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Media Rerum

I'm picturing three scenes we have in common, in which my use of the English language was an antagonist:

• the senate election, where I finished sixteenth and last;
  
• your responses to a previous, poetic draft of this paper;
  
• and Eben's excoriation of me in his office last semester.
  

I wanted to use this paper to identify this common language problem, but I'm finding that I haven't got the writing talent (gasp!) to do it justice. So I'll describe just one of those scenes; but I'll also charcterize the symptoms that are plaguing my ability to properly express myself, in words I still can't make explicit.

As you know, I went to Eben's office last semester to ask him to transfer me into this class, and he asked why I wanted to be a lawyer.
I told him, and he said: “I wonder what kind of surgeon your father is, that you grew up learning that humans are arrangements of organs. We won't get along. I don't want you in my class. No."
I responded, and he wrote a note to the registrar, and here I am.

But you may not be aware that this scene comes at the middle of a larger story. For you to understand how my words triggered Eben's inquiry into my father's surgical specialty (which happens to be vascular), you need to know what came before those words, 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: “to understand all is to forgive all." The more we learn about the Actors we think harmed us, the harder it is to define boundaries defining Actors to put within the crosshairs of our moral indignation. When we discover that our enemies "know not what they do," we have to blame their education; but their educators also knew not what they were doing -- and you can see how blame flees forgiveness all the way back to Creation.

Which is a great outcome, if you’re a Christian ... But I’m a Jew. Using these terms as ideal types, I mean by Jew the child who's been taught -- COMMANDED --

• to believe that his social position, and the information impacting me about others’ social positions, can never be “arbitrary,” --
• to ignore what he's 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, his parents gave him these cursed smarts.

And yet, for all that blessed perceptiveness, I've never ever seen a single one of these meanings. And that's my curse -- to be apathetic towards things that should make a mensch indignant.

• I hesitate before making Holocaust jokes, not because they make me uncomfortable, but they make others uncomfortable, and those people then attack me. What do they have, that I lack, that's making them indignant?
• When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee -- 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. Even today, I still have no idea what order I'm to go about crossing things off. The only indignity I feel is against myself.

I presented Eben 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 AROUND me. Which was the only 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.

He indicted my society, but I took it personally, and this is what it meant to me:

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.

But to coexist in a pluralist society, we need common authorities, and the strongest ones are secular. The story of Socrates becomes our Creation myth -- the Big Bang of secular gestures towards justice.

Why did Eben write that note to the registrar, based on my response? We'd have to know everything about Eben, and about everything else that followed that meeting. We would have to derive a new Republic. But we have too little time, and too few words remaining, in this paper, and in this month of the semester, and in this century, to have that conversation. We get busier every year. And so I'll postpone asking you to identify people you don't identify with -- at least, until my writing skills improve enough for me to identify something that our lives have in common with the scene in that picture.

If you're still confused, it's not the idea's fault, but my failure to express it. We should talk again soon.

-- AndrewGradman - 13 Apr 2008

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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 removed your first paragraph, which was about a phrase I've since deleted -AG]

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 admitting when you don't understand what I write: It's the best form of constructive criticism -- it's my sin not to make himself understood. Your saying it, adds meaning to a formerly meaningless rambling.

-- AndrewGradman - 11 Apr 2008