Hi, I'm Rich, and I'm a Simple-Minded Literalist

After their fashion, they were kind of cute: picture the Macbeths at age 18, or Claire and Frank Underwood of House of Cards as high-school sweethearts. Now reduce their evil by two-thirds and their cunning by half, and you have the two students in my career who took the time and exerted the effort to do some really nasty critiquing of my teaching.

Or one aspect of my teaching, personality, and way of being in the world.

What angered them was that I was a simple-minded "Literalist" and I had marked down the young woman of the pair for using words inexactly in her writing in a College Composition course (at Miami U, Oxford, Ohio, some time in the late 20th century).

This story would be totally irrelevant to anyone except to me and the couple if it weren't for "journalist Salena Zito’s analytical couplet on the surprise winner of [US Presidential] Campaign 2016 [... that] The press took Republican Donald Trump 'literally, but not seriously' [...], whereas Trump’s supporters took him 'seriously, but not literally.'"

The quotation above is from Charles Lane in an opinion piece published 16 November 2016 in The Washington Post, and Zito's differentiation between taking Trump "literally" and "seriously" has become a commonplace — and we're on our way to that degree of familiarity with Lane's advice that we should take Trump both literally and seriously.

I'd expand that advice and recommend taking every speaker with power both literally and seriously, while allowing, and allowing a lot, for the possibilities of such figurative language as hyperbole — and allowing for plain old bullshit and lying.

One example I gave was a coach demanding "one hundred and ten percent dedication to the team." I suggested pointing out to the coach that his demand was clearly figurative — there can only be 100% dedication to anything — but also excessive. He obviously wasn't demanding 110% dedication, but he was demanding a blank check, so to speak, and it would be well if team members got him to clarify by pointing out they had demands on their time — school, work, family — that were also legitimate and pressing and make a counter- offer of a very generous 30% dedication. 

There's a good chance that even star athletes would be thrown off the team — I once won a bet with some students that coachly authority would trump winning and that even a tennis coach would purge a disobedient player — ahem, there's a good chance any uppity high school or college players trying to negotiate dedication would be cut, but the point would be made.

If you can help it, it don't allow other people to make unlimited demands on your time, not unless you're a bonded pair and you really, really love and trust the other party. 

WORDS MEAN, goddamn it, and if "I want 110% dedication" doesn't mean "110% dedication," it does mean an open-ended demand that you should be very careful in allowing. 

Later in my career, I was going to learn the paradoxical Daoist teaching that no one lies. The paradox is resolved with the very sensible idea that if you listen carefully enough you can figure our what the person is really trying to say — but I'm pretty sure you have to be a Daoist sage to do that reliably.

Where we have trouble taking people literally or seriously is with pathological liars, of which I've met another couple. More exactly, I dealt with, let's say, a congenital liar in senior year of high school and was one among a number of people who had to deal with a pathological liar in college.

The congenital liar was a guy — we'll call him "Todd" — somewhat on the periphery of my life but still a friend and kind of classmate. (Chicago schools divided up by semesters, and he graduated the same year I did but a semester earlier.) Anyway, he was someone I was friendly with and had no reason to doubt him when he said he was taking ... let's call her Dolores to the prom. I did have reason to doubt him when Dolores asked me why I hadn't asked her to prom, and I told her because Todd said that she was going to the prom with him, and she said "Huh?!" and then some stronger things, and I went off looking for the first real fight since I was seven. Todd won, but I owe him this much: he was my introduction to the idea that some people would lie for the hell of it; that even when there was no reason to lie, some people might.

More powerful blows to my worldview came in college, when I learned that some people could behave with literal malice: i.e., that they would hurt someone not for any profit for themselves, not for revenge, but just to hurt someone they disliked. (In literature, I learned of people who just hurt other people — period; Shakespeare's Iago says he hates Othello, but maybe he doesn't; he may just despise everyone). More to the immediate point, I and the guys I lived with learned about pathological lying.

After his fashion, he was a cool guy: president of his pledge class, and, he said, working his way through school, including working at the job we offered him at the house, work beyond his chores as a pledge. And he was just cool, a smooth talker, personable — and an obsessive, compulsive, pathological liar who could make you think you'd gone crazy because he could assert obvious untruths with more assurance than most of us could talk about what was right in front of us.

After our experience with this guy, we had a new rule for our chapter: A pledge caught in lies was "depleged," and the burden of proof was on him to be repledged, and if he couldn't do that we'd pay whatever it cost for him to move out of the house and elsewhere. An honest, plain-speaking character in Shakespeare's King Lear describes the most contemptible of the villains in that play in terms of, "Such smiling rogues as these," who "Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain" that bind together people and society. Our cool, personable, pathological pledge wasn't that bad, but he was on the continuum.

When lies become constant, words no longer really mean, and that way lies social chaos.

So in good, simple-minded fashion, let us take seriously what people say, especially people with power — and start with the literal meaning of words and then work through the dangerous and wonderful complexities of language. 

And, while we're at it, let us hold the President of the United States to standards of exactness a competent teacher and pretty nice guy like me would hold college frosh to — and to standards of honesty a bunch of undergrads ca. 1962 could figure out they had to hold themselves to in order to live together even as a group of 50. If Mr. Trump says he'll torture prisoners and kill the families of terrorists, and we elect him president — which under the Electoral College system favoring small states and rural folk we did — then we've written that figurative blank check for actions up to the rack and more elegant means of torture, and the killing of children. This isn't "110%": torture and the murder of children (and the torture of children in front of their parents) are indeed possible: we can be sure of that since they have been done. And if someone recommends doing such things, and you empower him to do so, well that is exactly what almost half of the US electorate have done.

WORDS MEAN, damn it: often in complex ways, but they do indeed mean.

Trump and Truth

il n'y a pas de hors-texte […] — Jacques Derrida

Translation: "There is no outside-text."

It is usually mistranslated as "There is nothing outside the text"

by his opponents to make it appear that Derrida is claiming

nothing exists beyond language […].

 "Of Grammatology", tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1976.

(Original French published by Éditions de Minuit,

Paris, in 1967, as "De la grammatologie"), 158-59 [...].)

  

            

            In attacking Donald "Trump's relentless assault on truth," Eugene Robinson in a column in mid-June 2016 assumes truth's existence. I agree with Robinson that truth exists and that Trump undermines the concept — and thereby undermines a crucial bond for human society.

            Trump was born in 1946 and is in part a product of his time, in this case in ways that can be clarified by talking with academics — especially academics in the humanities — who were on university campuses in the latter part of the 20^th century, and by reading such books as Eric Hoffer's thoughts on fanaticism in The True Believer from 1951 and, preeminently, George Orwell's 1948/49 masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

            In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the spokesman for a totalitarian Party tortures the protagonist and tells him "Reality is inside the skull […]. You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature" and the triumph of the will of the Leader and power of the Party determines truth.

            This idea was cleaned up from the mid-1960s on to become "strong social construction": the idea that not just people's views of reality are determined by their cultures but reality itself is constructed "inside the skull[s]" of people interacting.

            And that academic idea trickled down or "osmosed" up or over to politicians, to where Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times could talk about a Karl "Rovism [that] posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all," and you can get Rove claiming "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality [...]."

            As Karl Rove would say, Robinson is part of "the reality-based community"; Donald Trump is not, and that makes him far more dangerous than more traditional liars.

------------------------------------------------

Reference: Eugene Robinson, 

            "The challenges in covering Trump’s relentless assault on the truth," The Washington Post 16 June 2016. <http://tinyurl.com/jehgsjz>

            "Trump’s relentless assault on truth," The Ventura County Star, print edition 18 June 2016, page 9B; on-line 17 June 2016. <http://tinyurl.com/hxegczm>

Questions for Trump (and, God Knows, Other Big Shots): Follow-Up for Radically Unanswered Questions

I think I have a technique for dealing with Donald Trump (and, God knows, others) when they utter words in response to a question — "in response" in the sense that the question was a stimulus and the words they produced a response — but not a response in the sense of answering or otherwise dealing with the question.
      First occasion, that interview: "Mr. Trump {or other person}, it's okay to decline to answer a question or tell me I asked it poorly and rephrase it for me. Now ..." and here the interviewer or moderator briefly restates the question.
      Second occasion:
           (in a sincerely concerned voice) "Mr. Trump, are you all right?"
            TRUMP (or other of his ilk): "What do you mean 'Are you all right?!' Why are you asking me, "Are you all right?!!"
             "Well, this is the second time I asked you a question and you answered another question, or just went off on some tangent. This isn't my area, but you could suffering from what's called 'dissociated utterance,' and it can be a symptom of serious problems. So if you don't want to answer the question or don't have an answer now, I'll move on. If you can't answer the question for some neurological reason ...."

And here Trump blows up and/or stomps off, and reporters and others search the web and find that the full old shrink cliché was "dissociated schizophrenic utterances."

Now it's far less likely that Trump is schizo than that he is, as Jeet Heer has asserted, "a bullshit artist," except he's not especially artistic at it. He's a very rich person and a celebrity, who grew up rich, and probably hasn't had to experience a lot of people telling him that if he really thinks he's responded to their questions. Anyway nowadays  he's either started to believe his own B.S., or he's got deeper problems. Or both: If I found myself losing my moorings in reality, I'd definitely fall back upon my own talents in the bullshit line.

Anyway, it will probably do no good to point out the contempt implicit in bullshitting people in serious public venues. Suggesting that macho, Big D, big hands Donald Trump, who prides himself on telling it like it is sounds like he has a mental illness where he can't speak straight, a disorder for which he should be pitied — now that might get him responding to questions seriously. Minimally, it should give our (post)modern practitioners of Yellow Journalism a juicy topic: just which mental problems should we infer from Trump's use of language (and that of Sarah Palin and others)? And should borderline __________ (whatever) disqualify someone from the presidency?

Cynicism, Stoicism, and "The Prisoner's Dilemma" (Sort of) [25 February 2014]

            It was undoubtedly part of some program under the over-arching theory my friend Dan Prickett used to call "Cliché of the Month Management"; anyway, some time more or less in the late 1970s or early 1980's, I found myself in a faculty workshop where we played a very unscientific variation on the psychology-experiment/game-theory game, "The Prisoner's Dilemma."

            In our exercise, participants were paired off — I found myself (possibly significantly) with a guy from the Miami University business school — and told that we'd both been arrested and were held in the same cell and allowed to talk until we were figuratively separated and each told we'd better cooperate and testify against the other. If neither of the pair "defected" and cooperated with the arresting authorities, we'd both go free for lack of evidence. If Prisoner 1 defected and agreed to testify against Prisoner 2, he would go to jail for a brief time, and Prisoner 2 would be sentenced to prison for a significant hard time; and, necessarily, vice-versa. If both defected, both would go to jail for a medium-length sentence.

            The details in sentencing differed from the classical "Prisoner's Dilemma" (or "Prisoners' Dilemma"), and I may misremember the variation, although I'm sure that we played the "iterative" form — where we played a number of rounds — and had the tweak that the two prisoners could negotiate between "interrogations."

            When our workshop group was asked for questions, I asked the Game Masters to tell us the specifics of the charges. They refused. I asked if we'd be allowed to consult a lawyer. No. How long might we be held without formal charges? They wouldn't say. Were we actually guilty of the crime — or did the authorities at least think we were? No comment.

            We started the game, and I refused to defect, and my partner defected.

            When we talked over the round, I noted my questions of the Game Masters and that their answers indicated that we were obviously in some sort of Kafkaesque situation and should be faithful to one another since we obviously couldn't trust the authorities.

            Next round, he betrayed me.

            In our conversation following that round, I explained that if he trusted the authorities enough to cooperate, then he should trust them to free us if we both remained silent; hence it would be in his best interest to stay loyal.

            And he defected again.

            And again, and again, for all the iterations we played before getting on to whatever the hell the lesson was for college teachers, scientists, and scholars in late-20^th-century southwest Ohio.

            Now if I had had my wits about me and had watched more old prison movies as a kid, I would have stood up after the third round or so, and interrupted the game by calling out in a controlled but loud voice, "Hey, screws! Send over a medic. My cellmate just accidentally fell on a shank fifteen times!" (and let the other participants in the exercise laugh and tell the Game Masters what happens in prisons to narks, ratfinks, stool pigeons, or whatever slang was appropriate for their generation ["nark," surprisingly, goes back to at least 1859 or 1860, but was making a comeback].)

            I didn't have my wits about me and was prudent enough to keep quiet in the, let's say, "directed discussion" that followed the exercise. I'd already pissed off my seniors and betters by asking those questions outside the Game.

            Writing now, with the advantage of hindsight and absolutely nothing to lose, I'll tell why I didn't defect.

            It is not because I'm a nice person or because I liked the ratfucking nark — in the Game — from the business school.

            My most respectable reason is that among the traditions I grew up in there was a touch of the capital "C" Cynic and the Stoic (but without the masochistic bullshit of the small "s" kind of "stoicism" that was classically associated with the macho-militaristic, slave-exploiting, boy-exploiting noble-folk of Sparta). I believed with the Cynics that "Virtue is its own reward," 'cause it ain't reliably gonna get any other; and I respected the idea of the Stoics that the only thing over which human beings have real, significant control over is our own integrity.

            In a Kafkaesque trap in a holding cell under some sort of weird tyranny, about all one has is one's integrity, and this one was going to hold onto mine and not have my behavior controlled by the decisions of, say, some small-c cynical asshole from the B-school who'd betray me and probably his mother, at least in a game.

            Okay, maybe that position isn't all that respectable, ethics-wise, but it's probably more respectable than my willingness to be stubborn when I had nothing serious to lose: I was naïve enough to be confident I was going to get promoted because I deserved it, even if I disrupted some pet project workshop project of some administrator showing, "Hey, I read a book!" (for a complementary theory of management from Dan Prickett).
            Cheating a good deal and applying common sense and real-world experience to the world of the Prisoner's Dilemma Game — I wasn't going to trust the in-Game authorities, ca. 1980 and certainly wouldn't trust them now, not when a lawyer friend has pointed out that real-world cops and prosecutors feel free to lie to suspects.

            And ca. 1980 I certainly wouldn't have trusted the social psychologists who put together such games. This was before strong rules on "The Ethical Treatment of Subjects," and lying by experimenting psychologists et al. was accepted and habitual.

            So I was something of an outlier, as we say nowadays, for "The Prisoner's Dilemma" of three decades and more ago, and I wish I'd pushed the point then and more forcefully since then.
            Stoicism and Cynicism are pretty sterile in themselves, but there is much to be said for "inner-direction," or pure cussedness, as part of one's repertoire, and there's much to be said, in outrageous situations — especially when they're just part of a game — for maintaining integrity.

            Along with Hamlet himself, Shakespeare' Polonius is a good example of a man of much schooling who doesn't think all that well. "[T]o thine own self be true, / And it must follow […] / Thou canst not then be false to any man" is a glaring non sequitur: If you're truly a scoundrel being true to yourself requires being false to all sorts of people. Still, the deeper joke both in the play itself and more generally is that old fart Polonius is correct: "This above all: to thine own self be true" is good advice to his son Laertes and usually good advice, period.

            Job standing up to a God grown vicious toward him affirms, "Till I die I will not put away my integrity from me." The rest of us wimps can at least pretend to integrity in a game — or realize that central to real-world freedom is occasionally breaking out of the mandated games and setting up new rules.