History and Evidence of a coordinate

When you come sixteenth in a race for fifteen seats, it’s cold consolation to be told, “Don’t worry, it’s just a popularity contest”—as though life were a Family Circus strip. But I don't regard losing popularity contests as a personal defeat. I hear my social web whispering, "take the loss personally, but also constructively" -- and they're right, pragmatically: man, a social construct, must obey his social web.

But I'll learn that lesson ass-backwards, if you don't mind. That is to say: considering that my perspective is the opposite of yours, don't be shocked to see me believing the contrapositive of what's expected of me -- to see me taking it "with certitude, but also socially."

• First, I'm proud of my loss, which is resounding evidence that my genius is still misunderstood -- tangible proof of just how far ahead of my peers I am ...
• and then I’ll take it socially:
  • first remembering what William James wanted us to know: that the measure of a Truth is the number of persons who act as though it’s meaningful to themselves (such that my election loss was an experiment, challenging a hypothesis about how I’m perceived);
  • and second, acting as though one deserves moral condemnation for not acting on William James's critique of useless knowledge -- i.e. I recognize that "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it (once I knew this well but I forgot)" -- as Teiresias failed to get Oedipus to understand.

This second draft of my Second paper interprets today's referendum as analogous to this community's negative responses to my first draft of this paper. It writes a revisionist history of my first draft, as well as of my Senate campaign: "It failed because it failed to find a thesis in my personal narrative." And because my social web has whispered that it wants to hear that thesis, I'll tell it too.

The narrative starts with me going to Eben’s office late last semester, to ask him to let me transfer into his class. He asked me why I wanted to be a lawyer, and I told him; and he responded, “Clearly your father’s a surgeon: you were taught to view warm human bodies as cold inhuman flesh. You do not belong in my class; you and I will not get along; I do not want you in my class"; and I said something, and here I am.

Before I trust you to understand the things I said immediately before and after his comment about my father (who, as is now legendary, is in fact a surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I have always thought myself both blessed and cursed to be among those who are well-educated and highly perceptive. We are both blessed and cursed, you and I, in that we cannot disprove what Voltaire meant only ironically -- that “to understand all is to forgive all;" for the more we learn about the things that harm us, the more we lose our grounds for moral indignation. A great lifestyle if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish. I'm painting stereotypes with broad brushtrokes but this is what I mean: I’m commanded to act as one who believes, that beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding, lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts. I'm commanded to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” -- no matter what I learn about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—that all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by morality.

For all my blessed perceptiveness, I'd never seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate to make Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but because when they make others uncomfortable, those people criticize me. When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, explaining that I was looking to learn what issues I should be concerned about as a lawyer—I emerged a year later with a list, but I still couldn’t care less whether I ever checked anything off that list.

So you can understand why, between Eben’s asking why I wanted to be a lawyer, and his telling me that I ought rather to be a surgeon, I said this: “Because I hate myself, and I want power.” I presented the phenotype of the son of Jewish parents, who wanted me to do good and to do well, but who also wanted proof that I would do good and do well.

• Given the dilemmas that parents face, the rational response is to train a son to seem rather than to be.
• Given that their control over our choices must eventually end,
  • parents first train us to seek things verifiably (call that "language acquisition");
  • and since their surveillance of us must eventually end too, they conform our visible choices, while still surveillable, towards the trappings of doing well and good.

But the tool of seeming is much better calibrated to identify doing well than doing good --

• just as it's easier for a surgeon to do good for organs but bad for the patient (cf effect of cheap MRIs ( 1 and 2 / my dad's mafioso stroke patient, "I knew something was wrong when I couldn't pull the trigger);
• or the ease with which a lawyer can do well for the client but bad for society.

And so I, like everyone, was taught to favor living well over living good—indoctrinated to use education to inject myself into power, and to postpone figuring out why I deserved that power until I'd consolidated it.

Eben understood, and so he forgave -- If by "forgiveness" you understand Jewish forgiveness, the forgiveness of Maimonides, "charity by stealth" -- he indicted my story to my face. This is what his words meant to me: Of course, it’s easier for your Jewish-boy head to find descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, in order to make you a good boy, as it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, _cannot be their sons' moral authorities. Moral authority comes from Rabbis / those who study Torah. Which in a secular era, means, those who purpose by studying truth, to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old._

Christian or Jew: if we are secular, we must look to Socrates. We must look to him, and forgive his mild pedophilia, because he was the first, the Big Bang, of secular ethicists. But we have too little time, and too few words remaining, in this century, and in this month of the semester, and in this paper, for me to tell you what sort of Republic I plan to derive for my life— too little time for me to tell you what I said to Eben, that got me into this class. I'm happy to share in person, what I mean by personally deriving a personal "Republic," i.e. a vocation.

If you want an advance idea of what I'm doing, ask yourself this:
Which figure is Plato, and why?
I'm not trying to be cryptic or trivial. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday, and I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at?

---

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

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

-- JosephMacias - 11 Apr 2008

This paper is fascinating. But to the significant degree to which it refers to the recent senate election, it is monumentally self-serving. Andrew, it is not a matter of misunderstood genius to fail to win an election that you fail to take seriously. I cast six votes out of my allotted 15 in this election: one for each candidate who took it at least somewhat seriously. I am not the only one who disregarded candidates who did not articulate why they sought office. My votes included some incumbents, some non-incumbents (admittedly including myself), but not you, because your candidacy statement consisted almost entirely of one-liners. Funny, yes; enough to knock an incumbent out of office, never. It was not misunderstood genius that lost you the election, it was arrogance. The more I think about this essay, well-written as it may be, the more I am struck by your choice to list the phonetic pronunciation of your proper name on Lawnet as "your majesty."

-- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008

--

Hi Ryan,
I respect your honest comments. I only added a signature line to the end. Last night I woke up to loud voices from your side of the hall at about 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time; had I known that you were commenting on my paper at that moment, I would have knocked on your door and asked to hear your comments in more detail.

First, your comments are gratifying, in that they show that I've finally managed to write both an "essay" and a "personal essay." In that sense you're right, my paper is self-serving.

For that very reason, I'm surprised that you limit the scope of my "self-serving" behavior to the "extent to which" I comment on my senate loss. Whatever I say "about the Senate election," or about anything else, must be about how people view me in totality, because a election, like a jury verdict, passes judgment on the entire person:

• it's a referendum on how much voters liked, and/or trusted for a job, the entire persona attempted by the Candidate statement
• = it's a referendum on the candidate's entire public persona, not just his Statement
  

You don't acknowledge that you know this, but you know it, consciously or unconsciously: For example, you identify the "arrogance" in my Senate statement with the "arrogance" underlying my listing of the phonetic pronunciation of my name on Lawnet (literally, "YOR MAA-je-stee," which I guess in some dialects and tongues would come out sounding like "Your Majesty," though I've never heard anyone pronounce it that way).

So I say that I'm "learning lessons", but on a second read-through you might find cause to think that I'm not trying to learn "from the election." In fact I wrote this paper because I thought it would be foolish try to do so -- i.e. foolish to try to translate the binary outcome of the referendum (or social experiment, as William James might call it) into an English-language hypothesis. If I tried to do so, I'd be making the same mistake I warned Adam Carlis to avoid in his LSAT poll:

One shouldn't start gathering data until he has convinced his AUDIENCE that he's properly associated [a hypothesis and a method], i.e. [properly associated "X" and "ZERO"], given that

• • HYPOTHESIS means "My data will NOT say ZERO, i.e. NOT say that [Q] is not true" and
    
  • METHOD means "I define ZERO as X, i.e. certain data from the following poll ..."
    
    • [where [Q] is an interesting/meaningful statement]
If you share your hypothesis and method with us after gathering the data, you oblige us to accuse you of writing the method to fit the data to the hypothesis.

That's why I don't regard myself as competent to explain my Senate loss, and never attempt to do so. (You read the first step of my two-step process, "taking the loss with certitude but also socially," out of context, which abuses my attempt to set out a technique for this paper, i.e. replacing subjective-psychological with empirical-sociological arguments). Instead, in order to extract meaning from the election (whose criticism was binary), I analogized it to my Second Paper (whose criticism was nuanced), since these were written by the same person. The rest of this paper interprets my previous Second Paper in light of those nuanced reactions, which I'm competent to do.

Your comments reflect that you never read those previous drafts, and you also have the disadvantage of not having had a long conversation with me since Legal Methods. I'm therefore not surprised that you interpret my paper as a commentary on my election loss. But I still don't see why you think you're a competent commentator on the outcome of an election. You are competent to comment on why you didn't vote for me.

Instead, you do what I didn't do -- you explain the outcome of the "experiment" in terms of your own "method and hypothesis," i.e the reasons you didn't vote for me. That's fine, I'm glad to hear it. But I'm surprised to be hearing it first, not to my face but in a public place, and justified as representative of public opinion.

Unfortunately, you've already cornered the market for redefining the phrase "monumentally and pathetically self-serving." I'll let you go without an epithet. I'll just comment that 7:50 Greenwich Mean Time is a poor hour to be making credible arguments.

-- AndrewGradman - 30 Mar 2008

While I have no idea what you're referring to about loud voices in the night, since I was home alone last night and reading your paper because I couldn't sleep, I do agree that 3:30 am after the Dean's Cup is not the best time to offer comments. It is exactly because I, and I assume others, don't know you that well that it matters what your candidate statement says. I don't have an opinion on your "public persona," and you are certainly among the majority in approaching the election facetiously. I only wanted to point out that it's most likely that and that alone which cost you. I find this paper very interesting and exceptionally well written otherwise; I wanted to comment only with regard to the one aspect on which I have commented. It looks like you're moving toward asking for more specific comments; I will be happy to offer them.

-- RyanMcDevitt - 30 Mar 2008

I rarely understand what you write, Andrew, probably because I am not 'listening' at the same frequency as you are speaking or because I am just watching when you do speak. That being said, when you write as lucidly as the prose of this essay, you really demonstrate your ability to be good. And instructive. I do not mean this to be an arrogant or condescending comment, if it comes out so. Indeed, that is precisely the opposite effect that I intend it. From the above, you have a good mind, and I wish I could 'read' it more often, in every sense of that verb.

-- JesseCreed - 11 Apr 2008