James wanted to learn about mammalian neuroanatomy, he went out, bought a sheep's head, and started sawing and slicing. Similarly, Kelly says, young experimental philosophers are picking up whatever statistical and other tools they need, any way they can. "You shouldn't be afraid to do something because you haven't got a professional degree in it," he says.
Thanks in part to its experimental wing, philosophy is becoming a less-insular discipline. Granted, its insularity can be overstated; bioethicists regularly interact with physicians. Yet many scientists and social scientists find philosophy to be a hermetic field, and experimental philosophy opens a door. One meeting place is the Moral Psychology Research Group, founded in 2003, which includes academic psychologists like UVa's Jonathan Haidt, Richard Nisbett (of the University of Michigan), and Josh Greene (Harvard), as well as empirically minded philosophers.
"Something that has always frustrated me with reading philosophy is that it's a mixture of logical inference and just description of intuitions," says Haidt. "And often my intuition would differ from that of the philosophers. It would seem like a step from tight link to tight link. but one-quarter of the links were up for grabs." Now that the x-phi'ers have embraced experimental techniques, however, they "are producing work of interest to our side of the fence as well."
Haidt, who studies the balance between intuitive or emotional responses and reasoning in moral decisions, has come up with the following x-phi-like results: Low-income Americans are more likely to think there is something seriously wrong with cooking and eating the family dog, should it be hit by a car, than are high-income Americans (who may be overriding their revulsion with the reasoned argument that no one is hurt by the dinner). More recently he has explored the differences in moral reasoning between liberals and conservatives, finding (unshockingly) that conservatives are more interested in principles of loyalty and purity than liberals are. Significantly more conservatives than liberals, for example, say they would never accept a transfusion of blood from a child molester, no matter how much money they were offered.
And John Doris, a philosopher at Washington University in St. Louis and another member of the moral-philosophy working group, has drawn on findings from social psychology to question the very underpinnings of Aristotelian "virtue ethics." Perhaps no theory that relies on stable, stout character can survive once psychologists have shown that even seminary students who have just heard a sermon on the Good Samaritan will step over a man in need if they are in a hurry.
A key question for experimental psychology is how it proposes to get from descriptive findings to philosophically sound conclusions about what we ought to do, or what ought to count as sound knowledge.
So far, it appears, the discipline tends to be better at tearing down such conclusions, or trying to. Mallon, Nichols, Stich, and Edouard Machery, of the University of Pittsburgh, for example, have taken aim at one of the most-famous philosophical theories regarding "reference," which comes into play every time people open their mouths to speak. Only a few decades ago, most philosophers adhered to the theory that a term refers to a person or thing when it offers the best fit with the qualities or properties of that person or thing.
The philosopher Saul Kripke, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, upended that theory, arguing that for a reference to be successful, it merely needed to be part of a chain of comprehensible usages of the term, passed from person to person. No one in the chain need know any of the descriptive details about the figure in question — which is why people who could not relate a single detail about Cicero's life can still use his name and be referring to the same historical figure a classical scholar knows intimately.
In one thought experiment, Kripke asked readers to think of Kurt Gödel, the logician who devised the numerical "incompleteness theory." What if an unknown figure named Schmidt had, in fact, created that theory, and Gödel had stolen it? Once we knew that, if we said "Gödel," would we then be referring to Schmidt, who, after all, now fit the description of Gödel better than Gödel himself? No, Kripke argued, we would still be referring to Gödel. Case closed, most philosophers have agreed.
In surveys, however, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich found that while American college students tended to respond to the thought experiment as Kripke predicted, English-speaking students in Hong Kong answered quite differently. A majority said "Gödel" would actually refer to Schmidt. A substantial minority of American students also agreed with that intuition.
Why, Stich and his collaborators conclude, should we privilege the intuitions of Western philosophers, or even Westerners in general, over those of Hong Kong students — and perhaps over those of most Asians? (His thinking has been influenced by the work of the psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, who has argued that Asians and Westerners categorize their observations of the world quite differently.) "I'm not going to hold my breath," says Stich, "while you come up with a theory why a third of the world's population is wrong on this question."
Commentary on this paper and related ones by the same authors has been flourishing. In one draft paper, CUNY's Michael Devitt offers several objections. One is that the Gödel example is a minor one among many that Kripke offered to defend his theory. Devitt also argues that, in the end, the question remains: Which theory of reference best explains the way humans use language — a question that, he suggests, may yet require some philosophical training and argumentation to resolve. As Kirk Ludwig, a professor of philosophy at the University of Florida, put it last year, commenting on the same papers, "[We] must ultimately return to the first-person approach to achieve the goals we set ourselves in philosophy." In other words: Back to the armchair.
At a recent gathering of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Brian Scholl, a Yale psychologist who studies visual perception, raised an even more fundamental objection to the kind of work typified by many x-phi papers: They are overreliant on surveys, which are unreliable precisely for the reasons experimental philosophers notice in other contexts: The people who take them can be swayed by all sorts of un-pin-downable factors. Although he thinks much work in x-phi is "fantastic," he wrote in comments posted on the Experimental Philosophy blog this month, "I worry that these sorts of methods end up telling you less about the psychological processes that underlie the philosophically relevant intuitions — and more about the psychology of how people cope with being asked strange questions."
Expect the experimental philosophers to argue back, adjust some of their approaches in response, and soldier on. They say they are well past the point where an objection or two can cause the movement to implode. "This is one of the best parts of experimental philosophy," says John Mikhail, who teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center, and whose work translates people's complex responses to moral thought experiments into algorithms. "Younger people are not taking 'no' for an answer."
Does that sound like an incendiary charge? Indeed, an armchair in flames has become the informal symbol of the experimental-philosophy movement, also known as "x-phi." Online you can buy a burning-armchair T-shirt or watch a burning-armchair YouTube video, accompanied by the x-phi alt-rock anthem. The aggressive symbol is only partly tongue-in-cheek: Some experimental philosophers believe they are simply augmenting and supplementing traditional philosophical work, but others view themselves as overturning a significant number of philosophical projects. They think they are calling into question methodologies that philosophers have made use of "for 2,400 years," as the Rutgers philosopher Stephen Stich, a pioneer of x-phi, puts it.
Experimental philosophy has percolated on the edge of the discipline for several years, yet remains dogged by this question: Will it mature into a central, respected strand of philosophy or remain a semi-fringe endeavor, viewed from the mainstream as the kind of work that should be done (if at all) in psychology departments — with the results perhaps pondered later by "real" philosophers?
At the heart of experimental philosophy lies a suspicion of so-called "intuitions." An intuition in philosophy is something far more potent than it is in ordinary discourse. Intuitions rear their heads when philosophers write such things as, "In this case, we would surely say …," or, "It would be natural to say …" (for example, that killing a man to harvest his organs is wrong). It is a deeply rooted sense, tested from multiple angles and honed through thought experiments and dialogue. The trustworthiness of intuitions (whose roots can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, who thought they represented glimpses of the true, ideal world usually hidden from us) hardly goes undebated by traditional philosophers — quite the opposite — but the experimental philosophers apply a new kind of pressure. They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.
Experimental philosophy has suggested, for example, that people from East Asian cultures may have different intuitions on very basic philosophical questions — reference (what nouns refer to in certain situations), morality, epistemology (what it means "to know" something) — than members of Western societies do. Experimental philosophers also draw on work by contemporary psychologists demonstrating just how malleable human cognition is, how easily redirected and reshaped it is by external cues, even as the conscious mind remains blissfully unaware. Opinions on crime and punishment, for instance, can be altered by placing people in a dirty room designed to trigger feelings of disgust: Subjects in such experiments respond more punitively when asked what should be done to certain hypothetical criminals.
"If we keep getting the same kind of results with the right kinds of controls and right kind of experiments," says Stich, "then there is a problem with the central method that philosophers have used throughout the 20th century, and for a long time before that": the reliance on armchair intuitions.
Understandably, such claims have met with resistance. "A philosophical problem is not an empirical problem," writes Judith Jarvis Thomson, the noted MIT moral philosopher, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle, "so I don't see how their empirical investigations can be thought to have any bearing on any philosophical problem — much less help anyone to solve a philosophical problem."
When several philosophers, including Stich and Joshua Knobe, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with a few psychologists, including the University of Virginia's Jonathan Haidt, proposed to Oxford University Press a new journal focusing on empirical studies of moral philosophy, they got back one particularly scathing anonymous review: "This group," it said, "is overly impressed by dubious functional MRI studies purporting to demonstrate the neurophysiological underpinnings of moral thinking, and by small sample, 'rinky-dink experiments' conducted by philosophers who are not trained experimentalists."
While much of the proposal authors' work was "perfectly philosophically respectable," the reviewer said, "a great deal of their interest lies in what I can only describe as the desire to eliminate morality (or at least the study of morality) from the discipline of philosophy itself." Other reviews were more favorable, although Oxford has not made a decision about the journal.
There are signs, however, that experimental philosophy is coming into its own. One was the publication in June of Experimental Philosophy (Oxford), a greatest-hits anthology edited by Knobe and Shaun Nichols, of the University of Arizona. What's more, the National Endowment for the Humanities recently awarded Nichols and Ron Mallon, of the University of Utah, $180,000 to invite some top experimental philosophers to Utah next summer to present the basics to professors unacquainted with the subject. The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, held a conference in September at which Stich and Williamson were to argue for and against the armchair, while the University of Cologne, in Germany, sponsored a gathering last month titled "The Armchair in Flames?" And the chair of the American Philosophical Association, Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Princeton, has written about x-phi as a positive development.
X-phi'ers were especially pleased that Caltech mentioned experimental philosophy as a subfield of interest — an apparent first — when it recently posted an ad for a tenure-track job in philosophy. "I just came out of grad school in 2005," says Thomas Nadelhoffer, who teaches at Dickinson College and runs the influential x-phi blog Experimental Philosophy, which has some 70 contributors. "We were universally told back then to do the best we could to hide that we do this stuff. Now people wear it on their sleeve."
In "An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto," the opening chapter of Experimental Philosophy, Knobe and Nichols say their critics would be right to reject the approach if the parody version of it reflected reality: But no one, they say, believes that philosophical questions — What acts count as "intentional"? Is it permissible to kill one innocent person to save five? — can be resolved by studying the answers ordinary people give. Rather, Knobe and Nichols argue, "The suggestion is just that, whatever else we do, we should also be looking at people's intuitions … as a way of coming to a deeper understanding of how the human mind works."
If Stich is the provocateur of the movement, upending 2,400 years of philosophizing with a single blow, Knobe is the diplomatic young star, emphasizing in a gentle voice that he merely wants philosophers to embrace "new tools" and that, for the most part, the reception of x-phi has been "a testament to the community of philosophy, and how open they are to different methodologies." A precocious 2006 Ph.D. from Princeton, he'd done some postgraduate work in a psychology lab at the University of Oregon under Bertram Malle, before enrolling in grad school. He finds himself drawn, he says, to the sorts of questions philosophers debated until the 19th century, as opposed to those of the 20th century, when the discipline got diverted into narrower, logic-chopping channels.
"From the beginning," he says, "Nietzsche was inspirational to me. I was interested in working on the kinds of questions he was interested in: how people make moral judgments, how moral judgments affect the way we understand our world." But while most Nietzsche scholars wrote essays on the philosopher's work, Knobe continues, "I was interested in doing experiments to answer the questions that he asked." Indeed, Knobe has argued, in a paper written with the University of Chicago's Brian Leiter, that Nietzsche deserves a spot alongside Aristotle and Kant in the pantheon of moral philosophers — in fact, above them. That's because Nietzsche argued that morality is the product of neither a virtuous upbringing, focused on creating firm character, nor the pure application of reason, but comes from individual, innate, sometimes unalterable attributes of humans — the sort of traits experimental philosophers like Knobe now pursue.
Knobe's best-known papers demonstrate how ordinary people's understanding of such things as intention, which philosophers have traditionally treated as value-neutral (one either tries to do something or doesn't, independent of the moral content of the act), is in fact shot through with moral considerations. Consider this scenario, used in numerous scholarly articles: A corporate chairman is presented by a vice president with a proposal for a new project. The VP explains that the project will increase profits but hurt the environment. The chairman replies, "I don't care at all about helping the environment. I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let's start the new program." They do, and predictably the environment is harmed.
Did the CEO intentionally damage the environment? In one of Knobe's most cited studies, some 82 percent of students said yes.
Then take this scenario: Same chairman, same VP, but this time the VP says the program will help the environment. The CEO, again, replies that he doesn't care; his only concern is money. He gives a thumbs-up and, again, as predicted, the environment is helped. This time only 23 percent of students say the CEO intentionally helped the earth, although the scenarios are logically identical.
That people's judgment about intentionality is shaped by the degree of harm done by the act being evaluated, also known as the Knobe effect, has been demonstrated in subjects from India, among 4-year-olds, even among people who suffer from deficits in their emotional processing. Some traditional philosophers had suggested in passing — using their intuition — that moral judgments might be shaping judgments about intention, but Knobe offered the striking data.
The study of intentionality is not purely ivory-tower stuff. Every time a U.S. bomber kills civilians in the course of combating the Taliban, the laws of war demand that the military investigate whether the pilots and their commanders intentionally caused the deaths and should be punished.
Knobe has found this intertwining of moral judgment with analytic assessment across a range of human thought: when we try to ascertain what people truly "value," for example, and when we judge people who have acted in situations in which they had little choice but to do what they did. (Presented with a hypothetical deterministic universe, in which every action can be predicted in advance, test subjects still say, oddly, that they would hold wrongdoers responsible.)
One could argue that the asymmetry in judgments about intentionality amounts to simple error, just as clearly as when people flip heads nine times in a row and then say they are "due" for a tails. But Knobe says it makes more sense to say that "intention" and "moral blame" cannot be neatly disaggregated without doing violence to the way the mind functions (as opposed to how philosophers think it should function). "From the beginning, your whole process of figuring out what is going on in the world is saturated with moral judgment," he says.
Other philosophers, even those of an experimental bent, are quicker to say that the test subjects are mistaken. Nadelhoffer, for example, in an essay in Experimental Philosophy, argues that courts may want to make jurors aware of this psychological puzzle, lest defendants who cause harm unintentionally (under the traditional understanding) receive punishments better suited to purposeful, coldblooded criminals.
One way that researchers have followed up Knobe's work is to parse even more finely the answers people provide in these surveys. Adam Feltz, a philosopher at Florida State University, and Edward T. Cokely, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin, recently found that subjects' answers to the chairman question correlated with personality traits: Extroverts were more likely to say that the CEO who harmed the environment did so intentionally than introverts were. Extroverts, being more socially minded, may be more primed to punish those who violate societal norms.
In fact, while Knobe speaks of pinning down "folk philosophy," or how ordinary people make sense of the world, the latest developments seem to underscore just how many folk philosophies there are. Alfred Mele, of Florida State, has investigated the Knobe effect and identified a multitude of subgroups, each of which responds to the scenarios in a distinct way, worthy of analysis. Although he's a sometime participant in x-phi, and hardly an enemy, he's still not sure where this work is headed. "I think the project of finding and understanding folk concepts of this and that is interesting," he says. "But it won't settle a lot of deeper philosophical questions."
That was precisely the point that New York University's J. David Velleman made in one of the most-famous takedowns of experimental philosophy. After Slate published a brief article about the trend in 2006, Velleman said (on the now-defunct Web site Right2Left.com) that many of the so-called x-phi discoveries "are not exactly news to traditional philosophers."
"Of course," he went on to say, "it's useful to know what most people think about intentional action and moral responsibility. In philosophizing on these topics, we can't stray too far from what people think. … Even Aristotle relied on endoxa — received opinions — as a starting point of his inquiries.
"Maybe Aristotle was the first 'experimental philosopher,' then? No. Aristotle knew that the real philosophizing starts after the endoxa have been surveyed. His view remains true today."
Today Velleman says he does not want to be painted as an enemy of experimental philosophy, or to be interviewed on the subject. But via e-mail, he affirms that he is dubious about whether philosophy departments ought to be training students in experimental methodology (none currently does so systematically), given limited resources. Still, he says, he is willing to let the marketplace of ideas settle the question.
X-phi'ers now tend to pick up their experimental chops by wandering over to psychology or cognitive-science departments, collaborating with psychologists, or working with someone already part of the movement. Sean Kelly, the first philosopher with a laboratory at Harvard since William James (Kelly studies visual cognition), suggests that they're working in a Jamesian spirit. When James wanted to learn about mammalian neuroanatomy, he went out, bought a sheep's head, and started sawing and slicing. Similarly, Kelly says, young experimental philosophers are picking up whatever statistical and other tools they need, any way they can. "You shouldn't be afraid to do something because you haven't got a professional degree in it," he says.
Thanks in part to its experimental wing, philosophy is becoming a less-insular discipline. Granted, its insularity can be overstated; bioethicists regularly interact with physicians. Yet many scientists and social scientists find philosophy to be a hermetic field, and experimental philosophy opens a door. One meeting place is the Moral Psychology Research Group, founded in 2003, which includes academic psychologists like UVa's Jonathan Haidt, Richard Nisbett (of the University of Michigan), and Josh Greene (Harvard), as well as empirically minded philosophers.
"Something that has always frustrated me with reading philosophy is that it's a mixture of logical inference and just description of intuitions," says Haidt. "And often my intuition would differ from that of the philosophers. It would seem like a step from tight link to tight link. but one-quarter of the links were up for grabs." Now that the x-phi'ers have embraced experimental techniques, however, they "are producing work of interest to our side of the fence as well."
Haidt, who studies the balance between intuitive or emotional responses and reasoning in moral decisions, has come up with the following x-phi-like results: Low-income Americans are more likely to think there is something seriously wrong with cooking and eating the family dog, should it be hit by a car, than are high-income Americans (who may be overriding their revulsion with the reasoned argument that no one is hurt by the dinner). More recently he has explored the differences in moral reasoning between liberals and conservatives, finding (unshockingly) that conservatives are more interested in principles of loyalty and purity than liberals are. Significantly more conservatives than liberals, for example, say they would never accept a transfusion of blood from a child molester, no matter how much money they were offered.
And John Doris, a philosopher at Washington University in St. Louis and another member of the moral-philosophy working group, has drawn on findings from social psychology to question the very underpinnings of Aristotelian "virtue ethics." Perhaps no theory that relies on stable, stout character can survive once psychologists have shown that even seminary students who have just heard a sermon on the Good Samaritan will step over a man in need if they are in a hurry.
A key question for experimental psychology is how it proposes to get from descriptive findings to philosophically sound conclusions about what we ought to do, or what ought to count as sound knowledge.
So far, it appears, the discipline tends to be better at tearing down such conclusions, or trying to. Mallon, Nichols, Stich, and Edouard Machery, of the University of Pittsburgh, for example, have taken aim at one of the most-famous philosophical theories regarding "reference," which comes into play every time people open their mouths to speak. Only a few decades ago, most philosophers adhered to the theory that a term refers to a person or thing when it offers the best fit with the qualities or properties of that person or thing.
The philosopher Saul Kripke, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, upended that theory, arguing that for a reference to be successful, it merely needed to be part of a chain of comprehensible usages of the term, passed from person to person. No one in the chain need know any of the descriptive details about the figure in question — which is why people who could not relate a single detail about Cicero's life can still use his name and be referring to the same historical figure a classical scholar knows intimately.
In one thought experiment, Kripke asked readers to think of Kurt Gödel, the logician who devised the numerical "incompleteness theory." What if an unknown figure named Schmidt had, in fact, created that theory, and Gödel had stolen it? Once we knew that, if we said "Gödel," would we then be referring to Schmidt, who, after all, now fit the description of Gödel better than Gödel himself? No, Kripke argued, we would still be referring to Gödel. Case closed, most philosophers have agreed.
In surveys, however, Machery, Mallon, Nichols, and Stich found that while American college students tended to respond to the thought experiment as Kripke predicted, English-speaking students in Hong Kong answered quite differently. A majority said "Gödel" would actually refer to Schmidt. A substantial minority of American students also agreed with that intuition.
Why, Stich and his collaborators conclude, should we privilege the intuitions of Western philosophers, or even Westerners in general, over those of Hong Kong students — and perhaps over those of most Asians? (His thinking has been influenced by the work of the psychologist Richard E. Nisbett, who has argued that Asians and Westerners categorize their observations of the world quite differently.) "I'm not going to hold my breath," says Stich, "while you come up with a theory why a third of the world's population is wrong on this question."
Commentary on this paper and related ones by the same authors has been flourishing. In one draft paper, CUNY's Michael Devitt offers several objections. One is that the Gödel example is a minor one among many that Kripke offered to defend his theory. Devitt also argues that, in the end, the question remains: Which theory of reference best explains the way humans use language — a question that, he suggests, may yet require some philosophical training and argumentation to resolve. As Kirk Ludwig, a professor of philosophy at the University of Florida, put it last year, commenting on the same papers, "[We] must ultimately return to the first-person approach to achieve the goals we set ourselves in philosophy." In other words: Back to the armchair.
At a recent gathering of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Brian Scholl, a Yale psychologist who studies visual perception, raised an even more fundamental objection to the kind of work typified by many x-phi papers: They are overreliant on surveys, which are unreliable precisely for the reasons experimental philosophers notice in other contexts: The people who take them can be swayed by all sorts of un-pin-downable factors. Although he thinks much work in x-phi is "fantastic," he wrote in comments posted on the Experimental Philosophy blog this month, "I worry that these sorts of methods end up telling you less about the psychological processes that underlie the philosophically relevant intuitions — and more about the psychology of how people cope with being asked strange questions."
Expect the experimental philosophers to argue back, adjust some of their approaches in response, and soldier on. They say they are well past the point where an objection or two can cause the movement to implode. "This is one of the best parts of experimental philosophy," says John Mikhail, who teaches at the Georgetown University Law Center, and whose work translates people's complex responses to moral thought experiments into algorithms. "Younger people are not taking 'no' for an answer."
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