we hates him, preciousssssss!
Apr. 10th, 2006 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ricardienneSo it seems that girls are supposed to write, or to make up stories. At least, there is a certain tradition of this being the case. (This is actually kind of related to what I wrote yesterday.) Is this because girls are inherently prone to fancy whereas boys are inherently realistic? Of course! Not to mention that girls are designed for quiet pursuits like reading and writing, boys for activities like physical play*. That's why Muscular Christianity had to come along: all of that studying scriptures and being kind to thy neighbor was just too feminine for real men.**
*Early medieval noblewomen were much more likely to be literate than their male counterparts, in fact.
**This I am not making up.
One would think that we would not find this sort of thing on the editorial page of the New York Times. But between John Tierney's periodic "women are actually happier to cook, clean, and raise children while their husbands support them" columns and David Brooks' "we are ruining America's boys by forcing them to become girly and intellectual when they clearly aren't meant to be" ones, one is uncertain what decade we are in already.
Yesterday, Brooks took up a new thread in this argument that was strangely familiar to someone who has been getting increasingly more furious at him for the last year or so:
Virtues and Victims
By DAVID BROOKS
(comments by me in non-italics, after the grand tradition of sporking)
All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
If you wander through the thicket of commentary that already surrounds the Duke lacrosse scandal, the first thing you notice is how sociological it is. In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes.
"This whole sordid party scene played out at the prestigious university is deeply disturbing on a number of levels, including those involving gender, race and the notion of athletic entitlement and privilege," a USA Today columnist wrote.
"The collisions are epic: black and white, town and gown, rich and poor, privilege and plain, jocks and scholars," a CBS analyst observed.
The key word in the coverage has been "entitlement." In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.
The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players "license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."
It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.
In other words, it might have been a coincidence that the victims were black and female.
Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.
If you were looking at this scandal through that language, you would look at the e-mail message one of the players sent on the night in question. This is the one in which a young man joked about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.
You would say that the person who felt free to send this message to his buddies had crashed through several moral guardrails. You would surmise that his character had been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and that he'd entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.
You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?
These are good questions. But asking "why do these young men have such base impuslses," is also a good questions. I find it disturbing that Brooks assumes that the impulse to rape is a normal one in males, one that must be restrained by an external morality. If you'll forgive a segue onto one of my favorite subjects, that is sort of the problem that Angelo finds in Measure for Measure: "in my heart the strong and swelling evil/Of my conception. The state, whereon I studied/ Is …Grown fear'd and tedious." Repressing the "baser impulses" didn't quite work, there, in the end.
The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
This is where it gets ridiculous. For one thing, "several," to me, means more than two but less than five. This puts us in thhe '60's, '70's, and '80's, when I, admittedly, was not yet born. Nevertheless, I seriously question that timeframe as appropriate. So, "boys will be boys" and we should recognize that unless we beat character into them early, we'll just have to live with the consequences. And I do have to wonder if, in this mythical time in higher education, it was a good thing that "educators cared less about academics." And "chivalry." Well, I suppose one can say that chivalry was invented to civilize the brutal male knight, and thus the male in general. I still cannot believe, however, that he is actually saying, "so men are basically evil scum who can't control themselves on their own." This is ridiculous and demeaning, really. Possibly I only have this opinion because I am an inveterate moral relativist or something, but frankly, Brooks comes out trying to take the blame away from the individuals much more than the side he's attacking does. It's not their fault, poor dears, if society has let them down.
Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.
"A godlike and a demonic side," eh? I don't think that's been current since, what, the Manicheans? And the Albegensian Crusade was in 1205. I am also not entirely clear on what he means by "the deathless sinner within." Aren't the wages of sin death?
Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.
But in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe tried to steer readers back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul. Wolfe's heroine is a modern girl searching for honor in a world where the social rules have dissolved, and who commits "moral suicide" because she is unprepared for what she faces.
Many critics reacted furiously to these parts of Wolfe's book. And we are where we are.
I just... OH MY GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU DAVID BROOKS?
He wants to go back to the good old days when character mattered and boys were taught to be men. But the implication of chivalry is inequality. The corollary of these gloried 1920's college professors are all-male colleges.
*Early medieval noblewomen were much more likely to be literate than their male counterparts, in fact.
**This I am not making up.
One would think that we would not find this sort of thing on the editorial page of the New York Times. But between John Tierney's periodic "women are actually happier to cook, clean, and raise children while their husbands support them" columns and David Brooks' "we are ruining America's boys by forcing them to become girly and intellectual when they clearly aren't meant to be" ones, one is uncertain what decade we are in already.
Yesterday, Brooks took up a new thread in this argument that was strangely familiar to someone who has been getting increasingly more furious at him for the last year or so:
Virtues and Victims
By DAVID BROOKS
(comments by me in non-italics, after the grand tradition of sporking)
All great scandals occur twice, first as Tom Wolfe novels, then as real-life events that nightmarishly mimic them. And so after "I Am Charlotte Simmons," it was perhaps inevitable that Duke University would have to endure a mini-social explosion involving athletic thugs, resentful townies, nervous administrators, male predators, aggrieved professors, binge drinking and lust gone wild.
If you wander through the thicket of commentary that already surrounds the Duke lacrosse scandal, the first thing you notice is how sociological it is. In almost every article and piece of commentary, the event is portrayed not as a crime between individuals but as a clash between classes, races and sexes.
"This whole sordid party scene played out at the prestigious university is deeply disturbing on a number of levels, including those involving gender, race and the notion of athletic entitlement and privilege," a USA Today columnist wrote.
"The collisions are epic: black and white, town and gown, rich and poor, privilege and plain, jocks and scholars," a CBS analyst observed.
The key word in the coverage has been "entitlement." In a thousand different ways commentators have asserted (based on no knowledge of the people involved) that the lacrosse players behaved rancidly because they felt privileged and entitled to act as they pleased.
The main theme shaping the coverage is that inequality leads to exploitation. The whites felt free to exploit the blacks. The men felt free to exploit women. The jocks felt free to exploit everybody else. As a Duke professor, Houston Baker, wrote, their environment gave the lacrosse players "license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."
It could be that this environmental, sociological explanation of events is entirely accurate. But it says something about our current intellectual climate that almost every reporter and commentator used these mental categories so unconsciously and automatically.
In other words, it might have been a coincidence that the victims were black and female.
Several decades ago, American commentators would have used an entirely different vocabulary to grapple with what happened at Duke. Instead of the vocabulary of sociology, they would have used the language of morality and character.
If you were looking at this scandal through that language, you would look at the e-mail message one of the players sent on the night in question. This is the one in which a young man joked about killing strippers and cutting off their skin.
You would say that the person who felt free to send this message to his buddies had crashed through several moral guardrails. You would surmise that his character had been corroded by shock jocks and raunch culture and that he'd entered a nihilistic moral universe where young men entertain each other with bravura displays of immoralism. A community so degraded, you might surmise, is not a long way from actual sexual assault.
You would then ask questions very different from the sociological ones: How have these young men slipped into depravity? Why have they not developed sufficient character to restrain their baser impulses?
These are good questions. But asking "why do these young men have such base impuslses," is also a good questions. I find it disturbing that Brooks assumes that the impulse to rape is a normal one in males, one that must be restrained by an external morality. If you'll forgive a segue onto one of my favorite subjects, that is sort of the problem that Angelo finds in Measure for Measure: "in my heart the strong and swelling evil/Of my conception. The state, whereon I studied/ Is …Grown fear'd and tedious." Repressing the "baser impulses" didn't quite work, there, in the end.
The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That's why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
This is where it gets ridiculous. For one thing, "several," to me, means more than two but less than five. This puts us in thhe '60's, '70's, and '80's, when I, admittedly, was not yet born. Nevertheless, I seriously question that timeframe as appropriate. So, "boys will be boys" and we should recognize that unless we beat character into them early, we'll just have to live with the consequences. And I do have to wonder if, in this mythical time in higher education, it was a good thing that "educators cared less about academics." And "chivalry." Well, I suppose one can say that chivalry was invented to civilize the brutal male knight, and thus the male in general. I still cannot believe, however, that he is actually saying, "so men are basically evil scum who can't control themselves on their own." This is ridiculous and demeaning, really. Possibly I only have this opinion because I am an inveterate moral relativist or something, but frankly, Brooks comes out trying to take the blame away from the individuals much more than the side he's attacking does. It's not their fault, poor dears, if society has let them down.
Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis.
"A godlike and a demonic side," eh? I don't think that's been current since, what, the Manicheans? And the Albegensian Crusade was in 1205. I am also not entirely clear on what he means by "the deathless sinner within." Aren't the wages of sin death?
Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.
But in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," Wolfe tried to steer readers back past the identity groups to the ghost in the machine, the individual soul. Wolfe's heroine is a modern girl searching for honor in a world where the social rules have dissolved, and who commits "moral suicide" because she is unprepared for what she faces.
Many critics reacted furiously to these parts of Wolfe's book. And we are where we are.
I just... OH MY GOD WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU DAVID BROOKS?
He wants to go back to the good old days when character mattered and boys were taught to be men. But the implication of chivalry is inequality. The corollary of these gloried 1920's college professors are all-male colleges.
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 12:15 am (UTC)He dragged Measure for Measure into this editorial? OH NO, he didn't! Wierdo.
No one should have to have extra decency and ethics lessons drilled into them. The very fact that some boys behave in a criminal manner is another kettle of fish. We shouldn't celebrate criminal behavior in athletes and try to normalize it in men's behavior patterns. Its a sign that our society is broken.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 01:47 am (UTC)He didn't. I did. But he brought in thinly-veiled original sin, so I figure anything goes at this point.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 02:03 am (UTC)Original Sin. A lot gets filed under that and thereby swept under the carpet.
I still say, stop reading Brooks like I did. You will be happier. I could never decipher his ramblings anyway. He is a sign that the Times is a bit of a joke now. If you want to read real news in the Times, check out the travel section from time to time. Matthew Gross writes satirical and pointed travelogues about current hot spots. He wrote about the Paris riots (the muslim riots back in Dec) and the land grab in Cambodia.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-11 02:11 am (UTC)I remember reading you on Matthew Gross a while back…
I like Maureen Dowd, usually (her book wasn't so great, but her columns are pretty funny), and I tend to trust Paul Krugman.
I usually at least skim Brooks, because there's a bit of a family vendetta against him, and it gives me something to talk about when I call home.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 08:16 am (UTC)Times = stupid
no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-12 11:03 pm (UTC)Heehee.