Watson and race

James Watson, the larcenous claimant to the discovery of DNA is also a racist and eugenicist. How great.

See this recent UK Times story for some charming racism:

... [Watson] is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really", and I know that this "hot potato" is going to be difficult to address.

I've spent many years showing how hard-science cannot teach morality - it's not in its possible ends nor means. Watson, unwittingly, helps me in that goal.

h/t Sullivan and Slate. Pic from here. Backpost finished 2009-11-26.

Kurt Vonnegut & Don Imus

Well Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at 84. This happened the same day that Don Imus was fired by MSNBC (and suspended by CBS) for saying nasty stuff.

The contrast between these two is instructive. Vonnegut was (until yesterday) the most important living American writer - because he was imaginative, knew how to write true satire, and generally he knew right from wrong. He was often compared to Mark Twain - and that's a fine comparison because the two were fine-thinking humorists. As such, even though I often disagreed with Vonnegut's politics, he was a hero to those of us who try to see the world realistically and communicate that realia to others. He was successful while most of us aren't. Hence, a hero.

Seeing Vonnegut a few months ago on The Daily Show was a defining nexus of this moment in time's highest culture. It was like witnessing Einstein meeting Freud (which never happened) or Twain meeting Churchill (which did). True, Jon Stewart and Kurt Vonnegut aren't at the stature of the above four, but we take what we can get.

Then there's Don Imus. I have not listened to the show for any decent length. I first heard of him from a relative, back in the late 80s, who liked the show because Imus told sick, racist jokes. Since that description, I have steered away from anything to do with him. Which was why I was so surprised a couple of years ago when I heard that he was a powerful interviewer of the powerful political elite. Huh? The racist-joke slimeball interviews presidential candidates and NYTimes reporters?!

Naturally, I am happy that Imus has finally been hoisted by his own petard. But the more important question is why he had been able to continue for so very long? Related to that question is: why did this obviously noxious and racist bonehead get caught LAST WEEK for what he has been doing for years?

The same holds true for Ann Coulter. She has been saying unconscionable things for years. Yet she gets smacked down for calling Jon Edwards a bad word. Huh? Especially since, if you've seen the footage, she actually did not call Edwards the fg-word. It was actually a botched joke. [Which, when it's as obvious as it has been in the case of Kerry and Coulter is a valid defense; it also applies to a recent flap over Garrison Keillor and can even apply to Imus's last straw.]

Why does it take so long to catch on to the vile nature of people like Imus and Coulter and why does the tide turn, often, on a small action and not on a grand error?

The same is holding true for the current government, by the way. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc were obviously criminal incompetents from day one. Yet America only figured this out around September 2006. Not after Katrina, not after no WMD, not after the economic policies written by Daddy Warbucks. It was before the Foley scandal, too. It just kinda happened. And the big revulsion - the one that should be in place now - has yet to happen. What I mean is that just as Imus and Coulter are now exposed for being the kind of people I knew they were years ago, so too Bush & Cheney will be exposed... it's this freakish new law of perception... but I don't know how or when it happens.

It does fall under the Tipping Point kind of dynamics, for sure. It's frustrating to me because until the point tips, the slimeball in question is given honor and access. Imus and Coulter were given respect, Bush and Cheney still are, yet when the point tips people will see them and revile them just as I see them and revile them now. Yet my revulsion, before the point tips, is heretical and unacceptable.

This is why it's an irony that Vonnegut dies the day a slimeball is unfrocked. Because Vonnegut saw the truth and was able to tell people about it. Yet his books were often and still are banned and reviled. While people like Imus walked free, Vonnegut's books were even burned. But I, like Twain and Vonnegut, can look at these ironies, inconsistencies and infuriations and find solace in the attempt to tell the truth of it all.

TNR About Bernard Williams

The TNR book review section gushes all over Bernard Williams (the philosopher, not the football player).

This is what I mean when I use the term 'gush:'

"When Bernard Williams died, in 2003, the loss was felt well beyond the refined world of academic philosophy. In a succession of obituaries and affectionate memorial events at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley, distinguished contemporaries from many fields testified to the inspiration he had given them. All spoke of his terrifying brilliance, his dazzling speed of mind and extraordinary range of understanding, his zest and his glittering wit."

Except, uh, Williams was an idiot. I read his facile and paper-thin philosophy as a freshman, in Philosophy 202. My preceptor (who was named Elijah, no joke) could have written the line I quoted from the TNR. And every precept the 19-year-old Styx would tear William's arguments into individual twizzler pieces. Elijah didn't like that.

My counter-Williams insurgency taught me two things that have kept with me till today:

1. I am a halfway decent philosopher,
2. Moral philosophy should not be taught in University.
   

Philosophy is about thinking on your own, not about what well-credentialed idiots have to say. If you are right, and they are wrong, the ideas should stand on their own. Philosophy lives and dies every moment of every day. It lives whenever and wherever there is still the unknown or unknowable; it dies when it's replaced by science.

Remember this about Williams, and academic philosophy. Moral Philosophy, as it's taught in grand academic centers, is on a lower level of sophistication than a High School Yeshiva mussar schmooze.

No surprise, I guess.

Michael Richards Meltdown

I just saw the clip of Michael Richards' horrible screaming meltdown. I stopped watching after 40 seconds because my face started burning with embarrassment. It teaches a bunch of lessons:

1. Richards may be a closet racist (the lynching line is most telling, not the n-word) and that's what a scared racist looks like - which explains all those lynching as well. His reaction was so violent! I wish I could have seen what he was reacting to.

2. If Richards is not a closet racist - and he may not be - then this just shows you that they're right about stand-up being the most frightening of all entertainment. It's just you trying to make people laugh and when you're not good at it, and when you used to be famous for making people laugh, and when people embarrass you by heckling that you're not funny, then Richards' response was the reaction of someone literally scared almost to death. His screams are the screams of a man falling off a bridge. He's that terrified.

Postcript on Derrida

As an anthropology student in a comp-lit dominated department, naturally I needed to read Derrida (luckily my mother, a Comp Lit professor, had a copy in the home). Anyone who went to college with me, and even people in outlying states, heard my voluble tirades against this overwrought con-artist.

His death (the New Republic entitled their obit/study "The Death of the Author") has brought all the penny-ante academists out of the woodwork (myself included) to sound educated by giving an opinon and interpretation of this Frog of One Color.

Today's times has an op-ed by a Williams professor (What Derrida Really Meant) who claims in his first paragraph:

Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, who died last week in Paris at the age of 74, will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines.

Normally I was going to let Derrida's death slide into the inevitable obscurity but that first sentence got me a-raging all over again.

In the top 3 of the 20th Century, eh? I guess if we limit philosophy to things that have nothing to do with reality (and therefore leave out the scientists, psychologists, and statesmen that made more impact - leave out Einstein, Freud, Jung, Feynman) then we still have more important and influential thinkers.

I never thought I'd say this, but Foucault is far more important than Derrida ever dreamed (and did). And I hate Foucault.

Bertrand Russell? John Dewey? Santayana? I guess they didn't have much impact as Derrida... if you're a professor at Williams. But deconstructionism is an invalid philosophy, a philosophical gumdrop in a world that demands bread.

{2009 Pic update: Surreal Derrida from this philosopher pix site. Isn't the internet great!}