Democratic Authority (Mostly Small-Scale)

"We elected you, and we can diselect you." —

Member of Chicago Grammar School Club to

President of the Club (me,  mid-1950s)

“And this took place in the United States, a

culture that educates its children against

blind obedience.” — Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

on Milgram obedience experiments, in Ethology:

The Biology of Behavior(1970: p. 448; ch. 18)

Part of the lore of US warfare in Iraq is that the neoCons et al. who devised it didn't plan much for the aftermath in part because they firmly believed that the default setting — the universal ideal — for human government is what we in the US vaguely call "democracy." Get rid of oppressors like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and voilà! soon, very soon the society is moving toward becoming Denmark or even the greatness of America. Similarly for the disintegration of the USSR and Warsaw Pact — and, for a while, it indeed did look like a number of countries would “have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” might actually expand. 

That Big Idea didn't hold up well, which did not surprise those who studied the development of actually-existing societies we call, still very loosely, democratic. That's mostly because the range of what we (loosely) call "democracy" does develop and has social and economic and cultural roots, roots that may not go down as deep as we believe — but it needs those roots.

I'm not going to deal much with Big Ideas, though there is an idea here: by age 20 I knew that democracy is far from natural and the general culture does not do a good job teaching it.

Back in high school Civics — and in grammar school before that — back in a time and place where one had to pass an exam on the US and State Constitutions and governments to get a grammar school or high school diploma — in Chicago in the mid-1950s, Mr. James Connelly taught us in Civics that the United States was a federal republic, where sovereignty rested in the People, who established a constitution giving authority to a government of elected and appointed officials, officials who then ran the government but served the People. That was our official ideology, our small "r" republican doctrine, and I believed it and figured most Americans believed ... except —

Except there was that memory from back with my grammar school club and the doctrinally ambiguous challenge to me, personally, "We elected you, and we can diselect you." Okay, "potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu" in a formula I'd later learn from Hannah Arendt and have driven home in street demonstrations: as Mr. Connelly said, the People always retained sovereign power, from which they conferred authority  which they could take back. Except that my grammar-school classmate had questioned my authority precisely because it had been given to me by him and the other members of the club. The very limited authority of club officers was something he understood and figuratively owned and ... therefore, it seemed didn't see it as very binding.

Weird. We were taught and told and, well, indoctrinated that legitimate authority came from the People. The kid back in high school accepted — willingly and perhaps too eagerly — the authority of parents and teachers and others he had no say about, but resisted even highly limited peer authority over himself that he himself had granted.

The old “consent of the governed” bit wasn’t working out, and my fellow American youngster preferred authority over him to be built into the system and pretty much based in age and status and other criteria beyond his control. I saw that, felt it a bit as disrespect, and then did what most of us most of the time do when dealing with contradictions and what I much later learned to call cognitive dissonance: I mostly ignored it and moved on.

Mostly, but the experience stuck, and moving on included high school and college fraternities where I served a term as secretary of each and used the office to rewrite portions of our constitutions and make sure the guys debated the matter and voted on it. Get them to "buy in" as we would later say by exercising their power over our organizing documents, acknolwedge the authority and feel the worth of the group by participating in governing the group.

My college fraternity chapter in the 1960s, though, offered additional opportunities. At least back then, and on our campus, pledges lived in the house, which offered ... well, some pretty obvious opportunities. Our pledge-training (sic) policy was laisse-faire through the class of 1965: laisse-faire combined with occasional strong punishments for screwing up (“PT,” “sweat sessions”). The class of ’65 had problems, and it became clear we, the fraternithy Chapter, were doing things wrong.

So a few of us checked out how parts of the military handled training, and in my course work I was also studying some relevant anthropology. We went over to a system of “little things”: rules for minor behaviors, none of which individually worth rebelling against but all of which together were practice in accepting the Chapter’s authority.

It worked. 

Usually it worked, and in one case that impressed me, with a guy in the class of ’66 I’ll call Terry. 

Now, a couple of upperclassmen in the chapter were outright geniuses. Terry wasn’t, but he was brilliant, going on to Harvard Law after graduation and not long after that doing some pro bono work that established some important law. Me? Well, an eminent Medievalist, after a couple or more gin and tonics once corrected some self-deprecating remark I made with, more or less, “No, Rich; you’re bright. Not brilliant, but bright” — and that’s about right. I was also a house officer when Terry pledged, and he kind of almost sort of respected my intelligence. He was smarter than I was or am — and as ... let’s say as firm in his opinions as I — but I had more experience; and as ambiguous as we arranged for pledges to feel about their status, he could figure out I outranked him. And the one time he screwed up (under the rules we’d set up), I was the one who quietly, privately, but in some detail, clarified for him that he was less clever and generally estimable than he thought. He was furious while being chewed out, but he submitted to it. 

We became friends, and one night after he initiated, and we were talking in my room, I said I really had to get to sleep and said good night, and he responded, “Good night, Mr. Erlich” — and then proceeded to pound his fists into the walls, while I said, “We got you! We got into your head!” 

As we had: I was a house officer, and when Terry was a pledge he called me to my face “Mr. Erlich” and threw in the occasional “sir.” (We hadstudied the military and some ideas on child-rearing of the traditional, though non-abusive, sort.)

Little rules, fairly easy to remember, very easy to obey, none worthy of rebellion — but often just there, frequently, calling for obedience and functioning to instill, figurative drop by figurative drop, some acceptance of the authority of the chapter.

I helped set up the program, but with a condition for my participation, one necessary for my integrity as someone who had issues with authority, even when I was in authority.

Between the end of Informal Initiation (“Hell Week”) and formal, ritualistic initiation, the guys undergoing initiation cleaned themselves up and then had this especially liminal period — I saidwe’d looked at some anthropology — marked by time alone in a quiet room, sitting for their Pledge Test. The test covered the usual quasi-useful history of the fraternity and such, but had one and only one question they had to get right, and keep taking the damn test until (sometimes with coaching) they did get. I had insisted that they answer the question, “What is the rationale for the pledge rules such as?”, and here some were listed. 

To initiate they had to figure out that many of the rules were arbitrary and intentionally so. If they studied during study hours that was in part because we told them to study, but also in part common sense. If they ordinarily used the back door to the house and the back stairs — that was onlybecause we told them to do so.

Part of the goal with a fraternity (beside and along with more serious partying) is to control to a fair extent where we lived: at least being able to paint a room the color we wanted and set rules for behavior. For that we needed pledges to go from being trained to accept authority of those above them in a hierarchy to active brothers — full citizens, so to speak — who would accept consciously the authority of the constituted group as group, and of peers they’d elected. We needed them to sit in a circle of approximate equals as a chapter and accept the authority of rules they’d help make.

And there was nothing inevitable or all that natural about the process, and it didn’t always work even for a small fraternity chapter, with well-schooled if not necessarily educated guys, who lived in a Republic with an official policy of popular government and official democratic ideals and vocabulary.

Note the official. About the time Terry was learning to call me “Mr.” and throw in the occasional “sir,” Stanley Milgram was conducting his problematic experiments on Obedience to Authorityand demonstrating how easy it is to get obedience where there’s mystique, in the Milgram case the mystique of “Science” and an authoritarian acceptance of rank. And Milgram et al. did that even “in the United States, a culture” far less than Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought “that educates its children against blind obedience.” We are a culture that trainsmany in obedience, to those with real power over us — as in the ability to help or hurt us — but also to those with the right mystique.

Fraternity chapters are short on mystique. And the moral here, if you’re still with me, is that one of the obstacles to achieving democratic-republican ideals is that (statistically) normal humans are like that kid in my grammar school club with little respect for authority he understood and had granted — even if all too willing to obey people just there, over him in a hierarchy over which he has no power. N = 1, proves very little, and not more with N = 75 or so for my fraternity chapter over a couple of years; but these small experiences were enough to get me accept the possibility that even Americans really aren’t that big on democracy or republicanism but are susceptible to confident fanatics like the Taliban, or “strong-men” like Saddam Hussein or authoritative bullies like Donald Trump, even when those strong-men/bullies have only the most limited charisma. 

We need more teaching of Civics and teachers like Mr. Connelly. And we need more parents and teachers and administrators and coachesand other older folk more often stepping back and letting young people function in organizations of the kids, by the kids, and for the kids — even when the kids may seriously mess up. We need to provide training starting very young in choosing which authority and authorities to accept, and to prefer authority based in the ideal of republics with liberal-democratic aspirations. 

US School Dress Codes

The admirable NPR discussion show 1A recently had a discussion title, "When School Dress Codes Ban Students’ Bodies." The discussion elicited a lot of comments. Here is mine (lightly edited).

For many years back in the last third or so of the 20th c., the first assignment in my writing courses was "Clothes" ("Write about what you know about; write about what you care about"— and, oh boy, my students knew about clothes). What many of my students most wanted to write and talk about was high school dress codes. Here are some discussion questions we started out with.
=================================

Discussion/Opening Questions:
(1) John T. Molloy [in Dress for Success] says that "Dress codes can work." If you've been places with dress codes—have they worked? If so,
How have they worked? For whom? To what ends? If authority figures have given you different justifications for dress codes than Molloy gives, which justification(s), if any, do you believe? How could you test the theories?
(2) With "code" in the sense of "a set of rules for affecting behavior and/or allowing communication," there were dress codes at your high school, and there are codes at Miami U. at Oxford (MUO). At your high school, who set the rules? How were they enforced? At Miami, what rules have you inferred?
(3) Molloy finds college students prejudiced about clothes; is this true? Are you(se) more prejudiced than high school students or, from Molloy's comments anyway, business executives?

=================================

High school girls' having to kneel so adults in authority could judge the length of their dresses is mentioned in Jerry Farber's satiric essay from 1967 that you can look up under his name and "The Student as ...": "In some high schools, if your skirt looks too short you have to kneel before the principal in a brief allegory of fellatio." Farber's analysis was that dress codes are part of the larger function of American schooling in general to teach Obedience to Authority. What Farber missed in 1967 was that there are always social rules and that the key question are Who makes them, and How are they enforced? At the Oxford, OH, campus of Miami University, groups of students made the rules for their groups and enforced them through usually subtle, sometimes not, peer pressure. The strictness of student rules was clear in the shifts over time from backpack carrying over both shoulders to over one shoulder and than back to both shoulders. I counted 99/100 students obeying the rules, and a student tested the theory by wearing his backpack over both shoulders when the rule was one shoulder. He got looks but elicited a comment only when he buckled the waist straps: *that* was going too far. The one-shoulder rule was robust enough that a male student risked life and limb obeying it while riding a high racing bike in a strong wind next to a busy highway.

Authority: Academic and Other (8 Feb. 2014)

"… you will respect my authoritah!" — Eric Cartman

            In Joe Haldeman's classic SF/Vietnam-War novel The Forever War (1972 f. — the composition dates are complicated), there's a dialog between newly-minted Major William Mandella and Colonel Jack Kynock, Mandella's "Temporal Orientation Officer" (it has been a long war, involving moving humans through the galaxy faster than light, so time within the novel also gets complicated).
            Relevant here is Kynock's discussion with Mandella of Mandella's psychology, about which Kynock may know more than Mandella, since he's seen Mandella's profile, which is too highly classified for the eyes of a mere major. Mandella questions his own competence for command, and Kynock tells him that, actually, Mandella does "have a certain potential" for leadership. "But it would be along the lines of a teacher or minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll made a hell of a bad officer unless you shape up" (opening of part IV, "Major Mandella").
            That is, "shape up" from the point of view of the Army.
            I found this dialog interesting on more than esthetic grounds. I had been a member of both a high school and college fraternity, had considered a military career, and I ended up teaching. The fraternity experience — the college part at least — I'll weave in and out of this essay. My potential military career story starts with my taking two years of high school ROTC, and then quitting in part because I had stopped growing at 5'2" and, at least at that time, I was two inches too short to be an officer in any of the military services of the United States. I was simultaneously, however, two inches too tall to be "4F" and "unsuitable for military service": so I still had to take two years of college ROTC, face getting my ass drafted and sent to Vietnam, and couldn't even be a cadet platoon sergeant, 'cause it'd look silly to have a platoon march with so short a man in a visible position. I did not have a good attitude toward the University of Illinois ROTC requirement.
            Still, I appreciated getting introduced to history in college ROTC, and spending a few hours a week in a quasi-military context was useful for my fraternity work. I could advise new-initiate active brothers to be alert in ROTC before they dealt with pledges; new initiates, I advised, should imitate the regular Army officers and NCOs and avoid acting like the cadet officers: i.e., they should be polite and confident and not assholes on their way to being fragged by their own troops — although a US-led hot war in Vietnam with fragged second-lieutenants mostly came later. (Not to say that a variety of unfriendly fire bringing down over-eager second lieutenants was something new with Vietnam, but "fragging" as a term was new.)
            Anyway, I took note of the behavior of regular Army officers because I was and am somewhat like William Mandella, but just somewhat; Mandella may be a nicer person than I am — and Joe Haldeman is a much nicer person. In part, I did want to impose my will on other guys, though surprised when I got away with it.
            A new initiate once asked me, "'Lich, what would you have done if one of us pledges hadn't obeyed you?" I paused and said, "Oh. (beat) That never occurred to me." And then I waited another beat until the irony became obvious, and I laughed and admitted to mild amazement each time I was obeyed. The trick, I explained to the guy, is to give an order courteously and sounding like it never crossed your mind that you'd be told to fuck off. And then I passed on that advice to emulate regular Army officers and avoid acting like the cadet variety. (The eventually fragged Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House [1978] had real-world antecedents.)
            So from the frat angle I was interested in authority, and also as a new student of history and just beginning student of human behavior. Older boys and young men are fairly easy to order around, but they're mostly used to taking orders from their parental-age elders. It takes a bit of doing to condition pledges to accept authority from other guys pretty much their own age and additional effort to get active brothers to accept the authority of people they live with, know, and have elected.
            I was intrigued that pledges would take my orders and actives (mostly) follow the rules; and when we had to come up with a new pledge policy after one particularly disastrous semester, I worked with the group devising new policies, even doing a bit of research.
            And, what the hell, I was also interested in my own psychology since I got off as much as the next guy — or almost; we had a couple or three really weird brothers — ahem, I was interested because this side of downright pathology I got off as much as most on the "S" part of the old frat-lodge S&M fun and games.
            As the 1960s wore on though, and as I started my teaching career, my concerns got more serious.
            With the 1960s wearing on, so did the Vietnam War; and, more personally, I saw violence much less deadly but much, much closer to home — I was in Chicago for the riots of 1968 — and I started reading on violence and on authority, most especially Stanley Milgram's experiments from 1963 f. studies of, as stated in the title of his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority.
            Less sensationally, I found myself "behind the big desk" in classrooms and in authority, and uncomfortable.
            I had no problem with imposing my will on pledges if I could: I never ordered them to do anything really wrong (for which the next part would not be justification), and they really did have the choice to say "fuck you" to me and follow that up with "and just fuck it!" and depledge. There was strong social pressure to stick with pledging, and moving would be inconvenient; but it could be done.
            All the courses I taught when I started teaching were required courses, and if my students dropped my section, there could be bigger inconveniences than moving from a fraternity into a dorm: like not getting into another section and slowing down their "satisfactory progress toward the degree" and, in some cases, putting in danger a scholarship or a draft deferment.
            More was at stake, and giving a low grade offered me no straight-forward Thomas Hobbesian "sudden glory" or Marquis de Sadean kick from imposing my will on — as in harming — other people. From my high school fraternity on, the bigger kick for me was to indirectly "impose […] ideas on other people," to get them to do what I wanted them to do, by convincing them to do it.
            Or getting them to believe the truth of my interpretation of … whatever.
            I wanted the students to respect and accept my authority as a teacher, but my authority, as someone who knew the material and could help them learn it and pick up some handy skills (like writing and critical thinking).
            Do note my arrogance here: I wanted to be respected for my authority, for what I knew and could do and to teach. I wanted respect for my personal authority, a variety not given me and enforced by the University and the State, but authority totally mine. I did not want subservience from students because as "instructor or record" I would assign each a grade.
            First off, subservience from students as students kind of disgusted me. I hadn't gotten subservience from pledges in either my high school nor college fraternity, and by the time I started teaching it was "been there, done that" for getting obedience. More important perhaps, in the classroom the bureaucratic "authority" of the grade (etc.) undermined my authority as a scholar and teacher and intellectual. I couldn't be sure if I'd convinced a student, or if the student went along with my ideas just to suck up.
            I suspect most of the students also couldn't be sure. Certainly, one guy said in class, looking a little shaken, "I'll write whatever it takes to get an 'A' …; I guess that makes me kind of a whore."
            Uh, yeah.
            I'm not a Christian or a Platonist, and I do not celebrate Mind over body — or even separate the two; but if it is wrong to prostitute one's body for a grade, to suck up to an instructor physically, it is also wrong — if more socially and academically acceptable — to prostitute one's integrity by pretending to agree when one isn't convinced.
            Now there's no problem if a good Christian student starts off an essay with a phrase like, "In a secular, materialist (godless and probably damnable) reading …" — and goes on to apply that approach to a literary text or an issue in history or a problem in evolutionary biology. Indeed, it would be unethical for an instructor to downgrade for such an opening: one can insist that a student know something or other, not that a student believe. As John Stuart Mill stated in a particularly strong illustration of the principle, "[…] there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist in the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief in them." Similarly, it would've been okay if one of my devout Freudian instructors insisted on my handing in a rigorous Freudian reading of, say, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, provided s/he had no problem with a brief cover note noting that I found ideological Freudianism, let's say unpersuasive (let's not say in addition, at least not on a cover letter, "and pernicious as clinical psychology and a little creepy").
            Haldeman's Major William Mandella is a better man than I am because he would want "to lead from empathy, compassion" as a primary motivation. I approve of empathy and compassion, but I'm a bit more into the arrogance of thinking I have something to say — obviously, since I write essays — and as a teacher I was pretty sure I had useful things to teach. That is the sort of authority I wanted acknowledged. I wanted not so much to impose my ideas on my students or anyone else but to have those ideas respected: listened to, considered, thought about, and respected enough to challenge.

            I know and knew that if my teaching didn't lead to credits and grades and a diploma, that I would've had precious few students and soon no job — and might've gotten punched out on my way to be fired. Still, I didn't like that kind of external authority because it undermined authority I that is — so long as my mind holds — intrinsic to me.

Grammatically Said ≠ Worthily Said, or Well Said (11 Aug. 2014)

           One day early in my career as an English teacher, a student at a tutorial on his essay said to me, "You know, for a guy so far Left in politics, you're a real conservative when it comes to grammar." I asserted in mostly mock indignation, "We are talking here, Sir, of a matter of style and rhetoric, and in cases of style and rhetoric, Sir, I am not a conservative; in such matters, I, Sir, am a reactionary!"

            I think he had ended not only a sentence but his opening paragraph with a preposition, and my complaint wasn't about grammar — a preposition is a perfectly grammatical thing to end a sentence with — but the stylistic point that he'd wasted a strongly-stressed climax position on a not-particularly-exciting function-word.

            Like most college-level English teachers, I had some training in linguistics and scientific grammar and had been perhaps especially fortunate to not have had writing rules shoved down my throat K-12, so I started teaching writing blissfully unaware that there was, e.g., some absolute prohibition against splitting infinitives (e.g., as I split "to have" above). I also didn't know that writers were forbidden to use "I" and got sincerely confused when my students wrote "It could be said that" when the normal construction is "I think."

            I ended up doing a little spiel on "It could be said that 'The moon is made of green cheese' — obviously, since I just said it." I noted that "I think" is pretty much an unarguable assertion — it'd be stupidly arrogant to tell you that you didn't think something — but "I think" is a handy locution and fine to use to hedge a bit (now and then) or, if stated emphatically, to give your take on some issue.

            My students taught me that "schoolmarm grammar" was alive and doing ill in 20^th-century high schools, often enforced by instructors of both sexes who were younger, cooler, hipper, and otherwise less schoolmarmish than I. So I added a section to my initial class handout listing "Writing Superstitions (Corrected)" and once got a small group of my colleagues to take out an ad in the school newspaper offering cash prizes to anyone who could find a current academic style sheet that supported such rules.

            No one collected, although Stanley Milgram once indicated that an industrious researcher could have dug up an old Psych style manual that forbade "I" and "we" — and that was why his initial report on his once-famous experiments on obedience had many passive-voice/deleted agent locutions — but more on that below.

            For now I will just pronounce the formula that I am not now nor (to the best of my knowledge) ever been a grammar Nazi, if, for no other reason, I was and remain too much of an intellectual snob to show off such ignorance.

            Still.

            However.

            But — but however much I'm willing to mess around with odd paragraphing and sentence fragments and starting even paragraphs with conjunctions, I do get persnickety about the ethics and politics and lesser but still important implications of writing: rhetoric is the art of ethical persuasion, and far from everything grammatically said or written is worthily said or written. Or, more commonly, far from everything grammatical is sensible and well-advised.

            So this much in favor of one kind of language conservatism.

            Most basically and least grandly, language needs schoolmarms and grammar Nazis for a kind of inertia that new locutions have to overcome. It also needs satirists, who can be even more reactionary than the schoolmarms. Words like "mob" and "debunk" started out as neologisms, and they stuck with the language despite the purists because they are useful. Slang from the 1920's like "23 skidoo" and "the cat's pajamas" — whatever the hell those meant — are no longer with us and unmourned. Ditto for "hep" and, I suspect, its hardier ancestor and descendent "hip," and numerable-but-why-bother expressions that entered the gantlet of pedantry and satire, had a run, and then got cut down and buried.

            A bit more important — if still vocabulary, not yet real grammar — there was merit when my third grade, or so, teacher rhetorically asked a classmate who'd asserted love for ice cream, "Would you die defending ice cream?" As the Usual Gang of (Wise) Idiots at MAD Magazine pointed out, "'Love' is overrated," "'Like' is underrated," in a couple of senses. Using "love" when "like" is quite sufficient devalues the meaning of "love" and reinforces the tendency in modern American communication TO FREAKING OVER-HYPE AND OVERSTATE EVERYTHING!!! (And I'll throw in for younger readers: The people who communicate with you only on Facebook are barely your acquaintances, not your friends, not unless you can call them up and have them take you to the airport or emergency room.)

            Similarly with some distinctions both pedantic and significant.

            It sounds weird to my ear when people say that something "begs the question" when they mean "invites" or "raises the question." To me, "begging the question" is a logical fallacy I never really understood, and I don't know why normal people would use the expression. Still, the new usage is no big deal, and if "that begs the question" comes to mean "raises the question" and removes old-style "begging the question" from colloquial conversation, that's fine with me.

            It's a significant issue, though, if "disinterested" comes to mean just "uninterested" and eliminates "disinterested" as an quick way to say "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage." We need the concept of "disinterest" if we're to talk easily about, say, journalism: journalists can't and shouldn't be objective in dealing with human stories — viewing human beings as objects to be observed is a step on the road to horrors — but journalists can try to be fair and accurate and, well, disinterested. And demanding objectivity is another instance of FREAKING OVER-STATING EVERYTHING: if Fox News really were fair and balanced that would be quite sufficient; they needn't try for godlike, or demonic, distance and detachment.

            Similarly, if with fewer dangers, is forgetting the flippant reminder, "Media [and data as well] are a plural noun." It's not ungrammatical to lump together all the various media into one vast singular "The Media"; it is, however, misleading and unfair. There is no vast singular Media out there, and Fox News isn't The Daily Show or The Nation or The Atlantic or PBS or NPR or graffiti. And if you have ever dealt seriously with data, you know that they are often messy and sometimes contradictory.

            The examples about, though, are just words: vocabulary, not grammar — a general principle John McWhorter stresses in his provocative Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. McWhorter raises a grammatical example I want to look at: using "they" as a gender-neutral, 3^rd-person singular pronoun, as in "Each student should bring their book." This is my example and a somewhat loaded one; McWhorter gives examples from literary English that will sound unexceptional to almost any speaker of English. I give this one because I served on a committee of two assigned to make rule-writing by Miami University's Student Affairs Council more gender inclusive, starting with rules that had "The student … he (his)." On this issue, we declined to use "The student … they/their" or "he and she" or "his and her" or "s/he" or any such locution on the grounds that gender shouldn't be an issue at all since our rules shouldn't be talking about "The student" to start with. "The Student" is an abstraction, a type, and The Student never shows up in nature. Even with the homogeneous undergraduate student body of Miami U at Oxford — dismissed by Playboy, MUO folklore saith, as "male models and cheerleaders with straight teeth" — the people who showed up in class and on campus were individual students.

            Thinking in categories is inevitable if we're to think at all, and careful typological analysis can be useful; it's done in two of my favorite books: Eric Hoffer's The True Believer (obviously dealing with a type), and Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression, which deals with ideal models of behavior abstracted from nature and specifically identified as abstractions. Still, most of us are rarely very analytical and many of us get sloppy in our thinking and speech and writing; types easily slip into stereotypes, and stereotypical thinking is usually not useful and often much worse.

            (Imagine a transition here.)

            I'll end by returning to Stanley Milgram and "I" and "we" and the passive voice; for, verily, as much as any schoolmarm grammarian bashed knuckles for using "I," my MS-Word Grammar Check comes down with less violence but equal dogmatism on the passive voice. And here I'll somewhat go along with Word Grammar Check, however often I disobey its commands.

            Milgram should have avoided the passive voice in his initial article on "Behavioral Study of Obedience" (1963), as he was to come to avoid it in his brilliant book-length study Obedience to Authority (1974). The passive voice is grammatical in English by definition: there are rules in actual English grammar — the grammar we use to generate sentences — that transform active voice statements into the passive. Passive-voice sentences, however, are longer and come across as weaker than active-voice, so there are stylistic reasons to prefer the active voice, but the issue I want to look at is ethical.

            Somewhere in, I think, her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt describes bureaucratic tyranny as government "in the passive voice, deleted agent." In modern tyrannies, people talk as if things just happen; "an edict comes down." During US military adventures in Vietnam, we were told — "The village was destroyed." The passive voice, deleted agent denies agency, denies responsibility.

            Milgram's experiments very much had to do with destructive obedience and with denial of responsibility. The ultimate occasion of his study was the obedience of German soldiers and others during World War II — many others — in slaughtering men, women, and children upon command.
            Milgram's experiments themselves raised ethical questions about deceiving subjects and pushing them to do, as far as they knew, awful things to a helpless man: inflict (they thought) increasingly high-voltage shocks, shocks that, if actually inflicted, could have killed the man.

            Milgram's presentation of these experiments may not be the last place in the world for the passive voice, deleted agent, but they are in that ballpark. And when I asked Milgram — in very bad taste on my part, at a party — why he'd used such locutions, the answer was that "That was how it was done."

            That was how it was done back in 1963, in a journal in psychology, whose editors, one would think, would have some command of the commonsense psychology that recognizes that human beings with human psyches do stuff. By 1974, the rules had relaxed enough that Milgram could write a book using "I" and "we" — and by the time MS-Word developed its spelling and grammar checker, the passive voice was to be eschewed.
                   (Although the Checker let me get away with "eschewed" where "avoided" would do the job — and still retain the little grammatical joke.)

            What the grammar Nazis are often complaining about is people not using the prestige form of the language and more often complaining about other people's not using the rules they worked hard to learn to obey. That's okay, so long as the grammar police aren't teaching English or copy-editing my writing or making children feel bad about their use of language. The word cops are, however, often misdirecting their efforts.

            There are still literal Nazis out there and other fanatics to be opposed, and if one's medium of opposition is language, they (sic) should be writing letters for Amnesty International and attacking instances of serious mischief in communication: the sort of significant offenses George Orwell attacked in an essay I'll recommend once again, "Politics and the English Language" (1946).

            And every now and then we language conservatives can attack a silly new expression or two and see if we can laugh it into oblivion. 

"Yes," "No," "Just Say 'No'" and Sexual Responsibility (29 Aug. 2014)

"our courteous Antony,

Whom ne'er the word of 'No' woman heard speak"

— His aide and friend Enobarbus on Mark Antony,

in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra

            I think most of my readers will agree with the formula, "No" means No; "Yes" means Yes; "Maybe" means maybe. Now I'd like you to think about the implications of that formula for young Americans, and especially how we educate and train young Americans.

            First off, if "Yes" is to mean "yes," people have to ask yes/no questions, and other people must be free to answer "yes" or "no." As one of my feminist colleagues put it (I'm quoting from memory), "I tell my students that asking once isn't harassment; it's what he's supposed to do. If he repeats himself after you've said "No," that is harassment. The first one is a freebie."

            And, second off, it's a freebie for everyone, or at least everyone in a voluntary encounter between (or among) people of the age of consent. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra is from the early 17^th century, and it's set shortly before the Christian era. Even back then, they had the concept that at least a good looking, imperial-class stud would be asked for sex by women, and he might, in theory, say "No." Antony won't, but (a) undesirable women probably couldn't get near him, and (b) by the mid-20^th century guys had developed the concept of male slut, which we can apply to this vision of Antony, as in the rhetorical question, "Is there anything you won't fuck?!"

            Antony won't say "No," but he could, so his "Yes" is significant.

            And Enobarbus seems convinced that women who want a man might very well ask, which is more significant.

            When I was in high school in Chicago around 1960 and guys would say, "Hey, she really wants me," we could respond, "If she really wanted you, she would ask you."

            Women and older girls, then, need to be able to say "Yes," or their "No" isn't totally convincing. Women and older girls need to be free to ask, and if they do not ask, then guys should assume that these gals might be willing to have sex with them but aren't exactly, let's say, champing (or chomping) at the bit.

            If "Yes" means yes and all, then the old idea of the coy young maid is a bad idea.

            The Machiavellian Duke of Buckingham tells the even more Machiavellian Duke of Gloucester — soon to become King Richard III — that when offered a crown Richard should "Play the maid's part: still answer nay, and take it" (Richard III 3.7.51; through-line 2252). Or as Shakespeare sexistly puts into the mouth of a young woman, "[…] maids, in modesty, say 'no' to that / Which they would have the profferer construe 'ay'" (Two Gentlemen of Verona 1.2.54-55; through-lines 207-08).

            So let us say an emphatic no to the gushy old romantic ideal of the shy maid who cannot say "Yes" but really wants "it." And equally no to the old romantic ideal of the pleading lover who keeps pressing his case; the repeatedly-rejected wooer always was a pathetic schmuck with no sense of dignity, but now we can, and should, see him also as an incipient stalker.

            "No" means no, damn it. Give her your number, and tell her that if she changes her mind to call. Ditto for "him" and all the various variations.

            I would not go so far as to push the case that people engaging in sex should ask permission for each stage of the encounter — each "base" in the sports metaphor — or I won't make that case unless they both get off talking dirty. After the initial "Yes," most couples can get along on body language and monosyllabics like "no," "stop," or "Oh, yeah!"

            (Sometimes, though, it's simply necessary to pause and "Use your words." I have no idea what sort of squeal or grunt I made, but a woman once courteously stopped what she was doing and asked, "Did that hurt?" And I had to think a moment and say, "I … I'm not sure. Do it again.")

            Initial saying of "Yes" or "No" and, if "Yes," some basic decisions — "Your place or mine?" "Do I need to buy condoms?" "You're sure your creepy roommate is out of town and took her iPhone with her?" — initial negotiation, even if quite brief needs some physical and aural space for communication. This is an additional reason why hook-up bars designed for noise and sensory overload are abominations on the face of the Earth. Indeed, some of the customers are in such places precisely because serious talk is impossible, but that's no reason they should be encouraged, or no reason beyond financial gain.

            So: One problem area in serious sex-ed for America's young people is more or less in the political Center and Left: squishy Romance and the subspecies of feminism that discourage  talking about sex, especially guys' directly asking older girls and women for sex. (My colleague had to tell her students that "The first one is a freebie" because other people had told them that any request for sex that turned out not to be desired was sexual harassment.) This problem area overlaps with the Right, and the "Just say 'No'" American puritanical tradition.

            Old-style, capital-"P" Puritans can be seen as generally orthodox Christians, who believed human beings are essentially souls and that the crucial issue is whether those souls are saved or damned. So far as we have any control over our salvation — and we may have none — traditional doctrine taught resistance to the soul's enemies: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

            Souls, in traditional Christian theory, are lead into evil by the bodily sins of Lust, Sloth, and Gluttony, and by the Worldly/Demonic sins of Wrath, Envy, Greed, and Pride. Puritans emphasized the threat of the Flesh, and today many pious Americans put little energy into condemning wrath, envy, or greed. And, with one crucial exception, today's puritans have nearly forgotten that Pride is a sin.

            Young Americans are taught morality mostly in terms of their sexuality and secondarily as an imperative to obey the laws or social conventions governing what drugs they may put into their bodies — variations on that battle against Lust, Sloth, and Gluttony. "Pride is the root of all evils" only when it takes the form of intentional disobedience to adult authority. "Just Say No" means "No" to peers, not to parents, ministers, or the law.

            One student at my university used puritan doctrine to explain the tendency of our students to "Get drunk, get stupid, get laid," without planning and without protection, and certainly without negotiation. One can get drunk, get stupid, get laid, and then get repentant and get absolved and get welcomed back into Holy Church. One can get wasted and sin and remain "a good kid."

            The fleshly sins are deadly, but easily forgiven. Unforgivable, she argued, would be the rebellion of an unmarried 19-year-old's planning to get laid, buying condoms, having sex, enjoying sex, and responding to older-adult accusations with "Yeah, I got laid—So? 'Sex is dangerous'? Skydiving is dangerous! Anything worth doing is worth a little risk to do! You take sensible precautions, which I did."

            If the question is obedience and the soul's salvation, not bodily health, equally unforgiven would be a 19-year-old who says, "No, we didn't smoke pot; we drank dope tea, talked, and took a bus home as a group. Tolerate it." Far better, in terms of obedience, for teens to sneak tequila and beer Friday nights, get drunk, get wild, and meekly repent on Saturdays.

            All the more so if the 19-year-old in question was a young woman. Again, when guys in high school would say, "Hey, she really wants me," we could respond, "If she really wanted you, she would ask you." More exactly, she would ask back then only if she had a lot of guts, and even after graduation, as a legal adult, it would take guts to tell her parents, if asked, "Actually, I planned the date, and the sex."

            Things have gotten better with educating gals on sex. I'm not so sure there's been progress with guys about sex or with either group on the closely-related matter of alcohol and other drugs. When I was growing up, fathers and "older guys" would instruct boys in sexual protocol (e.g., "bathe; take your socks off; spend the night; cook her breakfast"); and both sexes often got informal training in how to "drink like ladies and gentlemen." Bingeing and puking on your date was bad form, to say nothing of a bad introduction to asking for sex.

            Nowadays, chastity training discourages all nonmarried people from asking for sex. "Abstinence Only" precludes discussions of sexual hygiene and sexual manners — and helps makes mutual bingeing, not negotiation, a primary way for unmarried teens to get sex, however sloppily and dangerously.

            "Just Say No" undermines the believability of "No means no" and contributes to alcohol abuse, sexual assault, and morning-after charges of sexual assault. Under "Zero Tolerance," teaching your kids how to drink and throw a responsible party can get adults arrested.

            Under "Abstinence-Only" regulations, straight-talking, honest drug education — "This is what the drug will do for you, this is what it may do to you" — is forbidden.

            "Just Say No," "Zero Tolerance," and "Abstinence Only" cut off debate and forbid discussing relative risks and risk reduction.

            Puritan policies make excellent sense in terms of saving souls and training obedience, but in secular, democratic terms, they have high costs.

            Unless ruthlessly enforced, such policies contribute to teen-pregnancy, venereal diseases, and abuse — as opposed to learning responsible use — of alcohol and other drugs, and of other people. When ruthlessly enforced, Abstinence Only/Just Say No train for submission to power, not ethical choice.


            You want to reduce sexual assault on campus and elsewhere? After you've arrested, tried, convicted, and put in prison a whole lot more of the serial rapists responsible for much of the problem, start working on the cultural issues. Tops among those cultural issues are the people who haven't thought through "Yes means 'Yes' … (etc.)" and have implemented policies they see as solutions but are very centrally part of the problem.