READY FOR GRADING
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Media Res

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 my paper to identify this common language problem, but my writing isn't yet strong enough to do it justice. Instead, it characterizes the symptoms plaguing my expressing myself in a way that I can't, by characterizing one man's critique of how I express myself in a way that I can.

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 responded: “I wonder what kind of surgeon your father is, that you learned to think of humans as organs growing up. We won't get along, and I don't want you in my class. No."
I said something else, and he wrote a note to the registrar, and here I am.

But this scene comes from the middle of a larger story. The explanation for how my words triggered Eben's inquiry into my father's surgical specialty (which happens to be vascular) lies in whatever made me conceive 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 Antagonists we think harmed us, the harder it is to define boundaries around some feature of them that it would help us to target with our moral indignation. When we learn that our enemies "know not what they do" and forgive them, we can blame their education; but when we learn that their educators also knew not what they were doing -- blame flees forgiveness all the way back to Creation.

Which is satisfactory, if you’re a Christian ... But I’m a Jew. Terms not meant as labels, but as ideal types, such that the Jew is the student who's been taught -- COMMANDED --

• to believe that his social position, and the information impacting him 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 he's so adept at finding, there lie latent normative meanings, for the very purpose of finding which, his parents gave him his smarts.

And yet, for all my blessed perceptiveness, I've never yet revealed a single one of these meanings. And that's the 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 they know to be indignant?
• When I deferred my admission to Columbia Law School for a year—and worked for the American Jewish Committee, 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 curse: that the only indignity I can justify is against myself. "Don't forgive me, Lord! I know not what to do."

Thus, when I answered Eben's question, I presented the phenotype of a Jewish son -- the son of Jewish parents. Jewish, that is, in that they wanted me to do good and to do well, but parents in that they also wanted proof that I would do good and do well.

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

But the tool of seeming, in the hands of Jewish parents, 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 therefore 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 how this happened to me, and so he forgave me -- If by "forgiveness" you understand Jewish forgiveness, the forgiveness of Maimonides, "charity by stealth" -- he indicted my history to my face. My HISTORY: not me. He attacked my background, my assumptions, my sociology, my upbringing -- everything that CONCEIVED me. "For this sin of making you hate yourself, Forgive YOURSELF -- YOU know not what you do; blame your SOCIETY for making you feel this way -- and CHANGE it." He indicted my upbringing, which was the only kind of indictment that could break through my precocious Jewish-boy graph-paper brain-cage. He indicted society.

Of course, I didn't hear it that way. I thought he was indicting me, and I took it personally. This is what I heard: 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. If moral authority came from Rabbis, men who studied Torah, you who live in a secular era must look those who study Truth, to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old.

Living in a pluralist society, where Jew and Christian coexist, I need to appeal to common authorities, secular ones. 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 that he hoped would follow that meeting. We would have to derive a new Republic. But there's not enough time, and words remaining, in this paper, and this month of the semester, and this century, for us to have that conversation. We get busier every year. And so I'll wait to ask you to identify people you don't identify with, at least until I'm given a chance to improve my writing, and learn how to ask what we share with these characters listening to Socrates with certainty.

If you're still confused, don't blame me, or the idea -- blame my failure to express the idea. 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 by itself give the words some meaning.

-- AndrewGradman - 11 Apr 2008

Hello,
My goal was to characterize the ambiguity between [the demands of society and the demands of the individual] in a lot of different ways. Sometimes I do that by intentionally making the essay itself unclear. But where that OBSCURES the content [e.g. through vague syntax / poor logic / opaque metaphor] that's UNINTENTIONAL and BAD. I could use help identifying those places. Thanks. -- AndrewGradman - 13 Apr 2008