James E Hartley

The Oddity of Trust

Trust is a strange thing.

I started Melville’s The Confidence-Man expecting a novel. I discovered something else. What? I am not sure what it was. There is a story here, if you define story loosely, very loosely. On a Mississippi riverboat, there are a lot of conversations. The whole book is conversations.

There is presumably—it is never stated explicitly—one person—presumably the titular character—again, it is never stated—who is a party in all the conversations in the book. But, said person is constantly changing everything about himself from conversation to conversation. In one conversation he is a wealthy seller of stock, in another he is a seller of patent medicine, in another he is dressed as a harlequin. The parties with whom our titular character converses change too, but not always. Sometimes the same person has conversations with multiple incarnations of The Confidence–Man. Confused? It gets better. There is no narrative progression from conversation to conversation. The book starts with a blind man (presumably the main character) walking through the crowd with a signboard. It ends with a conversation in the dark with (presumably) our main character leading a blind man to his bunk. In between? Uh…never mind about it getting easier to describe.

So, this isn’t really a novel. It isn’t really anything. The closest thing would be a series of conversations all of which more or less, usually less, are about confidence. At first, I thought the book was going to be a long build-up to finding out how The Confidence-Man was setting up some elaborate scam on board a ship. But, the scam never materializes. There are lots of scams—well, at least I assume they were scams, but since there never really is a story which goes anywhere, why do I mistrust the Confidence Man? Maybe they weren’t scams at all. Maybe the stock being sold was real. Maybe the charity was real. Maybe the crippled guy really was a crippled guy.

All of which leads to the question of trust. I don’t trust the Confidence-Man in this book. I think it was one guy who kept changing his appearance. But why? Why don’t I believe all these people were genuine and different people? Why do I have no confidence that the characters in this book are actually who they say they are?

This is a whole book with conversations about the nature of confidence. It is meandering and convoluted and odd.

So, getting at the question another way: Why does anyone ever trust you? We often talk about when you should trust other people. But, why should you, the Reader, be trusted? What makes you, the Reader, worthy of trust? And if you had to convince someone that you were worthy of trust, how would you do that? Is the way you would convince someone you were worthy of trust the same as the way others could convince you that they are worthy of trust?

I think about trust a lot, actually. Why do people trust me? I am never quite sure. It is not that I think I am unworthy of trust. It is that I have no idea how anyone ever arrives at the conclusion that I am worthy of trust. What is it that I do that signals to someone else that I can be trusted? How do people know I am not running some elaborate scam? How do people know I won’t instantly betray them?

Could I sell patent medicine to total strangers on a Mississippi riverboat? I don’t think so. But, that is because I cannot imagine ever perpetrating such a scam and so I have an impossible time imagining I could be convincing.

I realize that a trustworthy person would have a difficult time gaining trust under false pretenses. But, how is a trustworthy person able to convey that aspect of his nature? If trustworthiness is by definition not amenable to experimentation, then how is it displayed? This is not some hypothetical problem. Every day, every person has to constantly face the question of whether someone who was just encountered is trustworthy. We make the decision on trustworthiness instantly, all the time. How do we know?

Which gets me back to the book. Why do I mistrust the character in this book? Why do I assume all these people are really one person? Why do I assume that this is not one person is trying to demonstrate the importance of trust? Why don’t I just think this is a book all about a virtuous person who got on a boat with the sole intention of improving the lives of everyone on the boat by enabling them to demonstrate trust in a complete stranger?

Trust is odd. And, after reading a book about it, I have no more answers to the quandaries of trust than I had before I read it. Indeed, I feel betrayed by this book. I thought it was going to be a novel, and it wasn’t. I thought there would be a story, and there wasn’t. Melville has betrayed my trust.

Watching the World Go By

“An occasion for serious study and reflection.”

In the late 19th century, Stephen
Crane (shortly before he published The Red Badge of Courage) spent a few years writing accounts of New York City, collected by the ever-invaluable Library of America. In “Coney Island’s Failing Days,” we read this:

As we walked toward the station the stranger stopped often to observe types which interested him. He did it with an unconscious calm insolence as if the people were bugs. Once a bug threatened to beat him. “What ‘cher lookin’ at?” he asked of him. “My friend, said the stranger, “if any one displays real interest in you in this world, you should take it as an occasion for serious study and reflection. You should be supremely amazed to find that a man can be interested in anybody but himself!”

The quotation there could stand in for a summary of the whole section. One imagines Crane wandering through the town for three years simply observing and writing down what he sees. We get portraits of the lowest of the low and the wealthiest. We get snapshots of odd moments in the life of the city. All done with Crane’s eye for the telling detail.

Is such observation enough? Crane certainly observes more than most. Is he right that the objects of notice should be grateful for the simple fact of being noticed?

Consider: “When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers.” In this brief sketch a man walking along with his boy falls to the ground, insensible. A crowd gathers. (The alert and perceptive reader can see from whence the title of this piece comes.) Five pages later, an ambulance has carried the man off. And what have we learned?

Curiously, Crane’s story is much like watching the evening news. Man falls. CNN reports on it. Next story. Sometimes we continue to stare after the ambulance as it leaves the scene. “It was as if they had been cheated. Their eyes expressed discontent at this curtain which had been rung down in the midst of the drama. And this impenetrable fabric suddenly intervening between a suffering creature and their curiosity, seemed to appear to them as an injustice.”

After finishing reading this set of pieces by Crane, I am quite troubled by it all. Compare it to, say, Evangelii Gaudium, Francis’ first encyclical. Francis was desperately trying to convince the Church, Christians everywhere, and indeed the whole world, that we need to pay more attention to the poor, the disenfranchised, the weak, the lowly. And surely he is right. But, Francis is missing the bigger point being made by Crane: do we pay sufficient attention to the not-so-poor and not-so-weak? Indeed, do we pay sufficient attention to anyone, anyone at all?

Man falls. Not just the poor man, but the rich man too. Perhaps the crowd surrounding the rich man is bigger than that surrounding the poor man, but is that enough? Shouldn’t we do more than watch, shouldn’t we also help the poor man out a bit? Obviously. But, what about the rich man? Should we say that since he has wealth, it is enough to gather around when he falls?

We don’t notice people as people. We notice that they fall, and we gather when they do, but who are these nameless people? Who was that student I just saw walk past my office? Shouldn’t I care?

Crane offers no solution; this is voyeurism, pure and simple. I am not sure what to make of it. I read about people in the depths of a coal mine in the late 19^th century and I think…I have no idea what I think. I read about gawkers gathered around a fire and I think, “Here I am gawking at the gawkers. I am being exactly as helpful as they are.”

Media Madness

If you want to understand the Presidential Election of 2020, you really ought to read a book published in 2008. James Bowman, Media Madness The Corruption of Our Political Culture.

(Bowman writes a monthly column on the media for the New Criterion, which is also always well worth reading.)

The thesis is in the title: The Media are Mad, not angry mad, but the type of madness that produces “the real arrogance of assuming that no other belief is possible without the assumption of the believer’s lunacy, imbecility, viciousness, corruption, or some combination of all four to explain it.”

Start with the myth of objectivity: “You speak, as it were, from no point of view….In other words, you speak with the voice of God. To believe this is the very essence of media madness, and it is to eliminate the need for fairness. It is only when bias is acknowledged that fairness becomes a consideration.”

Add to that the Culture of Emotionalism, which puts feelings at the center of attention. “The perfection of the passio-centric universe is our celebrity culture, so it is not surprising that the media’s coverage of everything more and more tends to resemble their coverage of celebrities.”

Remember: this was written in 2008.

Move on to the manufacturing of reality: “You might almost say that reality, as the media-mad are accustomed to using the term, can be defined as what the administration does not (officially, at any rate) believe. Therefore, when the media say that the administration…is out of touch with reality, it is a tautology. This is to say that by the terms under which the media culture has become established, it is the administration’s job to be out of touch with reality just as it is the media’s job to point the fact out to us.”

It just gets better from there. Once we have established the nature of the media’s madness, what follows all fits into a whole. Why the obsession with scandal? “The media’s assumption that it is the job of government to hide things and their job to find them out thus allows them to cooperate in the charade by which even those things supposedly creditable to the government are hidden from the public so that the media can triumphantly expose them to the world like a magician displaying the rabbit or the quarter or the hard-boiled egg that he himself has hidden. Scandal and hype therefore become much more than any individual case of wrongdoing or the hyperbole with which it is blown out of proportion. They become a way of media life.”

The same with the endless obsession with finding the root causes and the use of celebrities as experts. It is all just a part of this bizarre self-made world in which members of the media know the truth and there is no possibility that a rational, thoughtful person disagrees with that truth. In that world, the job of the media is no longer to report or analyze or whatever. The job of the media is to endlessly preen.

And that is undoubtedly part of the reason why over the years I lost interest in The News. I can no longer stand TV news. My wife still occasionally watches it, and I sometimes make it for a whole 5 minutes before wandering off to TV-less parts of the house. It is also why I no longer care about the immediate News Cycle—it is amazing how much of what is reported as “news” is totally irrelevant two days after the fact. If it doesn’t matter in 48 hours, did it ever really matter? In that case, why did it get so much attention at the time?

What does the future hold for the media? If you like calm, reasoned debate between people who disagree but still respect one another, then it is not going to be pretty. FOX and MSNBC are the future of News. Pick your view and then pick your media outlets which will dutifully confirm your view.

Media Madness is no longer a unique thing—we’ll just have to start calling it Human Madness.

Shrinking Man

Richard Matheson’s The Incredible Shrinking Man is, as the title might suggest to the perceptive reader, about a man who shrinks. Being written in the 1950’s, the cause of the shrinking was obviously going to be radiation. People were really worried about radiation in the 1950s. (Now we have become more sophisticated and only worry about radiation when it doesn’t involve giving up our cell phones.)

So, at one level the book is just another warning about the horrors of the modern world. Get in line.

Matheson is a good, solid writer—the tale never loses its forward momentum. It does this through a nice switching back and forth between our protagonist when he is less than an inch tall and the stops along the way to his (literal) descent into the microscopic. The story when he is small is a constant struggle to find food and ward off the seemingly mammoth Black Widow which hunts him. The story when shrinking is a series of set pieces about the problems of the world as one gets smaller and smaller.

There is a real terror at the heart of this book. It’s not the Black Widow. It’s this: every day, Scott (the protagonist) gets smaller (one-seventh an inch a day). From the outside, we think of Scott as getting smaller. But, flip the viewpoint—from the viewpoint of Scott, every day the world gets a little bit bigger.

As the world grows, the problems of the world grow. His wife thinks he is a freak. A child molester picks him up. His daughter loses respect for a father shorter than she is. Some local teenage hoodlums threaten him. The cat terrorizes him. The spider chases him down. His financial struggles grow day by day; he loses the ability to work; he dreads the attention of becoming a media sensation. And he is getting smaller. And smaller. He can count down the days until he reaches a height of zero. And as these problems grow, Scott can do nothing about them.

The book could easily have been entitled, with an Einsteinian relativistic twist: The Growing World.

So, imagine that life. You have problems. You know that not only will the problems not go away the next day, but that the problems will be bigger the next day. And the day after that they will be bigger still. And bigger the day after that. Eventually, what you see as problems now will be so large, you lose sight of them because you are focused on a whole new set of problems which have arisen. And they too will inexorably grow every day. Day after day after day. There is nothing you can do to stop your problems from getting larger and larger and larger. There is no way to halt the process, nothing at all that you can do.

How many days could you endure that life? How many days could you endure knowing, with utter mathematical certainty, that your problems will be larger tomorrow than they are today, and that will be true every day for the rest of your life, which isn’t long anyway because you already know the date at which you reduce to nothing.

What do you do? Curiously, the novel is not one of despair. Even though there is no end to the spiral downwards, Scott still struggles day after day to survive. He makes it through another day. Why? Is the survival instinct that strong? If you knew you were going to reduce to a height of zero in less than a week, would you too bother to wage war against a spider which is larger than you are? Would you endure a day of struggle and toil to gather up a few more cracker crumbs in order to feed yourself for another day?

Oddly, this book is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. Yes, the world is a big, very big, nasty place, but Scott endures. Despite having no reason to endure, despite having no prospects for improvement, Scott endures.

This novel is included in the Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1953-1956. Curiously, and I have no idea if this is by design or not, that is the same lesson as the other three books in this Library of America volume (Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants, Sturgeon’s More Than Human, Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow). The theme in all four is survival against all odds, survival in the face of despair.

That certainly was a theme in the air in the 1950s, but this volume has me wondering—is the consistency of that theme in the four books selected by Library of America for this volume a curious accident or would it have been the same if they had picked any four of the best of Science Fiction from 1953 to 1956? I have no idea.

How to Teach About the Greeks

The non-controversial claim: The Greeks (ancient, not modern) are extremely interesting. (The modern Greek economy is just a mess; it’s hard to believe that country was once a mighty empire.) The Greeks are not just interesting in some specific narrow way—across the board, there are endlessly fascinating things going on between 1000 BC and 30 BC in Greece.

The Puzzle: Why did nothing in my education ever teach me that fact?

When I think back to high school, I had two classes which had Greeks. I had an English class in which we read Aeschylus and Euripides. And I had a history class which had a section on the Greeks. The combination of those two things left me a) having absolutely no idea why the Greeks were important, and b) having no idea about how Greek history related to anything else. I had absolutely zero encounter with the Greeks in College.

Since then, I have read a lot of Greek authors. I’ve taught all sorts of books written in those days. There is much in that vast literature which I love. But, a few years back, when I was putting the final touches on a Great Books course, I realized that even though I have read all these authors and even though I was about to teach them again, I really had a very sketchy idea about how they all fit together. I know Homer and Plato/Aristotle and Aeschylus/Sophocles/Euripides/Aristophanes and Euclid and Herodotus/Thucydides/Plutarch, but in they were all just isolated books out there, talking to one another to be sure, but just books and not a story unto themselves. So, I decided to fill in that hole.

Fortunately, I had a book at hand. A few years earlier, I was at a conference with Thomas Martin, a Classicist at Holy Cross. A very smart and very interesting guy. I learned a lot talking with him. So, after my return from said conference (on Adam Smith), I read a book he wrote back in the 90’s: Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times. It is a quick history of Greece: 220 pages covering the whole range, touching on the history and books and civilization.

I think the audience was college students in some class or other who need a brief history of Greece. It reads like a textbook—which is not really a compliment. That being said, I enjoyed reading it and I learned a lot—which really is a compliment. If you, like me, feel a lack of understanding of how the whole Greek thing fits together, I’d recommend it.

But, the book creates a giant puzzle for me. While I enjoyed reading this book, if I had read it in high school or college, I would have hated it. That is not a statement about this book in particular; I would have hated any book like this. Presumably we read a book like this in my high school class and presumably I learned nothing from it.

What is the difference? Reading a book like this now is filling in details. I love Homer and Plato and so on. I find the Greeks to be fascinating. So, the history here is connecting some dots. But, if I imagine going the other way, it would never work. I can’t imagine reading a brief history of Greece and then thinking that Homer and Plato and so on are things I really should read.

This is a rather disturbing realization. Learning history is really important. I enjoy history. But, how do you teach history? If my experience generalizes, then we are going about it all wrong. We start when young by forcing students through the series of dates and cultural explorations. But, that is not the stuff on which dreams are made.

Why don’t we go the other way? Why don’t we start with the books? Why don’t we get students to fall in love with Homer and leave the discovery of history for a later point in life? Why don’t we just teach the Great Books of History—instead of some brief history of Greece, read Herodotus or Thucydides or Plutarch and that’s it? Don’t teach those books as History books with an emphasis on who did what to whom and when, but teach them as living arguments for how to lead a better life. I think, in other words, we may have the teaching of history all wrong.

But, I am not sure the preceding paragraph is right. Maybe reversing the discovery process won’t work at all. Maybe if I had read Herodotus in high school, I would have had exactly the same total lack of interest I had when we read whatever it was we read.

Even more troubling: in high school, I would have enjoyed Frank Miller’s 300. It might have prompted me to want to learn even more about Sparta. I start creating the curriculum: 300, then Plutarch, then The Iliad, then Herodotus. That might have worked wonders.

Is the fact that it would have worked enough? I suspect professors of Greek, for example, are less than enamored with Miller’s take on the Hot Gates. Is it acceptable to try to cultivate a love of history with a book of fake history?

Imagine I had a class with the goal of taking a set of students who know nothing about Greece and convince them to fall in love with Greece. How would I do it? Great Books, obviously. But in what order? How much historical information added along the way? I am still not sure.

How to be a Good Friend

What is Friendship? That is one of those questions which I instinctively answer, “It’s obvious,” but whenever I read something about the matter, I think the essay I just read misses the point.

Consider Plato’s Lysis, his dialogue on Friendship.

Not a very good work if one evaluates a work of philosophy on the criterion of providing an answer which is even worth considering. Nothing here on that front. A decent work if one uses the criterion of whether it has the possibility of provoking thought on an interesting subject, but the work is strained by the absurdity of the way Socrates spends far too much time asking if the fact that Like should be friends with Unlike and not Like, means that Good cannot be friends with Good. But since Good cannot be friends with Not Good, then how can friendship exist?

Such is the sort of argument that gives philosophy a bad name. It gets worse when he proceeds to define the nature of Friendship by asking whether the Body is Friend to Health and then works out the implications for that Friendship between Body and Health on Friendship between two humans.

So (news flash) Plato fails to give an answer here. But Montaigne’s essay on Friendship is not much better, arguing as it does that you can only have one Friend and that it obviously can’t be someone of the opposite sex.

Bacon does better by limiting his essay to the benefits of friendship, but leaves the question of a definition alone.

Emerson—uh, when did Emerson ever define anything?

Aristotle? By the time he is done dissecting Friendship, I have learned a lot, but it looks so lifeless on the lab bench.

Cicero does a decent job in his essay on the subject, but like all Cicero, it leaves me wanting a bit more.

Why is Friendship so hard to Define? As I think about it, I stumble on a related problem—is Friendship the same as Love? Is love necessary and sufficient for friendship? Or are they different? Can you have a friend you do not Love? Odd idea. Can you love someone who is not your friend? Well, Christ does say “Love Your Enemies,” but does that make them your friends?

And then there are all those types of friendships; my wife is my friend—my best friend, no less—but I have other friends too. Are these different classes or different degrees of friendship?

This troubles me. It should be easier than this.

And, it leads to the more practical concerns. If Friendship is a Good—and I think it is self-evident that Friendship is a Good—then it seems like we have a moral obligation to be perfect in our Friendships.

So, imagine you resolved to be the best Friend you could be to everyone who is a friend of yours. The best possible friend. What would you do? Is such a thing even possible? As soon as I start puzzling over how to be the best possible friend to everyone I consider a friend, I realize that my immediate thoughts turn toward things involving Time, which as much as I might like it to be otherwise, does come in fixed quantities.

If I wanted to be the best friend possible for my wife (as noted above, my best friend), then how can I also spend the appropriate amount of time being the best possible friend to all my other friends? Is it enough to be there when they call? Or does be the best possible Friend involve more proactivity?

The longer I think about this, the more I realize I have significant failings as a Friend. Maybe this is why Montaigne wrote his silly essay—if I define Friendship in such a way that I can only have one friend, then my problem is solved.

But, then what about all my other friends? They aren’t just acquaintances after all. They are my Friends. Sometimes, maybe most of the time, I’m just not a very good friend. I’m not being maudlin or anything here—and I am certainly not fishing for “Oh, you aren’t so bad” comments; just as a philosophical matter, I am not sure a) what defines friendship or b) how to be a perfect friend, and thus it is hard to see how I could be doing a very good job at this.

Another way of putting it, I am not sure how anyone else could be doing a good job at this either—does anyone think they are the Perfect Friend?

Now my inability to conceive of the existence of a Perfect Friend (Well, OK except a Friend who is Fully God…but that’s cheating), does not excuse my failings as a Friend. After all, I cannot imagine a sinless life, yet I should still aspire to perfection in all things. That would seem to include perfection in friendship. I’m just not sure how to go about this. How do I stop being such a bad friend?