At the recommendation of a blog commenter, I read the above-titled book by critic and memoirist Claire Dederer. The promotional material describes it as “a passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of #MeToo, and of the link between genius and monstrosity.” This didn’t sound so promising to me–it reminded me of about a zillion op-ed and arts page articles that I’ve come across in the past few years, and I didn’t feel like I needed another lecture about how we should separate the art from the artist, or conversely an explanation of how Kevin Spacey was never actually a good actor or whatever.
But the book was neither of those things. It was excellent and stimulated many thoughts which I’ll now share:
Who is worse, Pablo Picasso or Laura Ingalls Wilder?
This is not a serious question. Or, I should say, it’s a serious question that I am deliberately framing in a non-serious way, just as a way of demonstrating that there’s no unidimensional scale of badness.
Here’s the point. As a human being, Picasso seems like the worse of these two artists. As Dederer puts it, “The used-up women in his life make a fleshy pig-pile, so much that it can be hard to remember which is which: Fernande Olivier, Eva Gouel, Olga Khoklova, Marie-Thérèse Walter, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque. Two killed themselves–and so did Picasso’s grandson, Pablito–and most of the rest were left with their lives shattered after their time with Picasso. . . . . Picasso’s granddaughter Marina wrote in her memoir: ‘He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.’ It’s no crime to love a lot of women–even if it makes the women in question cross or jealous or crazy or suicidal. But of course Picasso was also abusive toward those women (beatings and burnings), and moreover he was a predator of young girls, who fascinated him and whom he used as models.”
On the other side, I have no reason to think that Laura Ingalls Wilder was an abusive person or that she did mean things at all (beyond the bad behavior that is occasional in all of us).
But . . . you can look at Picasso’s art and appreciate it straight up–as artifacts in themselves and in their role in politics and the development of art–without needing to concern yourself with his biography. No doubt his abusive behavior was connected to his artistic achievement, but the art was not about the brutality.
Wilder, on the other hand, embedded racism into the core of her books. Dederer informs us that the following sentence appeared on the first page in the early editions of Little House on the Prairie: “There were no people; only Indians lived there.” You can separate about Picasso’s art from his life in a way that you can’t separate Wilder from her political and social attitudes.
To look at this another way, consider scientists who held political views that you might now call odious, such as Francis Galton’s racism (which, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s views, were close to the core of his statistical work) or J. B. S. Haldane’s communism (which seems more peripheral to his contributions to biology, although I expect that Haldane himself saw some connections there). My goal here is not to go around canceling people–it would be absolutely ridiculous to abandon the scientific insights or try to retroactively diminish the contributions of people with problematic social or political views, and it would be even more hopeless if we were to try to remove all the assholes from history too–at some point there’d be just about nobody left–even gentle Einstein had some strongly racist views, also apparently was not such a nice husband, perhaps in the manner of modern sports stars who go through life expecting that other people will take care of them and clean up all their messes–; rather, the biography is part of the story. When we talk about historical figures, we talk about when they lived and where they were from and sometimes about their personal lives; their political views and personal actions can be relevant to our understanding too.
Benefit of Clergy
Last time this topic came up, I brought up George Orwell’s classic essay, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali,” where he discusses how to simultaneously think of the famous Surrealist painter as both a great artist and a terrible person.
It really shouldn’t be so hard to say that Einstein was a brilliant physicist, also a campaigner for peace, also had some racist views, also was a bit of a pig who expected other people to clean up his messes. It shouldn’t be hard to say that Yuval Peres was a brilliant mathematician, a generous colleague, and a sexual harasser, or that Neil Gaiman went through life doing bad things but he also wrote influential books. But somehow it can be hard for people to do this. Dederer’s book is a thoughtful exploration of why this separation can be harder than it looks, why it is that, as she puts it, “The person does the crime and it’s the work that gets stained.”
To put it another way, if you don’t want to say, “X has been a good person and valuable contributor to society in many ways, but in some other ways he’s behaved badly and exploited his position,” it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re clueless–that X’s misdeeds blind you to his contributions–; it could just mean that, in your judgment, the misdeeds outweigh the contributions enough that you don’t feel comfortable celebrating the contributions, or that the misdeeds change your interpretation of the contributions. Although it can go in the other direction too. I know Yuval as a generous colleague, willing to put in the time and thought to work out a difficult math problem with me. Years later I heard he had a side career as a sexual harasser, and that’s horrible, also I wonder if that flowed out of his generosity as a mathematician. That is–and I say this without knowing any of the context, so I’m really just using his case to represent the general principles here–it seems plausible to me that he was following his usual practice of being a caring, involved colleague to these women, and this care engaged his emotions, which, when combined with poor judgment and lack of self-control, led to his repeated inappropriate behavior.
Consider this diagram:
I put “brilliant mathematician” at the top here because, even if it might not be the most important thing about Yuval, it’s his most distinctive attribute: there are a lot more generous colleagues and sexual harassers in the world than there are brilliant mathematicians.
In any case, the point of the above triangle is that all three of its vertices go together. Yuval’s brilliance as a mathematician facilitates his generosity as a colleague. It’s a lot easier to be helpful if you have a deep understanding. And the generosity put him in a position that facilitated the harassment. My point is not to claim that if you want the brilliance, you need to accept the harassment–I suspect that had the consequences been clearer, Yuval would’ve been able to restrain himself–; my point is just that his misdeeds are connected to his virtues.
The principle of retroactivity
Dederer writes, “The principle of retroactivity means that if you’ve done something sufficiently asshole-like, it follows that you were an asshole all along.”
I guess this is true, in that everyone–well, just about everyone–really is “an asshole all along,” in some sense. Roman Polanski was an asshole, Albert Einstein was an asshole, Orwell and Dali were assholes of course, Terry Speed was an asshole long before he harassed that postdoc, also you and I and most of our neighbors–including those who have never done any harassment of any sort–are assholes in some aspects of our lives. Being an asshole is part of the human condition.
What I’m saying is that, once you have reason to look back in time for asshole behavior, you’ll be able to find it.
Dederer continues: “a current moment can remake the past anew, can imbue the past with new truth . . . the stain travels backward, affecting and defining the perpetrator not just at the time of the abuse, and not just after the abuse, but before he committed the crime.”
This reminds me of how it can be hard to assess how good a book or movie is, until you get to the end. A story of suspense or mystery can be very compelling, but only if the mystery is resolved in a satisfactory way. If the solution is a cheat, this reflects backward and makes the early parts of the story retrospectively flawed. Conversely, a great ending can retrospectively make earlier parts of the book or movie all make sense.
And this makes me wonder whether Dederer’s quote is revealing a problem we have when thinking about people and events, which is that we try to fit things into a storyline, whether that be a “Breaking Bad”-style decline into depravity or a redemption arc or an he-was-an-asshole-all-along narrative.
The idea of genius
Dederer talks about the problematic idea of the “genius,” which reminded me of my problems with the scientist-as-hero narrative. It’s a problem! There are geniuses, but they make their own characteristic errors. Even the best scientists make scientific errors; as I wrote here:
Brilliance represents an upper bound on the quality of your reasoning, but there is no lower bound. The most brilliant scientist in the world can take really dumb stances. Indeed, the success that often goes with brilliance can encourage a blind stubbornness. Not always–some top scientists are admirably skeptical of their own ideas–but sometimes. And if you want to be stubborn, again, there’s no lower bound on how wrong you can be. The best driver in the world can still decide to turn the steering wheel and crash into a tree.
But that’s the outside take. Dederer also looks at it from the perspective of the “monster”: “The experience of channeling something, of being a servant to something bigger than yourself, isn’t just for the prodigy, or even just the young–Picasso retained it throughout his life. . . . Part of Picasso’s livelong practice was to give himself to this greater power. This freedom was actually part of his job–paradoxically, part of his discipline.”
I can relate to that. I’ve been so lucky in my life to be able to work on problems that I think are important and interesting, and I do feel a sense of responsibility to make the most of my time here.
I don’t agree with everything Dederer says on the topic, though, for example: “Isn’t the genius the person who changes everything about his or her field? . . . If you go by that definition, Duchamp is actually a greater artist than Picasso. If a Renaissance artist time-traveled to the twentieth century, he would’ve recognized what Picasso was doing as painting. But Duchamp would’ve made zero sense to him as art. Duchamp changed everything. But Duchamp doesn’t fulfill an image that we have in our minds of genius.”
Sure, I’ll buy the what-the-Renaissance-artist-would-think bit, but . . . I don’t think that makes Duchamp a genius. Or, maybe he was a genius at promotion; it doesn’t make him a genius at art. In contrast, Picasso really was a genius as art! I know these judgments are subjective; my point is that I don’t think that being “the person who changes everything” is either a necessary or sufficient condition for genius.
Are we “excited by their asshole-ness?”
Later, Dederer writes, “Part of the reason so much attention has been trained on men like Picasso and Hemingway is exactly because they’re assholes. We are excited by their asshole-ness.”
Ummmm, who is this “we” you are talking about? I’m excited by the art that Picasso and Hemingway created, and then I’m interested in learning more about their lives. If they were super nice guys, I’d still be excited about their work. Now you might say that being an asshole was a condition for their work–perhaps the only way they could’ve made such contributions was through a single-minded focus that excluded all others–but, even so, at best that just means the asshole-ness was necessary, not that this is what attracts us to them.
Yeah, I know the trope of the sexy bad boy . . . here it is right here for you . . . but I think it’s orthogonal to the “genius” thing. Some people are fascinated by sexy bad boys, some people aren’t; I don’t think that’s the key to the appeal of Picasso or Hemingway.
Do writers and artists get special dispensation to be assholes?
Dederer writes, “Writers want to be left alone to write, and be waited on. . . . at least a few men are onto themselves. The novelist John Banville told the Irish Times that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a shitty dad, and what’s more, probably most writers are. ‘[Writing] was very hard . . . on the people around me, on my children. I have not been a good father. I don’t think any writer is. You take so much and suck up so much of the oxygen that it’s very hard on one’s loved ones.”
What an asshole (Banville, that is, not Dederer). Indeed, Banville’s a double asshole in that quote, first by being a bad father (I’ll take his word on that) and second for blaming it on being a writer. Lots of writers have no problem being good fathers. There are 24 hours in the day, and there’s enough “oxygen” to be a good writer and a good parent. Look, Banville: if you or Neil Gaiman or Philip Roth or whoever wants to go around being an asshole, that’s you, and that’s all. Get over yourself, dude. You can take your Prince of Asturias Award for Literature and stick it where the sun don’t shine. That said, you might be a good writer; I’m not claiming otherwise.
George Orwell, Rebecca West, Claire Dederer, James Wolcott
I have the above list of names in my notes from reading the book. Unfortunately, I can’t remember what I wanted to say about them! It’s like a puzzle–What do these names have in common?–but I can’t figure out what it is. I read Dederer’s book several months ago.
One thing is that George Orwell and Rebecca West are pseudonyms, and Dederer writes about writers taking a new identity. I’m not sure where Wolcott fits in, though.
The monsters in our lives
Dederer’s deepest message is that the real issue with being a fan–or choosing not to be a fan–of art “monsters” (including monsters in their actions such as Roman Polanski and Pablo Picasso and monsters in their ideologies such as Laura Ingalls Wilder) has nothing to do with famous people and everything to do with people we love.
Not to get all Freudian about it, but the real challenge is dealing with the monsters of our childhood. Whether this is family members who physically abused or neglected us, or authority figures who abused their trust, or loved ones who treated us well but were abusive to others, we’re reliving those original contradictions of the people who were important in our lives. That’s why it’s so hard. The decision to reread Harry Potter or not, or to enjoy the dramatic stylings of Kevin Spacey . . . ultimately these are easy questions. If they feel hard, it’s because they stand in for closer, more personal questions.
Similarly, when thinking about academic misconduct, the fundamental challenges come when people who we’ve loved and respected have taken advantage of us–or of others.
We write about Francis Galton or Woody Allen or Yuval Peres because that’s less uncomfortable than writing about people closer to us.
An email from Jenny Diski
Also, Dederer wrote about the author Jenny Diski, which brought to mind an email exchange I had with Diski back in 2010. I wrote:
I’m writing to you because of a reaction I had to an offhand remark in your recently published review of a book on Psycho. You wrote:
“Skerry isn’t really one to let go of jargon. In the preface he explains how to read his book, not as most books are doomed to be read, from beginning to end, but differently and ‘in keeping with the multiplicity of voices that make up the text’. It gets quite scary: ‘The temporal structure of these chapters goes from the present-tense narrative of my research trip in Chapter 1 to the achronological, “cubist” structure of Chapter 3 . . .”
I don’t know any of the people involved, but I suspect that Skerry was not intentionally writing in jargon; it’s just hard to write clearly. Harder than many readers realize, and maybe harder than you, as a professional writer, realize. My guess is that Skerry was trying his best but he just doesn’t know any better.
I had a similar discussion with a friend on this topic a while ago, where he was accusing academics of deliberately writing obscurely, to make their work seem deeper than it really is, and I replied that we’d all like to write clearly but it’s not so easy to do so. I’ve written several books myself, but I’m a statistician, not a creative writer, and I’m always struggling to write clearly and with minimal jargon.
There are some fundamental difficulties here, the largest of which, I think, is that the natural way to explain a confusing point is to add more words—but if you add too many words, it’s hard to follow the underlying idea. Especially given that writing is one-dimensional; you can’t help things along with intonation, gestures, and facial expressions. There’s the smiley-face and its cousin, the gratuitous exclamation point (which happened to be remarked upon by Alan Bennett in that same issue of the LRB), but that’s slim pickings considering all the garnishes available for augmenting face-to-face spoken conversation.
My full reactions are here.
Anyway, I hope this is useful to you in giving a slightly different perspective on academic writing. In short: when we write badly, it’s not always on purpose!
To which Diski replied:
Thanks for your email. I’m sure you’re right when it comes to your field – any field involving maths, but I’m not so sure about the humanities. I think there is very little that can’t be said about movies or even literature and history plainly (by which I mean well written) enough to be accessible to any literate person.
In any case, Skerry was, I thought, using the idea of postmodernism idiotically and unnecessarily in order to make his book appear more scholarly. Just my opinion, of course.
It’s always so great when a person responds in a serious way to a serious question.
Last words
Not the last words of Dederer’s book, but the last words of the second-to-last chapter. She writes:
You will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn’t make a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
If assholeness is attractive, that helps explain Trump, I suppose.
With the triangle hypothesis about Yuval, maybe your point is just that there is always the possibility that people’s most distinctive (good and bad) qualities are all ultimately relatable to some way. But isn’t it also possible that there is no easily to articulate theory to describe how a particular person could do good things and very bad things, such that attempting to find one can be misleading? E.g., I know nothing about Yuval, but maybe his being generous with you and abusive with women have little to do with each other. Maybe he saw the younger women around him as objects for his pleasure and you as a peer, so his actions with you have little explanatory power for his harassment. If that’s the case, then saying that his generosity likely played a role in his status as harasser could read like an attempt to soften his responsibility for those actions.
Jessica:
My guess is that he did view those young women as peers of some sort, and that was probably part of what made him emotionally attached to them. I’m guessing that he did not see them as “objects for his pleasure,” exactly, but he does seem to have had difficulty seeing himself from their perspective. But I don’t know; I haven’t talked or corresponded with Yuval for decades, and we never talked about this sort of thing.
Also, I think it should be clear that Yuval being a “brilliant mathematician” and a “generous colleague” doesn’t excuse him being a “sexual harasser.” I’m just saying that all three things are part of who he is. If, as I think might be possible, his generosity played a role in his status as a harasser, I don’t mean this to soften his responsibility for those actions.
I guess this is a typo:
“he was a predator of young firls,”
A bit more searching, however, found this:
https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.signal.firls.html
scipy.signal.
firls
firls(numtaps, bands, desired, *, weight=None, fs=None)[source]
FIR filter design using least-squares error minimization.
Typo fixed; thanks.
And a possible Freudian slip:
“After he had spent man nights extracting their essence…”
OK, I went in and fixed that typo too!
Lastly?…
“it [doesn’t] necessarily mean”
After flagging a couple of annoying typos I suppose I should comment constructively now.
In the world of opera, the classic case is Richard Wagner, generally regarded as one of the top three opera composers ever and also generally regarded as antisemitic and white-supremicist. His Wikipedia article does an amazing job of rationalization, glossing it essentially by alternating between “Some of his best friends were Jewish!” and “But most Germans at the time were antisemitic!”. There are hints of this ideology in his operas. But excluding Wagner’s works is unacceptable to most opera lovers, as it would be the equivalent in painting not of excluding Picasso but of excluding Impressionism. So he remains.
On the other hand, a recent case in Catholic liturgical music is that of prominent contemporary composer David Haas, who was widely and credibly accused of sexual misconduct, in the context of liturgical workshops he led. It’s difficult to see how genius in liturgical writing and sexual misconduct would be two vertices of a genius triangle. The songs on their own are inspiring, but anyone who knows the backstory and has dealt with similar “monsters” in their lives would be the opposite of inspired. After weighing the harm and benefits, his music has been excluded.
I think the family / childhood discussion, “We write about Francis Galton or Woody Allen or Yuval Peres because that’s less uncomfortable than writing about people closer to us” is backwards. We’re used to thinking about people in our families and communities — both from our own experience and in an “evolutionary” sense in that we’ve generally lived in small communities without mass media. It’s useful to think of people as good or bad in these local contexts; “X” is bad, so I avoid him. In the modern world, we’re tempted to apply these previously-learned habits of making judgements of good and bad to artists, scientists, and celebrities, even though it’s irrelevant — we don’t interact with those people, and their work can exist on its own. We apply these judgements because that’s what we’ve been trained to do; it’s intuitive. We have to consciously think about *not* caring about the moral standing of Picasso. (Personally, I don’t care.)
Lots going on here. For one thing, what’s with the dash-semicolon construction? I don’t recall you ever using it before — I’m sure you _did_ use it before, but I don’t remember ever noticing it and I’m sure it’s not common — and here you use it a zillion times. Well, three times. Still, that’s a lot!
I don’t agree at all with what you wrote to Diski. Loads of papers are intentionally filled with jargon or just unnecessarily “sophisticated” language, and there’s no way all of that is unintended. I agree with you when it comes to some sorts of ‘hard science’ articles — in an extreme case, if your paper is just a bunch of theorems and proofs, there’s no need to try to jazz it up and perhaps no good way to do so — but in many other fields at least some writers use ten-dollar words to try to make their one-dollar insights seem more valuable than they are. Not that that’s the only thing going on: I also think people tend to write in the style of the articles they read in journals, without ever thinking about whether that’s actually good. Instead of thinking along the lines of “what are the clearest articles I’ve ever read, and how can I use those as models” I think a lot of people aim for the median style, or the one that stands out the least, or something. Maybe a scientific-paper-writing class should be required in grad school.
But although I think that many papers are written badly for a reason, I do agree with you (Andrew) that most of the badly written papers aren’t that way on purpose. If I were just writing to you (Andrew) in an email, I’d just say a phrase that would convey this agreement in shorthand, but since I’m writing this as a blog comment I will tell a little anecdote instead. About twenty years ago, Andrew and I were working on a paper. It was shortly after I had read Knut Schmidt-Nielsen’s autobiography — KSN was an animal physiologist who was deservedly famous for clear writing — and I reported to Andrew that KSN had given an example of how he used to edit other people’s journal submissions for clarity and brevity. (He edited a journal by actually editing the articles, like a newspaper editor!). I told Andrew that the example was: someone had written “Desert-dwelling mammals, though well-adapted to life in arid environments, nevertheless show signs of distress when deprived of water for long periods”, which KSN shortened to “Even camels get thirsty.” After that, whenever Andrew and I found ourselves trapped in a thicket of verbiage of our own making, one or the other of us would say “even camels get thirsty” to remind us both of what we were trying to achieve.
Years later, I re-read the relevant section of KSN’s autobiography and found that the example was far less extreme than the one I reported. My example is much better! Or at least, it would be much better if it were actually true. (Or do we not care? https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/02/27/did-chinese-laborers-on-the-yangtze-pay-someone-to-whip-them-and-why-cant-political-scientists-and-economists-resist-telling-this-evidence-free-story/ ). I think the honest thing to do is to leave KSN out of it, and just say “consider a sentence like [the hifalutin one], wouldn’t it be better if it were [camels]”.
Moving on…you quote Dederer as writing “The principle of retroactivity means that if you’ve done something sufficiently asshole-like, it follows that you were an asshole all along,” but without context I can’t tell whether she’s saying that is actually true, or if she’s saying that’s something people believe. I don’t think it’s true, I think people can and do become assholes. I don’t disagree that at _some_ level “we are all assholes”, as you put it: everyone behaves badly sometimes — none of us would want to be judged purely by our worst behavior, as I try to remind myself when I see someone being an asshole. Behaving like an asshole is one thing, _being_ an asshole is another. Taking myself as an example, I hope I was never so bad that someone who knew me well would have considered me to be an asshole, but I definitely behaved like an asshole more often in my late teens and early twenties than I did later on. But I still have it in me, lord knows. At any rate, in my case I’m pretty sure that my membership in the fuzzy set of assholes is not as strong as it once was, but other people can and do sometimes go the other way.
The obvious things to comment on are the things I disagree with, but just to avoid seeming like all I do is complain and say you’re wrong, I agree with your response to Dederer’s claim that “Part of the reason so much attention has been trained on men like Picasso and Hemingway is exactly because they’re assholes. We are excited by their asshole-ness.” No “we” aren’t.
Phil:
I know the dash-semicolon thing is uncommon and is even frowned upon, but I really like it. More generally, I’ve noticed that when I speak, I can construct long complex sentences but keep it all clear by the use of pauses and intonation, but when writing it’s more tricky. Dash-semicolon is one of the tricks that I’ve found helpful in attempting to express, in writing, my style of speech.
The dash-semicolon thing is OK with me, my only objection (if that’s the right word) is that it’s unusual and therefore a bit distracting. But I agree it has a function that is served by neither dash nor semicolon alone. I suppose you have to weigh the readers’ distraction with the functional benefits…or don’t weigh nuthin, you be you.
Oh, as long as I’m here, I had a thought about “George Orwell, Rebecca West, Claire Dederer, James Wolcott”: they all wrote about some aspect of the themes covered by Dederer’s book (which I knew nothing about until reading your post).
1. Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy”, as you have already noted.
2. West, “The Duty of Harsh Criticism.” Hmm, evidently the order of events in my head is backwards from reality, I thought she became his lover but still wrote a terrible review of one of his books, but it seems that it actually went the other way round. But anyway she could love the man while hating his writing.
3. I don’t remember much of Wolcott except for general snarkiness, but in a search I did turn up this: “Perhaps [Vanessa] Redgrave’s political passion and her passion as an artist spring from the same rich source; perhaps the gall and the energy which propel her all over the globe to spout Marxist rubbish is also what enables her to enter so deeply into a role [in the Holocaust melodrama Playing for Time] that she becomes transfigured–luminously possessed.”
I just want to confess that I’m not nearly erudite enough to have come up with these examples just by reading Dederer’s book, as you evidently did if these examples are what you had in mind. Indeed I had to look up “Rebecca West” to remind me where I knew the name. But since you provided Dederer and Orwell yourself, as well as the list of names…well, it was pretty easy to take it from there.
OK, now I remember about Rebecca West. She was a great and humane writer but apparently was a horrible parent, at least according to the testimony of her son, Anthony West. Incidentally, I think it’s funny that he had the last name of West, given that “Rebecca West” is a pseudonym–she was originally Cecily Fairfield. I’ve read other things about this family and there seems to be little dispute that Anthony’s descriptions were largely accurate and Rebecca really was a bad parent.
James Wolcott . . . I can’t remember the connection I saw to this theme. I recently read his memoir but I can’t see how any of that relates to all this.
“I suspect that had the consequences been clearer, Yuval would’ve been able to restrain himself–; my point is just that his misdeeds are connected to his virtues.”
You are a silly man, Andrew. Usually in a good way, but I am really not sure what you were going for here.
What value do you find in throwing these counterfactuals around? As a self-admitted monster, I can tell you that it certainly provides me with a reassurance that if I ever get caught, acting like just a confused guy who “didn’t think of the consequences” will be enough to have some people talk in not completely unfavorable terms about me, possibly even giving me a pass if I manage to adequately feign contrition.
Unless you’re talking about someone with the mental age of a child (unlikely given the aforementioned achievements), I cannot conceive of them not going through a very careful calculus of what they can get away with. I do this all the time. I mostly limit myself to [redacted].
And I heartily agree with Dr. Hullman’s point about the null explanatory power of “virtues”. If anything, me being a competent academic affords me some other comforts that make certain other one-time payoffs far less attractive. Conversely, I would probably have a more illustrious career if I didn’t spend several hours per week [redacted]. But hey, that’s what my brain happens to enjoy and I’ve learned there is no point in fighting it.
Anyway, why the hell are racism and communism being mentioned together as if they were somehow comparable examples of “odious views”? This post is quite a doozy I must say.
Amused:
I don’t see why you think it’s “silly” or without “value” to consider counterfactuals. Counterfactual reasoning is how we think. Check out the literature on causal inference.
Just as I think my counterfactual speculations are fine, I think it’s fine for you to speculate. You and Yuval are two different people, I assume, and just because you have certain traits in common, I don’t see that this makes you the authority on what Yuval was thinking. Yuval may well have gone through a very careful calculus of what he could get away with . . . in that case it seems that his calculus didn’t go so well, given what happened to his career.
Finally, let’s keep the Patrick Bateman crap out of the blog comments. I know that such behaviors are out there, but this is not the place to discuss them.
I can separate some people’s faults from their achievements. Einstein, Wagner, and Picasso created great works whose impact will resonate for ages long after the sins and crimes of their creators have evaporated. Very few human failures deserve eternal damnation. I think we should focus on Ingalls in large part because of her faults; the realty of the harshness of life in her era becomes bowdlerized by the rather schmaltzy version that was on our TV screens.
I have some serious personal failings, and reading about the shortcomings of others helps me absorb them.
As a humanities writer I agree with Andrew more than with Diski about the role of jargon, but I might try to articulate the difference. I was a bit struck by Diski’s idea that humanities ideas should be accessible to “any literate person”: can we really have no more complicated ideas than that? After thinking it over, I wonder if the ideas we convey are constrained somehow by the way we write about them.
[Note: I am not at all committed to this argument, just thinking it through, but now that I’ve written this comment I might as well post it.]
My field is the history of science and technology, so I am not writing statistical methods but often the historical arguments I’m trying to make do depend on explaining some technical stuff too.
A lot—not all—of humanities writing is aimed at “any literate person,” or maybe just a colleague in the next department who doesn’t know anything about your field. Without weighing the merits of that imaginary readership as a target audience, it might mean that in the humanities, if you want to make a complicated argument, it’s acceptable in writing, even expected, to spend a lot of words clarifying the more fundamental material.
If I am writing about some aspect of 19th century US economic history, I am **expected** to give a lot of context about what else was going on in the US and the world, rather than just jumping in to my analysis of production statistics or whatever.
So maybe it’s that the humanities holds our readers fixed, more than the sciences do, and adjusts the complexity of what we’re trying to say? In your books, Andrew, do you begin with a basic definition of how numbers and math work? That is kind of what we do. If we demanded more prior knowledge of our readers, could we say more?
And I liked the “-;” a lot!
Thanks for this article. I have to deliver a eulogy in a week for one of my oldest friends –one who my wife despised because of how he treated his wife. Much food for thought here.
“It’s always so great when a person responds in a serious way to a serious question.”
Is this sarcasm?
Canttell:
No, I’m serious. I appreciated that Diski responded to my serious question in a serious way. People don’t always do that.
In our 30 year marriage, the thing my late wife and I disagreed with each most strongly was this very topic. I am willing to forgive anything — yes anything — to admire genuine achievement. I don’t have to like the creator at all to like or even the work. For her, however, even minor indiscretions that the public was unaware of cast the entire oeuvre of actors and playwrights and directors (her main fields) into a sort of netherworld of disrepute. We got along fine, but never reconciled over this issue.
The odd thing about it to me, however, is that it sometimes constrains your opinions of a body of work contingently on a set of uncertain facts. Woody Allen is a perfect example. Whether or not my wife liked Annie Hall was actually (to her) dependent on whether or not Allen committed child abuse. (She didn’t care much about his marrying his sorta-stepdaughter.) When a new documentary or book arguing one side or the other came out, she would actually change her mind about his entire output based on her assessment of the evidence. That, to me, was genuinely crazy. Suppose one day we discover that we had Picasso all wrong (unlikely, but certainly possible for some others whose assholishness is in greater dispute.) Do we then change our mind about the work?
“I am willing to forgive anything — yes anything — to admire genuine achievement.”
Josef Mengele was given an award by Nazi Germany for a string of medical discoveries based upon his work at Auschwitz. He was able to make these discoveries largely because he could exploit experiment designs that were not available to other researchers.
Just sayin.
I hear ya Matt. And yes. I would use the results of that research if it were in fact useful. (I believe, despite Mengele’s medals, that the research he did was actually worthless.) One should of course worry about the incentives of allowing unethical research to be used (analogous with the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine in 4th Amendment law), but a situation in which the data is used but Mengele is executed for his crimes should pretty much close the incentive gap.
According to the Modern Lovers song, Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.