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 thing about them that we'd benefit 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.

My 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 well by doing good; but parents in that they also wanted proof that I would do so ...

• Parents face a dilemma -- their control over our choices must eventually end -- such that the rational response is to train a child to seem rather than to be.
  • first training us to seek things verifiably (call it "language acquisition");
  • and since their surveillance must eventually end too, conforming our actions, while still surveillable, towards choosing the visible trappings of what they think is best for us (call it "language control").

But the tool of seeming, in the hands of parents [of any persuasion] who want us to do well by doing good, 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 doing well over doing 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 -- by which I mean "Jewish forgiveness," the forgiveness of Maimonides, "charity by stealth" -- he indicted my history to my face. My HISTORY: not me. He attacked my history, 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." Which was the only kind of indictment that could break through my precocious Jewish-boy graph-paper brain-cage. He indicted society because it made me.

Of course, I didn't hear it that way. I thought he was indicting me directly, and I took it personally -- and so 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.

Living in pluralist America, where Jew and Christian and everyone must coexist, we need to outgrow our parochial authorities, and translate our values into common authorities, secular ones. If Jewish moral authority came from Rabbis, men who studied Torah, then in a secular era we must look those who study Truth, to reveal NEW ETHICS, not ossify the old. 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 what I said in 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 -- to 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

It is so refreshing to hear your voice come through in your papers. Your most successful moments are those when you speak from your experience and build from there.

There may be some obvious dangers where distinctions are limited to Christian/Jew (everyone else fits where?) or when speaking on Eben's intent or thought process (unless you feel it was clear). However, given the context of this paper and having read the first draft, I think you take this risk knowingly. Since your paper is ready for grading, I'll save any constructive comments for the revision process.

-- MiaWhite - 13 Apr 2008

Hey Mia,

I appreciate your comments. You're absolutely right: I risk of offending people, by distinguishing "my Jewishness" from "others' Christianity," and ignoring everything else. But, because that distinction is central to my essay, I'd like to defend it -- and lay out guidelines for how people can help me improve it:

1. Eben once said that he regards "Judaeo-Christian" as a deceptive combination; and of course he regards himself as Jewish, not Christian. Thus I chose this distinction because [I think] it instructs him to identify with me. Its unfortunate side effect is to tell non-Jews not to identify with me; but, as you noted, it's impossible for me to speak to everyone in every place: This part speaks better to Jews, worse to others; perhaps, as you said, better to Eben than it did to you.
2. Later I tried to identify with members of all non-secular faiths, when I said, "In a pluralist society, where Jew and Christian coexist, I need to appeal to common authorities, secular ones."
3. Finally -- given that the insult to non-Jews was inevitable -- I tried to limit it by means of a cheap trick -- saying that I distinguished Jew vs. Christian as "ideal types." i.e.: Although the characteristics I assign "Christianity" and "Judaism" don't align with how most people use the words, I hoped to shift the reader's attention onto what I was assigning these labels to: i.e., two world-views that are different and each meaningful.
   • "Insofar as" (get your gun) I'm discussing the world-views and not their labels, then the question, "What common English labels already closely approximate that distinction?" becomes distracting, and even counterproductive ...
     • (If I thought such labels existed, then I wouldn't have bothered with my own inquiry; I'd just do a full-text search of a descriptivist dictionary (i.e. read a thesaurus). And we could delegate all social research to the writers of descriptivist dictionaries ... but only because that would force them to define "lexicographer" as "everyone in society" -- and then the meanings of words would be whatever I could get people to accept, and I'd be well advised to do my own research after all ...)
     • That was a joke.
   • However, I acknowledge that my using the phrase "ideal type" was a cheap trick -- because as far as I can tell, it just means this:
     • Normal language permits the reader to take into account how people other than me use a word;
     • Ideal types instruct her to understand in a word, only what I say it means.
       The latter instructs you where to stop
       -- such that "Christian v. Jewish" forgiveness = "Christian" vs. "Jewish" forgiveness.
   I know I risk ridiculousness in asserting my right to make up the definitions of words -- as when I told my friend yesterday that "Reality can get in the way of good thinking." But I actually want to define the "good writer" in precisely those terms: as one who is as able to successfully make up the definitions of words;-- or, viewed in terms of what he thinks he's doing, able to figure out exactly which terms he ought to make ideal types, and which terms he ought not to;-- or, viewed in terms of social cues, able to signal precisely when, and how, he's using ideal types, and when he's using regular terms.

I need to find a way to balance 1, 2, and 3 within the essay, because they're each important, but they work at cross-purposes.
I would appreciate feedback on how I can do that. -- AndrewGradman - 13 Apr 2008

Hello reader,
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