James E Hartley

Pseudo-Intellectuals and Their Opponents

Yet Trissotin, I must admit,
So irks me that there’s no controlling it.
I can’t to gain his advocacy stoop
To praise the works of such a nincompoop.
It was those works which introduced me to him;
Before I ever saw the man, I knew him;
From the vile way he wrote, I saw with ease
What, in the flesh, must be his qualities:
The absolute presumption, the complete
And dauntless nature of his self-conceit,
The calm assurance of his superior worth
Which renders him the smuggest man on earth,
So that he stands in awe and hugs himself
Before his volumes ranged upon the shelf,
And would not trade his baseless reputation
For that of any general in the nation.

That is Clitandre in Moliere’s The Learned Ladies. It (and all the quotations which follow) are from the absolutely brilliant Richard Wilbur translation. (Side note: Wilbur’s translations of Moliere’s verse plays are extraordinary; somehow there is never a forced rhyme.)

As the play opens, we get dueling portraits of Trissotin. As is obvious from the above, Clitandre is not impressed. Clitandre’s mother, Philaminte, is highly impressed, so much so that she is arranging to marry off her daughter to this scholar she esteems so highly. (Fear not, Dear Reader, in the end Clitandre will marry the true love of her life and all will be well.)

If you want an example of how things never really change, you can do no better than this play from 1672.

When we meet Trissotin later in the play, we predictably discover that Clitandre is right. Trissotin is an intellectual fraud. The question for us today is why does Philaminte believe that Trissotin is so brilliant? Why doesn’t she see that there is absolutely no depth of thought in her intellectual hero; why is she so willing to accept that what he is saying must be true?

Consider the following conversation:

Trissotin: For method, Aristotle suits me well.
Philaminte: But in abstractions, Plato does excel.
Armande: The thought of Epicurus is very keen.
Belise: I rather like his atoms, but as between
            A vacuum and a field of subtle matter
            I find it easier to accept the latter.
Trissotin: On magnetism, Descartes supports my notions.
Armande: I love his falling worlds…
Philaminte:                  And whirling motions!

Here is the question: What did you think when you read that conversation? Are Trissotin, Philaminte, Armande and Belise having an intellectual conversation, full of insight and wit? Did you see the name-dropping and assume these all must be super smart people having a super smart conversation? Or did you notice that none of them are actually saying anything beyond platitudes? They are simply name-dropping.

I have noticed this phenomena a lot, probably because I spend way too much time in gatherings with Ph.D.s. (My favorite example occurred at a pre-talk dinner where one of my colleagues and the guest speaker spent a considerable time showing off their ability to mention great museums. “The museum in Detroit is really excellent.” “Yes, but have you ever been to the one in Cincinnati?” And so on for a good 10 minutes. Somehow neither one of them ever manage to actually say anything substantive about any of the museums they mentioned. It was hard not to laugh out loud at them.) In the popular imagination, if you have a lot of years of education, you must be really smart and know a lot of stuff. In reality, most Ph.D.s I have met are the equivalent of an idiot savant. They know a whole lot about one small thing; that is how they earned their Ph.D.

But, does someone with a Ph.D. know anything about any subject outside of their narrow area of expertise? Maybe. (Frequently told joke which is funny because it is true: Ph.D.s are people who have learned more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.) Just like people in any walk of life, some people are widely knowledgeable and well-read and some are not. Some lawyers and doctors and pastors and electricians and barbers know things beyond their narrow expertise; some really don’t know much of anything else. Yet, there is a presumption that people with Ph.D.s know a lot of things.

Why does this matter? Think for a moment about the effect of this assumption that intellectuals have knowledge and wisdom on things beyond their narrow expertise. What would be the effect of this assumption if the academics start believing it themselves?

Moliere’s describes it perfectly in a discussion of the aims of this society of the “learned.”

Regarding language, we aim to renovate
Our tongue through laws which soon we’ll promulgate.
Each of us has conceived a hatred, based
On outraged reason or offended taste,
For certain nouns and verbs. We’ve gathered these
Into a list of shared antipathies,
And shall proceed to doom and banish them.
At each of our learned gatherings, we’ll condemn
In mordant terms those words which we propose
To purge from usage, whether in verse or prose.

Looking at the state of the modern Academy, it is really hard to believe those words were written over three centuries ago. Certain nouns and verbs shall henceforth be verboten! Forbidden words! Words that we all know should be hated! We’ll gather together and denounce these words!

What gives the characters in this play the confidence that they can decide which words needs to go? Do you even have to ask? These people are the learned! They are the ones who have that scintillating discussion above about Aristotle and Plato and Epicurus and Descartes and thus they know more than the plebeians who live outside their learned society. One of the goals of the learned society, perhaps the most important goal, is to purge society from the use of improper language. (Earlier in the play Philaminte fired a servant because the servant’s grammar was improper!)

Drawing the connection to contemporary society is not difficult. But, then a funny thing happened. The hoi polloi outside the Academy banded together to oppose the attempt of the learned to ban words from use. Sadly, the result is not an argument for freedom of speech. The result is an attempt to ban a different set of words and thoughts from educational institutions.

We are quickly heading for a world in which academic institutions have dueling speech codes. Both speech codes are being promulgated by “experts,” people who pose as all-knowing mandarins happy to use their status to advance the idea that those other people out there are talking in really really bad ways. There are a lot of Trissotins in the modern world.

There is no better example of this baleful problem than Penguin Random House, which has recently done both of these things:

1. Decided that the Roald Dahl books need to be edited to remove offensive language.
2. Filed a lawsuit in Florida to oppose attempts to remove books other people find offensive from school libraries.

If that seems like Penguin Random House is contradicting itself, you are under the mistake impression that anyone cares about free speech anymore. Free speech is for me, not for thee.

Sadly, Penguin Random House is all too typical. The result has been a whole bunch of people relying on their own Most Favored Intellectuals, who are happy to issues directives from on high about how all the rest of us should think.

Where does this lead? Moliere again:

By our high standards we shall criticize
Whatever’s written, and be severe with it.
We’ll show that only we and our friends have wit.
We’ll search out faults in everything, while citing
Ourselves alone for pure and flawless writing.

In 1672, that was satirical wit. Now? It is the motto of just about everyone involved with education on both sides of the duel.

What is the solution? Lose the idea that there is anyone out there whose ideas are so pure and flawless they can be accepted without critique. It is painfully easy to notice the pseudo-intellectuals amongst those with whom you disagree. Remember that there are many pseudo-intellectuals in your tribe too. A little intellectual humility would go a long way.

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The Canary in the Fed’s Coal Mine

Timing is everything. Imagine publishing a book two weeks before a major crisis that is perfectly explained in its pages. Jeanna Smialek just did that.

If you want to understand the financial crisis slowly unfolding right now, you can do no better than to read Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis.

If you took an economics course back when you were an undergraduate, you may think that you know what the Federal Reserve does. Your monetary policy education, however, is probably out of date. March 23, 2020, is a date that means little to most people, but it is, as Smialek dubs it in a chapter title, “The Day the Fed Changed.” This is the story of a revolution, but because there were so many things happening in those days of Covid panic, not many people noticed.

Read the rest at Law and Liberty

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Why We Don’t Trust the Rich

Over the course of this series of essays, we have been exploring why it is that people object to an unequal distribution of wealth. We saw in the first essay, that the objection is not limited to concern for people living in poverty. In the next two essays, we saw that while there are related complaints about the sources of great wealth, such complaints are not well-grounded. So, what is it? Is it that wealthy people are inherently more wicked?

Once again, we turn to literature to guide us. Consider Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If one is looking for an exemplar of the despicable rich, one can do no better than Ebenezer Scrooge. The first description of him is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”

If this portrait of Scrooge is underneath the complaints about unequal wealth, it is not hard to understand the problem. Do people like him really deserve to be the wealthiest people in town? Why should Scrooge be able to lord himself over his clerk, the impossibly charming Bob Cratchit? In the depths of winter, Bob is working next to a fire that amounts to nothing more than a single coal because Scrooge refuses to let him add another. The entire set-up of this story is designed to raise the complaint about the horrible distribution of wealth in Victorian England.

But, Dickens is clever. As everyone knows, A Christmas Carol ends on such a happy note that it can only be described as Dickensonian. After the ghostly visitors, Scrooge is a reformed man. The final description of Scrooge: “He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, borough, in the good old world.” You would love to know this reformed Scrooge; you would enjoy having dinner, even Christmas dinner, with him.

What is so clever about this ending? Scrooge is every bit as rich at the end of the story as he was at the beginning of the story. If the Scrooge at the beginning of the story is the example of what is wrong with wealth inequality, then why doesn’t the story end with Scrooge losing his wealth?

Read the rest at Public Discourse

The God of Analogies

“All human knowledge is analogical…These analogies have their origin in the perfect knowledge of God….Human knowledge of God is the indispensable background for our knowledge of anything at all…”

That is from the conclusion of Vern S. Poythress’ Redeeming Reason: A God-Centered Approach.

Poythress has created a cottage industry in Redeeming Books. Ere now, he has Redeemed Mathematics, History, Philosophy, Science, and Sociology. Redeeming Reason is thus a sort of Ur-Redeeming—before thinking about any subject we must first redeem our reason.

What does it mean to redeem reason? In what way was reason heretofore unredeemed? Wittgenstein encapsulates the error. Poythress notes that Tractatus Logico-Philosphicaus “is remarkable, but very far from a Christian approach,” which is a shocking offhand claim to toss into a footnote. Wittgenstein’s problem—he didn’t ground his method in God.

Apparently all the reasoning that has gone on before Poythress came along has suffered from being improperly grounded in something other than God. It is neither a coincidence no incidental that three-quarters of the footnotes with citations in this book are to other things written by Poythress. This is not a summary of what others in the long history of philosophy have said about reason; indeed, it isn’t even clear that Poythress sees himself as building on that historical foundation.

What is this new way of conceiving of reason? Analogies. All proper reasoning is simply an analogy. We think about God, but God is too complicated for us to understand, so what we do is create analogies of God and the creation of those analogies is reason.

Here is an example, the first one Poythress provides in this book. Logical thought, a subset of reasoning, is an analogy of God. How? Consider the principle of noncontradiction, that two contradictory things cannot be simultaneously true. A and Not-A cannot both be true. It’s simple logic. Now if we think about this idea of a logical principle, what can we say about it? The Law of Non-Contradiction in specific, and logical principle in general, is: omnipresent, eternal, immutable, immaterial, invisible, truthful, reliable, omnipotent, transcendent, and immanent. You know what else is escribed by that exact same list of adjectives? God! Logic is an analogy of God! QED! “The law of noncontradiction testifies to God.”

If you are unpersuaded that the fact that Poythress has found a list of adjectives describing both logic and God is proof that logic only exists because of God, then you are simply still stuck in ways of reasoning which are not analogically based on God.

In one of the more surprising twists in Poythress’ argument, God Himself is an analogy of God:

Analogy, we have said, involves both similarity and difference. The similarity that belongs to an analogy is a reflection of the unity that is in God. This unity is represented by God the Father. The difference that belongs to an analogy is a reflection of the diversity that is in God. His diversity is represented preeminently by God he Son, Finally, the analogy itself, as a multifaceted relation, is a reflection of the Holy Spirit, who preeminently reflects relations.

It is analogies all the way down! All reason is composed of analogies. A is an analogy of B and B is an analogy of C and C is an analogy of God and God is an analogy of Himself, and so on to infinite regress.

How does this work? Consider arithmetic. As stated above, logic is an analogy of God. Mathematics is a subset of logic in which special symbols are used. 1+2=2 is just a set of symbols. Then when I say, “One apple plus one apple equals two apples,” I am creating an analogy of the set of symbols which is a subset of logic which is an analogy of God who is an analogy of Himself.

This may sound like a simplification of the argument of this book, but it isn’t. Poythress himself collapses the argument of this book to a single page in the conclusion, so the bulk of the book is just a seemingly endless set of examples of analogies based on other analogies. If you want to make sense of Isaiah’s idea that “the daughter of Zion is like a lodge in a cucumber field,” you just need to think through the myriad of ways that phrase can be reasoned out in an analogical sense.

But through the whole book, I could not shake the feeling that I have read all this before. This is where Poythress’ penchant for self-citation becomes problematic. There is another philosopher of some note who has a theory that all our knowledge is merely a reflection of some perfect knowledge that exists outside of our universe. That triangle you see isn’t actually a triangle (lines have no breadth or depth, so we literally cannot see the lines that make up an actual triangle). Rather, the triangle you see is a form of the Ideal Triangle. There is also an Ideal Dog and an Ideal Beauty, and everything we see is just some sort of form of these Ideal Forms. In other words, all human knowledge and all things on Earth are simply analogies of these Ideal Forms, or as they are commonly called, the Platonic Forms.

What is troubling for Poythress’ book is that he is simultaneously arguing that reason must begin with God and presenting a form of reason that sure seems a lot like what Plato was arguing. Now maybe Poythress sees no similarity between his account of reason and Plato’s account, but when the most famous philosopher has an argument that sure looks a lot like your argument, then maybe, just maybe, you ought to at least mention that fact. Surely it would be worth a chapter in a book about how reason is simply an analogy to something outside direct human experience to discuss how your theory is different than Plato’s theory that reason is simply an analogy to something outside direct human experience.

I read this book because of my long fascination with how reason and faith interact. It isn’t Poythress’ fault that this book isn’t about what I assumed it was about. But, I am very stuck on trying to figure out the answer to this question: Who is the audience for this book?

The argument itself is self-contained. If you accept it, well and good. But, is the argument persuasive if you don’t initially accept it? Of course not. If you don’t accept that all reasoning is analogical, then an analogical argument that reason is analogical is by definition not persuasive. To accept the argument requires some form of revelation from God.

Poythress acknowledges this need for revelation, which then complicates the argument of the book. If God has not revealed Himself to the Reader, then there is no way the Reader will be persuaded by this book. That problem is not of much concern to Poythress. But, what if God has revealed Himself to the Reader and the Reader is perfectly willing to accept that God is the Author of All Things? Is it necessarily true that such a reader will also accept the argument that reason is definitionally analogical? If a Reader does not accept the analogical argument because the argument in favor of the argument assumes the argument is correct, what then? Does accepting this account of Reason also require a second revelation from God about the nature of reason? If accepting the conclusion of the book requires God to reveal to you that the argument of the book is true, then why do we need the book?

Who then is the audience for this book? I am truly unsure.

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(Crossway wants to make sure that you The Reader know that the US Federal Government requires me to disclose this shocking bit of news: Crossway sent me a copy of this book so that I could review it here. The Federal Government wants to make sure that you are not deluded if I am only saying nice things about a book because I got a free copy. The oddity of this regulatory burden is particularly apparent when the review being written about the book is nowhere near as laudatory as the advertising wing of a publisher would like. Fortunately for you, Dear Reader, Crossway only asks me for honest reviews and I only write things I actually believe. Shocking, to be sure.)

Bankers, Usury, and Wealth Today

“On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that…Masters of the Universe. There was…no limit whatsoever. […] Moving the lever that moves the world was what he was doing.”

That was Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s brilliant 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. As an expression of the age, it is right up there with Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” from Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street.

Over time, the popular perception of bankers as soulless and depraved hasn’t changed a bit. In 2011 a protest about the wealth distribution was dubbed Occupy Wall Street. Interestingly, no protests targeted the industries that generate even greater wealth: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and major sports stadiums. Nor were the protests in the parking lots at Wal-Mart, Target, or Home Depot. The anger about the wealth distribution was directed straight at bankers.

As we have seen over the last couple of essays in this series, the contemporary discussion about wealth distribution is not really about inequality per se. Underneath the discussion about the wealth distribution is an often unstated belief that high levels of wealth were not earned in an appropriate manner. One avenue of this discontent is the latent belief that merchant activity is immoral, violating the principle that goods should always sell for their Just Price. The belief that a good has an inherent just price has vanished, but the implications of that belief still lingers a bit.

The most vehement criticisms of wealth are translated into criticisms of the financial industry. When, and why, did the financial sector begin to arouse such ire?

Read the Rest at Public Discourse

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The Rope Dancers

You almost certainly have never heard of the play The Rope Dancers by Morton Wishengrad.

Moreover, you have also almost certainly never heard of Morton Wishengrad in any context.

Having just read the play, I am stunned, truly stunned, that this play languishes in obscurity.

How obscure is it? There is no Wikipedia page for the play or for the author. Think about that. There is a Wikipedia page for everything I ever look up. Until now. If you start looking for discussions about the play, you’ll find a handful of old reviews of productions of the play, but I have not yet stumbled on anyone who simply wrote about the play.

You, the Reader, now suspect that this is one of those plays which deserves no critical attention. You will think that until you read one of the reviews of a performance. “A powerful play—tragedy almost in the classical sense—showing great psychological insight and making telling use of symbols.” “It is, in fact, one of the most uncompromising plays I have ever seen; if Mr. Wishengrad can maintain his integrity in the hurly-burly of Broadway, he may yet, in that respect at least, confirm his leading lady’s premature contention that he’s the finest American playwright since O’Neill.” “The power of realism, when employed by American writers, goes even further, with greater originality, depth, and art in Morton Wishengrad’s The Rope Dancers, a play that is as difficult to describe, as it is to assay.”

Unconvinced? The play was included in the anthology Best American Plays Fifth Series 1957- 1963, published in 1968.

It is not a perfect play. (The reviewer for the Kenyon Review was not a fan.) It won’t hold up to Shakespeare, Moliere, or Shaw. But, it fits right in with the mid-20^th century American greats: Miller. O’Neill, and Williams. Again, it’s not Death of a Salesman, or Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or A Streetcar Named Desire, but it is far closer to them than a play that languishes in total obscurity should be.

The plot summary will make the play sound maudlin, which it most definitely is not. A woman (Margaret) and her 11 year old daughter (Lizzie) move into a 1950s New York tenement. Margaret is a hard women; an overly friendly new neighbor is treated rather roughly in a welcome-to-the-apartment-building visit. The daughter seems fragile, or at least is treated as fragile by her mother. Lizzie wears a white dress with a very bright pocket in which she constantly keeps her hand which is in a black mitten. She skips rope (symbolism alert) to rhymes she has invented (including one about President Rutherford Hayes!) The father (James) shows up after a bit; he is an impossibly charismatic drunk, who is as well-read as anyone I have ever met. Toss in a truant officer, trying hard to get Lizzie to school over the objections of her parents, and a Doctor, called in to deal with Lizzie’s ailment, St Vitus Dance. Well, that is her obvious ailment. Her other ailment, the source of great shame to Margaret, and by extension Lizzie, is the six fingers on Lizzie’s mittened hand.

And now you don’t really want to read the play because, like I said, it sounds like some sappy made-for-TV movie. It isn’t. The plot is there for the dialogue, which is incredibly sharp. The end of the play is fascinating once you get past the shock. The three main characters are deep and deeply fascinating. If you like reading mid-20^th century American plays, I cannot recommend this play highly enough. (If you don’t enjoy the genre, then first read more Miller and Williams to develop your taste.)

The title of the play is a reference to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. James reads a portion aloud in the middle of the play and, as is suspected since it is the source of the title, it provides the key. At the outset of Nietzsche’s book, Zarathustra wanders into a town in which a tightrope walker is about to perform. Zarathustra takes the opportunity to offer a lengthy series of cryptic remarks (if you have read Nietzsche, this does not come as a surprise). The rumination is about how man is a tightrope, a perilous link between where man starts and the unknown destination to which he is going. Man “is a bridge and no goal.” And so on. (If you want to piece all this together, read Zarathustra a few dozen times.) But for the purposes of the play the important line is the one James looks up from the book to quote from memory: “I love them that are in great scorn, for these are they that are great in reverence.”

The obvious scorn in the play is that between the estranged Margaret and James; and the great reverence is manifest right beneath that scorn. But stepping back, the whole play is an exercise in great scorn, which is simply a mask for great reverence. The play is a microcosm of the human condition, how we all are forced to wrestle with the aftermath of Original Sin, and the guilt we feel in the face of the effects of sin, and how our attempts to overcome those feelings of guilt inevitably fail. It is a demonstration of how we learn to work that part of ourselves of which we are most afraid into becoming a vital part of our identity, and how the removal of the evidence of guilt can lead to our own destruction. It has a surprisingly effective reflection of the nature of education, why we force children into school, and whether it is more important to learn knowledge or wisdom.

The depths of the play keep unfolding the longer you stare into it. So, why is this play completely unknown? Undoubtedly part of the explanation is the obscurity of the author, whose biography is not easy to piece together in the absence of a Wikipedia page. He was a writer for radio and TV serials, including a hundred episodes of The Eternal Light (which does have a Wikipedia page!). As far as I can tell, The Rope Dancers is his only play.

It was, however, a Broadway play, with a notable cast. The family was played by Siobhan McKenna (here is her Wikipedia page, which notes she received a Tony nomination for her performance in this play), Art Carney (here is his Wikipedia page, he was a mega star), and Beverly Lunsford (who would later go on to fame in Leave it to Beaver—not surprisingly, she also has a Wikipedia page). Even the actress who played the neighbor, Joan Blondell, has a long Wikipedia page.

Yet, Morton Wishengrad and The Rope Dancers languishes in obscurity. The only copy in print seems to be from one of those presses that just scans old library books. (The Mount Holyoke Library had three (3!!—was this once used in an MHC class??) copies of an old, out-of-print edition from Samuel French.) A play this good should really not be so hard to find.

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