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 is 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 what they're saying is true, pragmatically: man, a social construct, must obey his social web.

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 choosing to believe the contrapositive of what you're whispering--to see me taking it "with certitude, but also socially."

• Thus, 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 me 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 my hypothesis about how I’m perceived);
  • and second, acting as though this social disproof were a moral condemnation of my not acting on William James's wisdom about useless knowledge -- i.e. recognizing 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 act like he believed.

This second draft of my Second paper interprets today's referendum as analogous to this community's judgment of my first draft of this paper. It writes a revisionist history of my first draft, and 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.

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.

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 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 self-consciously well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire said 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. By which 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 proximate social and structural position, and the information impacting me about others’ social and structural 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.

For all my life's perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things a mensch should be indignant about. 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, patently explaining to them 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. Given that their control over our choices must eventually end, parents first train us to seek, whatever we seek, verifiably; that's called "language acquisition;" 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);
• or the ease with which a lawyer can do well for the client but bad for society.

Eben understood, and so he forgave -- if you regard as "forgiveness," Jewish forgiveness, the forgiveness of Maimonides, forgiveness by stealth: He indicted that history to my face. And 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 this 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, and those who study Torah -- which in a secular era, means, those whose purpose in studying truth, is to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old.

Christian or Jew: if secular, we must look to Socrates. We must look to him--forgiving his slight pedophilia--because he was the first, the Big Bang, of secular ethicists. And because we have too little time, and too few words remaining, in this century, and in last month of the semester, and in this paper, for me to tell you what sort of Republic I plan to derive for my life— while you wait to for my third paper -- the outline of a derivation of a personal "Republic," by which I mean of a legal voication -- I ask you, Which figure is Plato, and why?

My guess: He's the depressed dude sitting at the foot of the bed. He is depressed because he knows Socrates points to the ceiling, and not a higher realm of existence. Perhaps he thinks he is foolish not to flee.

Anyways, I really enjoyed this paper. It is very honest. I recommend getting a new checklist from an experience that allows you to connect and relate to people from different walks of life. I'll comment more later... I want to think about this some more.

-- JosephMacias - 11 Apr 2008