Starting my Search for Gaps in the Graph-Paper Grid

When you come sixteenth in a race for fifteen seats, it’s cold consolation to be told, “Don’t take it personally, it’s just a popularity contest”—as though life were a scene from Family Circus. Meanwhile, I hear my social web whispering to me, "take it personally, but also constructively".

I'll do both. But society's perspective being the contrapositive of mine, I'll seem to it to be doing the contrapositive of what it expects of me -- taking it "with certitude, but also socially". That is to say: I can be proud of my loss -- I can treat it (why not?) as resounding evidence of a genius misunderstood, tangible proof of how far out front I am -- as long as, good God, I also take it socially: I must remember, that society measures Truth by observing the persons who claim that it's meaningful to themselves (such that the election shook a theory of how I’m understood), which means I must act as though I regard that Jamesian Truth as meaningful to me -- as though I'll be morally condemned for forgetting that critique of useless knowledge -- as though I remembered, at the last minute, that "Wisdom is a curse, when wisdom does nothing for the man who has it" -- which everyone knows, but also forgets, when he's the object of his own inquiry.

The referendum on my Senate Statement was analogous to this community's judgment of the last draft of this paper. And so I'll write the history of both that draft and my Senate campaign: " Each failed, because I 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 share that too.

The narrative starts with me going to Eben’s office late last semester, to ask if I could transfer into his class. He asked why I wanted to be a lawyer, and I answered; and he said, “You do not belong in my class. I don't know what kind of surgeon your is, but he taught to view bodies as organs, and you and I will not get along." And I said something else -- 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 vascular surgeon), you need to know what came before that meeting, by which I mean, my life up to that point. I've always regarded 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, and all of us, 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 Actors we think harmed us, the harder it is to define boundaries around Actors, such that our indignity knows where to lay its crosshairs. When we discover that our enemies "know not what they do," we have to blame their teachers -- and then their unions -- and then their political system -- and then the repression of the male instinct to urinate on a fire -- the grid gets finer ad infinitum.

Mechanized forgiveness is great, if you’re trying to be a good Christian ... But I’m Jewish. Where by "being Jewish" I mean this: I've been COMMANDED --

• to believe that my social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
• to ignore what I'm learning about physics, biology, evolution, psychology, sociology, and path-dependant accounts of history—because all of these bottom-up accounts are ruled, from the top down, by Morality.
• to ACT! as though beneath the descriptive meanings I’m so adept at finding, there lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which, my father and mother gave me these cursed smarts.

And yet, for all my blessed perceptiveness, I've never ever seen a single one of these meanings. What a curse! -- To be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant. To hesitate before making Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but they make others uncomfortable, and those people then attack 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 -- I emerged a year later with a list, but I couldn't care less whether I ever checked anything off that list -- and even today, I still have no idea what order I'm to go about crossing things off.

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 easy for lawyer to do well for the client but bad for society.

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 that story to my face. MY STORY: not me. He attacked my background, my assumptions, my history, my sociology -- everything EXCEPT ME. Only that kind of indictment that could crack open my Jewish-boy graph-paper precocious brain-cage and tell me to do something -- something, anything, just not what I was doing before.

And this is what I heard: Of course, your Jewish boy head prefers finding descriptive truths rather than normative truths; your father taught you to be this way, to make you a good boy, because it made him a good surgeon. But fathers, though perhaps moral authorities, _cannot be their sons' moral authorities. Moral authority comes from Rabbis, persons who study Torah. Which in a secular era, means, those whose purpose in studying truth, is 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. You'll have to ask me in person, what I mean by personally deriving a personal "Republic."

My answer to that question has been as unsteady as my answer to this enigma: Which figure is Plato, and why? I'm not trying to be cryptic. My father surprised me by sending me this print for my birthday. I've lost sleep looking at it. What the hell is David getting at? To me the answer has a lot to do with Peter Drucker's definition of marketing. Which is why I give a shit about marketing.

---

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

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

Jesse
Thank you for being willing to admit when you do not understand what I write: that's my fault, and hearing you say it is the best form of constructive criticism. It's the writer's sin to not make himself understood (William James and Teiresias again).

I guess this is the lesson I learned:

• One must in some way already be relevant to his readers (e.g. shared election / public "father surgeon" story) before his writing can portray him in a way that they consider relevant ...
• ...just as you need some data (from an election or a poll), before you can craft a message to your voters.
  • --> thus the "Senate Election" was a POLL, telling me that my Second Paper sucked.

-- AndrewGradman - 11 Apr 2008