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History and Evidence of a coordinate
When you come sixteenth in a race for fifteen seats, it’s cold consolation to be told, “Don’t worry, it’s just a popularity contest”—as though life were a Family Circus strip. But I don't regard losing popularity contests as a personal defeat. I hear my social web whispering, "take the loss personally, but also constructively" -- and they're right, pragmatically: man, a social construct, must obey his social web. | |
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< | But I'll learn that lesson ass-backwards, if you don't mind. That is to say: considering that my perspective is the opposite of yours, don't be shocked to see me believing the contrapositive of what's expected of me -- to see me taking it "with certitude, but also socially."
- First, I'm proud of my loss, which is resounding evidence that my genius is still misunderstood -- tangible proof of just how far ahead of my peers I am ...
- and then I’ll take it socially:
- first remembering what William James wanted us to know: that the measure of a Truth is the number of persons who act as though it’s meaningful to themselves (such that my election loss was an experiment, challenging a hypothesis about how I’m perceived);
- and second, acting as though one deserves moral condemnation for not acting on William James's critique of useless knowledge -- i.e. I recognize that "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it (once I knew this well but I forgot)" -- as Teiresias failed to get Oedipus to understand.
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> | But I'll learn that lesson ass-backwards, if you don't mind. That is to say: considering that my perspective is the opposite of yours, don't be shocked to see me believing the contrapositive of what's expected of me -- to see me taking it "with certitude, but also socially:"
- I'm proud of my loss, which is resounding evidence that my genius is still misunderstood -- tangible proof of just how far ahead of my peers I am ...
- but I'll also take it socially:
- Remembering what William James wanted us to know: that the measure of Truth is the number of persons who act as though it’s meaningful to themselves (such that my election loss was an experiment, challenging a hypothesis about how I’m perceived);
- ...and acting as though that were true -- as though I would deserve moral condemnation for not acting on his critique of useless knowledge -- acting as though "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it (once I knew this well but I forgot)," as Teiresias never got Oedipus to understand.
| | | This second draft of my Second paper interprets today's referendum as analogous to this community's negative responses to my first draft of this paper. It writes a revisionist history of my first draft, as well as of my Senate campaign: "It failed because it failed to find a thesis in my personal narrative." And because my social web has whispered that it wants to hear that thesis, I'll tell it too. | |
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< | The narrative starts with me going to Eben’s office late last semester, to ask him to let me transfer into his class. He asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, and I told him; and he responded, “Clearly your father’s a surgeon: you were taught to view warm human bodies as cold inhuman flesh. You do not belong in my class; you and I will not get along; I do not want you in my class"; and I said something, and here I am. | >
> | The narrative starts with me going to Eben’s office late last semester, to ask him to let me transfer into his class. He asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, and I told him; and he responded, “Clearly your father’s a surgeon: you were taught to view warm human bodies as cold inhuman flesh. You do not belong in my class; you and I will not get along; I do not want you in my class"; and I said something and here I am. | | | | |
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< | Before I trust you to understand the things I said immediately before and after his comment about my father (who, as is now legendary, is in fact a surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I have always thought myself both blessed and cursed to be among those who are well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire meant only ironically -- that “to understand all is to forgive all;" for the more we learn about the things that harm us, the more we lose our grounds for moral indignation. A great lifestyle if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish. I'm painting stereotypes with broad brushtrokes but this is what I mean: I’m commanded to act as one who believes, that beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding, lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts. I'm commanded to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” -- no matter what I learn about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—that all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by morality. | >
> | Before I trust you to understand the things I said immediately before and after Eben's comment about my father (who, as is now legendary, is in fact a surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I've always regarded myself both blessed and cursed to be among those who are well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire meant only ironically -- that “to understand all is to forgive all" -- for, the more we learn about the Actors that harm us, the harder it is to identify the Actors against whom we want to be morally indignant. Which is great, if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish.
It's a blunt stereotype, but is what I mean by "being Jewish": To be commanded --
- to act like one who believes that beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts.
- to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
- to ignore what I'm learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality.
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< | For all my blessed perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate to make Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but because when they make others uncomfortable, those people criticize me. When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, explaining that I was looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about as a lawyer—I emerged a year later with a list, but I still couldn’t care less whether I ever checked anything off that list. | >
> | And yet, for all my blessed perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate to make Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but because when they make others uncomfortable, those people criticize me. When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, explaining that I was looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about as a lawyer—I emerged a year later with a list, but I still couldn’t care less whether I ever checked anything off that list. | | | So you can understand why, between Eben’s asking why I wanted to be a lawyer, and his telling me that I ought rather to be a surgeon, I said this: “Because I hate myself, and I want power.” I presented the phenotype of the son of Jewish parents, who wanted me to do good and to do well, but who also wanted proof that I would do good and do well.
- Given the dilemmas that parents face, the rational response is to train a son to seem rather than to be.
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- and since their surveillance of us must eventually end too, they conform our visible choices, while still surveillable, towards the trappings of doing well and good.
But the tool of seeming is much better calibrated to identify doing well than doing good --
- just as it's easier for a surgeon to do good for organs but bad for the patient (cf effect of cheap MRIs ( 1 and 2 / my dad's mafioso stroke patient, "I knew something was wrong when I couldn't pull the trigger);
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- or the ease with which a lawyer can do well for the client but bad for society.
And so I, like everyone, was taught to favor living well over living good—indoctrinated to use education to inject myself into power, and to postpone figuring out why I deserved that power until I'd consolidated it. | >
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- or easy for a lawyer to do well for the client but bad for society;
I, like everyone, was taught to favor living well over living good—indoctrinated to use education to inject myself into power, and to postpone figuring out why I deserved that power until I'd consolidated it. | | | | |
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< | Eben understood, and so he forgave -- If by "forgiveness" you understand Jewish forgiveness, the forgiveness of Maimonides, "charity by stealth" -- he indicted my story to my face. This is what his words meant to me: Of course, it’s easier for your Jewish-boy head to find descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, in order to make you a good boy, as it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, _cannot be their sons' moral authorities. Moral authority comes from Rabbis / those who study Torah. Which in a secular era, means, those who purpose by studying truth, to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old._ | >
> | Eben understood, and so he forgave -- If by "forgiveness" we understand, Jewish forgiveness, the forgiveness of Maimonides, "charity by stealth:" he indicted that story to my face. MY STORY: He attacked my story, not me. He attacked my background, my assumptions, my history, my sociology -- EVERYTHING EXCEPT ME. Only that kind of indictment could crack open my precocious Jewish-boy graph-paper brain-cage and tell me what to do. | | | | |
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< | Christian or Jew: if we are secular, we must look to Socrates. We must look to him, and forgive his mild pedophilia, because he was the first, the Big Bang, of secular ethicists. But we have too little time, and too few words remaining, in this century, and in this month of the semester, and in this paper, for me to tell you what sort of Republic I plan to derive for my life— too little time for me to tell you what I said to Eben, that got me into this class. I'm happy to share in person, what I mean by personally deriving a personal "Republic," i.e. a vocation. | >
> | And this is what I heard: it’s easier for your Jewish-boy head to find descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, in order to make you a good boy, as it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, cannot be their sons' moral authorities. Moral authority comes from Rabbis, persons who study Torah. Which in a secular era, means, persons whose purpose in studying truth, is reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old._ | | | | |
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< | If you want an advance idea of what I'm doing, ask yourself this:
Which figure is Plato, and why?
I'm not trying to be cryptic or trivial. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday, and I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at? | >
> | Christian or Jew: if we are secular, we must look to Socrates. We must look to him, and forgive his mild pedophilia, because he was the first, the Big Bang, of secular ethicists. But we have too little time, and too few words remaining, in this century, and in this month of the semester, and in this paper, for me to tell you what sort of Republic I plan to derive for my life— too little time for me to explain how my response to Eben got me into this class. You'll have to ask me in person, what I mean by personally deriving a personal "Republic."
Answering that question has something to do with this: Which figure is Plato, and why? I'm not trying to be cryptic. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday. I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at? To me the answer has a lot to do with what Peter Drucker said about marketing. Which is why I'd like to get a Ph.D. in marketing. | | |
| | | -- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008 | |
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| | | Hi Ryan,
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< | I respect your honest comments. I only added a signature line to the end. Last night I woke up to loud voices from your side of the hall at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have knocked on your door and asked to hear your comments in more detail. | >
> | I respect the honesty of your comments. I only added your signature to the end. Last night, at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time, I woke up to loud voices in the hallway; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have knocked on your door and asked to hear your opinions on my paper in person.
I'm glad you consider my paper "monumentally and pathetically self-serving." It means that I've finally generated both a "narrative" and a "thesis" -- a "personal essay" that's also an "essay." It means we can finally start asking the important questions that constitute revision: how can I IMPROVE the relationship between the "persona" and the "environment" that I chose for him. | | | | |
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< | First, your comments are gratifying, in that they show that I've finally managed to write both an "essay" and a "personal essay." In that sense you're right, my paper is self-serving. | >
> | Every anecdote in a personal essay ought to pursue a common thesis, i.e. ought to advocate a self-consistent and self-reinforcing character construct. So I'm disappointed with myself, to learn that I portrayed myself as "self-serving" only in those paragraphs that describe my response to the election results. The election is just one facet of people's perceptions of me; my classmates don't act in different "capacities" when they're voting for the student senate, commenting on the Wiki, or speaking to me (or not) in the hallway. So if I seem self-serving and arrogant in one paragraph, I ought to seem self-serving and arrogant throughout. | | | | |
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< | For that very reason, I'm surprised that you limit the scope of my "self-serving" behavior to the "extent to which" I comment on my senate loss. Whatever I say "about the Senate election," or about anything else, must be about how people view me in totality, because a election, like a jury verdict, passes judgment on the entire person:
- it's a referendum on how much voters liked, and/or trusted for a job, the entire persona attempted by the Candidate statement
- = it's a referendum on the candidate's entire public persona, not just his Statement
You don't acknowledge that you know this, but you know it, consciously or unconsciously: For example, you identify the "arrogance" in my Senate statement with the "arrogance" underlying my listing of the phonetic pronunciation of my name on Lawnet (literally, "YOR MAA-je-stee," which I guess in some dialects and tongues would come out sounding like "Your Majesty," though I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way). | >
> | Now, I'm not sure whether you'd accept that characterization of me. First you said that what caused you (and by analogy, much of the class) to not vote for me, was specifically my flippant Candidate Statement; but in the very next sentence you said that the "arrogance" in that Statement validated my apparently "arrogant" behavior elsewhere -- e.g. how I listed the phonetic pronunciation of my name on Lawnet. (I guess some dialects or tongues would read "YOR MAA-je-stee" as "Your Majesty," though I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way.) | | | | |
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< | So I say that I'm "learning lessons", but on a second read-through you might find cause to think that I'm not trying to learn "from the election." In fact I wrote this paper because I thought it would be foolish try to do so -- i.e. foolish to try to translate the binary outcome of the referendum (or social experiment, as William James might call it) into an English-language hypothesis. If I tried to do so, I'd be making the same mistake I warned Adam Carlis to avoid in his LSAT poll:
One shouldn't start gathering data until he has convinced his AUDIENCE that he's properly associated [a hypothesis and a method], i.e. [properly associated "X" and "ZERO"],
given that
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- HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say ZERO, i.e. NOT say that [Q] is not true" and
- METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. certain data from the following poll ..."
- [where [Q] is an interesting/meaningful statement]
If you share your hypothesis and method with us after gathering the data, you oblige us to accuse you of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis. | >
> | Whether or not you'd articulate it, you do seem to appreciate, that people judge and act as whole personas, not segmented functions. In this paper, for example, the same persona that "arrogantly" explained why I didn't win a senate seat, also explained how Eben's class is causing me to reconsider why I came to law school. My paper will be a success when my readers, faced by the contradiction between "arrogance" suggested by certain statements and lack of arrogance in others, choose the latter characterization as "true", and treat the former as "ironic." | | | | |
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< | That's why I don't regard myself as competent to explain my Senate loss, and never attempt to do so. (You read the first step of my two-step process, "taking the loss with certitude but also socially," out of context, which abuses my attempt to set out a technique for this paper, i.e. replacing subjective-psychological with empirical-sociological arguments). Instead, in order to extract meaning from the election (whose criticism was binary), I analogized it to my Second Paper (whose criticism was nuanced), since these were written by the same person. The rest of this paper interprets my previous Second Paper in light of those nuanced reactions, which I'm competent to do. | >
> | I don't know how the mechanism works, but I feel that you should have sensed that I neither have, nor CLAIM, insight into what features of my persona influenced the election. I think you made a mistake -- I don't know why you took, out of context, my decision to portray myself with "certitude", with "pride in my genius," when there was an ESSENTIAL second step, "behaving socially." That word sets out technique I use in the rest of the paper, for explaining how Eben's class is affecting my path through law school: I use an empirical-sociological rather a subjective-psychological account. I think that I make it very clear, and I've always made it clear, in everything I write, that I don't give any credibility to "subjective" characterizations or evaluations of intentions. I think that's the bulwark that, in a contradiction, makes ironic any of my putative attempts to explicitly characterize my psychology, e.g. as arrogant. | | | | |
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< | Your comments reflect that you never read those previous drafts, and you also have the disadvantage of not having had a long conversation with me since Legal Methods. I'm therefore not surprised that you interpret my paper as a commentary on my election loss. But I still don't see why you think you're a competent commentator on the outcome of an election. You are competent to comment on why you didn't vote for me. | >
> | The "empirical-sociological" language I speak contains no verb "decide" -- only "obey." That's why I did not try to translate the social experiment (as William James might call the election) into a hypothesis that we BOTH found meaningful. One who shares his hypothesis and method AFTER gathering the data, obliges us to accuse him of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.
- where HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say [ZERO], i.e. NOT say [NOT Q]
- METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. as [biased data from the following poll] ...;"
- [Q] is an interesting/meaningful statement) ...
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< | Instead, you do what I didn't do -- you explain the outcome of the "experiment" in terms of your own "method and hypothesis," i.e the reasons you didn't vote for me. That's fine, I'm glad to hear it. But I'm surprised to be hearing it first, not to my face but in a public place, and justified as representative of public opinion. | >
> | Instead, we will say that I heard a command that I refused to obey, consisting in the following social fact: some of my classmates ask me to like myself less than I currently do." I can't obey that command -- but nor can I command THEM to like me more than THEY currently do. So I changed the subject, sort of: I kept talking about myself, but I analogized the (binary) critique of my Candidate Statement to this community's (nuanced) critique of *my previous Second Paper . By interpreting my previous Second Paper in light of those nuanced critiques (classmates commented on my previous drafts, I incorporated their reactions, their reactions were different, etc. ...), I was able to construct a persona that both I and my classmates could recognize. | | | | |
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< | Unfortunately, you've already cornered the market for redefining the phrase "monumentally and pathetically self-serving." I'll let you go without an epithet. I'll just comment that 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time is a poor hour to be making credible arguments. | >
> | You explained the outcome of the election, the "experiment," in terms of the reasons YOU didn't vote for me -- some phenotype of me that you regard as both "monumentally and pathetically self-serving", and "arrogant." (How altruistic of you to remove "pathetically" from "self-serving", in a later revision.) But I don't see what makes you, or me, or any one person, competent to explain why I was the one candidate out of sixteen not to win.
- It's natural for us all to assume that there existed a social concept of me pre-existing the election;
- the hazard is for persons to conceive of the election as MEASURING, inter alia, that social fact.
- However, it actually CREATED some new social fact, i.e. those persons' willingness to analogize its "data" to past phenomena.
- But WHICH past phenomena?? The election never claimed to measure my social identity; and yet that's exactly the social fact that gets created in its aftermath
- i.e.: the answer held by the public as to "How well we think the experiment measuring Andrew's social traits (e.g. his "arrogance," etc) was controlled" becomes a function of "What values certain advocates want the public to validate, and how badly they want the public to validate it."
In other words, you're competent to comment on why you didn't vote for me. That's fine, I'm humble enough to hear it. Instead, you made a serious misstep, by likening my "arrogance" to a "monumentally and pathetically self-serving" portion of my paper. I regard that as an ad hominem. In an earlier draft of this response, I tried to turn the tables on you. It would have been more mature of me to simply assert that in the context of my own paper, where the power relationship is asymmetric, (search for "In the context of my own paper") I have a special immunity against public, personal attacks. Instead, I'll paraphrase my previous comeback as an empirical-sociological claim: attempts to use the Wiki for psychoanalysis at 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time are poorly calculated to be credible. | | | -- AndrewGradman - 30 Mar 2008 | | | -- JesseCreed - 11 Apr 2008 | |
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Jesse
Thank you for being willing to admit when you do not understand what I write: that's my fault, and hearing you say it is the best form of constructive criticism. It's the writer's sin to not make himself understood (William James and Teiresias again).
I guess this is the lesson I learned:
- One must in some way already be relevant to his readers (e.g. shared election / public "father surgeon" story) before his writing can portray him in a way that they consider relevant ...
- ...just as you need some data (from an election or a poll), before you can craft a message to your voters.
- --> thus the "Senate Election" was a POLL, urging me to change the message in my Second Paper.
-- AndrewGradman - 11 Apr 2008 | | |
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