Acephalous

You'll learn nothing at all from thems et al.

Do you know what happens when you allow “scholars” like Jonah Goldberg to invent historical movements and monsters?  You end up with uncited statements of obvious provenance that mask sheer lunacy behind the rhetorical scrim of conventional wisdom:

[T]he principles that inspired the American founding were always viewed as universal principles, which applied to all of mankind. Curiously, it wasn’t until the introduction of Historicist and Darwinian philosophy (which gave birth to Progressivism) that some Americans began to argue otherwise.

I wrote a dissertation about popular adaptations of evolutionary theory during the Progressive Era and have long styled myself an historicist* and I have absolutely no idea what that second sentence could possibly mean.

Does its author, Joseph Philips, mean to argue that Darwinism—which was neither the only nor even the dominant evolutionary paradigm of the Progressive Era—gave birth to “Progressivism”?

Does he mean to argue that the New History movement—inaugurated in 1912 by James Harvey Robinson’s The New History and abetted by works like Charles Beards’ An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1913)—gave birth to “Progressivism” fifteen years after it’d been born?

Or does he mean nothing at all—but learned from the likes of Goldberg et al.—that the best way to prevent people from criticizing the seriousness of an assertion is to pretend its “knowledge” so common as to be above reproach?

Care to place bets as to where I fall on this one?  I didn’t think so.

*Before someone objects: writing “an historicist” is too correct.

Being a secret socialist is hard.

I'm still a few days behind the news cycle, what with volcanoes and not picking up people to take them to the airport, so I just now ran across this item which, for reasons that boggle the mind, has been linked pretty much everywhere.  As someone who, unlike Kagan, wrote an actual dissertation on the impact of early 20th Century socialism on American thought—reconciling Jack London's Darwinism and socialism requires discussing his socialism, after all—I wondered how easily I could be branded a traitor to this great nation on the basis of cherry-picked quotations, and as it turns out I'm doomed.  Just consider the charges against me.

Of course I believe in change:

[Jack] London wanted to believe that if industrial life could ravage a body in so short a time, social and cultural change could improve a society over a shorter span than the “deep time” geology-influenced evolutionists believed was required. London wanted to believe that a new social order could create a new, superior species in units calculable in years instead of eons.

Of course I believe in progress:

Received wisdom had the trajectory of social evolution necessarily moving—progressing—toward increasingly complex forms of collective behavior.

Of course I want an undemocratic socialist tyrant in charge:

Telic actions cannot be performed by acephalous organizations; democracy is hamstrung by “by the arrant idiocy of political organization.” Such actions can only be undertaken by undemocratic organizations whose leaders are chosen not because they represent society at large, but because they do not. Such leaders will accelerate the process London believes already at work: namely, that “from the facts of [human] history . . . the trend of [social] development is toward greater and greater collective wisdom.”

Of course I believe socialism is the product of natural selection:

As Thomas Huxley wrote in a letter (27 October 1890) to William Ball: Have you considered that State Socialism—for which I have little enough love—may be a product of Natural Selection? The societies of Bees and Ants exhibit socialism in excelsis.

Of course I believe that the death of capitalism is the fiat of evolution and the word of God:

You are perishing, and you are doomed to perish utterly from the face of society. This is the fiat of evolution. It is the word of God. Combination is stronger than competition.

Of course I believe the Fish-Eaters are the chosen of God:

When the tribe complains of hunger, the Bug “sang a song of how good it was to be a Fish-Eater[, how] the Fish-Eaters were the chosen of God and the finest men God had made[, and] how fine and good it was for the Fish-Eaters to fight and die doing God’s work, which was the killing of the Meat-Eaters.”

And if that weren't enough, of course I want to kill puppies:

For a week it appears as if Big-Tooth may indeed bring about the domestication of the dog, but then he returns home one day to find his friend Lop-Ear “had killed the puppy and was just beginning to eat him.”

If some patriot doesn't put a stop to me soon, I'm gonna be forced to take action myself.

The dissertation you were destined to write.

For some reason, I kept on hearing the name "Lambert" repeated recently.  Every time I did, the theme from my favorite childhood cartoon took up residence in my head for hours on end:

Watching "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" as an adult made me realize that the reason I always remembered Winnie the Pooh narrating it was because Winnie the Pooh narrated it; more importantly, I learned that my fascination with nature vs. nurture debate started early.  I can graft so many elements of that cartoon onto arguments in my dissertation that it makes more sense to say that those arguments were rooted in it.  

"Lambert" tackles the notion that we essentially are what we are, but can choose to be otherwise.  So too does my dissertation.  It addresses the fact that superiority is dependent upon environment, and that environment encompasses both the social (the lambs) and natural (the wolf) worlds.  So too does my dissertation. 

I would go on, but I can barely see for all the irony: a cartoon I loved as a child in which the premises of deterministic thought were challenged likely determined the topic of the dissertation I would write as an adult.

" ?"

(x-posted.)

Life-altering erudition in honor of Britney Spears of his day can be found here. 

I don't know about you, but I'm a changed man.

(I should start a series.)

Characters Discussed in My London Chapter Whose Names, in Aggregrate, Infantilize Me

1. One-Eye, a wolf
2. White Fang, a wolf-dog
3. Buck, a dog-wolf
4. Earnest Everhard, a porn star dead socialist revolutionary
5. Big-Tooth, a hominid
6. Lop-Ear, his companion
7. Red-Eye, an atavism
8. Ab, a man of the Age of Stone
9. Uk, a paleolithic literalist
10. Oan, an early Shakespearean hack
11. Wax-moth, an agent of creeping socialism
12. Long-Beard, the sole survivor of a capitalism
13. Afraid-of-the-Dark, one of his three nephews
14. Deer-Runner, another
15. Yellow-Head, the last of them
16. Fith-Fith, failed chief of Long-Beard's ruined tribe
17. Three-Legs, inventor of agriculture
18. Pig-Jaw, father of domestication
19. Big-Fat, née Twisted-Lip, discoverer of God
20. Crooked-Eyes, corn liquor magnate
21. The Bug, first minister of propaganda
22. Tiger-Face, chief of the jointed staff
23. Long-Fang, obviously doomed socialist revolutionary
24. Split-Nose, professional scapegoat

No real punch-line here, other than I'm amazed I'm able to take myself seriously writing about these folk.  (Or, possibly, an explanation as to why I really can't.)  Sadly, this is my strongest chapter, the one that should be my writing sample and/or job talk, but I'm thinking I should go with something else, like the one in which I prattle on about a fish. 

Crap.  I'm never going to land a job, am I?

This Is How Very Important He Was

Whenever I tell people I'm working on Herbert Spencer, they tilt their head and ask:

"What does The Faerie Queen have to do with American literature?"

"Absolutely nothing," I reply.  "I'm working on Herbert Spencer, not Edmund."

"Who was Herbert Spencer?" 

"Only the single most important intellectual force of the Nineteenth Century."

"If you say so."

And I do.  Because he was.  Only I can't prove it fast enough to prevent their attention from drifting to more significant matters.  (Like their work.)  Now I can.  Here, reprinted in its entirety, is an article from the front page of The New York Times (6 December 1903):

He was the Britney Spears of his time!  Except instead of being a useless pop singer, he was an Intellectual Titan!  Two days earlier—and also on the front page—the Times had reported:

The question, of course, is "For whom is Spencer's condition causing 'grave anxiety'?"  The answer is, well, everyone.* 

Point being, HERBERT SPENCER WAS SO IMPORTANT THE TIMES PUBLISHED A FRONT PAGE ARTICLE SAYING HE HAD HAD A BAD DAY SO STOP LOOKING AT ME FUNNY AND TALKING ABOUT THE FAERIE QUEEN ALRIGHT?

If I Could Parse This Sentence, The Dissertation Would Be Done

On the eve of the Spanish-American War, Colorado Senator Edward Oliver Wolcott stuffs all my concerns into one gloriously unwieldy sentence:

Who is to say that in the evolution of such a Republic as this the time has not come when the immense development of our internal resources and the marvelous growth of our domestic and foreign commerce and a realization of our virile strength have not stimulated that Anglo-Saxon restlessness which beats with the blood of the race into an activity which will not be quenched until we have finally planted our standard in that far-off archipelago which inevitable destiny has entrusted into our hands?

Evolution and domestic policy and foreign affairs and hyper-masculinity and race-pride and refined blood and imperialism and American exceptionalism all colliding in one impenetrable interrogative!  If I could unpack it succinctly with conviction I'd be long done.

What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

As there's confusion over basic procedural issues like how long a dissertation abstract should be (one single-spaced page, two single-spaced pages, five single-spaced pages), I figure there's no harm in asking a basic intellectual question:

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

If I'm to be redefining it, I ought to know what the majority of scholars think it is.  I'm tempted to follow Lisa Long, who, in her review of three recent attempts at defining naturalism, threw up her hands in defeat:

In the end, naturalism turns back on itself, becomes the uncategorizable category, precisely because the taxonomic and evolutionary tendency of literary history is naturalist in and of itself—concerned in its own way with determining what nineteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine theorized as the ubiquitous "race, moment, and milieu" that have produced literary naturalism and other generic categories. American literary genres emerge as living, breathing, and ever-changing entities in these texts and in critical history as a whole; much collective scholarly energy has been spent, like that of biological taxonomists, looking for similarities between genres/"species" of literature, and hierarchicalizing those groups based on evolutionary relationships.

She identifies the current attempt to define naturalism as one more lost battle in a long, unwinnable war ... which means the best I can accomplish in my introduction is another pointed setback in an unending campaign of failure.  Of course, I could really surrender and claim, as one critic recently did, that naturalism is "less a movement than a jumble of proffered peculiarities."  The mind rails against the brutal honesty of that definition, but I admire its bravado.

So which naturalism should I be redefining?  The most current consensus?  The most powerful? 

Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

Accelerating Evolution; also, More on the Talkiness of Talks, and the Terrible People Who Read Essays Aloud

I've posted a copy of yesterday's talk—"Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London's The Iron Heel and Before Adam"—for interested parties to read/discuss/mock. 

The usual caveats apply: when I write talks, I write talks; I don't simply read aloud something meant to read alone. 

So you'll find simplification—in particular as regards the physiological basis of the Baldwin effect, as pointed out by Vincent Fitzgerald in the Q & A—and the frequent repetition of characters introduced and concepts established earlier. 

It doesn't sit well on the page.  I know that.  You can't keep as much in your head listening as you can reading.  You can't control the pace of a speaker.  You can't re-read or linger over paragraphs.

More and more, I'm convinced that people who read essays aloud are doing so to satisfy their own intellectual vanity:

"My work is difficult and impressive.  You're going to find it difficult to understand.  That is because I am impressive."

And difficult.  Don't forget difficult.  Because if you're one of these people, you're being difficult for the sake of being difficult.  You think it makes you impressive.  It doesn't. 

It makes you impolite.  It betrays your indolence.  If you want to communicate with your audience, you have to format the points you make in your written work to the media in which you're presenting them.  If you don't want to communicate, you're rude (wasting the audience's time to feel the hum of your ego inflating) and likely lazy (as politeness takes effort). 

More on the conference itself shortly.

The Dissertation, It Just Ruins Everything

I'm at the luncheon following the morning's talks at the American Literature Association's Symposium on Naturalism.  (More on the them momentarily.)  I'm discussing 19th century evolutionary theory with two extremely bright graduate students and a number of professors. 

We're discussing our work, and I'm enjoying not having to explain everything for once—I say Haeckel, they think ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny; they say Weissman, I think de-tailed lizards—and the experience is beautiful.  (To return to the previous metaphor: you shag the final out and you're jogging back to the bench, faking punches, slapping asses, feeling camaraderie.)

Only there's this feeling. 

This recognizable feeling. 

This familiar feeling. 

But sitting at this table, having this discussion, I can't place it.  So I ignore it.

This annoys it.  It escalates its campaign from gentle prod to vigorous tap.  This fails. 

It soldiers on. 

Only when ankle kicks turn to body blows do I pay it the attention it desperately seeks:

"Who are you?" I ask.

"You should be working on your dissertation," it responds.

I hate it.  I really, really hate it.

... You Edit Nightmare Down, You Edit Nightmare Up, You Edit Nightmare Down, Then You Shake It All About ...

For those who'd like to attend my panel, please consult the official program.  Or show up in Garden Room I of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Newport Beach at 2:00 PM this Saturday.  Either will work. 

As for what you'll be treated to should you choose to come, well, remember what I wrote yesterday about condensing forty-five pages into fifteen?  Remember the hubris implicit in my declaration that it'd be easy to whittle those fifteen pages down to eight? 

The Gods certainly did, as today I received my comeuppance: over the course of six hours, I managed to edit fifteen pages "down" to sixteen ... but only after casting aside of the rules of evidence, the laws of logic, and the integrity of my argument.  Just as you can only fold a sheet of paper so many times, there's only so much you can nstrip from an argument before it resembles Ann Althouse.  (In seriousness, not literally.)  I'd hit that point around 14 pages.  No matter how many times I took out this bit about Lamarck necessary to understanding Spencer or this bit about Spencer necessary to understanding London, I found myself confronting the same thing:

Utter nonsense.  Without A there could be no B.  Without B, C and D make no sense.  Since C subtends E and D's foundational for F, I could no more remove C or D than A or B and ... then, like an Angel from Heaven, a heavenly angelic email descended upon my inbox informing me that one of the participants will not be able to make my panel, leaving the remaining two panelists an hour and twenty minutes to work with. 

Life is good.  See you Saturday. 

(Or not.)

Suprised by Sodomy? Not Anymore.

Yesterday, this dialogue appeared on Unfogged.  The point? 

According to Ogged:

He's not creepy.  He's actually pretty normal and he's only unusual in being more willing than most to say what he's thinking. The thoughts he's having don't make him an outlier ...

Today, I desperately needed to find a copy of Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology (1873).  I found an excerpt, followed by this comment:

Spencer is an interesting read. The book is a general discussion on the science of sociology, and the particular biases and difficulties that skew its study. I've been tempted to post a number of passages, but I liked this one quite a bit.

My point? 

Read the thread that excerpt inspires:

Necessarily Dull: Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life

Last December, I met a couple of people from the Cato Institute and had a conversation with them about Herbert Spencer.  Earlier this week, one of those people, Julian Sanchez, mentioned the publication of Mark Francis' Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life:

A new book about Herbert Spencer apparently argues against the conventional wisdom that he preached "social Darwinism." I think that's right, and the association has lasted as long as it has just because it was useful to have an identifiable foil.

The linked review convinced me to buy the book.  The impressions Francis wants to correct about Spencer run parallel to the impressions I want to correct about the American literary and popular culture Spencer influenced.  The fear of being trumped aside, I want to see whether my reading of Spencer jibes with that of someone who's done what no one's even attempted in over a hundred years: seriously studied the entirety of Spencer's massive oeuvre. 

I've many thoughts on the matter, some of which will go to my making good on a promise I made to the other person I met last December, Will Wilkinson.  I warn you: these posts may be boring.  Francis writes in his introduction:

[Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life] is a hybrid between biography and textual analysis, which must achieve a precarious balance between chronicling an often-uneventful personal life and offering a substantial account of ideas that frequently seem to have no current interest.  Any intellectual biography would face similar problems, but there is an extra difficulty here because Spencer's life appears especially empty.

Francis then reproduces the faux-obituary Spencer's friend and former lover, the soon-to-be popular novelist George Eliot, wrote when he was thirty-four and a soon-to-be popular philosopher:

Spencer, Herbert, an original and profound philosophical writer, especially known by his great work XXX which gave a new impulse to psychology and has mainly contributed to the present advanced position of that science, compared with that which it had attained in the middle of the last century.  The life of the philosopher, like that of the great Kant, offers little material for the narrator.  Born in the year 1820 &c.

Dear Person or Persons With Whom I Share Plumbing,

I appreciate you sharing the reek of cheap ganja with anyone who enters my apartment.  Showering to the smell of stale bong water invigorates my soul.  Watching your morning fog on its miasmatic creep from the bathroom into the hall, then from the hall into my office, is the highlight of my day.  You have a kind heart. 

However, I find the material I produce in the wake of your morning ablution decidedly subpar.  This morning I transcribed a passage from Herbert Spencer's Psychology thus: "Every form of Intelligence being, in essence, an adjustmust of inner to outer relations; it results that as, in the advance of this adjustmust, the outer relations increase number, in complexity, in heterogeneity, by degrees that cannot be marked."  Granted, in terms of Lamarckian adaptation, the neologism "adjustmust" has some traction: individuals who "adjustmaybe" are less likely to survive than the "adjustmusters" who crane their necks for the next highest leaf.

But I digress.  (I do that a lot lately.)  I know what you're thinking: "Dude.  Just 'cause you see my smokes in your place don't mean you score a contact high.  Seriously."  Perhaps.  You do know about those scientific studies of scent and cognitive function, right?  The ones saying strong scents like peppermint work as mnemonics, and that you remember what you were thinking when you first smelt those smells?  Because let me tell you:

The crap my brain excavates every time you pump my place full of your noxious weed ain't exactly helping me finish my dissertation.  Quite the opposite.  It would be awesome if you could do your business in some room not connected to any of mine.  If you must—€”if it's bathroom or bust—”maybe not toke so early in the morning or keep it up for quite so long.  You have work to do, and I'm sure the shirts you smoke don't help so much. 

Make an adjustmust.

All will be cool.

Marx Towers over Spencer

In death, at least, his grave does.  In response to Jodi's remark about Marx's grave being across from Spencer's, I wrote:

Actually, it's Marx whose grave is opposite Spencer's (as Spencer was the far more influential contemporary figure). It appears to be the other way around because that's not where Marx was originally buried. He was initially buried down the hill and across the way, in an obscure corner of Highgate. In the '50s, a group of Marxists pooled their funds, dug him up, and had him moved to the posh section of the graveyard, up there with Spencer, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, &c. His monument is so much bigger, well, because those who moved him wanted to make a statement. (As did the various people who have tried to blow it up.)

Here's a stunning photograph of the looming bust of Marx (found here):

I note this to remind myself of its usefulness as an anecdote, if not in the Jack London chapter, then in my general introduction.  It neatly captures the belated, artificial elevation of Marx over Spencer as the foremost thinker of the late nineteenth century, but allows for the introduction of grand historical irony, inasmuch as Spencer wasn't the free market advocate most now consider him.  Terrible sentence, that is, but not an altogether terrible idea.